: A reluctant pop-song genius, Rundgren now resides presumably closer to the heavens in Hawaii. –>

Todd Rundgren has no time for fibbers

By Greg Cahill

It’s easy to imagine Al Franken’s satirical barb Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them perched on Todd Rundgren’s nightstand. After all, deception of every kind is at the center of the songs that fill the pop legend’s most recent album, the aptly titled Liars (Sanctuary).

“When I started writing material for this record, I didn’t have a whole concept yet,” the 56-year-old rocker recently explained to Manhunt.com. “But the first song I did was ‘Wondering.’ It was my reaction to the 2000 presidential election, and the completely surreal nature of it. It really made me see that we go through life thinking certain things are true, and then reality is thrust upon you and you realize you’ve been living a lie, a complete lie–that you don’t seem to be able to count on anything anymore.”

Liars is packed with prevarications: the little white lies we tell our loved ones to avoid hurting their feelings; the half-truths we tell our friends; the big, black lies we tell ourselves. Once Rundgren started thinking about the vein of dishonesty and self-delusion that runs through our lives, he realized he’d tapped into a veritable mother lode of fabrication.

Thus, the album cover sports a portrait of him dressed as the Easter Bunny–after all, we even practice a paucity of truth by perpetuating lame-brained myths for our kids.

Musically, the album–Rundgren’s first new studio release in seven years (his 2000 CD One Long Year compiled singles that had been issued on his PatroNet website), and his first straight-ahead pop album after 15 years of experimentation–is a return to form for a maverick who has walked away from a number of trailblazing paths. Liars has even drawn favorable comparisons to 1983’s Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect and 1978’s Hermit of Mink Hollow, two of Rundgren’s best albums. And rightly so.

From the bittersweet blue-eyed soul of “Sweet” to the gothic chant of “Mammon” to the stinging guitar attack of the title track, Liars qualifies as one of the angriest, most engaging protest albums to come along in years. Rundgren even levels his sights on the vacant promises of organized religion (“Afterlife”).

Of course, this transformation might mean something to the legions of diehard Rundgren fans who continue to engage in online “Todd is God” debates. But an entire generation (or two) has missed out on one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most innovative geniuses.

A little history may be in order.

Rundgren’s first group, the Nazz, emerged in 1967 as a domestic knock-off of the British Invasion bands (their first hit, “Open My Eyes,” was a send-up of the Who’s “Can’t Explain”). Rundgren, who had a knack for expressing his sensitive side, made his solo debut with 1970’s pop-ish “We Gotta Get You a Woman.” A Wizard, a True Star, from 1973, replicates an entire acid trip and is considered an art-rock triumph.

From there, Rundgren moved on and created a new band, Utopia. He went solo again. The hits piled up: “Hello It’s Me,” “Can We Still Be Friends,” “Real Man,” “Bang the Drum All Day.” Each commercial success was followed by Rundgren setting off in a new artistic direction: Philly soul, pop, hard rock, a cappella, gospel, ska, electronic music, lounge–the results were uneven, but always produced flashes of brilliance.

In the meantime, he produced a host of Beatle-esque cult hits for the likes of Patti Smith, the Psychedelic Furs and XTC. But it is his fascination with technology–and his willingness to forsake stardom in favor of innovation–that has set him apart. In the mid-’80s, it wasn’t uncommon to find Rundgren playing small clubs with nothing but a fledgling Mac Classic (about as powerful as your cell phone), a keyboard and a home movie screen, working his technological magic.

Rundgren, who produced the first two commercially released music videos (one of which was nominated for the first-ever Grammy award for Best Short Form Video), has an impressive list of landmark feats: first interactive live TV concert live (1978); first music video to combine live action and computer graphics (1980); first graphics paint-box software for a computer (1982); the first live national cablecast of a rock concert (1982); and the first interactive CD project (1993).

More recently, he has operated a landmark subscription website, pioneering the distribution of original downloadable songs over the Internet.

“I guess the common element in all of those projects is a certain sense of adventure, part of which is the disinclination to repeat things that I’ve done before or to do exactly what everyone else is doing, even if it happens to be something that I used to do and has suddenly become popular,” Rundgren told me a few years ago. “I guess in that sense I am self-consciously alternative. It’s not because of an effort to satisfy an audience need; it’s my own need to hear and to experiment with things that are different or new to me, to constantly absorb new influences.

“Sometimes I absorb so many new influences that it seems to obliterate anything that I’ve done previously, but eventually it all gets merged together in some kind of stew and, ideally, comes out as recognizably me,” he said, adding with a laugh, “eventually.”

And that’s the truth.

Todd Rundgren and the Liars (with guitarist Jesse Gress, keyboardist John Ferenzik, bassist Kasim Sulton of Utopia, and drummer Prairie Prince of the Tubes) perform Tuesday, Sept. 14, at the Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. 8pm. $30. 707.765.2121.

From the September 8-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Vinyl Word

MFSL is back on track with a pair of new albums

By Greg Cahill

Before closing its doors in 1999, the Sebastopol-based Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab label pressed the finest vinyl ever to spin on a turntable. Those long out-of-print MFSL reissues command some of the highest prices in the collector’s market; on eBay, the label’s 1980s Beatles box sets of original master recordings fetch $1,000 or more for all 14 Fab Four titles.

So now that the label has been revived, and has resumed giving music fans new high-quality CDs on 24kt gold discs, it’s a welcome sight to see MFSL once again reissuing original master, half-speed recordings on audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl.

The first two vinyl reissues in the label’s new Gain 2 Ultra Analog series are 1997’s So Long, So Wrong (Rounder/MFSL) by Alison Krauss & Union Station (a two-disc, limited edition release), and 2003’s Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People, a five-song, 45RPM EP by Primus.

I didn’t receive a review copy of the Primus disc and to be honest, it’s too much hassle to realign the belt on my Music Hall turntable so I can play 45s. So you’re on your own on that one. But if the Alison Krauss album is any indication, you’re in for a serious treat (plus the MFSL 45 RPM disc should offer more sonic definition than a standard 33 1/3 RPM disc).

Musically, So Long, So Wrong is one of the hottest bluegrass outings of the past decade, marked by sparse acoustic arrangements that leave plenty of room for Krauss’ gentle high, lonesome vocals. Her old fans, and one suspects even her newfound followers, weren’t disappointed.

“After mainstream success happened for Alison Krauss & Union Station,” music critic Cub Koda noted in his All Music Guide review at the time, “one would have rightly expected a commercial sweetening of their sound, resulting in diminishing (or even abandoning) the simple but very unique thing that brought them into the public eye–and eventual public acclaim–in the first place. But the group’s first new recording in the wake of the surprise success of Now That I Have Found You: A Collection (Rounder) finds Alison Krauss & Union Station happily keeping their eclectic focus firmly on the prize stretched before them with no silly attempts to court the hat-hunk-of-the-month or the boot-scoot-boogie crowd.”

Sonically, the sense of space, clarity and warmth of this MFSL reissue is simply astonishing. Quite simply, this is one of the first albums I have heard that without qualification supports the notion vinyl is superior to CDs.

I might just break down and buy that Primus EP . . . .

Web extra to the September 1-7, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

: ORZ show that, with Dave Eggers on your side, the universe definitely expands. –>

One Ring Zero prove the claviola can be mightier than the pen

By Sara Bir

Though there are works of well-known writers that have notably been converted into song–the present-day longevity of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, owes a great deal to Iron Maiden–it’s generally uncommon. We have yet to see, for instance, P-Diddy covering Joyce Carol Oates. With the release of As Smart as We Are (Urban Geek), a little band from Brooklyn called One Ring Zero has changed that. The CD’s lyrics are penned by 17 authors (among them Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Dave Eggers, Neil Gaiman and A. M. Homes) who usually write books rather than songs.

This is not what One Ring Zero initially set out to do. In the late ’90s, two guys named Joshua Camp and Michael Hearst became friends while working, respectively, as accordion and harmonica technicians at the Hohner distribution center in Richmond, Va. One day a small shipment of a prototype instrument called a claviola, which Hearst describes as looking like “a swan run over by a car,” arrived. Hearst and Camp, instantly intrigued, formed One Ring Zero to play reconfigured 20th-century klezmer music utilizing accordion, guitar, claviola and a rotating cast of musical friends and household appliances.

The claviola and its spectrum of sounds–which approximate anything from Zamfir playing a clarinet to Stevie Wonder covering Zamfir–has a large role in the One Ring Zero’s grab bag of Eastern European folk traditions, country music balladry and refined avant-garde audio mayhem. It’s a musical context that almost any author, A-list to Z-list, would be proud to find his or her words embedded within.

The author project came about after One Ring Zero became regular performers at the McSweeney’s bookstore in Brooklyn, sharing a very small stage with very big names during readings. It’s there that Camp and Hearst met writer Rick Moody, who asked the band to play while he read. One Ring Zero, in turn, asked Moody to write a song for them. That collaboration launched an entire album with Moody, which led Hearst and Camp to pursue the concept on a much grander scale.

It’s a brilliant idea, but the realization of it wasn’t so simple. “The whole business angle to the project has been tricky,” Hearst explains over the phone. “It seemed like such an easy way to market two industries–give this to record stores and bookstores–but it didn’t work out that easily. Because this has never really been done, the distributors really didn’t know how to handle it.”

Many bands work very hard for years and receive only marginal attention from the press, but Hearst says it never occurred to him to feel resentful that One Ring Zero’s sudden leap into the spotlight–lots of press, an appearance on Fresh Air–came via the cred of well-known authors.

“Part of me knows that it takes whatever you can do to get recognized,” he says. “And the one thing that was very important to me with this album was that you could have no idea who wrote the lyrics and it would still be a great album. So even if people are buying it because of the name Margaret Atwood, I feel like we did the best we could to make a good record.”

Composing music for the vast assortment of lyrical material that they received was not as daunting as one might assume, says Hearst. “We have been scoring for theater and modern dance, so it really was not all that massive of a stretch. I’d say if anything, the thing I learned most was how to collaborate with 17 different egos.”

Just as with standard-issue pop songs, some of the lyrics of As Smart as We Are are great and catchy (the Tin Pan Alley echoes in Paul Auster’s “Natty Man Blues”; the transformation of Myla Goldberg’s “Golem” through Syd Straw’s smoky vocals into a klezmer torch song), while others are . . . different. Jonathan Ames’ “Story of the Hairy Call” is basically a nonrhyming personal essay (“When I was a little boy, I was very troubled / I had a bad back and an elevated testicle”) somehow worked into charming nursery-school music.

This brings up an interesting point: can writers of novels and poems write decent pop lyrics? I imagine that anything William Faulkner or Hemingway might have produced would not even pass muster, while Charles Dickens or Jane Austen might have somehow become the Brill Buildings of their times.

Ultimately, it seems that even bestselling writers want to be rock stars.

From the August 25-31, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.