Todd Rundgren

The first time I ever hear Todd Rundgren was way back in 1972 when I Saw The Light first hit the international airwaves (I live in Australia) and as a post-Carole King Tapestry easy-listening rocker, I Saw The Light was as smooth as it gets. At the time, some oldies would complain that Rock'n'Roll was ugly, that it had no place for beauty but lemmetellya, that song had "swing". O.K., it wasn't the most profound, moving statement but it sure made you feel good.

And then I caught a couple of concert performances on TV, like when the eccentric Mr. Skinny played piano, accompanying a visible 8-track tape machine for some likable pop...before he brought his band onstage...and played complex prog-rock.

However eccentric, I only started to investigate Todd's music properly in 1976 after a music buff lent me A Wizard A True Star. Overnight I became hooked. I immediately gobbled up the back catalogue and became a huge fan overnight. I should explain here that Rundgren fans are often an extreme bunch and many feel that ahem...Todd is God. I was never that bad...but er...I could see their point, because when Todd was good, he was very, very good.

If I had to describe Todd at that time, it would have been:

Lennon & McCartney's bastard son
who thought he was in The Who but
made a living playing white Philadelphia soul bars, but
was secretly a member of MENSA
who moonlighted as a stand-up comedian on Saturday nights &
sang in the church choir on Sundays

And though the albums were frustratingly erratic and continued to be so to this day, there's no doubt that Todd produced some of the most memorable white pop music of the 70's & 80s and deserves to be remembered for far more than:

I Saw The Light &
Bang On The Drum All Day

I don't think it would be unfair to argue that the average Billy Joel fan might have got a better bang for their buck over the years than the average Todd fan. He's uncompromising, unpredictable, and well, entirely self-indulgent. On the other hand, he's also brave, inspirational, frequently funny and is, in his own words, A Wizard, A True Star.

Is he a genius? Well, that I don't know...but here's where it all started, with Todd's first band, The Nazz:

The Nazz

Open Your Eyes

When The Nazz brok up in 1969, none were to forge a successful career in pop music other than Todd, who found immediate work as an engineer and producer at the small Bearsville Records.

Precocious and opinionated, Rundgren ruffled a few feathers with clients, including The Band...but used down time to create his first solo album...

Runt

Todd Rundren's 1970 debut, Runt, is both a tentative affair...and a fascinating insight into his next twenty years of making music. It's all there, melody, lyrical intelligence, bizarre experiments, pop Heaven...except it's all in a developmental stage. Truly fascinating.

The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren

A harsh view of Todd's follow-up, the quiet The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren might be that he'd jumped on the singer-songwriter bandwagon of Carole King, James Taylor...and Don McLean...but a closer inspection would show that Todd had none of the confessional aspect of these artists. He was just making quiet pop.

Something / Anything

Considered by many of his less experimental fans to be his masterpiece, 1972's Something/Anything...was precisely that. A one man band, totally in control of the recording environment doing everything, because he can! OK, I admit it, his drumming is a little clunky

Melody, intelligence...and more than a little indulgence. Something/Anything would have made a superb single album...as it is, ¾ of it is pretty good with some real highlights...and the 4th side, recorded with session musicians to create a band-like LIVE atmosphere...is a mess.

A Wizard / A True Star

If the straights loved Something/Anything, then the freaks love A Wizard/A True Star. You see, six years after everyone else, Todd discovered acid...and it shows, with his brain racing at a mile a minute. Wizard is a lot of fun...but it must have been very weird for his more conservative fans.

Todd

With the double album Todd, our troubador drew a line in the sand and threw away mainstream success, quite deliberately. Things were going to happen for Todd his way or no way at all. Freaking out the fan base with Wizard was one thing, it, at least, had plenty of radio-friendly tracks but this eclectic, short double album without a single was much more difficult to take.

For the Todd fans, who were prepared to see their hero experiment...and fail, occasionally, it was different: "More please, and soon!"

Around this time Todd premiered his touring band, Utopia, which played jazz rock, somewhat akin to the complexities of Frank Zappa and consisted of a power trio and three synthesizer players.

Initiation

1975 saw Todd wave his freak flag even higher with the New Age manifesto, Initiation. Side 1 sees Todd at his most indulgent, including the acapella Born To Synthesize... but in hindsight, contains some good...but cosmic pop.

Side 2 was a 30-minute instrumental, A Treatise On Cosmic Fire, which confused, baffled and frustrated fans and reviewers alike.

Faithful

With an audience seriously diminished as a direct result of his cosmic experiments, Todd set about building bridges with the general public and first up, his touring band, Utopia, had two members shaved off and swerved away from jazz rock back towards pop and rock.

Recorded in London, while on tour with Utopia (the bootleg I had from this tour with Luther Van Dross on backing vocals was sensational!). Side 1 contains note-for-note cover versions of songs from 1966, Todd considering them noteworthy enough to mark the tenth anniversary of Psychedelia. Once more, Todd infuriated critics...but in hindsight...with only two of the songs (by The Beatles & The Beach Boys) having any continued life...and the rest (including songs by The Beatles, Dylan & Hendrix) virtually forgotten...Todd got it right!

However, Side 2 of Faithful is a magnificent song cycle, containing some of Todd's very best work, including the sensational The Meaning Of The Verb To Love, a song that is, I'm sure, an important part of the soundtrack to many of Todd's fans lives.

Todd's Lifeline

Sometime around 1977 Todd accepted an invitation from an unknown singer, Meatloaf and his songwriter Jim Steinman to produce a theatrical retro album, Bat Out Of Hell...for a chunk of the royalties.

Todd recorded the album with his Utopia band and a couple of members fron Bruce Springsteen's band at his Utopia Studios. The album broke first in Australia in 1978...and went on to sell 35 million copies worldwide.

Bat Out Of Hell

Royalties from Bat Out Of Hell enabled Todd to keep his "artistic integrity"...and keep experimenting, to this day.

The Hermit Of Mink Hollow

With Todd's on again/off again romance with model Bebe Buell finally over, Todd headed back to the studio and created a one-man-band minor masterpiece. Hermit makes a fascinating comparison with Runt, his first album with all the same trademarks there...but eight years later, Todd's just so much better! Critics and fans were very happy with this return to form, including the hit single, Can We Still Be Friends?

Bebe Buell's tell-all autobiography

Healing

With money from Bat Out Of Hell coming in in bucketloads, Todd, once more, infuriated his new-found straight audience with this New Age classic. Let me warn you, it's very erratic...but there's some wonderful stuff here, including a 20-minute near-instrumental meditation-as-pop-music opus, Healing 1, 2 & 3!

Over on the Utopia front, they'd just released Adventures In Utopia, (a Top 30 album)...and when Bearsville, Todd's record company complained that Healing:

was uncommercial
dragging Utopia down (the audacity!)
had no single (double that audacity)

...Todd headed back into the studio and recorded two of the best tracks of his life, Time Heals & Tiny Demons which was issued as a 45 RPM FREE single with Healing.

With the relationship with his long-suffering record label, Bearsville, seriously souring, Todd released this short album to fulfil his contract...but it still had it's delights. Much of Side 1 is sumptuous (but every track goes on too long) and Side 2 happens to contain a curiously little comic ska-beat number (at the time there had been a recent ska-revival in the UK)...which I loved...and when released as a surprising single, reached #63.

A couple of years later, it trickled into mainstream America...and became Todd's most popular song, ever, even though most fans don't know he wrote it!

"I dont wanna work...I just wanna bang on the drum all day..."

Acapella

Acapella is the last Todd Rundgren album that I had any strong identification with. It's a gorgeous set of songs, which, with The Hermit Of Mink Hollow, is easily the best of his career. As usual, Todd made things difficult for himself and Acapella was completely recorded...using only his voice, treated to sound like instruments (see video at the review)!

After Acapella, Todd released these albums:

Nearly Human...applauded by the critics as some of Todd's best work...I still only hear only one great track unfortunately, the wonderful Parallel Lines (anybody want a white R'n'B hit single for a duo?) and one pretty good one, Waiting Game

Nearly Human

The LIVE in Japan DVD sees Todd on tour promoting Nearly Human.

LIVE In Japan

A Second Wind...terribly, terribly disapponting. My least favorite Todd album, ever. There's a lot of adult huffin'n'puffin' but the set is mostly devoid of inspiration with the only decent track being The Smell Of Money, which Todd wrote for a musical about gay playwright, Joe Orton. Avoid it!

No World Order...Todd does rap. I hated this album for many years but during the last few I've changed my mind and now consider it a minor masterpiece much like A Wizard/A True Star. I'll admit, some of the rap is really amateurish and Todd goes over the top with some silly Fire & Brimstone-like rants but there's something very brave about this curio.

There are few "songs", as such, but beware, Boy Bands might make a comeback if one of them ever got hold of the immensely hummable Property. The final track, too, Fever Broke, in which the whole album is revealed as delirium is one of the most unusual love songs ever, not so much Oedipal...as grateful for having someone who cares.

Presently, you can pick up a copy for $0.01, which is a bargain, if I say so myself!

No World Order

The Individualist was far less thematic than No World Order, this is a mixture of more rap (the title track is unfortunately particularly awful)...and some songs, a few of which are really good, including:

the mystical, sublime Beloved Infidel
the always applicable The Ultimate Crime, a powerful song about avoiding personal responsibility (those puritanical self-flagellating roots have to appear every now and then)
the I-dare-you-not-to-hum-this-later Espresso about being on the road, again!
the very unusual for Todd, marginally mysoginistic (or perhaps that just resigned and a little bitter) It's A Woman's World

However, everything on the album, including all of the songs above just go on t-o-o l-o-n-g! The Individualist is a dark album and I believe that whatever crisis that was, it resulted in Todd leaving the mainland, moved to Hawaii and not releasing an album of new songs for ten years!

      "...Water, Water, everywhere
       And not a place to stand                                                                                         My foundation rests on bedrock
      But the bedrock rests on shifting sands..."

Tables Will Turn

The Individualist

With A Twist saw Rundgren looking at his back catalogue...and doing it bossa nova style. Only Todd's fans, used to putting up with his strange experiments, would tolerate a major artist becoming his own lounge act. Frustrating and funny!

With A Twist

One Long Year was a collection of songs from from Todd's sponsor-an-artist internet site. Avoid it.

One of Todd's traits throughout his career is to keep himself interested in what he's doing and for one tour he decided to form a power-trio and strip his music right down. The LIVE in San Francisco DVD is the result...

Todd's Power Trio LIVE DVD

Liars, critically acclaimed (and mostly loved by the Amazon fans)...the snippets will give you a pretty good indication of the techno base and Todd's present state of mind.

For some reason I don't really want to hear Liars yet...but I'm sure I'll get round to it when I'm ready.

Liars

Liars, the album, plus a LIVE DVD...

Liars 2.0

Todd Extras: