Todd vs. Todd

A guy told me once that every town has a Frank Zappa fan. If that’s a true statement, then let me add that every other town has a Todd Rundgren fan in it. My old hometown was no exception, except it took car trouble to learn about it.
Now I had a couple of Todd Rundgren albums before my MGB convertible decided not to start one Saturday night. It was a great, unreliable two-seater that was a joy to drive in the summer and a freezing, rear-wheel drive nuisance during the winter months. There always seemed to be something wrong with it, alternating between major repair and minor issues. One of those minor issues was that it sometimes wouldn’t start. And when I mean “wouldn’t start,” I mean the engine gave no indication that you were turning the ignition at all.
The guy that would fix the car happened to be the only guy in town that fixed MG’s. He didn’t really even have a car shop; I swear to God that his primary source of income was fixing golf carts, which probably doesn’t bode well for MG enthusiasts, but nonetheless, he would agree to tinker around with my car and it frequently would run after he looked at it. He explained why my car wouldn’t turn over and showed me how to fix it, probably because he was tired of dealing with me, and after being armed with such mechanical knowledge, I was able to figure out how to start it from that point forward.
But until that time I, and the girl that I was making out with, were stranded.
I parked the MG on a dark side street and leaned over the stick shift for a kiss and when we both decided to move to a more comfortable location, I discovered that the car wouldn’t start. We walked down the street to a stop sign and flagged down a car, a pedestrian Oldsmobile station wagon, with hopes that they could drive us to my companion’s working vehicle.
The rescuers were two girls a few years older than we were and one of them, the driver, was the older sister of a friend of mine. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but after a brief introduction, we both acknowledged that we had heard of one another. This made the car ride a little more relaxed as the two girls continued to converse while we rode in the back seat. Apparently, they were returning from some drama of their own where my friend’s sister had just broken up with her boyfriend. The soundtrack for the breakup was an album by Todd Rundgren’s Utopia.
Both girls seemed familiar with Rundgren, which was unusual since Utopia was not the type of band that was played at all on radio stations in Southeast Iowa. After professing their love for Todd, I made it my mission to learn more about this dude that shared my first name.
While the older girl’s love was apparent, it seemed that not many other people loved them. Every Todd Rundgren and Utopia album that I found and eventually purchased always seemed to be lodged in the cutout bin.
Oh well. There’s nothing wrong with saving money.
I didn’t start where I needed. I started with Back To The Bars, a double album that I picked up next to nothing. When I opened it, I discovered that one disc was warped to the point of being unplayable. The other sides were good enough for me to purchase Healing, a much more electronic effort than what I expected. The second side is pretty good to get high to.
I moved on to the Utopia output.
The first was Swing To The Right, a fairly unremarkable effort with one good side and the other a fairly mundane one.
And then I was offered the chance to borrow Utopia’s eponymous-titled 1982 effort that happened to be autographed by all of the members of the band including Todd himself.
I forgot to return that album and still have it today. One of the lessons I followed was to never, NEVER, loan out my albums to anyone. Give me a tape and I’ll make a copy for you. It was a practice that I later learned true collectors always followed. It appears that the sap who loaned out an autographed Utopia album didn’t follow this creed. Don’t worry; the dude got it with a bunch of other free shit from an Uncle or someone who happened to work at a radio station. In other words, he didn’t appreciate it as I did. Plus, he loaned it to another friend who, in turn, loaned it to me after he made a copy. Plus, the rightful owner later slashed one of my tired at a high school dance (unrelated and unknowingly) with a pair of other douche bags who thought it would be a riot to slash everyone’s tires.
Utopia was a good record, three sides in length (yes, three) and chocked full of two-and-a-half-minute pop jems that hinted at Rundgren’s power pop heights.
I later got Oblivion from the cutout bin at a Tower Records store in California that miraculously survived the trip back to Iowa in a car during the hot summer months. I love this record and there’s a good chance that you’ll hate it. First of all, the production values are horrific. Every song is covered in an 80’s glean that sounds silly. And it’s not just the sound; it’s the way the whole thing was mixed. It blows my mind that Rundgren allowed his name on a record with such a shitty production.
Nonetheless, I liked it enough to pick up……Something/Anything. Yes, the album that I should have started with was the last one I purchased. Was it an epiphany? Pretty much. I discovered that I wasted a lot of time with those other records, Utopia and otherwise, and my fixation with Todd ended. I mean, once you get to the top of the mountain, there’s not a lot of point in continuing to climb it. And Something/Anything is the top of Todd’s mountain.
Besides, Rundgren never returned to the power-pop masterstroke of that album again, so why would I be obligated to follow him down into paths that merely avoid those characteristics that brought him so much success to begin with?
The album that prompted this entire discovery was The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect. It was playing in that girl’s station wagon and I later got a cassette copy for myself. It’s the record that features the song that most people recognize for: “Bang On The Drum All Day.” It’s a throwaway (and most of Effect is, in fact, a bunch of throwaways) and shamefully overshadows “Drive,” the best song on this effort. “Drum’s” resilience amazes me; there are at least three or four teams in the NFL that use it when their team scores a touchdown and it remains a perennial favorite on rock station’s Friday afternoon playlists. In both cases, I’m positive that there are better choices available, but for some reason, this knock-off Rundgren track gets all the airplay,
Nonetheless, Effect was poor enough for me to stop looking to my namesake for anything remotely consistent and, at the risk of offending someone in every other city in America, to stop looking to him for something, anything, better.



Todd Rundgren & Bebe Buell Photograph by Bob Gruen