1972: the first — and to be disastrously short-lived — tour of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia has stopped for a breather in Chicago. The band is cruising the Loop by foot, but the welcome they’re receiving from the locals is hardly what you’d expect for visiting rock & roll dignitaries. It could be their flash clothes, but more likely it’s the hair: Jean-Yves Labat is sporting a bright green lime ’do, Hunt Sales has had his sharply skunked, his brother Tony’s is day-glo pink, while Todd’s is every color they have a name for and then some.

Whatever the cause, the effect is a shitrain of indignation. Sailors whistle and old women threaten to have coronaries as they pass, cars screech to a halt in disbelief, and even hippies feel obligated to be rude. 1964 all over again, just a little more colorful this time around. “See the thing is,” says Todd as he dodges the insults, “that before long none of this will be so weird. Pretty soon kiddies will be pestering their parents ... ‘Aw, c’mon Mom, just a little purple on the side ... ’ ”

1974: “It gets to the point,” says the same Todd Rundgren, the color in his hair faded almost to nothing, “where you wonder if all somebody’s gonna do is make jokes. Is that it? Or aren’t you gonna turn your ability into something more than a joke. There’s still just as much humor in what I do, it just gets more Subtle all the time. A lot of the humor in my music before was along the lines of nervous laughter. Which is not really humor; it’s laughing so you don’t have to think about what’s really there. The reason I made the records funny in a certain way was to show people that I wasn’t obligated to make them serious. And so if somebody thinks I’m obligated to make funny records now, then it’s time to make serious records.”

The Todd Rundgren Cult was marshalled primarily by the principal’s exhibitionism. With Todd there was always a show; a performance to be given even if the venue was as trivial as an ad for Billboard. Following his activities was like watching a mescaline cartoon, but every childstar, for better or worse, eventually grows up and graduates to prime time. With Todd, the process of artistically growing up was attacked with the same flamboyance which characterized his adolescence. He was, some said, like a kid turned loose in an intellectual candy store. “What’s he on?” others would ask. But it was really the same old Todd. Though the scene had shifted from high school to some supposedly loftier academy, you could still count an occasional spitball from the side of the room.

“I’m not trying to tell anybody anything,” he contends. “I just do it for

"The more popular my records become, the less accessible I have to be." the people that ask. People that want to know what a person in my position experiences. That’s the only thing that’s worth telling them. They want to know what’s different abbut the existence that I lead; what distinguishes me from them. Why dp they write to me and I don’t write to them? Why am I on the stage and they’re in the audience? But I’m not obsessed with it. I don’t think ‘What’s my seriousness quota this month’...”

As he stretched his old songforms farther and farther away from their safely limited definitions, however, the danger arose that he might actually vanish beyond his potential audience’s horizon. And by placing himself beyond their comprehension, he stood to negate his greatest and longest-standing asset: his ability to involve people in whatever it is he’s doing. But Todd, ever untrue to any form, sees it a little differently.

"It's time to make serious records."

“I never make records for the masses,” he states flatly“If the masses buy ’em, that’s fine. But I actually expect that the more people buy ’em, the less people will understand ’emBecause people will begin to buy them out of habit, knee-jerk reaction. The more popular my records become, the less accessible I have to be, if only to make people question why they bought it in the first place.”

Oh, so it’s almost as if you’re issuing a challenge to your audience. “In a certain way I am.. This is a generation of big-mouths that, despite whatever we might find prettiest to think, has done nothing to make a genuine difference. We all know where things should be, but it’s too easy to be static. And I don’t make records to pacify people into that position even further.

“Most people making records today are making a living. If you actually do sell records, people suddenly believe that the record which sold contains within it that magic stuff that makes them saleable, and they build on imitation from there. ‘Well, there’s my style, what I’ve been looking for, because it makes me a living.’ This is one of the few lines of work where that’s possible. You can’t be a doctor and experiment on people until you’ve found that magic formula. You have to go through a lot of serious discipline to do it effectively, like going to med school for eight years.”

Though his records now sell quite handsomely (even if the rank & file in his audience is still struggling to break past “Hello It’s Me”) he’s maintained the luxury of a cult within his following, a sub-audience that’s more than willing to lie down on his operating table with earphones on. There are the fans, and there are the True Believers. He can afford to play this extravagant cat and mouse game because, in the end, he doesn’t make records for a living. When the time comes to pay the rent, he’ll go out and produce one instead.

It almost seems that whenever he finds himself with a spare month on his hands, he systematically sets about filling that time with as much outside production work as he can squeeze in. The last time anyone looked, he was simultaneously producing Hall & Oates, Felix Cavaliere, the Hello People, and a Utopia album (not to be confused with a Todd album, which will follow), Oh yes, and he was investigating the possibilities of working in a Laura Nyro album somewhere along the line. Is this in fact the way the process works? “More or less.” Are you good enough to get away with it? “Yes. But I give artists the kind of record they want to have. Sometimes what they want might be miles away from what I think they’re capable of, but in the end it’s their record.

TURN TO PAGE 78.

Creem

Creem

MATE of the MONTH

Photo by

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 41

“My own records, of course, come out of a totally different consciousness. Which, good or bad, is at least my own. So many people go through life without a direction. They just go from stop to stop. It’s like they’re on a bus, and the only time they get off is to piss. And to avoid thinking about why they might be alive, they just fill up their time with things to do. So to communicate effectively, you have to make yourself appear to have a purpose. People like to think ‘If I’m confused and don’t know what the hell I’m alive for, at least somebody does. So’ there must be a reason for me too. I just don’t know it.’ So out of all this arises my responsibility to affirm for them that they do have a reason.

Take it or leave it. At least it’s never dull.