TODD GODS OUT

Initiation (Bears ville)

The answer is: No, Todd has not surfaced from his headlong (and I mean head; more on that later) dive into neo-Eastern mysticism. The man who gave us such incredible tunes as "We Gotta Get You A Woman," "I Saw The Light," "Hello," It's Me," "Just One Victory," even the slightly Utopia-befogged "International Feel," and the less lyrical "Piss Aaron" and "Slut" continues

TODD RUNDGREN from his last album mired in his naive, idealistic, quirky and anachronistic vision of Man and his Universe. (Didn't Pepsico do some such exhibition for the 1965 World's Fair?)

While this record is a more personal statement than Utopia, that utopian proselytizing still abounds as Todd tells of his visionary rebirth into Real Manhood—Initiation being the record album of Todd's Bar Mitzvah. In Manhood, the light, cuddly adolescent love songs of yore (preUtopia) have given way for the light, only sometimes cuddly; multi-colored day-glo visions of a Real Man—not the stalwart macho image traditionally conjured up by the label "Real Man," but the true Real Man who can say "I see with my heart/I hear with my heart/I feiel with my heart" and "still take no crap from no one" (no violence implied, for sure) and whose "world is something you can't see"—the reality of the Real Man at the same time (more irony) not being your traditional or even tangible reality. Shades of 1967 Peace, Love, and LSD?

Yes, eight years after the fact Todd appears to have become a head arid written and performed an album that is sure to take all you tripsters, you brother heads out there into righteously better places. "Born to Synthesize" is the cut you will most want to actually space out on, it being a whooshy cosmic blues holler that is really out there. To wit: "Like waves on still u|ater the forms reappear/Quickly erasing the ones before." (Remember on acid how you used to forget things— entire trips—that went just moments before— now thoroughly here, now deeply into it there— yeah there, man, that purple tree!) "Initiation" is a pretty and melodic tune that can reinforce your acidic (versus Hassidic—this is the New Bar Mitzvah!) beliefs with its repeated pronouncements that "Love has come/Love has come" and its singularly pithy closing line, belted out in the best sort of joyous cast-of-hundreds Broadway show finale style, that consists of only onq word: "Unification."

All this acid head stuff, including side two, a numbing bleepity-splish 36 minute instrumental entitled "A Treatise on Cosmic Fire," does not hide the not so-together-and-groovy-and-loveymankindy side of Todd. The closing cut on side . one is "Fair Warning" and leads quite nicely into a discussion of the Paranoia of Todd Rundgren.

Paranoia is defensiveness in the face of little or no confrontation, rair Warning" is jyst that, a warning, but to whom? Todd reiterates over and over, "Dontcha follow me now," admitting that his whole trip may just be down the garden path but justifying it (again, to whom?) with "I'd rather live by a dream than a lie," and excusing it in advance repeatedly with "But I gave you fair warning." He does seem to have some sense of humor about this whole thing, what with the psychedelicized Barry White spoken opening to this .song, but that could be another mo^e subtle form of his defenisveness. For all his yucking it up, within this same song he is tenaciouslly clinging to his naivete, lashing out at those unseen but expected foes with lines like "You can say what you ,will about me talk is cheap I don't mind."

, But the heavy metal rocker-on side one called "The Death of Bock and Roll" is the opus magnus of the Paranoia of Todd Rundgren:

Just the other day I got a call from a friend

""I heard what you been play in and I think it's a sin

Why can't you make a living like the rest of the boys

Instead of filling your head with all that synthesized noise?" * .

Jackals wait nearby, watching rock and roll die. *

Those jackals are not only his friends, but me (of all people)! "The critics got together and they started a game/You get the records for nothing and you call each other names." Gulp!

I don't intend to call Todd Rundgren any names myself, unless of course calling him an unmitigated acid head who is the once (and future?) hope of rock "n" roll is calling him names. "Real Man" and "Death of Rock and Roll" are good songs—not up to his best, but up to a lot of folks" best. And if Todd wants to be paranoid that's all right provided he doesn't completely blow his tubes with it...and wind up in terminal regression to some easier but insidiously naive vision of the world.

"Copyright 1975 Earmark Music, Inc. BMI