Todd Rundgren – ‘A Wizard, a True Star’
It was a simple batch of ingredients: a personal studio, a giant windfall of money, a little bit of discontent for his last record, and enough psychedelic drugs to send Timothy Leary into outer space. Todd Rundgren wanted to do something different, something that dispensed of the easier listening parts of his previous album, Something/Anything? Informed by the hallucinogenic experience, Rundgren crafted an amorphous trip of an album that spearheaded avant-rock, bedroom pop, and Tame Impala’s entire discography 13 years before Kevin Parker was even born.
Falling down the kaleidoscopic rabbit hole that is A Wizard, a True Star remains one of the most singular musical experiences in all of rock. Never before had an artist so thoroughly ignored what had made him popular in favour of sonic experimentation. Across 19 songs that made it one of the longest single-disc studio albums ever, A Wizard, a True Star made Rundgren one of the rare singular geniuses in popular music.
Most of the time, classic albums are analysed through their songs. But A Wizard, a True Star can’t be directed on an individual song basis – not unless you have surgical tools and hours of free time on your hands. The album needs to be experienced as one continues flow, with each song either building or tearing down the track that immediately preceded it. Between ‘International Feel’, its quasi-reprise ‘Le Feel Internacionale’, and the closing track ‘Just One Victory’, Rundgren creates sounds and styles of music that didn’t exist before he closed himself off in Secret Sound Studio with a couple of friends.
One of those friends was Mark ‘Moogy’ Klingman, a keyboard savant who shared Rundgren’s interest in futuristic sounds. The two put together their own studio by combining the payments from their two previous albums, Something/Anything? and Moogy II. Without interruption or outside influence, Rundgren began crafting rough material that didn’t require fully fleshed-out arrangements, conclusions, or even titles. Songs could last ten minutes or one minute. Styles could vary wildly. Nothing was planned, other than an interstellar journey through music.
Kicking off with the electronic ‘International Feel’, the first side of A Wizard, a True Star flies through 14 uninterrupted vignettes sandwiched into 12 songs. Rundgren throws everything at the wall, including sound collages, effects-heavy progressive rock, Al Jolson-like music hall tunes, and a rendition of ‘Never Never Land’ from the 1950s musical version of Peter Pan. Whether he’s twiddling the knobs of his synth or ripping through a ragged guitar solo, Rundgren rarely ever stays in one place for any extended length of time.
The stranger Rundgren gets, the purer his expressions become. Highlights include the first instance of electronic punk on ‘You Need Your Head’, a ferocious dig at John Lennon on ‘Rock and Roll Pussy’, a surreal trip through another world that turns into a warped version of ‘Toot Toot Tootsie’ on ‘Just Another Onionhead / Da Da Dali’, and a gleefully profane march on ‘When the Shit Hits the Fan / Sunset Blvd’. When Rundgren returns his spaceship to its original launching point on ‘Le Feel Internacionale’, his search for a new utopia comes back in triumph.
The idealistic yearning that fills out most of A Wizard, a True Star would later be tapped into when Rundgren formed his next band, Utopia, which he founded with Klingman that same year. Rundgren tries on just about every genre of music throughout the first side of the album, with one notable exception: there are no piano ballads or singer-songwriter tracks like ‘Hello It’s Me’. Rundgren’s refusal to be pigeonholed was as artistically noble as it was commercially foolish. After notching two top 20 hits in the US from his previous album, Rundgren refused to release any singles from A Wizard, a True Star. It was all for the best, considering none of the album’s songs could be considered radio-friendly.
In the album’s second half, Rundgren jumps back on the piano for ‘Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel’. It was as close as Rundgren would come to replicating his previous sound, with an added layer of strangeness that hadn’t appeared before. ‘Does Anybody Love You?’ hits on Rundgren’s obsessions with romance, lust, and sex that appear frequently throughout the album. After that, it’s time for the album’s wildest run: a four-song medley of classic soul tracks, all filtered through Rundgren’s psychedelic worldview.
“It’s like opening up a hole in your memory and suddenly these memories – soul records you loved, say – start leaking out from who knows where,” Rundgren claimed in Paul Myers’ book A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio. “That’s another aspect of psychedelic drugs sometimes, hearing and seeing things that wouldn’t be familiar to you if you weren’t so psychedelic. You suddenly see them differently and they convey a different meaning.”
With a purposefully childish lilt, Rundgren pours the silliness on thick with the track ‘Hungry for Love’. ‘I Don’t Want to Tie You Down’ is the sound of Rundgren sending his previous incarnation on a sci-fi journey, doubling as a wonderfully strange illustration of the album as a whole. With a fiery man-versus-machine battle in ‘Is It My Name?’ and a final celebratory trip in ‘One Final Victory’, Rundgren lands his ship on an optimistic and hopeful note.
Rundgren would sacrifice quite a bit to make A Wizard, a True Star happen. The most obvious casualty was commercial success – in the months following the album’s release, Rundgren had to produce both the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut and Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re an American Band to make up for the losses he incurred creating A Wizard, a True Star and the first Utopia tour, which was cancelled after just a few weeks. After his brief time as a pop hitmaker, Rundgren would split his time between producing other artists and pioneering new technologies and techniques in his solo work.
What A Wizard, a True Star told Rundgren’s newfound audience was that he wasn’t going to be the piano balladeer that he was expected to be. Instead, he was going to be a space-age prog-rock intellectual with both eyes pointed straight toward the future. While giving his commencement speech for the Berklee College of Music graduating class of 2017, Rundgren used A Wizard, a True Star as the starting point for his artistic emancipation.
“[A Wizard, a True Star was] my act of tyranny after having achieved commercial success,” Rundgren claimed. “I threw out all the rules of record making and decided I would try to imprint the chaos in my head onto a record without trying to clean it up for everyone else’s benefit. The result was a complete loss of about half of my audience at that point … This became the model for my life after that.”
While it alienated most of Rundgren’s casual fans that were brought in after hearing Something/Anything?, A Wizard, a True Star became a beacon for generations of musicians who utilised a DIY attitude toward their own music. For stars as diverse as Kevin Parker, Prince, and Frank Ocean, Rundgren’s self-sufficiency would become a model on which they would base their own working habits. To anyone who attempted to craft their own song, album, or symphony within the comforts of their bedroom, Rundgren was the forefather from which to take notes.
A Wizard, a True Star remains Rundgren’s defining work – an engrossing middle finger to any and all expectations that had surrounded him during the height of his fame. Today, it reads like an instruction manual to anyone who wants to mess around with synthesisers, arrangements, thematic storytelling, or psychedelic experiences. But you don’t need to be interested in any of that to fall into the vibrant explosion that is A Wizard, a True Star: you just have to keep your mind open.