Todd Rundgren's Utopia

One of the strangest tributaries of rock in the mid-70s was Todd Rundgren's foray into progressive rock and fusion with the band Utopia. The band's lineup for its 1974 eponymous debut album featured three keyboard players, a bassist, drummer, and Todd on guitar and lead vocals.

Many critics point to this album as the quitessential evidence of Todd's inner conflict between solipsistic technocrat and first-rate pop melodist. It begs the question of who was responsible for what aspects of the music on this bizarre, uneven album.

The opening track "Utopia Theme" (recorded live) and the 30-minute epic "The Ikon" are the two most emblematic tracks on the album. Both are compendia of what were even by then prog and fusion cliches: low-rent Genesis, bargain-basement ELP, and factory-clearance Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Much of these two tracks are sequences of riffs that repeat ad infinitum, interspersed with glorious "chorus" sections that show Todd's light melodic touch to good effect; the juxtaposition of these two elements is jarring and just plain weird. It helps neither that the band had no virtuoso instrumentalists on the order of Keith Emerson or John McLaughlin, nor that the album's sound quality suffers from the need to jam so much music onto two sides of an LP.

Yet after repeated listenings, the album grows on you. It almost sounds like an enthusiastic young garage band's approach to progressive rock -- especially compared with the jaded, slick later efforts of bands that influenced Utopia in the first place. It's progressive rock that actually rocks.

The Utopia lineup on this album didn't survive, and the band flirted with progressive rock with two more albums before completely selling out. As it turns out, the best prog album that Utopia ever made was not under its own name: it was L, by ex-Gong (and future System 7) guitarist Steve Hillage, produced by Rundgren, with Utopia as one hell of a backup band.