from Record Review Magazine
April 1980

Todd, the 'Renaissance Man', discusses songs, studios, life...

By Jeff Tamarkin

You really have to wonder if Todd Rundgren has several clones of himself running around, taking care of his business for him. I mean, the guy always seems to be working on twenty projects at the same time. In the past year and a half, Rundgren has produced albums by the Patti Smith Group, Rick Derringer, the Tubes, and the Tom Robinson Band, not to mention Meatloaf's soon-to-be-released followup to his monumentally successful debut of 1977. He has completed the first half of a video project -- the first video recording solely intended for presentation via the relatively new medium of the video disc. And, in addition, he has somehow managed to find the time to devote his full attention to recording Adventure in Utopia, the newly released album by Utopia, the band which includes Rundgren on guitar, Kasim Sulton on bass, Roger Powell on keyboards and John Wilcox on skins.

Adventure is one of the most successful of the group's LPs, on the whole. It avoids some of the grandiosity and pomposity which has characterized previous Rundgren and/or Utopia recordings. And, although there is a theme running throughout the music on the record, it is not a concept album trying to make an IMPORTANT STATEMENT. It is, rather, a collection of material that is not necessarily connected but just happens to fit together well. During a recent promotional jaunt to New York City, Rundgren discussed the new Utopia album and his general thoughts on life and outer space with RECORD REVIEW.

Although he has been called a "Renaissance man" more than once -- no doubt because of his phenomenally adept grasp of state-of-the-art studio techniques Rundgren is, in other ways, a throwback to another era, namely the late '60s. After all, he lives in Woodstock, and he does front a group that calls itself Utopia in a time when anti-everything in rock seems to be at an all-time high. So, what with the idea of being in the 1980s freshly implanted in the collective consciousness, it seemed appropriate to ask Rundgren what the concept of Utopia means to him today, as the general quality of life gets worse and worse.

"I had to take pause today," he responds, looking straight ahead as he removes his feet from the coffee table, "and ask, are things really getting worse and worse? And they're probably no worse than they've ever been. We have a little 'entertainment' going on in the Middle East," he continues, accenting the word entertainment in a sarcastic tone, "but it can't be as bad as the middle of World War Two. Things certainly have been worse. Things may get into a greater degree of turmoil and agitation from time to time, but things are still progressing."

Thank you, Reverend Todd, but what about Utopia? The new album is called Adventure in Utopia, and drummer Wilcox earlier explained that the LP was made up of songs taken from the group's proposed TV series, which would "try to present the visual and sociological aspects of this mystic thing called Utopia." Is there a concept of Utopia that the group shares, or is it just a name they picked out of a hat?

"Yeah, we picked the name for a reason," Rundgren answers. "We're just a bunch of cockeyed optimists. That's why we're Utopian. It's generally an optimistic, communal sort of thing. WE'RE DIRTY COMMIES!!" Rundgren and band crack up laughing, and Todd finally allows that "I don't consider Utopia a goal or a finished end product." He puts on a phony, Woodstockian hippie voice. "It's a way of life; it's a way of doing things." Pass the pipe.

Moving on to less cerebral matters, such as the year and a half it took to record the new album, it was surprising to learn that the delay was not due to marathon painstaking recording session with the perfectionist producer, a la the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, but to the musicians' self-confessed casual approach to recording. "Lately, we get too laid back in the studio," Rundgren admits. "Sometimes we'll go in the studio and not do anything. This is not a recommended practice, because most people have to pay for their studio time. Sometimes we'll crap around for four hours and play for an hour. But the point is that sometimes it takes four hours to get you to play well for an hour."

He jokes that the first thing the band does when it arrives in the studio is ask what time they have to be there the next day. But somewhere along the line, Rundgren always manages to produce recordings that give audio buffs multiple aural orgasms. So, the reason, then, for the time span between Utopia's last record, Oops! Wrong Planet, and the new one, is that the band likes to take its time, and that they each have individual projects that occupy much of their spare time.

Rundgren, of course, likes to produce other artists, record solo albums (Hermit of Mink Hollow and the live set, Back to the Bars were his last ones), and fiddle around with little deviations such as video discs. Powell programs computers, and played in David Bowie's band on his last U.S. tour. Wilcox is into real estate (that's what he says, anyway), and Sulton gigs around the east coast with his own band. So, Utopia's latest was actually assembled piece by piece over a long stretch of time. Rundgren said that this album differs from other Utopia albums in that it was created primarily in the studio itself from bits and pieces of music that the band members had been working on individually.

"It's sort of like a laboratory approach," Rundgren explains. "A lot of this stuff has no conception when we start it, at least not lately. It used to be that we'd conceptualize everything beforehand. But on this album, we just figured that we weren't going to get into an overly conceptualized album, that we'd just go ahead and see what we could make out of what we had. We didn't have a clear-cut goal when we started out to make most of these songs."

He adds that the material is ideal for live performance, because "We can perform almost everything literally, as it happens when we record. We don't do a lot of overdubbing and we don't overdub things we can't perform live." Most remarkable perhaps, is his statement that although the LP was over a year in the making, most of the cuts took only two or three days each to record. The instrumental tracks could be laid down in a day or two, and the vocals in another.

After the tracks are recorded, they begin a new life as live material. The band says that as they become more comfortable with their new songs, they begin to alter some of the parts for the stage. But they emphasize that there is little that takes place in the studio that they can't duplicate on stage.

Adventure in Utopia begins, appropriately enough, with a track called "Road to Utopia", one of those previously mentioned exercises in "cockeyed optimism" which finds Todd & Co. marching merrily along the "road to Utopia," via a spirited rocking melody. The cut features some of Rundgren's most inspired guitar work on the LP, and is intended as the "theme song" of the Utopia TV show. "You Make Me Crazy "is sort of what might happen if you crossed Television with Dwight Twilley, and "Shot In The Dark" sounds as if it is going to be a cover version of "Lady Madonna" and then turns into one of the most intricately constructed tunes on the record. Rundgren cites "Shot" as one of the songs that was completely created within the confines of the recording studio.

"We don't know how they get there," he laughs. "We just started fooling around. Usually everybody has got a few ideas, which we check out in the preliminary stages and then distill."

"Set Me Free" is described as being "a little directed" at Warner Brothers, the parent company of the group's Bearsville label. "If you don't dig my plan / Just set me free" they sing. And although the lyrics are carefully worded so that they could be taken to refer to a man/woman relationship, Rundgren does not deny that the band has had its problems with the company. In fact, "The Very Last Time" also is targeted at the company.

"Everybody knows we don't get along with our record company," Rundgren confesses. "It's like the couple down the block who fight all the time. It's just an established fact and nobody's uptight about it any more. It ebbs and wanes. That's what the song ("Very Last Time") is about. But it doesn't have to be about that. Most people don't have battles with their record companies because they don't have record companies, so it can be about having a battle with anybody. It's about the situation."

Still, it would seem to an innocent bystander like this one that Utopia doesn't have such a bad deal. They admit that they aren't under any pressure to deliver "product" by a certain date -- or else -- and in fact, the group is not required to deliver anything until they are completely satisfied with the recording. "The prime thing, before we ever put pen to paper, is artistic latitude," Rundgren states.

Bassist Sulton, listening in, adds that "We might get in some kind of trouble for it, but in the end, we're not going to put out a stupid record, or a record that's not the right record or a finished record."

Getting back to the finished record that they have just allowed to be released, one of the more striking titles is "The Last of the New Wave Riders." Looking at that name on paper, one has to wonder if the Runt's production experience with the likes of Patti Smith and Tom Robinson caused him to get trendy for a few minutes and come up with something for Clash and Costello fans. But other than a lot of brutal, raunchy guitar playing and a ceaseless backbeat, there's little here to suggest that Rundgren will momentarily shear his long locks in favor of the Sid Vicious look. In fact, the song is about... well, let him tell ya:

"It's sort of a silver surfer song. I always thought the silver surfer was an interesting concept. It has crude connotations that go with it -- beach bums and big Kahunas and I doth sense the cosmic force zooming across the universe on a silver surfboard." And the punchline? "It's the same thing for people who play rock and roll. The bottom line is that it's a dirty business." He affects the Woodstock hippie voice again. "But," he says, "you can really take it to moments of sublime bliss."

So, it has nothing to do with new wave music, then? "No, new wave takes on a different meaning every day, anyway. It's an old term. It used to be applied to biblical arts and art movements of the '20s." Oh.

"Second Nature" is another one with more to it than meets the ear. Behind that, ahem, danceable, pop beat, Rundgren is singing about "the concept of telepathy, which most people misunderstand as beaming thoughts directly into your head in great glowing neon letters, when it's more the concept of wordless communication."

The song is a good bet for a single to these jaded ears, but Rundgren and all three band members seem surprised to hear that opinion. Wilcox says that the song reminds him of "Stormy," the '60s hit by the Classics Four. "It brings back summer fun and quart bottles of beer," he says.

"Telepathy and quart bottles of beer," Rundgren muses, laughing.

"Love Alone" is the curiosity piece of the record. It's a ballad that is so mushy that Paul McCartney could have written it on the same day that he wrote "My Love." Throughout the piece, there is a synthesizer rigged up to sound like an accordion. Keyboardist Powell mentioned that he used the synthesizer to achieve the accordion sound, instead of just playing an accordion, simply because "I don't know how to play an accordion." The band calls it their "punk song" and also refers to it as "Disney-rock."

"Caravan" is the longest track on the record but is also its tour-de-force. Structurally, it reminds this listener of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear The) Reaper" in parts, with the jangling Byrdsian guitars and vocal harmonies countering the blitzkrieg rock and roll attack that powers the piece for most of its seven minutes. Although it might be unfashionably lengthy, there is never a moment when it drags. Rundgren describes "Caravan" as a "travelogue."

"One of the concepts of the Utopia TV program is that it (Utopia) is a rogue planet that wanders through the universe, without a real sun to call its own. And it's the same way with the real planet Earth. When you think about the whole concept of space, we all walk around down here and there's gravity and it seems real secure. But when you get out there, there's all these little balls of crap flying around, zooming around space. And they can all crash into each other at any moment. Life is like that," he says, getting philosophical again. "It's an adventure and you'll have these tortures and stuff thrust on you. It's a real Zen kind of song."

"Zen and the art of balls of crap," Wilcox concludes.

Comparing Adventure in Utopia to other Utopia LPs, Rundgren notes that the band "vacillates between the optimistic and the cynical. Oops... was a real pessimistic album, and Ra, before that, was an optimistic album. The new one is more optimistic. So I guess we'll have a pessimistic album next." He announces in an AM radio announcer's voice, "Coming soon! A pessimistic album from Utopia!"

Rundgren says that he has no immediate plans to produce any albums by other artists, now that he has completed all of the outside projects he had been working on. "I've had a flurry of activity, but by the time that's apparent to most people, I'll have been finished and chosen to rest."

Looking back over the production work he's been involved in over the years, Rundgren says he has no favorites of the albums he's produced. But he did comment briefly on some of the most noteworthy, including the seminal 1973 debut by the New York Dolls, Patti Smith's most recent album, Wave, Meatloaf's commercially spectacular debut, and Rick Derringer's most current LP, Guitars and Women.

The Dolls' album, Rundgren says, was "Silly. It wasn't silly because I didn't take it seriously, but because of the scene that surrounded that band -- all the freaks and press people. It was a circus, constantly. I don't know how the record even got finished in the long run and they didn't care how it got finished."

Recording Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell was "pretty easy," he recalls. Rundgren says that he was surprised at the LP's phenomenal sales. "Everybody was!" he exclaims. He also produced Mr. Meat's second album, which will be finished up after His Loafness completes work on his starring role in the forthcoming film, Roadie.

Patti Smith, he says, was "a unique situation because Patti is such an old friend of mine. I think a lot of things were expected of me that at another time and place I wouldn't have had to deal with." Asked to elaborate, Rundgren explains, "I was expected to save something in some way. They hadn't even played (the material together before they started making the record. They expected to ad lib."

On Derringer's latest, Rundgren said he had a relatively simple task because, "Rick has been in the studio and has lots of experience producing other people. So he can take care of a lot of stuff himself."

Curiously, despite Rundgren's reputation as a notorious perfectionist, he admits that there are often flaws on records he produces both for himself and his band and for other artists. "There are always little mistakes, but I leave them in because they're not worth fixing. We don't really concentrate on mistakes that much. They don't hinder our enjoyment of hearing the records or the audience's." He believes that capturing a feeling is most important in a recording, and to worry about making mistakes could ultimately destroy the spontaneity that is essential to an emotional rock performance.

Comparing the approach he uses as producer on his own albums to that he uses with the band's albums and to his outside projects, Rundgren profoundly theorizes that, "I guess my own albums are like going into the bathroom with a Playboy and a jar of Vaseline. That's a superpersona thing and I don't have to take in any other considerations except my own capabilities. With Utopia records, my responsibilities are minimized because I don't have to supervise things. Everybody knows the situation and what we're trying to accomplish, so I can work more integrally with the band. Doing other people's albums is usually the biggest responsibility. Most of the productions go pretty smoothly. We had a few disheartening exceptions last year, but otherwise, most of them were pretty easy, pretty smooth."

The big question which remained unanswered, however, was how one Rundgren could possibly find the time to do as much as he does. "Would you believe I'm actually bored sometimes?" he replies. "Right now I have a leisurely existence."

...and Utopia as next Monkees?

By Boni Johnson

Todd Rundgren is a dictator, but he is shrewd enough to share his power. Long-standing Utopia fans know that since the current lineup (Rundgren, Kasim Sulton on bass, Roger Powell, synthesizers and trumpet, and John Wilcox, drums) solidified in 77, the group has been a four-way proposition, with everybody writing and singing leads.

A quick check of backgrounds shows that Wilcox trained at both Berklee and the Manhattan schools of music, and caught session work with artists as divergent as Steve Hillage and Daryl Hall and John Oates.

Keysman Powell skipped the studio musician scene and instead worked as a protégé to designer Robert Moog, and later as a public relations rep on behalf of Arp and Moog.

Kasim Sulton, Utopia's youngest citizen (21) spent time as an engineer (the group is full of engineers), but while touring with singer/groupie Cherry Vanilla he was spotted and soon after wangled his current post.

All three are pursuing solo careers with Powell's second solo work. Airpocket, due out in spring 1980.

RECORD REVIEW caught up with Powell and Wilcox at a Hollywood motel, the day after they performed a local gig. Both men were thoroughly likeable, thoughtful and articulate, but not overly serious, as you might expect.