The weird mess that was Todd Rundgren and Utopia

Back in my high school years, circa grade 10, I found myself getting knee-deep in the music of Todd Rundgren.  At the time, Todd was one of my faves.  His lyrics seemed to speak to a lot of my silly teenage angst and his quasi-religious (or whatever you wanna call it) treks fit the open-minded/open-ended opinions I had on such stuff.  However, his band Utopia was a harder sell for my ears.

Not that that was strange, really.  Utopia was never a band that quite fit.  And not in the Velvet Underground or Big Star sort of way.  Utopia's biggest problem was that since it was Todd's baby, its formula would constantly change from album to album, much like Rundgren's solo work.  But Todd doing something different each time out in a solo manner was more intriguing than having to slog through Utopia's myriad changes.

In the beginning, Utopia had a shitload of dudes in it.

Look, you can chalk the first bit of confusion up to the fact that it was the '70s when the band debuted (1974) and listening to the prog rock mess of Todd Rundgren's Utopia is still a challenge for most.  Personally, I still enjoy the epic side-long "The Ikon" (clocking in at just a shade over 30 minutes), mainly for Todd's wacko guitar work on it.  The goofy lyrics leave a lot to be desired, but Rundgren manages to weave some pop sensibilities into his trip.  The rest of the album (the first side) is a drag.  "Utopia Theme" is a chore. "Freak Parade" is a mess, and the short "Freedom Fighters" is mired in the kind of craptastic noodle-headed comic book philosophies that bogged down a lot of the slightly more "progressive" artists at the time.  Utopia was no Rush.

The second version of Utopia during the goofy RA phase.

The first version of the group with its too many members squeaked out a crummy live album after that, featuring one decent tune that was marred by leftover hippie nonsense ("The Wheel").  After no one bothered to care about that LP, Rundgren pared the band down to a quartet and shat out the cosmic slop known as RA.  The band dressed in bad Egyptian attire on the album's sleeve and managed to turn out a couple decent tunes ("Communion with the Sun" and "Jealousy") and then managed to mess up most of side two with the boring "Singring and the Glass Guitar (an Electrified Fairy Tale)."  Again, Utopia was no Rush, whose own 2112 pretty much set the benchmark for this kind of thing.  So Todd reconfigured what Utopia was all about again and came up with a new formula.

 

Oops!  Wrong audience.

1978's Oops! Wrong Planet was a step in a more pop-oriented direction.  The only thing leftover from the prog crap was the giant pyramid that Todd would scale during live shows featured on the front cover.  There were no epic tunes this time, just regular-length tracks.  My fave of the bunch has always been "Windows" featuring vocals by keyboardist Roger Powell.  This is where you'll also find the not very tough "Love in Action" and the overrated "Love is the Answer."  "Trapped" and "Crazy Lady Blue" were fine and overall the album was better than its predecessors on the whole, but that really wasn't saying a lot.

New decade, new duds, same sales.

So the '80s dawned and Todd was faring better with his solo stuff as usual.  Utopia trotted out Adventures in Utopia in 1980 and scored a "minor" (something like #65 if memory serves correct) hit with "Set Me Free" sung by bassist Kasim Sulton.  But there were better songs, like Todd's New Wave ballad "Second Nature," the fantastic "You Make Me Crazy" with vocals by drummer John Wilcox, and the silly "Shot in the Dark."  At this point it seemed like the band was humping the comic book ideas completely with songs like "Last of the New Wave Riders."  Fans will note that on the LP and subsequent reissues that the album was a supposed soundtrack for a TV special that never aired, with each of the tracks coming from a different episode.  To my knowledge an actual series was never produced and the "concept" was just that.  Weak sauce.

Well, anything's better than the Egyptian garb.

But making a slight dent in the pop charts wasn't satisfying enough for Todd, so next up we got the Beatles send-up Deface the Music which actually had some killer pop tunes on it, but sold like dead rats on a buffet as it was released around the time John Lennon was killed and no one couldn't have cared less.  But it is worth checking out, especially if you're a Beatles fan, though it doesn't come close to the fun of the first Rutles LP.  Not to be deterred, the band reconvened and spat out Swing to the Right, a collection of tunes inspired by Reaganomics and all that stuff some of you kids may remember.

Actually, the album has some really solid tunes on it and is worth delving into, even if it seems like a difficult listen at first.  Rundgren and pals were finally honing something approximating coherence here over an entire album.  "Shinola" is one of Todd's best and nastiest bits, and the New Wave/disco groove of "Fahrenheit 451" is tasty.  "Lysistrata" is the one Todd would trot out during solo gigs, and the cover of "For the Love of Money" is pretty damn good.

The band's best LP.  No one cared

Following this, the band and Rundgren split from the Bearsville label and started setting up shop on crummy indie imprints that no one ever heard of.  The first release, simply entitled Utopia is the band's best work, bar none.  The original LP featured 15 tracks across three sides of vinyl.  Here you had everything from the favorite "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" to "Princess of the Universe" to the terrific "Bad Little Actress" and "Hammer in My Heart."  The band nailed it dead on.  It should have been a hit, especially in the early '80s when it was issued, but like everything else the band did, it basically sank without a trace, known only by the band's fans.

Christ, let's just call it a day already.

The frustration of missing the public yet again began to take its toll and the last pair of Utopia albums, Oblivion and POV were rather depressing affairs.  I always preferred the former over the latter as it at least had stuff like "Too Much Water," "Love With a Thinker," "If I Didn't Try," and the oddball "Bring Me My Longbow."  It's actually not too bad, but suffers from a sort of over processed sound a lot of albums were punched through at the time.  POV, on the other hand, had the corny "Mated," the decent "Crybaby," and the goofy "Zen Machine."  Meh.

And then it was over.  Todd called it a day on the group.  The last offering was a "best of" compilation of the last three albums called Trivia, which featured two "new" tunes, the decent "Fix Your Gaze" and the ho-hum "Monument."  Years passed and in the early '90s the band got together briefly and released the live Redux '92: Live in Japan.  Again, only the hardcore cared, and again the band was put to rest.

It's hard to assess what Rundgren was going for with Utopia.  Aside from the great self-titled album, you could basically cherry pick ten tracks from most of the other albums and have everything you need to know about the group.  To my ears, there was always just something about the sound of the band that wasn't quite right.  Why Todd felt the need to have a regular band format crank out these albums when he would have been just as adept at doing them himself is worth pondering as well.  There are people who will swear by this group.  I love a lot of Todd's work, but honestly I find a lot of Utopia's tracks to just be pointless.  I suppose Todd did, too, after years of trying to make it work.

Blog pinger