The True Stardom of Todd Rundgren
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He Put A Spell On Me: The True Stardom of Todd Rundgren by Barney Hoskyns 
John Seigler (bass), Ralph Schuckett (electric piano), Todd Rundgren (guitar), Moogy Klingman (organ) and John Siomos (drums) rehearse at Secret Sound Studios for Todd's album A Wizard, A True Star in 1972.It is 35 years since TODD RUNDGREN released the spellbinding A Wizard, A True Star. Here Rock's Back Pages Editor BARNEY HOSKYNS makes a case for it as The Best Album of All Time while (below) we add RON ROSS' epic 1973 profile of Rundgren and JERRY GILBERT's contemporary Wizard review to the RBP Library.SOMETIMES I DO know what to feel. And right now I feel like saying what I've felt for some time, which is that Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star is The Greatest Album Ever Made. You heard me. Better than Pet Sounds. Better than OK Computer. Unquestionably better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Farts Club Band. An album of vaulting ambition – of wizardry and true stardom – released into an unsuspecting world by a contrary, super-precocious wonder boy who should have been the biggest thing to happen in the '70s but who was just too complex and polymorphous for lasting pop success.A Wizard, A True Star was released thirty four years ago – its U.S. date was 31/3/03 – but it still sounds more bravely futuristic than any supposedly cutting-edge electronica being made today. A dizzying, intoxicating rollercoaster ride of emotions and genre mutations, the album was substantially the work of Rundgren himself, pieced together in late '72 at his own Secret Sound studio on NYC's West 24th Street.Where its immediate predecessor, the more fondly-regarded Something/Anything?, was choc-full o' good toons – limpid micro-ballads and winsome boy-in-his-bedroom doodles – Wizard was the sound of Philly's finest rabbit-toothed soul boy going into interstellar prog-psych overdrive, taking the listener on a seamless sonic journey whose map was written substantially by hallucinogenic drugs. (And not just for Rundgren, since the other muses on the record – from keyboardists Moogy Klingman to drummer John Siomos to stellar axe boy Rick Derringer – were out of their skulls on one potion or another.) "Psychedelics brought me to an awareness of myself that I’d no comprehension of previously," Rundgren told me in 1997. "You don’t know your ‘You’ until you’ve had your ego stripped away and you realize you’re all that stuff. You begin to see your ego elements as these weird, goofy, aberrational appendages."Rundgren claimed that surrendering to "this sort of flow of stuff" made him question his usual musical procedures: "So much musical product is just a function of habit and ego, in that you wanna come off a certain way. So many people use music as obfuscation, as a wall between them and the audience." Wizard, Todd said, was "me just mapping my head right onto a record... battling against any sort of filtering process". For some, the lack of filter makes A Wizard, A True Star TOO MUCH – an epic exercise in self-indulgence. But to such nay-sayers I exclaim Pish!. For surely the point of pop, to a large degree, is that it permits us to go too far. Not all rock'n'roll music has to be tidy, generic, circumscribed within formal limits."When I listened to Something/Anything? six months after I’d made it, I realized there were songs on there that had taken me twenty minutes to write," Rundgren said. "And I thought, Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas I’d essentially come up with in high school?" Herein lies the rub, I suspect. For just as Phil Spector flew too close to the sun with 'River Deep, Mountain High', its hubris ultimately derailing his entire career, so Rundgren, in declining to capitalize on the pop success of 'I Saw The Light' and 'Hello, It's Me', turned away from the mainstream to fashion a mind-blowingly experimental, radically unpunctuated opus that conspicuously lacked hit singles. To quote from the monster Todd piece I wrote for Mojo (because I can't be arced to think of new ways of saying these things):"Wizard was a voyage through the cosmos garnished with synthesizers that twinkled like stars, nineteen tracks that leaked into each other or tripped on each other’s heels, jumping from the fuzz tone metal of 'Rock And Roll Pussy' to the surreal ephemera of 'Dogfight Giggle', from the nonsense of 'Just Another Onionhead' to the anthemic rush of 'When The Shit Hits The Fan', and even finding room for a medley that drew on Rundgren’s love for Curtis Mayfield ('I’m So Proud'), Smokey Robinson ('Ooh Baby Baby') and the sweet Philly soul of Thom Bell (The Delfonics’ 'La La Means I Love You')."Listening to it again, three decades after its birth, what strikes me more than ever is just how inventive, playful, clever, funny, mind-warping and downright fucking BEAUTIFUL A Wizard, A True Star is. Right off the top of my head I can pick ten miraculous things that have brought me untold joy for 30 years:1) The very start of the album, with its throbbing, slightly scary electronic buildup – unfurling into the glorious multi-textured march of 'International Feel'. "And still there's more…"2) The waves of keyboards lapping over the shimmering Disney classic 'Never Never Land' – making the point that Wizard is a kind of rock'n'roll Fantasia.3) The ballad-boy throwback that is 'You Don't Have to Camp Around', with its mild swipe at the fey glam scene – ironic given Todd's own flirtation with glitter (not to mention production of the first NY Dolls album).4) The dreamy synth instrumental that is 'Flamingo' – like some missing link between Garth Hudson's 'Genetic Method' and Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange soundtrack.5) The magnificent epic that is 'Zen Archer', with its choppy verses and open, sweeping choruses, climaxing in a sublime, oceanic fadeout.6) "You want the obvious you'll get the obvious you want the obvious you'll get the obvious…" ('Just Another Onionhead')7) The apocalyptic anthem that is 'When The Shit Hits The Fan', with its allusions to terrorism and near-premonition of 9/11 ("the Chrysler Building fell in my yard…").8) The moving and uplifting 'Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel', with its surging horns and its impotent, hand-wringing sadness – blueprint for so many of Todd's Compassion Songs ('Love Is The Answer', 'Want Of A Nail' et al).9) The second ballad-boy throwback that is 'Does Anybody Love You?' How dreamily lovely is this!10) Just the fact that he has the balls to sing the lines "My voice goes so high you would think I was gay/But I play my guitar in such a man-cock way" on the fuzz-metal 'Is It My Name?' In her Circus review of the album, Todd's mate Patti Smith described A Wizard, A True Star as "Rock and Roll for the Skull". Sadly, this endorsement failed to help the record rise any higher than No. 86. For Rundgren's label Bearsville it was the beginning of the end.Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era," recalled Paul Fishkin, Bearsville's general manager (and the inspiration for Rundgren's early hit 'We Gotta Get You A Woman'). "If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there’s no question in my mind that we could have had it all. Todd’s whole thing was, he was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part of that is that he expected everyone to go along with it."To his credit, Rundgren has always been unrepentant about his refusal to play safe. "The things I’m involved in, and the ideas that I have, are as accessible and as fascinating as anyone’s music," he told NME's Paul Morley. "It’s not my loss if no one discovers it. I have more important priorities. By the time people discover where I am, if they ever do, I’ll be someplace else anyway."If you've never heard it, do yourself a favor and go buy Wizard today. And no, you don't have to be out of your skull to take this trip.
John Seigler (bass), Ralph Schuckett (electric piano), Todd Rundgren (guitar), Moogy Klingman (organ) and John Siomos (drums) rehearse at Secret Sound Studios for Todd's album A Wizard, A True Star in 1972.It is 35 years since TODD RUNDGREN released the spellbinding A Wizard, A True Star. Here Rock's Back Pages Editor BARNEY HOSKYNS makes a case for it as The Best Album of All Time while (below) we add RON ROSS' epic 1973 profile of Rundgren and JERRY GILBERT's contemporary Wizard review to the RBP Library.SOMETIMES I DO know what to feel. And right now I feel like saying what I've felt for some time, which is that Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star is The Greatest Album Ever Made. You heard me. Better than Pet Sounds. Better than OK Computer. Unquestionably better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Farts Club Band. An album of vaulting ambition – of wizardry and true stardom – released into an unsuspecting world by a contrary, super-precocious wonder boy who should have been the biggest thing to happen in the '70s but who was just too complex and polymorphous for lasting pop success.A Wizard, A True Star was released thirty four years ago – its U.S. date was 31/3/03 – but it still sounds more bravely futuristic than any supposedly cutting-edge electronica being made today. A dizzying, intoxicating rollercoaster ride of emotions and genre mutations, the album was substantially the work of Rundgren himself, pieced together in late '72 at his own Secret Sound studio on NYC's West 24th Street.Where its immediate predecessor, the more fondly-regarded Something/Anything?, was choc-full o' good toons – limpid micro-ballads and winsome boy-in-his-bedroom doodles – Wizard was the sound of Philly's finest rabbit-toothed soul boy going into interstellar prog-psych overdrive, taking the listener on a seamless sonic journey whose map was written substantially by hallucinogenic drugs. (And not just for Rundgren, since the other muses on the record – from keyboardists Moogy Klingman to drummer John Siomos to stellar axe boy Rick Derringer – were out of their skulls on one potion or another.) "Psychedelics brought me to an awareness of myself that I’d no comprehension of previously," Rundgren told me in 1997. "You don’t know your ‘You’ until you’ve had your ego stripped away and you realize you’re all that stuff. You begin to see your ego elements as these weird, goofy, aberrational appendages."Rundgren claimed that surrendering to "this sort of flow of stuff" made him question his usual musical procedures: "So much musical product is just a function of habit and ego, in that you wanna come off a certain way. So many people use music as obfuscation, as a wall between them and the audience." Wizard, Todd said, was "me just mapping my head right onto a record... battling against any sort of filtering process". For some, the lack of filter makes A Wizard, A True Star TOO MUCH – an epic exercise in self-indulgence. But to such nay-sayers I exclaim Pish!. For surely the point of pop, to a large degree, is that it permits us to go too far. Not all rock'n'roll music has to be tidy, generic, circumscribed within formal limits."When I listened to Something/Anything? six months after I’d made it, I realized there were songs on there that had taken me twenty minutes to write," Rundgren said. "And I thought, Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas I’d essentially come up with in high school?" Herein lies the rub, I suspect. For just as Phil Spector flew too close to the sun with 'River Deep, Mountain High', its hubris ultimately derailing his entire career, so Rundgren, in declining to capitalize on the pop success of 'I Saw The Light' and 'Hello, It's Me', turned away from the mainstream to fashion a mind-blowingly experimental, radically unpunctuated opus that conspicuously lacked hit singles. To quote from the monster Todd piece I wrote for Mojo (because I can't be arced to think of new ways of saying these things):"Wizard was a voyage through the cosmos garnished with synthesizers that twinkled like stars, nineteen tracks that leaked into each other or tripped on each other’s heels, jumping from the fuzz tone metal of 'Rock And Roll Pussy' to the surreal ephemera of 'Dogfight Giggle', from the nonsense of 'Just Another Onionhead' to the anthemic rush of 'When The Shit Hits The Fan', and even finding room for a medley that drew on Rundgren’s love for Curtis Mayfield ('I’m So Proud'), Smokey Robinson ('Ooh Baby Baby') and the sweet Philly soul of Thom Bell (The Delfonics’ 'La La Means I Love You')."Listening to it again, three decades after its birth, what strikes me more than ever is just how inventive, playful, clever, funny, mind-warping and downright fucking BEAUTIFUL A Wizard, A True Star is. Right off the top of my head I can pick ten miraculous things that have brought me untold joy for 30 years:1) The very start of the album, with its throbbing, slightly scary electronic buildup – unfurling into the glorious multi-textured march of 'International Feel'. "And still there's more…"2) The waves of keyboards lapping over the shimmering Disney classic 'Never Never Land' – making the point that Wizard is a kind of rock'n'roll Fantasia.3) The ballad-boy throwback that is 'You Don't Have to Camp Around', with its mild swipe at the fey glam scene – ironic given Todd's own flirtation with glitter (not to mention production of the first NY Dolls album).4) The dreamy synth instrumental that is 'Flamingo' – like some missing link between Garth Hudson's 'Genetic Method' and Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange soundtrack.5) The magnificent epic that is 'Zen Archer', with its choppy verses and open, sweeping choruses, climaxing in a sublime, oceanic fadeout.6) "You want the obvious you'll get the obvious you want the obvious you'll get the obvious…" ('Just Another Onionhead')7) The apocalyptic anthem that is 'When The Shit Hits The Fan', with its allusions to terrorism and near-premonition of 9/11 ("the Chrysler Building fell in my yard…").8) The moving and uplifting 'Sometimes I Don't Know What To Feel', with its surging horns and its impotent, hand-wringing sadness – blueprint for so many of Todd's Compassion Songs ('Love Is The Answer', 'Want Of A Nail' et al).9) The second ballad-boy throwback that is 'Does Anybody Love You?' How dreamily lovely is this!10) Just the fact that he has the balls to sing the lines "My voice goes so high you would think I was gay/But I play my guitar in such a man-cock way" on the fuzz-metal 'Is It My Name?' In her Circus review of the album, Todd's mate Patti Smith described A Wizard, A True Star as "Rock and Roll for the Skull". Sadly, this endorsement failed to help the record rise any higher than No. 86. For Rundgren's label Bearsville it was the beginning of the end.Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era," recalled Paul Fishkin, Bearsville's general manager (and the inspiration for Rundgren's early hit 'We Gotta Get You A Woman'). "If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there’s no question in my mind that we could have had it all. Todd’s whole thing was, he was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part of that is that he expected everyone to go along with it."To his credit, Rundgren has always been unrepentant about his refusal to play safe. "The things I’m involved in, and the ideas that I have, are as accessible and as fascinating as anyone’s music," he told NME's Paul Morley. "It’s not my loss if no one discovers it. I have more important priorities. By the time people discover where I am, if they ever do, I’ll be someplace else anyway."If you've never heard it, do yourself a favor and go buy Wizard today. And no, you don't have to be out of your skull to take this trip.
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