An Evening With Todd Rundgren
December 4, 2007 at 8:00 p.m.
Antones (213 W 5th St)
$23-$25
[info] | [tickets]

There is this entire world of brilliant artists that produced oodles of fantastic work in the '70s that most of us know because of a standout hit here or there that makes its way into a more mainstream outlet, or an association with some more widely known entity. Vince Guaraldi's jazz piano works introduced us to a career's worth of incredible records thanks to Charlie Brown's Christmas, and from there we became more intimately familiar with Tim Hardin, for example. And a deeply obsessive stint with the Velvet Underground led us to Nico's solo work (well, the only mildly high/stoned parts of it) and the incomparable John Cale. A brief obsession with the facts surrounding John Lennon's death led us to discover the artist we are concerned with today, however.

Turns out, when Mark David Chapman shot Lennon, he left an eight-track tape of Rundgren's The Ballad of Todd Rundgren along with other artifacts, in his New York hotel room in an orderly semicircle on the hotel dresser. "I left it as a statement, I guess," he was quoted as saying in Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon. Chapman had been obsessed with Rundgren and told Jones, "Right between the chambers of your heart is how Rundgren's music is to me. I cannot overestimate the depth of what his music meant to me."

Well, holy shit.

Regardless of how intensely Rundgren's music has affected psychopaths, the curiosity led us to Something/Anything, a fantastic four-sided LP released in 1972 (Rundgren's third solo effort). Widely regarded as a magnum opus, Something was remarkable in that it featured Rundgren purely and wholly: he performed every instrument and sang every part on the first three sides, and was accompanied by a band on the fourth. The album features songs we know (though we might not realize it until we hear them) like "I Saw the Light" and "Hello It's Me". We highly recommend it, along with Rundgren's more prog-influenced '70s material like A Wizard, a True Star.

Rundgren's influence on the rock and pop music community is hard to measure: he's been on the bleeding edge of marketing trends for decades, having produced the first music video and issued the first CD with interactive material. He was Liv Tyler's surrogate father until she was 7, standing in for a drug-addicted Steven Tyler, and he composed the music for Pee Wee's Playhouse in the '80s. He's dabbled in every genre known to man, produced records for acts like Sparks, Badfinger, New York Dolls, XTC and the Band, and has a stunning catalog full of incredible material just waiting to be appreciated by a new generation. Your chance comes tonight, as he performs at Antone's. Fill out the form for a chance to win a pair of tickets on us.

Congratulations David and Katherine!