Todd Rundgren is universally regarded as the most influential and innovative music artist of his generation. For the past 35 years, as a musician, singer/songwriter, record producer and multimedia artist, he has consistently been on the bleeding edge. The true achievements of Rundgren's can be measured as a number of "firsts" that he pioneered himself, among which were the releases of the world's first commercial music video and the world's first interactive audio CDs.
His fascinating 35-year career seems like a virtual rollercoaster ride which has taken him from garage band (The Nazz) to record producer and technological visionary, whose work is used by millions of people around the globe.
Playing rock'n'roll since his high school days in local bands in Philadelphia, in 1967 he formed his first serious band, The Nazz. The band had a pyschedelic pop hit, Open My Eyes, before disbanding in 1969.
For his next musical venture, Rundgren went on to form Runt in 1971; and scored first taste of national U.S. success with the top-20 hit single We Gotta Get You A Woman. During the same year, in addition to writing songs and performing them, Rundgren became heavily involved in the production and engineering aspects of making records.
Shortly thereafter, he went on to produce albums for Badfinger, The Band, Paul Butterfield, James Cotton, Fanny, and Grand Funk Railroad. By '72 he embarked on a solo career and released the milestone double album Something/Anything; his first album where he played all the instruments and over-dubbed his vocals to create what is still highly regarded as his most ground-breaking album to date. The album spawned two top-20 hit singles in America, I Saw The Light and the seminal Hello, It's Me.
During this period of time, Rundgren's fan base continued to escalate. Rundgren followed up Something/Anything with two more ground breaking, psychedelic albums A Wizard / A True Star (1973), which at the time proved to be the longest running rock album ever released (it clocked in over 60 minutes on vinyl) and the self-titled masterpiece Todd (1974).
By 1974, Rundgren formed a progressive rock band called Utopia, and during that same year he released Todd Rundgren's Utopia, an album packed with cosmic rock numbers fused with outstanding instrumental tracks. By 1976, he streamlined the band and recruited Kasim Sulton (bass), Willie Wilcox (drums) and Roger Powell (keyboards), a tighter, edgier Utopia - with a penchant for undeniable full-on power rock songs and killer pop hooks. This particular 4-piece line-up of Utopia went on to record a grand total of eleven albums.
As a record producer in his own right, Rundgren has a rich 35-year history of outstanding production credits under his belt. His production credits are mind-boggling. In 1973 one of his initial successes producing Grand Funk Railroad's massive hit album and single We're An American Band led him to produce albums for the likes of the outrageous New York Dolls (1973), The Tubes' Remote Control (1976), and the Patti Smith Group's Wave (1979).
By the time Rundgren produced Meatloaf's multi-million selling Bat Out Of Hell album (1977), he was aknowledged as one of the world's top record producers. From this point on, Rundgren went on to produce albums for an array of talented bands and artists. Some of his key production credits include XTC's Skylarking, Hall & Oates' War Babies, Grand Funk's We're An American Band and Shinin On, Bourgeois-Tagg's YoYo, and Psychedelic Fur's Forever Now. He also produced albums for Badfinger, Shaun Cassidy, Cheap Trick, The Pursuit of Happiness, Steve Hillage, Lords of the New Church, and Bad Religion.
When the 1980s rolled around, and before MTV was just a seed that was still waiting to grow, Rundgren became heavily involved in the advent of video technology and began creating enhanced music videos with the aid of the computer. As a live solo artist, he relentlessly toured North America, at times, backed by his videos and pre-taped musical arrangements, which in those days, was totally unheard of. Once again, Todd was clearly ahead of his time or was the rest of the world trying to catch up with him?
In 1992, under the moniker of TR-i (aka Todd Rundgren Interactive) he released the album No World Order; the first interactive music CD-ROM that allowed listeners to reconfigure the song tracks into alternative versions. By 1994 he released the album The Individualist; the first interactive 'enhanced' CD. The latter even included a video game.
Todd Rundgren is the acknowledged godfather of the marriage of music and multimedia.
By 1998, Rundgren launched his proprietary PatroNet technology (www.patronet.com), the Internet's very first direct artist subscription service. Originally conceived for Todd Rundgren music enthusiasts in mind, Rundgren initiated an ingenious subscription service that enabled fans to download his recordings directly from his website.
On April 5th, Sanctuary Records UK will release 'Liars' - Rundgren's 18th solo effort, and his first album of all new material in over 10 years.
The following are some of the innovations from Rundgren's career in music and multimedia which validates him as rock's first true multimedia visionary:
* 1978: The first interactive television concert, broadcast live over the Warner/QUBE system in Columbus, Ohio (the home audience chose each song.in real time during the concert by voting via QUBE's 2-way operating system).
* 1978: The first live nationally broadcast stereo radio concert (by microwave), linking 40 cities around the country.
* 1979: The opening of Utopia Video Studios, a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art facility. The first project produced by Todd there is Gustav Holst's The Planets, commissioned by RCA SelctaVision as the first demonstration software for their new Videodisc format, the precursor to the DVD.
* 1980: Creation of the first color graphics tablet, which was licensed to Apple and released as The Utopia Graphics Tablet.
* 1981: Time Heals, the first music video to utilize state-of-the-art compositing of live action and computer graphics (produced and directed by Todd), becomes the second video ever to be played on MTV (after Video Killed the Radio Star).
* 1982: The first live national cablecast of a rock concert (on the USA Network), simulcast in stereo to over 120 radio stations.
* 1982: The first two commercially released music videos ever, one of which was nominated for the first-ever Grammy awarded for "Best Short Form Video" in 1983.
* 1992: The release of "No World Order", the world's first interactive record album.
* 1994: The release of "The Individualist", the world's first full-length Enhanced CD.
* 1995: The world's first interactive concert tour.
* 1998: Launches PatroNet, the world's first direct artist subscription service
