Todd Rundgren has always made his living by being stranger than most folks in the music business. He's the recording industry's best-known technophile, the mad professor locked in his secluded studio, always on the frontier of new methods of sound manipulation. If it's got dials or diodes, Rundgren has fiddles with it, either for his own work or as a sought-after producer of other people's albums.
He has specialized in becoming a high-tech one-man band, first on vinyl, then on CD. Only in the past few years has technology caught up with his ambitions for live solo performances of his brand of electronic wizardry.
For Friday's show, he climbed into a circular, 20-foot high pod of interlocking metal arches capped by an array of 24 video screens. Cameras within the pod broadcast Rundgren's motions on 12 screens; the others were devoted to a pastiche of computer-generated images and snippets from old Rundgren videos.
Four flexible tentacles extended from the pod at each 90-degree interval to dangle inflatable toys over the heads of the crowd. Red lights flickered with seemingly disconnected messages, in the style of the artist Jenny Holzer. The crowd got special charge from repeated flashing of the word "Buttafuoco." All of it was very odd, very Rundgren. The musical styles this pop chameleon has adopted -- techno, hip-hop and rap -- are all a very long way from his 1972 hit "Hello, It's Me." Maybe Rundgren, locked in that studio with a radio, listened to a day's worth of current pop and decided, "Hey, I can do that."
He was absolutely right. In a two-hour performance, he covered the range of what's hot, dipping into jack-swing soul, pumping up the volume with socially conscious techno-rap.
There were a lot of puzzled faces in the crowd of more than 1,100 when Rundgren opened the show with the driving hip-hop beats culled from his latest album, "No World Order." The older Rundgren fans, the folks who still have Nazz singles, must have wondered where their multimedia messiah was leading them. Three dancers, the TR-I girls, wove through the crowd trying to loosen a few limbs. He even appeased the fortysomethings in the crowd with an acoustic mini-set, and took requests. The softer selections -- "Black and White" "Secret Society" -- were wedged between the head-bobbing sounds from "No World Order." All of it left many fans wondering if Rundgren was engineering a spoof of the electronic-driven music of today's pop, a la Neil Young's "Trans" album, and whether he truly believes that techno is the sound of the future.
Rundgren is a risk-taker from way back, so the stylistic change fits, especially if one remembers that Rundgren produced the New York Dolls' first album and presaged the punk revolt. And while other musicians of his generation continue to harp against the encroachment of computers, Rundgren has embraced them, mastered them and uses them to design new ways of making music.ways of making music.
But what will he do next?