Todd Rundgren

Todd Rundgren was one of the most innovative musicians in the entire history of rock music. He was the first to record an album playing all the instruments himself, the first to mix all sorts of genres on the same album, the first to use his voice to simulate an entire rock band, the first to produce a video-disc, the first to produce an "interactive" album, etc. Rundgren seems obsessed with a form of titanism that drives him to attempt the most improbable feats, but also often condemns him to failure. The long suites that were supposed to crown his art instead highlighted his congenital inability to produce a mature synthesis of his eclectic encyclopedism.

Todd Rundgren cut his teeth with Nazz, the Philadelphia band that emerged in 1968 from the garage-rock scene. Rundgren was the prodigy guitarist of the lineup (not yet twenty). The Nazz drew on the mod culture of The Who (Open My Eyes in the style of I Can't Explain) and the vocal harmonies of The Beatles (Hello It's Me). Best (Rhino, 1984) is an anthology of the Nazz.

After the band broke up, Rundgren launched a solo career as eccentric as it was prolific, making him one of the most influential figures for later generations (at least as a producer and organizer).

The first solo albums, Runt (Bearsville, 1970), played entirely by him (except for drums), featuring the "sweet" soul of We Got To Get You A Woman and the Zappa-esque gag of In The Clique, and Ballad (1971, with the archetypal ballad of his piano style, Be Nice To Me), are collections of graceful, well-orchestrated refrains that target modern customs.

Rundgren played virtually all the instruments (two years before Mike Oldfield) on the monumental Something/Anything (1972), from which he also managed to extract the hit Saw The Light. An archetype of DIY (Do It Yourself), written, played, sung, and produced by Rundgren, the album borrows harmonies from soul (Dust In The Wind), beat (Couldn't I Just Tell You), boogie (Black Maria), honky-tonk (Piss Aaron), funk (Some Folks Are Even Whiter), gospel (Slut), rhythm and blues (Wolfman Jack), and folk-rock (The Night The Carousel Burnt), with the mastery of a seasoned disc jockey, exploiting every production and arrangement trick and excelling in the more rocking tracks. Regardless of ingenuity and "mimetic" skill, however, the sound is still washed-out and lacking personality. The real creative ideas are found in the instrumental parts, always poised between a small-theater gag and a conceptual piece, as demonstrated by Breathless. Rundgren is searching for a new song form, but the sung pieces will never be his strong suit.

His is a fluid but occasional rock, at times brilliant and always unruly, ranging across virtually all genres, from blues to electronics, with the manners of an eccentric collector and sometimes a parodist. His exceptional gifts as a composer of light music would in any case have made him a certain star of the Brill Building. A Wizard/True Star (1973) turns the identity crisis into a method, without being ashamed to reveal how beneath the sonic megalomania lies the good old "Philly sound" (the long baroque suite of International Feel, which is his Abbey Road, and Just One Victory, for example); but it also prepares the electronic developments of his eclectic professionalism (Dog Fight Giggle and Rock And Roll Pussy). Although still naive, the music of this album moves away from song form to assume decidedly transgressive traits.

Todd (Bearsville, 1974) is the endpoint of this race to reinvent the already known, a double album in which this Mozart of Philadelphia equips himself with powerful electronic machines and surveys popular music of all eras (I Think You Know, A Dream Goes On Forever, Useless Begging, Spark Of Life), amusing parodic ditties in the style of cartoons or vaudeville (An Elpees Worth Of Toons), as well as a couple of surreal-kitsch instrumental interludes (Into The Chakras We Go, a long pastiche for electronic sounds, and Drunken Blue Rooster, a 1930s saloon-style piano piece). The highlights of the album are the two more aggressive and pyrotechnic tracks, King Kong Reggae and Heavy Metal Kids, two imaginative caricatures in the style of Frank Zappa. Expanding Zappa�s collage concept, Rundgren in effect invented a modern version of the music hall, whose ultimate aim, however, seems only to showcase the performer�s acrobatic instrumental skill, as he again alternates among different instruments and especially hams it up on the synthesizer.

Utopia (1974), the title of both his futurist show and his backing band, is the manifesto of the new direction: unrestrained heavy-metal guitar work, long chameleonic progressive-rock suites, flash-rock synthesized arrangements, pretentious mystical/space-age lyrics, and, above all, impeccable production. The track Utopia is a driving pastiche that reinvents the concept of melodic fantasy and stylistic collage. The monstrous The Ikon (about half an hour), modeled after Yes, is a grotesque exaggeration of that idea. Rundgren has absorbed the lessons of his previous experiences and understood what his true vocation is, but he has not lost the habit of overdoing it.

From then on, the sound of Utopia gradually lost consistency, settling into blatant space sagas, with the synthesizer of Mike Powell increasingly prominent. Ra (1977) is an even more ambitious concept, which includes the long Singing And The Glass Guitar, in the techno-rock style of Alan Parsons. Love Is Action, on Oops Wrong Planet (1977), and Set Me Free, on Adventures In Utopia (1980), the Beatles imitations of Deface The Music (1980), Lysistrata, on Swing To The Right (1982), his most political album, and Maybe I Could Change, on Oblivion (Passport, 1984), are the least trivial songs.

In the meantime, Utopia's original keyboardist, Jean Yves Labat, debuted solo with the synth-psychedelic M. Frog (1973), containing the Zappa-esque anthemic We Are Crazy, and then continued with Underwater Electronic Orchestra (1976), later revised as Transition #1 (1978). Utopia's second and main keyboardist, Roger Powell, had already released Cosmic Furnace (1973), one of the very first albums of solo synthesizer by a rock musician, and later he would release Air Pocket (Bearsville, 1980), lumped with the new-age movement.

Meanwhile, his solo career continued under the banner of unpredictability. Initiation (1975), influenced by Buddhism, contains the disjointed A Treatise On Cosmic Fire, a (for its time) colossal suite. Faithful (1976) meticulously reconstructs in the studio famous songs by the The Beatles and the The Beach Boys (but also includes Black And White and When I Pray). Hermit of Mink Hollow (1977) is a collection of more modest songs, such as Can We Still Be Friends and You Cried Wolf.

In 1979 Todd Rundgren also began experimenting with video technology and produced both the first video-disc (1979) and the first video clip to mix music and graphics (1981).

This was followed by a do-it-yourself electronic album such as Healing (1981), containing the three-movement suite of the same name, the effervescent Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect (1983), featuring the playful ska of Bang The Drum All Day, and his ultimate extravagance, A Cappella (Warner, 1985), an album on which he imitates (with electronically processed vocals) an entire rock band (the swamp gospel of Johnee Jingo, the disco-soul of Something To Fall Back On). Nearly Human (Warner, 1989) is a tribute to orchestral soul on which he performs "live in the studio" The Want Of A Nail and above all I Love My Life for a 23-voice choir.

Second Wind (Warner, 1991) is a collection of new pop and soul ballads recorded live. No World Order (Forward, 1993) was the first interactive album in the history of music (the listener can combine short techno and rap fragments provided by Rundgren to make up her own songs). One Long Year (Epic, 2000) is a stylistic collage almost entirely assembled on the computer.

The artist of Liars (Sanctuary, 2004) is still the same artist of A Wizard/True Star. His eccentric rock vignettes are still among the most original ever.

Later albums include: Arena (2008), State (2013), White Knight (2017), Space Force (2022).