Todd Rundgren’s Utopia (Rhino/Bearsville)
For Record Store Day Black Friday, Rhino has issued a 50th anniversary edition of Todd Rundgren’s first Utopia endeavor, on psychedelic pink swirl vinyl.
Todd first created the band as a vehicle to showcase his guitar chops, surrounding himself with THREE keyboard players, and choosing to play extended pieces with long instrumental passages.
The album opens with the “Utopia Theme,” which starts out angry and bombastic, before landing on a melodic piece that allows for lots of soloing. Rundgren doesn’t even start singing til the 7-minute mark. The track is definitely exciting, recorded in front of a live audience. Even at 14 minutes in length, it keeps your attention.
It immediately segues into the studio track, “Freak Parade,” and some of the momentum is lost. The track starts out dreamily before jumping back and forth between crazy time signatures and goofy lyrics. Rundgren was definitely going for Frank Zappa here. There are some really great parts, interspersed with experimentation and noodling. The 10 minutes is kind of hard to take here.
That’s followed by “Freedom Fighters,” the only thing resembling standard song structure. It’s still not hit-single worthy, but Rundgren actually turns in a memorable hook, and the soloing is hemmed in (the song lasts 4 minutes).
Side two consists entirely of a 30-minute piece called “The Ikon.” It starts with an opening motif that plays through several times, leaving plenty of room for soloing. Then, at the 3:30 mark, things shift drastically into a riff that reminds me of Styx (!). There’s nice harmonies on the chorus, then at 5:30, things shift again for more soloing. About 8:30 mark, things get gentle, resembling something that would’ve fit nicely on one of his solo albums. About 10:30, things ramp up again, for some insane guitar and keyboard soloing, even squawking sounds, similar to Brian Eno. 14:30 it calms down again and gets dreamy. At 17 minutes, Rundgren comes back in, the “you don’t have to be afraid” part is very good – this is his most impassioned vocals on the entire record. At 21:21, it abruptly jumps into another aggressive section, with even more soloing. At 24:00, things continue to shift from fast to midtempo, til the end of the song. It’s an extremely long piece, with both really good and just so-so parts.
Todd Rundgren made a career out of choosing musical styles that were already out of step. His first group, the Nazz, was doing mid-period Beatle pop in 1968, when the rest of the world was embracing psychedelia. Utopia 2.0 emerged as a power pop band around the time New Wave was taking over. So, putting a Prog Rock band together in 1974, in hindsight, falls into a pattern for him.
The new, 50th anniversary edition, is pressed on a psychedelic pink swirl vinyl, which looks fantastic. It also comes with an excellent liner note sheet, written by Rundgren expert Paul Myers, shedding new light into this interesting chapter of his career. —Tony Peters