Photo credit: Melissa Miller
It's an artist's prerogative to evolve where their muses lead them. If those muses lead them to heretofore uncharted realms of weirdness in the autumn, they can only hope for the audience they’ve cultivated to follow them along into the breach.
Todd Rundgren, a singing and songwriting multi-instrumentalist who learned his way around studios and mixing boards far back after disenchantment over the sound of his late ’60s records with the punky Nazz, has long been weird. But he hasn't been so much of an outsider to not have carved for himself a niche in the classic rock pantheon. And his embrace of technological innovation since the ’80s has given him stature commensurate to Neil Young as a man entering fogy status who can still be looked to by younger artists for inspiration as to how to remain relevant.
The brand of relevance Rundgren displayed at a near-capacity Pabst Theater Tuesday night primarily involves idiosyncratic takes on electronic dance music styles. Flanked by a couple of glamorous background singing dancers young enough to be the 66-year-old's daughters and donning sunglasses to accent his soul patched visage, he looked as if he were commandeering a rave for Baby Boomers who likely missed that phenomenon at its early '90s flashpoint.
Certainly, there were oases of dancing to the tracks he sang from his current Global album that comprised nearly half of his set of around 24 songs. More clapped along to and after his synthesizer-heavy new tunes and recastings of album tracks from far back as the mid-‘80s, as proclaimed by his opening act, hype man and keyboardist, Stone Throw Records soulful funkateer Dam-Funk. The few times Rundgren played electric guitar, it was a transparent model flecked with fluorescent sparks that shone when the lights were dimmed. Its look and heavily processed sound befit the columns of animated graphics and Rundgren's unorthodox sartorial sense of wearing a 24-button black vest and equally dark pants while leaving his arms bare.
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When Rundgren long into his set performed a triptych of his ’70s run of solo hits, he assayed them as tech-house remixes. Anyone expecting his soft rock of yore should have by then realized that he's not someone necessarily bound by anyone's expectations. The absence of his semi-ska TV sports accompaniment "Bang The Drum All Day" from the night's proceedings may indicate its author's acknowledgement of the song's near ubiquity. It might have been fun to hear how he would have performed it in his current style, though.
If one aesthetic criticism could be leveled at Rundgren within the framework of his presentation, it seems he sometimes over-sang, perhaps as a means by which to compete with the loudness of his backing tracks. He made a faux pas for which the crowd quickly forgave him when in one of the few times he spoke between songs he mistakenly inferred that he was playing Chicago. He gave the excuse that he was high on life. It's difficult to fault him for that.
