from Mojo Magazine
February 1998

"Go Ahead, Ignore Me!"

Supercharged songsmith. Soul-steeped singer. Shocktastic showman. Production wizard. Technological pioneer. Conceptual visionary. Virtuoso one-man band. He was the pop prodigy who had it all. And then blew it. Please rise for Todd Rundgren.

by Barney Hoskyns

Hello, it's him. Standing in the doorway of a two-storey industrial structure on the edge of San Francisco's Mission District, clad only in a pair of green plaid shorts, is the star-spangled wizard who goes by the name of Todd Rundgren. Tanned and lean and exuding the rude health one might expect in a man who recently upped sticks to Kauai, northernmost of the Hawaiian islands, Rundgren beckons me inside and leads me up to the loft he keeps as his Bay Area pied-à-terre. The loft is full of detritus, a combination dressing-room and antique store. A row of multicoloured stage costumes sits atop a long shelf. A pulpit stands in a corner.

And bang in the middle of the room, winking at me, is the inevitable Apple Powerbook from which my arrival has dragged Todd away. Turns out he's making changes to the browser on his website, primary vehicle these days for communicating with his diehard fans. As I sit watching him tap away at his keyboard, I think back to a mind-blowing show at the Hammersmith Odeon in October 1975 when Todd and the second edition of Utopia took me on a psychedelic glam-prog journey that changed the face of rock music for me forever.

"Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era," Paul Fishkin, former general manager of Rundgren's '70s label Bearsville, will tell me a few days later. "If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there's no question in my mind that we could have had it all. But Todd was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part is that he expected everyone to go along with it."

Rundgren is still tapping at the Powerbook as his long-serving, long-suffering road manager Mary Lou Arnold drives us north on 101 to Petaluma, the small town in which 'The Total Individualist' will play a one-man gig tonight in a quaint establishment called the Mystic Theater. En route we make a pit-stop in Sausalito, the town where for 10 years Rundgren and his family lived, and where he needs to consult with a fellow computer buff whose wooden balcony commands awesome views of San Francisco's aquamarine, surf-flecked bay.

After about an hour, Rundgren puts his Powerbook back in its pouch and we proceed on our way through Marin County. When he jokes that he has "a back-up band" in case the computer fails, I realise that much of the music we'll be hearing tonight is contained inside that small metal box. For several minutes he holds forth on the hot computer-nerd topic of the day, Microsoft's purchase of $150 million worth of shares in Apple. I grunt and nod as though deeply familiar with the inner workings of Silicon Valley. Mary Lou interrupts to check on the route to Petaluma. A nervous driver at the best of times, she awaits Rundgren's orders with mild trepidation. Time was when he used to bark directions at her through a megaphone: 20 years of driving through America together has made them a hilarious double act. "Follow the force, Mary Lou," is all Rundgren will say at this juncture.

Friends say that Todd Rundgren was into computers as early as 1965, when he was a lanky, long-faced 16-year-old growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby. By then he was already a precocious specimen, albeit the product of a typically dysfunctional middle-class family. "My family was not close-knit," he says. "Everyone was competing with each other. We never said I love you', we never hugged. As a result everyone in my family [dad Harry, mom Ruth, sisters June and Lynette, and baby brother Robin] turned out to have some psychological problem."

Rundgren says a major part of his karmic journey has been breaking "the lineage of bad fathers" from whence he sprung: his commitment to his own children Rex, Randy and Rebop (as well as to the actress Liv Tyler who, born in 1977 to Todd's then girlfriend Bebe Buell and brought up as his daughter, was in fact biologically fathered by Aerosmith's Steve Tyler) comes, he claims, before anything else in his life. "Before I ever knew what karma meant," he says, "I swore to myself that I was not going to be my dad, that I was gonna want to have any kid that I had. The rewards are incalculable. I feel so bad for my father that he never experienced what I do."

One thing Harry Rundgren did give Todd was an exposure to a range of music that broadened the boy's palette beyond mere pop music. If Todd's first group was a covers band called Money, his own tastes inclined as much to classical music and Broadway show tunes as they did towards the British Invasion hits and soul records of the mid-'60s. As a "weedy and undersized" would-be class clown, he was never into rock'n'roll per se. "I didn't particularly like Elvis Presley. He looked like the greasers who beat me up all the time. I thought the whole rock milieu was kinda silly. I listened to anything from Debussy to Richard Rodgers."

After school was out, Rundgren -- the boy the kids teased as "Runt Green" -- would sit at the piano in the empty auditorium and tinker with major sevenths and "cool progressions". He says many of his trademark changes were worked out during these late afternoon sessions.

Debussy and Rodgers notwithstanding, the teenage Rundgren did in time become a rabid guitar fanatic, styling himself, like a thousand other American boys, after the Eric Clapton he heard on Bluesbreakers and Yardbirds records. On June 23, 1966, the day after his 18th birthday, he packed everything he owned into a case and split for Ocean City, one of the umpteen seaside towns dotted along the New Jersey shoreline. Not long after, he caught a show in nearby Wildwood headlined by The Byrds: bottom of the bill that night was a Philadelphia blues band called Woody's Truck Stop "who'd sort of modelled themselves after the Butterfield band and were blowing everyone's minds". Within a couple of months, Rundgren had joined them as resident slide-guitar maestro, "the Elvin Bishop of the group".

"Todd was completely different from everyone else," says Paul Fishkin, who'd assumed managerial duties. "Everyone else was taking drugs, and he took nothing. People just couldn't believe it. Also, he was very ambitious -- all he wanted to do was play. At these very straight fraternity parties, while the rest of the band took breaks, Todd would play right dirough, just jamming and soloing. And he was always frantically cleaning up the gear. One time he was cleaning the guitar cords, and one of the other guys asked him why in the hell he was doing that. He said. 'In case we go on tour'!"

Fishkin maintains that Rundgren was actually fired from Woody's Truck Stop for not taking drugs. Rundgren himself says it was simply a difference of emphasis that occasioned his departure: "Influenced by the San Francisco scene, the band decided they wanted to take acid and get it together in the country. I had to draw the line when the lifestyle became more important than the music." Leaving shortly after Rundgren was bassist Carson Van Osten, with whom he proceeded to form Nazz, a name that came from Lord Buckley via the Yardbirds B-side The Nazz Are Blue. Recruiting drummer Thom Mooney and singer/keyboardist Robert 'Stewkey' Antoni from rival Philly bands, Rundgren was unequivocal about his Anglophile goals: "We wanted to combine The Beatles' genius in the studio with the heavy-duty show business of The Who on-stage."

The Nazz story was one of such failed promise and twisted internal politics that it almost derailed Rundgren's career. An energetic, good-looking group who wowed crowds at psychedelic dungeons like Trauma and the Electric Factory, Nazz were adopted by The Mamas and the Papas publicist John Kurland after they saw the LA harmonisers headline over The Who in early '67. Kurland was a closet homosexual whose idol was Brian Epstein, and his Beatle-esque gameplan was for Nazz likewise to slay the teens and enjoy critical credibility. Quick to recognise Rundgren's gifts, Kurland kept the band cooped up in a house in Great Neck, Long Island, and groomed them to be America's next pop sensation. "Todd was certainly the leader, and by far the most talented," says Michael Friedman, Kurland's assistant when Nazz signed their management contract at the beginning of September 1967. "But Kurland over-promoted the teenage aspect of the band, and their credibility was affected by that. He led them in the direction of, 'You're gonna make it through records' -- always the wrong strategy."

The group didn't play their first official show 'til January 1968. When the debut Nazz single, Hello, It's Me/Open My Eyes, was released on Atlantic affiliate SGC in the summer of 1968, it instantly signaled that here was a pop genius who could do blistering hard rock and lilting pop ballads -- and do both brilliantly. The parameters were clear just within Open My Eyes, a psych-pop classic subsequently included on Lenny Kaye's seminal Nuggets compilation: it starts like The Who's I Can't Explain, features a screaming guitar solo and some outrageous Itchycoo Park phasing, yet still finds room for a meltingly gorgeous Brian Wilson middle eight. Then there was Hello, It's Me, putative A-side and big hit for the solo Rundgren when rearranged and released as a single from Something/Anything? in 1973.

The only catch was that Rundgren didn't sing lead vocals on either of these Nazz songs, or on almost any Nazz song. Instead vocals were handled by the bland Stewkey. Nazz, recorded in Los Angeles with an old-school producer named Bill Traut, made Rundgren's talents even more clear. Moving from the Cream-style power-trio blues of She's Goin' Down to the Jimmy Webb orch-pop balladry of If That's The Way You Feel (string arrangement: TR) was diverse and then some. "The eclecticism was part of the Beatles formula," says Rundgren. "They weren't self-conscious about experimenting and nor were we, even if other people might have thought, What's this with The Beach Boys and the heavy metal in the same song?"

Kurland's hyping of Nazz made little appreciable difference to the album's fate, for all the money splashed out on Mod togs and haircuts. Released in August 1968, the record rose no higher than Number 118. At the end of the year, the band flew to London to start work on their second album, ambitiously planned as a double with the title Fungo Bat. After the completion of just one song (Christopher Columbus, subsequently included on Nazz III), the Musicians' Union learned that the group played instruments as well as sang and swiftly terminated the session. Returning to New York, Nazz quickly began to splinter, with the retitled Nazz Nazz (1969) fomenting the envy and jealousy within the band. Rundgren's deep immersion in the music of Laura Nyro -- most evident on the closing, 11-minute A Beautiful Song -- particularly rankled with Stewkey and 'Moody' Thom Mooney.

"I was starting to find myself as a songwriter, which they didn't like," says Rundgren. "I pretty much took over the production and the spokesmanship, because whenever Stewkey opened his mouth everyone started laughing."

It didn't help that John Kurland began playing the members off against each other.

"Kurland had a very sick dynamic going," says Paul Fishkin, who kept up with Todd during the Nazz period. "Ultimately he wasn't a manager at all. He was just a publicist and he thought like a publicist." Rundgren recalls that the scales only fell from his eves after Kurland's wife died and he announced that he wanted to give his wife's wedding ring. Kurland is said to have written a novel about the rise and fall of Nazz, in which (according to the famed rock encyclopaedist Lillian Roxon) Rundgren "emerges as a sort of anti-hero... someone incapable of feeling real love". Several years later, Kurland would commit suicide.

By the time Nazz III (made up of tracks from the Fungo Bat/Nazz Nazz sessions) appeared in 1970, Rundgren had long flown the nest, moving out of the Great Neck house into a Manhattan apartment owned by the Screen-Gems music publishing company, his sights set on becoming a producer. "Todd came out of the Nazz tremendously embittered that it had failed," says Paul Fishkin. "He would get people telling him how great he was, and yet he was pretty much broke. From time to time he even threatened to quit music and become a computer programmer." Falling in with the Greenwich Village fashion crowd, Rundgren hung out with the proprietors of Stone The Crows, a sister store to London's Granny Takes A Trip -- "I got into a much more co-operative lifestyle... girls who were real nice to me!" He decided he was never going to be in a band again.

Rundgren is still wearing his green plaid shorts as he takes the stage in Petaluma. The small theatre is packed for what Todd isn't shy about describing as "a warm-up show for my imminent appearances in Japan and Shanghai". Kicking off the gig with a selection of one-man-and-his-axe back pages, he howls his way through Hammer In My Heart and Mystified, segueing from the latter into the faux-ZZ Top of Broke Down And Busted. "I'm just in a manly mood tonight," he confides after singing himself ragged.

A significant portion of the show is given over to material from the enhanced CD The Individualist, with Rundgren singing over backing tracks played by the Powerbook. When the disc malfunctions and Todd is obliged to run it again, the thought occurs that a) he is being hoist with his own petard and b) there might be more dignified ways to earn a living. A kind of shut-up-'n'-play-yer-guitar mood is detectable in the audience, who breathe an audible sigh ot relief when Rundgren shuts down the computer and seats himself behind the piano for an extended suite of 88-key classics. From a fluffed Fidelity to a Freddie Mercury-esque Song Of The Viking, the guv almost gets away with his Victor Borge of Rock act -- but not quite.

After another Powerbook karaoke sequence that includes the propulsively danceable Family Values, Rundgren -- always an entertainingly cynical raconteur on-stage -- muses on the making of With A Twist..., a new album of what he terms "personal standards" rerecorded in a loungecore/bossa nova style in Hawaii. The album is actually a treasure, serving more than anything to remind us just how great his 'greatest hits' (I Saw The Light, Can We Still Be Friends, A Dream Goes On Forever, et al) really are, and to rekindle interest in lesser-known Rundgren pearls like Influenza, Fidelity and Love Is The Answer. On-stage tonight he treats us to his bossa nova version of I Saw The Light, and to the album's serene reading of Marvin Gaye's I Want You. And then he sings what may be my favourite Todd Rundgren song of all: Cliché. I am jetlagged but happy.

Sally Grossman pokes at a plate of chinese food in the Little Bear, one of the restaurants founded by her late husband Albert in Bearsville, the tiny hamlet that serves as an adjunct to the more famous town of Woodstock. Sitting a stone's throw from the disused video studio Albert built for Todd in 1980 - "the big white elephant building", as she puts it -- she is remembering the goofy prodigy who first surfaced in Grossman's New York office in the late summer of 1969.

"Todd was this boy wonder," she says. "To be such a renaissance man as he was at the age of 21 was very striking. We were spoiled, of course, because we were used to brilliant people -- Dylan, Janis, Butterfield, The Band. But he was like all of them, his talent was already full-blown. It wasn't like you heard him and thought, Gee, with the right songs and the right producer..."

At that time, Rundgren was at large in Manhattan. Days were spent girlwatching with Paul Fishkin on St Mark's Place, nights were devoted to scoping rock's beau monde at Steve Paul's The Scene. But Todd Rundgren's wastrel days were numbered, since it turned out that he had a major champion in John Kurland's old partner Michael Friedman, by now-working as right-hand man to none other than Albert Grossman. "Initially Albert didn't like Todd or think he was talented," says Friedman. "But I presented him as a producer. Even at that point, he was brilliant in the studio."

"I knew Albert was supposed to be this Allen Klein kind of guy," says Rundgren. "It wasn't too long before he started to see something in me, and to give me engineering and production jobs on a trial basis. And then I went up to Toronto with Robbie Robertson to produce Jesse Winchester's first album. They were pretty happy with the results, so they made me the titular sound guy on The Band's Stage Fright."

It was almost certainly during the sessions for Stage Fright, recorded with a mobile truck at the Woodstock Playhouse in 1970, that Rundgren acquired a reputation for brattish arrogance -- one which has accompanied him throughout his career as a producer. "He stood out like a sore thumb among the Woodstock crowd," says Mike Friedman. "He was wearing red velvet pants and had green hair, and he had no use for most of that scene. He thought The Band were a bunch of old farts." Friedman told Fred Goodman, author of The Mansion On The Hill (which includes a fascinating chapter on Grossman), that he once witnessed Levon Helm chasing Rundgren around the studio "trying to kill him because he'd made these nasty remarks about Garth Hudson being an old man." While he alleges that Stage Fright was "because of the incredibly slow pace they worked, one of the more maddening experiences I had as a sound guy," Rundgren admits somewhat ruefully that he was "not quite fully-fleshed out in terms of socio-political skills". There would, he says, "be friction in the studio because of my inexperience and lack of wisdom in dealing with people."

Arrogance was endemic to Woodstock and the Grossman stable. Grossman certainly didn't help when he told Rundgren he was going to make him "the highest-paid producer in the world", and then proceeded to do it. When Rundgren took over the production of Badfinger's Straight Up from George Harrison (then busy with the Concert for Bangladesh), Grossman demanded an unheard-of fee for his fair-haired boy. "He asked for a shitload of money, more than any producer had ever been paid," says Rundgren. "And they paid it because it was Albert Grossman." Recalled Badfinger's Joey Molland of the experience: " Todd was unbelievably rude. He would insult us. He'd say we couldn't play, couldn't write, couldn't sing, couldn't do anything. I don't know where he got off."

The list of Rundgren clients who would concur with such grievances is long and impressive. "Nobody ever used him twice," says Mike Friedman. "He was just so self-involved. And there was never a thank-you -- Albert would never have given him those projects if it hadn't been forme."

A point came, inevitably, when Rundgren thought he might like to cut his own album. He moved out to LA, hired former Electric Prune Jim Lowe to engineer the session, and set to work on his debut album, Runt. It was very close to brilliant. "We'd thought he was just this guitar player who sounded like Eric Clapton," says Tony Sales, who with his drummer brother Hunt formed the album's rhythm section. "We had no idea what he could really do." Off the bat, he proved he could do it all: the jubilant pop of We Gotta Get You A Woman, a Top 20 hit in November 1970; the Brian Wilson balladry of Believe In Me; and the throwaway Big Star trash-rock of Who's That Man? Here were all the blueprints for Rundgren's styles, stirred into a pot by an impish, Disney-esque wizard not unlike the one pictured on the album's back cover.

"Bearsville were floored by its range and variety," says Rundgren. "They were even more floored when We Gotta Get You A Woman became a hit." Unfortunately, the song also ran aground on early '70s feminism. "The line about women -- 'they may be stupid, but they sure are fun' -- caused a lot of problems when a key female music director in Detroit took exception to it," chuckles Paul Fishkin, on whose lack of success with the ladies the song was based, and who by this time was himself working for Bearsville.

A group of women who made rather less fuss about the song were the groupies who glommed on to Todd in California -- especially Miss Christine, one of the Girls Together Outrageously who'd recorded for Frank Zappa's Straight label. "Christine was really strange, but Todd liked the adulation he was getting from her," says Tony Sales, himself stepping out with Miss Pamela (later Des Barres). Rundgren's adventures in Tinseltown continued with the recording of 1971 's The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, another smorgasbord of effortlessly clever pop songs and ballads. Rundgren had by this time started smoking pot, "and the results were immediate in terms of the refinement of a style." Pot, he says, "made me aware of my own thought processes... I started thinking about how my brain worked and what I could do with it. The symbology of language took on new meaning for me, rather than just reflexive meaning. I didn't look at the drug as recreational or escapist. It was always about going to something."

What stuck out most of all on Ballad were the dazzling tunes, most of them on ballads or mid-tempo tracks written on the piano -- songs by the callow troubadour he now slightly dismisses as "the amateur singer, the amateur piano player, the funk-free boy doing his little song". Funk-free they may be; unmemorable Wailing Wall, The Range War and The Ballad (Denny And Jean) are not. This was Todd tipping his hat to Laura Nyro and Carole King, for sure, but doing it exquisitely.

The album sold a lot less than Runt but elicited excellent reviews, including one in Rock Magazine from Patti Smith, the proto-punk New York poetess with whom Rundgren had had a brief affair and begun a more lasting friendship. "We became friends because we were both sort of alien, misfit-type people," says Smith. "We were wiry, skinny, hard-working people who didn't quite fit in. Neither one of us was involved with drugs at the time, and it was a relief just to meet somebody to talk to where you didn't have that kind of drug-culture peer pressure to worry about."

The Ballad Of Todd Rundgren led seamlessly to the breathtaking Something/Anything?, in the estimation of many Todd Rundgren's finest achievement. "Something was pretty much gonna follow along the lines of Ballad," says Rundgren. "But it just went on and on, fuelled by pot and Ritalin [a speed-like prescription drug once used by addicts in conjunction with methadone]. I'd record for eight hours during the day, but I'd also rented an 8-track machine and some synths for other ideas I didn't wanna burn studio time on. So at night I'd take Ritalin and finish writing a couple of songs, then go over to record some more 'til four or five in the morning. The first three sides of the album were done in three weeks. I was, like, Mr Music."

No less crammed with treasures than its predecessors, Something was also a conscious display of tricks, flaunted with the chutzpah of a rock'n'roll jester. Seven years before Prince recorded his first album tout seul, Rundgren turned the studio into a solipsistic laboratory. One minute he was the guitar-toting hard-rocker of the slow, mesmerizing Black Maria, the next the power-pop god of the chiming Couldn't I Just Tell You, the next the epic balladeer of the ecstatic Sweeter Memories. Marlene -- about his 17-year-old girlfriend Marlene Pinkard -- was the prettiest thing he'd ever written. For the album's fourth and final side, Rundgren brought the Sales brothers into the studio, along with keyboard whiz Mark 'Moogy' Klingman and former McCoy/Johnny Winter sideman Rick Derringer. The tour de force sequence of songs included a catchy new mid-tempo version of Hello, It's Me.

"Go ahead, ignore me," challenged the ads in the music press, which showed an unhinged Rundgren clutching a stick of dynamite. (In a Rolling Stone profile in April 1972, he told Ed McCormack that he envisioned himself becoming "the Elvis Presley of the '70s"! In the same piece, Patti Smith is quoted as saying that Todd "has absolutely no heroes".) I Saw the Light climbed to Number 16 in May '72 and by the summer the album was in the Top 30.

At this point, Rundgren met Bebe Buell, a young Virginia-born model. "He rang me up and asked me on a date," Buell recalls. "We went to Max's, but didn't sit in the famous back room because I don't think he thought he would fit in." Over the next three years, Bebe made sure that she and Todd would "fit in" wherever they damn well pleased. "I became his social director," she says. "A lot of the fun he had, he had because I dragged him by his multi-coloured mop of hair. He was always an abstract little buddha, always preferred to be thinking rather than drinking."

Creem described Todd and Bebe "the prettiest stars on the New York turntable". For Buell, Rundgren was close to being a father-figure. For Rundgren, Buell was the conduit to a hipper-than-thou scene he might never have embraced of his own volition. It was Bebe who insisted he see The New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, and who first turned him on to magic mushrooms.

"Psychedelics brought me to an awareness of myself that I'd no comprehension of previously," Rundgren says of his first trips. "The pot gave me a window into my thinking process, but that's just the process. You don't know your 'You' until you've had your ego stripped away, and you realize you're all that stuff. You begin to see your ego elements as these weird, goofy, aberrational appendages." Rundgren claims it was surrendering to "this sort of flow of stuff" that made him question his musical procedures. "So much musical product is just a function of habit and ego, in that you wanna come off a certain way. So many people use music as obfuscation, as a wall between ' them and the audience."

A Wizard, A True Star, recorded in late 1972 in Rundgren's new Secret Sound studio on Manhattan's West 24th Street, was Todd "just mapping my head right onto a record... batding against any sort of filtering process". It was also a gloriously unpunctuated rollercoaster ride through the various musics Rundgren had colonised. Songs leaked into each other or tripped on each other's heels, jumping from the fuzztone metal of Rock And Roll Pussv to the surreal ephemera of Dogfight Giggle, from the nonsense of Just Another Onionhead to the anthemic rush of When The Shit Hits The Fan -- and even finding room for a divine soul medley that drew on Rundgren's love for Curtis Mayfield (I'm So Proud), Smokey Robinson (Ooh Baby Baby) and the sweet Philly sound of Thom Bell (The Delfonics' La La Means I Love You).

For some, myself included, Wizard was and is the most awesomely ambitious rock record ever made. "Rock and Roll for the Skull," raved Patti Smith in her Circus review when the album came out in March 1973. Sadly, Wizard rose no higher than Number 86, and it baffled many listeners, including the good folks at Bearsville. "I'm sure Albert was as perturbed as anyone else by the way I followed up Something/Anything?" says Rundgren. "But when I was listening to Something six months after I'd made it, I realised there were songs on there that had taken me 20 minutes to write, and I thought, Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas I'd essentially come up with in high school?"

There was an added complication when the new version of Hello, It's Me mysteriously took off on radio. When this relatively straightforward rock'n'soul ballad hit Number 5, A Wizard, A True Star started to sound even more wildly offbeat. "There was bad luck with timing," says Paul Fishkin, by now in charge of Bearsville. "We didn't put out Hello right away, which was my mistake. Todd was off on his psychedelic adventure, and a year later Hello becomes a hit. With five more potential hits on Something, he says, 'No fucking way am I releasing anything else off that album.' And the culmination of all the madness is the Midnight Special appearance where he gets on the piano singing Hello, It's Me and looking like a fucking drag queen."

"I called it the Man-Eating Peacock outfit," laughs Bebe Buell. "It was no nuttier than Peter Gabriel dressed as a sunflower, but we were all so upset. It wasn't self-sabotage -- I think Todd thought everyone would like it. But [makeup artist] Nicky Nichols was not only highly creative and highly gay but he was stoned out of his mind with unlimited access to paint and feathers!"

"At this point, Todd was into a sort of existential use-me-as-a-piece-of-art kick, and he let Nicky do whatever he wanted," recalls Fishkin. "Todd had iron fucking balls, I will say that, but the Midnight Special appearance was the moment when it all came crashing down. This is his chance to be Elton John and The Beatles and more, and he goes on TV singing this beautiful loping smash-hit ballad and Nicky has made him up with wings and painted his eyes as multi-coloured teardrops! The world is watching, and this is the Todd they see."

"Todd wouldn't take any advice, not even from Albert," says Mike Friedman. "He was just impossible to deal with, he knew everything, and he always wanted to be five miles down the road from where he was. The bottom line was that the public didn't buy it. He wasn't Stevie Wonder -- another guy who could do it all but who knew how to make commercial records."

When he produced other artists, however, he had a sure commercial touch, such as Grand Funk Railroad's We're An American Band. "When Albert Grossman told me he was gonna make me the highest-paid producer in the world, I thought, What a weird idea," Todd recalls. "With the Badfinger record, he asked for a shitload of money and got it. And it ratcheted up again when I did Grand Funk. I got $50,000 upfront, unheard-of in 1973."

The first sign that Rundgren was willfully turning his back on his own pop success was the 1973 tour with the band that was eventually christened Utopia. Assembling a line-up that included the Sales brothers, keyboard players David Mason and Moogy Klingman, and a demented, Eno-esque synth twiddler named Jean-Yves 'Frog' Labat, Rundgren developed that he remembers as "an expensive, high-concept, technically complicated show" that featured an eight-foot geodesic dome and exploding flashbulbs, not to mention multi-coloured hair for all concerned. It was not an unqualified success.

"We had a disastrous gig in Philadelphia when this big elaborate intro built to a point of thunderous loudness and then the flashbulbs didn't go off, there was no sound coming out of the guitar amps, and we were just standing there with our thumbs up our asses," says Rundgren. "For a long time Utopia had little credibility in Philly."

Undaunted by this Tap-esque fiasco, a second incarnation of Utopia was unashamedly inspired by the flashy virtuosity of Yes and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. "Todd was constantly mulling over his fucking Yes albums," remembers Bebe Buell. "He would wake up every morning and put freaking Roundabout on! Even when I did finally get him to see The New York Dolls, he just sat there laughing hysterically from beginning to end. The psychedelic experience really did change him; it opened up that third eye. Utopia was a concept he really believed in musically but also as a potential way of life."

With the intermittently excellent double album Todd (1974), and then with Initiation (1975), Rundgren's music : increasingly reflected the arcane ideas and theories he was absorbing from books on mysticism and Eastern philosophy. "I started devouring these philosophies, never buying ' any of them whole but following the thread of anything that was consonant with what I was experiencing. These concepts found their way into my personal cosmology and into my music. I never read the actual Treatise On Cosmic Fire, [inspiration behind the long sequence that concludes Initiation] because it was just too damn opaque, but I figured it made a good concept to hang the music on."

The Utopia theme, which had been tentatively introduced on Wizard's International Feel, was unveiled officially on 1974's Todd Rundgren's Utopia, complete with all 30 minutes and 22 seconds of The Ikon. "City in my head/Utopia/Heaven in my body/ Utopia/It's time for me/For me to go," went the opening track, recorded live in Atlanta. Today, much of the music on the record doesn't seem at all bad: unfortunately, many people -- including Bearsville, once again -- looked on Utopia with a distaste that bordered on alarm. "Albert decided this just wasn't marketable," says Bebe Buell. "He'd thought he had something commercial with Todd that would be around forever, but Utopia was like starting from scratch. Music was getting simpler and Todd Rundgren was getting more complicated."

The climax of Todd's technocratic madness was undoubtedly the bombastic Ra (1977), the first album credited simply to Utopia and the first to feature the trimmed-down four-piece line-up (Rundgren, keyboardist Roger Powell, bassist Kasim Sulton, and drummer John 'Willie' Wilcox) that would stay together for almost a decade. Just when hordes of scabby punks were putting the boot into pomp rock, Rundgren chose to go on the road with a stage set built around a 25-foot pyramid and a giant gold sphinx that shot laser beams out of its forehead.

"The four-piece band was oriented much more towards songwriting and singing, but we still had the legacy of pomp rock," reflects Rundgren. "Ra had an 18-minute track called Singring and the Glass Guitar, and it was based on this quasi-mystical Egyptian concept." Having witnessed the tour twice in 1977,1 can vouch for the fact that the Ra shows deeply divided Rundgren's audience between prog fiends who dug the laser beams and solo Todd fanatics who wanted to hear songs like Couldn't I Just Tell You - who clung to the fact that the solo album Faithful (1976) boasted such nuggets of pop genius as Cliché, The Verb 'To Love', and Love of the Common Man. (It also boasted an entire side devoted to meticulous -- indeed, faithful -- remakes of '60s psych-pop classics like Good Vibrations, If Six Was Nine, and Strawberry Fields Forever.)

"There was a split in the audience," concedes Rundgren, "and there was a whole double life period where I continued to make Todd Rundgren records but only toured with Utopia." Ironically, even the 20-year-old Kasim Sulton was bemused by material like the histrionic seven-minute Hiroshima. "I thought, Why can't we just do things like Couldn't I Just Tell You for two hours?" he says. "Wouldn't that be a lot easier and more fun? Why do we have to play this song about the atom bomb? But Todd never looked at Utopia as having anything to do with his solo stuff. When we were discussing what songs we'd do on the first tour, I suggested Hello, It's Me. No way was he gonna do that song. He said, 'The kinda songs people expect to hear, I ain't doing them.'"

Although Todd continued to work as a producer, he began to spend increasing amounts of time in the house he'd bought in Mink Hollow, near Woodstock. He also left the Albert Grossman stable, though he would continue to work with Grossman on various projects 'til the so-called 'Grey Cloud"s death in 1986. "I don't enjoy rock'n'roll anymore," Todd told Creem in October 1975, three months after the move to Mink Hollow. "I honestly don't enjoy the scene. And I seriously wonder if I was meant to make myself deaf in front of a bunch of people, just playing this super-loud frantic music."

One of the tracks on Initiation was a bitter tirade entitled The Death Of Rock And Roll. "Todd felt under duress," says Bebe Buell, who lived with him and their dogs Puppet and Furburger at Mink Hollow. "I noticed that his boyishness began to diminish and he became harder. I saw him toughen up and lose a lot of his sensitivity."

March 1978 saw the release of the aptly-titled Hermit Of Mink Hollow, a return to solo melodiousness that included a smattering of classic break-up songs (Too Far Gone, Hurting For You, Can We Still Be Friends). Entirely performed and recorded by Rundgren in the new Utopia Sound studio he'd built at Mink Hollow, Hermit should have been a much bigger hit than it was. Following on its heels that year was Back to the Bars, a double live album of Rundgren's best-loved songs recorded -- as a kind of anthology -- at the suggestion of Paul Fishkin. For a checklist of the man's greatest songs, there's no better place to look.

Meanwhile, Utopia did an about-face from the pomp of Ra, releasing the poppier Oops! Wrong Planet (1977), an album summarised by Roger Powell as "an Armageddon-ish Earth -on-the-skids opera". The inimitable Rundgren melodies were still there in abundance, but so were the new sounds of Powell, Sulton, and Wilcox: Todd made a point of stressing that the group was a democracy. By 1980, on the moderately successful Adventures In Utopia, the band had climbed aboard the NewWave bandwagon and were busy in the studio with the burgeoning technology of '80s pop: the result was sub-par, even if Set Me Free managed to dent the Top 30.

"With that whole Utopia thing, he lost not only me but hundreds of thousands of people," says Sally Grossman. "There was this whole misguided notion that they were doing it all together, when in retrospect all they did was drag Todd down. In my candid opinion." Rundgren himself felt that Utopia were never given a fair chance by Bearsville: "We never sold records commensurate with the size of the crowds we drew -- mostly because, whatever the fans thought, Bearsville did not take the records seriously. After Foghat, which became the biggest commercial success the label had had at that point, we got no support whatever from the label."

Another person who thinks Utopia were hindered from making it is Chris Andersen, who became Rundgren's principal sound engineer in 1977: "Albert never thought Utopia were very good. There was a love-hate relationship with Albert. Todd would constantly complain about Albert." But Andersen lays more of the blame at the door of Eric Gardner, who'd taken over the management of Todd's career in '76. "Gardner's office couldn't keep a credit card paid," claims Andersen. "We'd show up at hotels with a busload of people and find the American Express was no good. We'd get $4,000 upfront from a promoter for sound and lights, but Gardner would instruct me to spend no more than $1,500. The result was that the show looked and sounded cheap.

"Eric Gardner lives in a mansion in Hollywood now. Todd's broke." An alternative explanation, Andersen concedes, is that Rundgren was and is "a completely unmanageable personality", someone who, when presented with a golden opportunity, shunned it: "I think in some ways he's afraid of success," Kasim Sulton concurs. "Todd never did anything to please anybody else. After Adventures, the most successful record we had, we wanted to follow up with another record like it. So what does Todd do? He announces that we're gonna do a Beatles parody [Deface The Music]. And that's what we did."

Rundgren's attention, in any case, was being diverted towards projects other than Utopia, most commercially Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell. "Moogy Klingman came in with Steinman and Loaf and Ellen Foley, and they rented a rehearsal studio and performed the whole album, with all the elaborate arrangements and all the drama. It came off like a spoof on Bruce Springsteen and I thought. Cool, everyone loves Bruce and the critics all blow him," Todd remembers. "Bearsville passed on the album, but Bat Out Of Hell became a giant cash cow for me. It created an incredible amount of money that I found all kinds of ways to squander."

Squander it he did, first and foremost on the new video studio he and Albert Grossman built at Bearsville. Ever the techno-pioneer, Todd had first merged video images with computer-generated electronic music on the first Utopia tour in 1974. Now he was ahead of the curve again, producing videos that composited live action with computer graphics. (Time Heals would become the second video ever to be played on MTV, after Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star.) "Rundgren by 1980 was a town industry," wrote P. Smart in his book Rock And Woodstock. "He hired dozens of people to do studio dates, to put together a body of video work. Employees came and went, complaining about his ever-increasing ego, unprofessional ways, shrewishness and miserliness."

"Todd's lack of communication skills became a real problem," says Chris Andersen. "You can make records by yourself, and write a computer graphics programme by yourself, but when you try to do video it requires clear communication of what all the jobs are. That was something he never successfully did." Other people think Rundgren was simply too far ahead of his time. "I wouldn't say Todd was exactly squandering money," says Kasim Sulton. "But things could maybe have been done a little differently. Todd would say we were gonna get all kinds of video production work up there, but MTV hadn't even started at this point. He made a mistake in thinking people were gonna travel 100 miles out of New York to use a production facility when they had the same facilities in the city."

On August 13, 1980, four masked men broke into the Mink Hollow house, bound and gagged Rundgren and his new girlfriend Karen Darvin (formerly Bruce Springsteen's other half), and loaded up a truck with various items of studio equipment. "One of the stories I heard was that one of them was actually whistling some of his songs while they were going round the house," says Chris Andersen. The intruders were never apprehended. "Todd was very traumatised by the experience," says Andersen. "It wouldn't surprise me if it played a part in Todd's eventual decision to leave Woodstock."

Three months later, and just a few days before he shot John Lennon in December 1980, Mark Chapman made a trip to Woodstock to look for Rundgren. It turned out that Rundgren had replaced Lennon in his obsessive affections, and it seems likely that he would have shot Todd had he found him. The connection is particularly ironic when one considers Lennon's "Open Lettuce to Sodd Runtwhistle", published in Melody Maker in September 1974 after Rundgren had slagged off the music of the ex-Beatles. "I think the real reason you're mad at me is 'cos I didn't know who you were at the Rainbow in LA," Lennon wrote. "When I found out later, I was cursing 'cos I wanted to tell you how good you were."

The entirely DIY album Healing (1981) was written and recorded partly as therapy after those dreadful events. Primarily using synthesizers, Rundgren used the record to make a moving plea for compassion in an increasingly brutal world. As the '80s progressed, moreover, Rundgren's writing began to address society's ills head-on, not least on the 1982 Utopia release Swing to the Right. "I realised that you do have to be in the world, that you can't build a philosophy that's only an excuse not to get engaged with anything," he says. "So the subject matter changed into a manifesto for somebody who knows the difference between himself and the rest of the world but who also accepts some responsibility not to be completely detached from it."

A new contract with Al Khoury's Network label brought Utopia (1982), an album of New Wave powerpop in a style redolent of XTC. But by the time the band turned in the last of three listenable electro-rock albums [Oblivion, P.O.V. and Trivia], morale had hit an all-time low. "We saw less money up front, and the tours were winding down," says Kasim Sulton. "It was discouraging for everybody. We weren't expanding our fan base. Willie wanted to do a record one way, and Todd wanted to do it another. Roger and I were caught in the middle. P.O.V. is one of the better Utopia records, but was a nightmare to make. People yelling and screaming at each other, Willie with drum machines breaking down on him and Todd saying he could just as well do this by himself."

That is in effect what Rundgren did do. With Utopia taking an indefinite sabbatical, Todd recorded A Cappella, a bold album composed entirely of solo vocal tracks that also marked the end of Todd's relationship with Bearsville, leading eventually to a deal with Warner Brothers and his move to San Francisco. For a while, Rundgren virtually commuted between Woodstock and San Francisco, continuing to produce acts at Utopia Sound while cultivating a new circle of acquaintances among what -- on the 'Mystory' page of his TR-i website -- he calls "the artsy counter-cultural elite" of the Bay Area. More often than not, his bread-and-butter cashflow came from work as a studio gun-for-hire. "Basically these were jobs lined up by Eric Gardner to make J money," says Chris Andersen. "Eric would get $150,000 for Todd to produce a record. There were some artists he was really interested in working with, like Patti Smith, The Psychedelic Furs, The Tubes and Cheap Trick, but with others it was just a job, and he wasn't good at pretending he was interested. He'd sit on a bed at the back of a studio reading computer magazines while I engineered."

Rundgren took at least a putative interest in The Pursuit Of Happiness, a Canadian band led by Moe Berg. Berg's songs took their cue directly from Todd, many sounding like outtakes from such Utopia albums as Oblivion and POV. "When I hear about people not getting I along with Todd in the studio, it's totally understandable to me," says Berg, who remembers the Love Junk sessions at Mink Hollow in the summer of 1988. "Fortunately I got off on all his antics. The way the studio was set up was that the band played in a kind of basement, and you could only really see him up in the control room through a mirror. And I'd look up and see him reading a magazine with his feet up. Every once in a while he'd stop you and say, 'You sped up!'-- and that was it.

"When he found out that Survival [on 1990's superb One-Sided Story] was gonna be five minutes long, he went, 'Oh my God, I'd better get a book and a magazine!' He bragged that we were the band he could do the fastest! He said we were in competition with Jules Shear's Watch Dog, and that's what we had to beat. One-Sided Story was recorded and mixed in two and a half weeks."

Chris Andersen says the most stressful part of any Rundgren production was always the mixdown stage: "Todd developed a technique of basically ramming the mix down the artist's throat. He wouldn't allow the artist in the studio -- the band would be sequestered down in the guest house. Then I'd call down and tell them to come up and listen, whereupon Todd would turn the volume up to 130 decibels, pin their ears against the back of the wall, and say, 'Well, whaddya think?' No-one in that situation can have anything constructive to say. With Cheap Trick's Next Position  Please [1983], the camaraderie between Rick [Nielsen] and Bun E. [Carlos] and Todd was totally enjoyable, until the day we started mixing."

Another project to which Rundgren genuinely did commit himself was XTC's brilliant Skylarking (1986). Alas, the band's Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding expended a great deal of energy slagging off Todd after the record was finished. "It may be one of the best records he's ever made, and yet he got such shit from the band in the press," says Andersen. "That had to hurt quite a bit."

At the tail-end of the '80s, Rundgren recorded one of the greatest albums of his career. Nearly Human (1989) had its inception in three things: Warner Brothers' request for commercially viable music, Todd's desire to get back to a live, full-band sound, and a new immersion in the black soul music of his youth. "It was the first time I had built soul generally into the concept," he reflects. "What really inspired me was Terence Trent d'Arby. When I first saw him perform, I was knocked out by the intense dynamics, the fact that he sung like a motherfucker, and the fact that he was on this quest as well. And I went back and listened to a lot of Marvin Gaye." Bolstering the soulfulness of the album was Bobby Womack, who sang alongside Rundgren on The Want Of A Nail, and a large gospel-style chorus of backing vocalists. There wasn't a duff track on the record, and songs like Fidelity, Parallel Lines and The Waiting Game rank among the most euphoric and uplifting music of Rundgren's oeuvre.

"I thought Nearly Human was brilliant," says Sally Grossman, who threw pre-tour parties for Todd in New York and LA when the album was released. "Anybody I got to go to the shows raved about them, but I couldn't get many people to go. It was like this complete perception problem. Albert used to say, 'We know you're capable of making commercial records', and Michael Ostin at Warners would say the same thing. The line must have gone down and become institutionalised: Todd, we know you can do something that appeals to more people. It gets scary when you can't sell 100,000 records."

By the early '90s, after the fairly dire Second Wind, Rundgren was back to being a cult artist without a major-label deal. Not that it affected the man's prodigious output, or the quality of his music. The songs he wrote for the off-Broadway musical version of Joe Orton's Beatles screenplay Up Against It brilliantly utilised Todd's early love of show tunes, veering from the influence of Gilbert & Sullivan to that of Brecht & Weill. The minor hoopla surrounding his interactive No World Order CD (1992) obscured the fact that it contained some charged techno-rap diatribes; the same went for 1994's The Individualist.

But for all his rhetoric about "aggressive personal evolution", Rundgren has become a desperately marginalised figure, of interest only to the legion of obsessives with whom he communicates via his websites. Culminating the whole process, he decided to give up on record companies and sell his music directly to his fans through the Internet.

"He's his own worst enemy, commercially," says Sally Grossman. "By doing this to himself, he cannot fulfill the visions he has because he has to do everything on the cheap. It steadily gets more myopic. And the fan clubs are disastrous. In the last few years of going to shows he hasn't got a new audience, partially because if you went to a show it was so fucking insular. It's not good for him or the music."

How insular does it feel this saturday night at Slim's, the San Francisco club founded by Boz Scaggs back in 1988? Actually, not very: there's a nicely diverse mix of people crammed into the place, testament to the esteem in which Rundgren is still held in the city that was his adopted home for over a decade. From the moment he breaks into the sludgy fuzz-rock of Todd's No 1 Lowest Common Denominator, Todd, attired in a fetching turquoise sarong, sounds considerably more together than he was in Petaluma. "I'm trying to get a slight grip tonight," he chortles after a spontaneous, off-the-cuff cover of You've Got To Hide Your Love Away.

Yet the same sense of unease descends on the spectators when Todd boots up the Powerbook and runs through Temporary Sanity and Beloved Infidel from The Individualist. A singer with the support act had cheekily remarked that Todd was "gonna do some karaoke and home movies for you tonight", and she wasn't far off the mark. Despite calls for The Last Ride and Just One Victory, Rundgren concentrates on lesser-known material like Compassion and Up Against It's Free, Male And 21. He sings I Saw The Light in its new Astrud Gilberto incarnation -- "we've been lounging since before lounge was hip," he drawls -- and he returns to the interminable one-man jam of Mystified, torturing his vocal cords as he parodies the figure of the blues-rock guitar god.

As I watch him, alone on the stage, it strikes me that there's a kind of splendid isolation about the guy that's also a little sad. It's as if he's painted himself into a corner from whence there's no way back to the musical mainstream. Should that matter? Does he care? "I started changing when I realised that, when you get to my age, there's no way to make a comeback," he says to me as we wind up a four-hour conversation in his San Francisco loft. "I could still make a healthy living just off my musical output if I was a little looser about producing people I don't really want to produce. There are any amount of compromises I could take on, and even if I don't my family can live fairly comfortably. I'm not particularly smart about money, and when I get a big chunk of it from Meat Loaf, what do I do? Blow it all on a video studio.

"I've made personal changes that are nobody's business but mine, but I've also assessed my position in the scheme of musical things and come up with what to me are completely logical conclusions but to everyone else seem to be the equivalent of some new drug, i.e. this computer thing. I could have redefined myself musically, taken the Neil Young route and redeemed myself with the kids and squeeze I don't know how many more years out of my career. But I realised it wasn't just about the style of music, it was about deconstructing the whole musical process including the delivery medium."

"He's always been the Davy Crockett of rock'n'roll," says Bebe Buell. "He thinks of all these things before everyone else, beats the door down and then gets none of the money or credit. All of the big stars come along during a movement, whereas Todd created a movement. The pioneers are always the people who either have to die or take the flak. Has Prince ever uttered Todd's name? I met Prince when he was 16, when Todd played Minneapolis in 1974 -- this tiny little person with huge hair standing backstage who wanted to meet Todd. And Todd did his usual, 'Oh, hi, kid' number, and Prince was like, I play everything and I'm real talented...'

"A lot of multi-platinum artists were born from the little eclectic buddha called Todd Rundgren, and not one of them has admitted it. Todd is somebody we should all be taking care of and protecting. Now I just think of him as the lonely wayward genius. He doesn't realise how many people still love him. There's a kindness and goodness inside of him. Bless his heart, no matter how many ups and downs he had, my daughter always went to private school, always had a new wardrobe for school every fall. He's like a wounded creature who's been hurt so much that outsiders probably don't notice tiiese gestures of his as much as I do."

"He has always been a very kind and personable friend," says Patti Smith. "He's very supportive, and he's a good father. He was extremely kind to my children after my husband passed away. See, stardom and fame are fleeting things. The fact that Todd did exactly what he wanted to and didn't bend to trends is admirable to me. When you look back on your life, wouldn't you rattier have been a pioneer than a rich person who cashed in? And he's not just rebellious, because he has a very strong, articulate philosophy and he backs it up with action. He's always had very revolutionary ideas, and I think that the ideas he has now about work presentation will be ground-breaking. The way he's going will probably be the way of the future."

"Todd was more of a specialist thing than Bowie or even Iggy," says Tony Sales, who's played with both. "It's almost the way my father [cult comic Soupy Sales] was: a unique talent to be appreciated by the people who understand the joke. With Todd, you had to understand the joke."

"Todd thought that eventually everyone would get it," says his old friend Paul Fishkin. "But by the time he got the credibility, all it did was reinforce the cult. And yes, he did have continual problems getting along with people, because his defensiveness caused him to be arrogant. It made for a tumultuous time: the juxtaposition of the people around him who knew he could be huge and the fanatics who would have done anything for him. And I think the saddest part of all this is that, underneath it all, he was very disappointed."

"The things I'm involved in, and the ideas that I have, are as accessible and as fascinating as anyone's music," Todd Rundgren told NME 15 years ago. "It's not my loss if no one discovers it. I'm living it all the time. I have more important priorities. By the time people discover where I am, if they ever do, I'll be someplace else anyway."

Catch you there in the next millennium.

A TODD TWENTY
Psych-prog-pop-rock'n'soul: a score of unclassifiable classics from three decades.

Open My Eyes (Nazz, 1968)
Nuggets psych-punk classic, a Who/Cream hybrid with a pure Beach Boys middle eight. Eclectic or what?

If That's The Way You Feel (Nazz, 1968)
Laura Nyro meets The Association: the prototype for all Rundgren's great piano ballads. A Todd string arrangement and a brilliant ascending middle section.

We Gotta Get You A Woman (Runt, 1970)
Timeless pop whimsy with one of Todd's great singalong choruses. Ben Folds Five eat your hearts out.

Hello, It's Me (Something/Anything?, 1972)
A yearningly soulful update of the Nazz ballad: the definitive self-portrait of Todd the boy wonder.

Marlene (Something/Anything?, 1972)
The most melting ballad on the boy's double-album meisterwerk, hymning his 17-year-old sweetheart.

Couldn't I Just Tell You (Something/Anything?, 1972)
Todd stakes his claim to powerpop deity with this crisp, snappy classic.

International Feel (A Wizard, A True Star, 1973)
Enter the next dimension with the brain-blasting lift-off to Rundgren's most cosmically audacious platter.

Zen Archer (A Wizard, A True Star, 1973)
A delirious highlight from the magical mystery trip that is Wizard. A soaring melody that floats through a melee of sax, synths and stacked vocals.

Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel (A Wizard, A True Star, 1973)
Our final selection from this stellar song cycle: Todd at his most convincingly passionate.

I Think You Know (Todd, 1974)
First song proper on the overlooked 1974 double, a ridiculously beautiful track featuring Todd's greatest ever guitar solo.

The Last Ride (Todd, 1974)
The ne plus ultra of epic Rundgren ballads, climaxing in an orgasmic squall of screaming guitars.

Utopia Theme (Todd Rundgren's Utopia, 1974)
Fourteen intoxicating minutes of hard proof that Todd could prog-rock with the best of them. Recorded live in Atlanta.

Cliché (Faithful, 1976)
Arguably the most perfect song Rundgren has ever written, emoted over a crystalline blend of harpsichord and acoustic guitar.

The Verb 'To Love' (Faithful, 1976)
A rhapsodic seven-minute treatise on romance; one of the great white-soul tracks of our time.

Magic Dragon Theater (Ra, 1977)
Proving that Utopia weren't all Spinal Tap pomp and circumstance, this tuneful Queen-meets-The Beatles diversion is an overlooked gem.

Hurting For You (Hermit Of Mink Hollow, 1978)
The most heartrending of several break-up ballads on an entirely self-performed album cut at Utopia Sound.

Healer (Healing, 1981)
Another DIY job, this gorgeous salve for a sick world finds Todd in proto-electro mode, layering synths over a busy drum machine track.

Fidelity (Nearly Human, 1989)
Rundgren does Bobby Womack, reprising the sweeping white-soul ache of The Verb To Love'.

The Waiting Game (Nearly Human, 1989)
More of the above, just one of the indecent number of masterpieces on this extraordinary record.

Love Is The Answer (With A Twist, 1997)
A blissful bossa nova reworking of the last song on Utopia's Oops! Wrong Planet, coated in a sheen of seraphic backing vocals.