Todd Rundgren

Last time Milwaukee saw Todd Rundgren, he was fronting a gutted version of The Cars called The New Cars. It was a pretty conventional paying gig for the cult pop-rocker, who has worked with artists as disparate as XTC, New York Dolls, Hall & Oates, Meatloaf, Bad Religion and Pee-Wee Herman, dabbled in prog-rock, rapped over dance-pop and released an interactive CD-Rom album. Even the biggest Rundgren fans concede that the singer doesn’t always take his own solo work seriously enoughin the last decade or two, his misses far outnumber his hitsbut Rundgren’s latest, no-frills rock tour, which stops at the Pabst Theater tonight for an 8 p.m. show, promises to draw from the material that made him a bona fide star, not the technology-driven, one-off experiments fans politely put up with.