"I've given up trying to force my self either to become a star or a rock martyr," mused a subdued, almost serene Todd Rundgren, sprawling his wiry frame over the corduroy couch in Bearsville's Manhattan offices. "There's no point in forcing the outcome of either role. I was into that rock 'n roll lifestyle once. I wanted everything, I wanted to be famous and have everybody love me. I wanted it and I had no idea why. But now I no longer have the objective to sell so many records or pack such-and-such a place. I don't even know that I'll continue to make records or perform at all. It's something that's subject to change at any point depending on the input."

Strange words from the boy wizard of rock. But it seems that the child has evolved into, in his own words, "a real man." The adolescent goals of scenemaker fame and musical power have palled in favor of arduous but more satisfying inner struggle of the self. A more solid self, one that's not afraid to share the hard ship of creation and the glory of consummation. So Todd Rundgren, former one-man band (and producer), is now content, he says, to be known as just the guitarist for a group called Utopia who just released Another Live Album on Bearsville Records. "A lot of the stuff I do solo is not meant to be performed live," Todd related, "so I needed a performance, as opposed to record-oriented vehicle."

So Utopia started out merely as a backing tour band for Todd. Gradually, though, it evolved into an organic unit, with all the members sharing songwriting and arranging tasks. And last year, the time seemed right and a Utopia LP was released to mixed and very passionate notices. The mystical, spacey feel to the album was derided as Rundgren's attempt to jump on the Oriental bandwagon: after all, Todd was cavorting onstage in pink "preemie" pajamas seasons after Grace Slick unveiled her Kung Fu fall fashion line! And what's with these guruoid lyrics, the critics railed: "City in my head/heaven in my body," what happened to "We gotta get you a woman," ain't that where Utopia was really at? Instead of a woman they got a 30-minute extended one sided concept song about that perennial favorite on the Transcendental Top Ten, that Spiritual Synthesizer in the Sky, "The Ikon." "I don't know about Todd anymore," one long-time fan recently told me. "I mean what is this Ikon shit?"

"It's just a story, it's only a story," chuckled Todd, fingers drumming a pattern onto the corduroy. "They'll read the most incredible outlandish bullshit, Dune, eat up all the sci-fi they can read, and all the little memorabilia, and Star Trek stuff, they lap that up. It's just the context people place it in. The Utopia album went over good in some places in the world where they were less Todd Rundgren oriented."

In response to some of that criticism, perhaps, Todd released a solo album, Initiation, that continued the theoretical thrust of the Utopia set, but presented it in a much more musically accessible context. And then, in late fall, Todd kissed his organic tomatoes goodbye temporarily, and journeyed down from his Elysian Woodstock retreat to the bowels of Manhattan, to prepare to jet to Europe for another Utopian tour, a tour timed to coincide with the release of Utopia's second disc, Another Live Album.

KARMA-VILLE:

Another Live Album should please some fans put off by the relative exotica of the first Utopia set. It's a more balanced album, with more musical and lyrical variety. The first side is a spiritual suite of sorts, kicking off with a heavy, majestic spacerocker, "Another Life," written by Todd and keyboardist Ralph Schuckett. It is, obviously, a song about reincarnation. "But we don't come way out and say reincarnation is this, that, or the other thing," Todd points out. "We're not trying to foist off a full-blown cosmology on people."

"The Wheel" is next, a haunting, acoustic Rundgren ballad with an Eastern touch. To Todd, life is a karma-ville, and, Budweiser notwithstanding, you don't only come around once. "The song's point is to make people aware of an unbroken chain of actions and reactions that has resulted in, for instance, what we consider life today": Todd is lecturing. "And how, if an ideal did exist, how through this unbroken chain, you can bring things to that ideal, as opposed to life being a series of totally random events having no meaning beyond that. Essentially the song is about the meaning of life in general, as opposed to life without meaning." Not quite in your "Hello, It's Me" area, but this means the song's got meaning!

"The Seven Rays" follows "The Wheel," the rays, in psychic circles, being a generally accepted theory of personality evaluation. It seems that everyone can be divided into seven discrete personality traits like unity, understanding, harmony, goodness, beauty, etc., and the ideal is to balance these traits in your dynamic encounters with the world. It also sounds heavy.

WE LIKE NICE SONGS:

Side Two is a lot less ponderous, opening with some improvisation between Moog man Roger Powell and Todd, segueing into Powell's electronic "Mr. Triskets," which then segues into Leonard Bernstein's "Something's Coming." And you better believe that even Utopia has a West Side too. "It's a cool song," Todd laughs, "we like nice songs. Every once in a while were member a good song that nobody's done for a while, so we'll do it. Listen to it, it sounds very Utopian. And a little Broadway too." "Heavy Metal Kids" is next, a favorite from the Todd album, a social commentary on hypocrisy, destructiveness, and violence, followed by a rollicking version of that old Move favorite, "Do Ya." The album closes on an optimistic note with "Just One Victory," the inspiring ballad from Todd's Wizard- A True Star LP. So Another Live Album is one more attempt at modern orchestrated music, executed in a more accessible for mat than the first Utopian venture. And Todd seems pleased. "Utopia has been a constant transferal of personal liability, fame, responsibility, and financial benefit," he said. "I've accomplished a gradual transfer from me to the band. When we first went out on the road there was no such thing as Utopia, it was just a word tacked onto Todd Rundgren and now it's becoming an entity more in itself. I'm not going to try and make the personality of Todd Rundgren any more present, whereas the band is representative of a communal attitude that people generally need to adopt in order to deal with problems that are present." Whew!

So to present accurately what is essentially a performing band, the logical context had to be a live album. "The band is more exciting, more unique live than they are on record," Todd noted. "Anybody can go into the studio and spend months and months and come out with a technically adequate LP, but our band plays with a much better groove live, so we decided to do a live album."

BHAGAVAD ARP:

It's a long way from the budding horniness of Nazz music to the cerebral semi-celibacy of Utopia and one wonders about the changes Todd has experienced and then chronicled on his albums. It seems to be a long leap of faith from the decadent Dadaism of Wizard to the Eastern mysticism of the last few albums. Yet, it's clear that Todd approaches the Bhagavad Gita as he does the latest ARP synthesizer: as a tool to help articulate his ever changing interior landscape. "Eastern mysticism doesn't represent my life anymore than drugs do, or anything else. All it is is just information, tools which have to be incorporated into an ongoing thing. You don't want to act like a Chinaman or Donovan Leitch. I don't want to fall into those holes, or act like all of a sudden I've discovered this thing that's been there all the time. I try and learn from all these things but to glorify any one of them is a mistake. They're only tools, they can be used correctly, or incorrectly."

Still, many have stumbled down the counter-cultural burn-out path, from politics to drugs to guru worship and Todd seems to have escaped from any lasting attachment to any of these sirens. In fact, sitting here on the couch, at ease, absentmindedly playing with his blue suede Nike sneakers, it seems that the reclusive, gentleman-farmer, vegetarian Woodstock life is agreeing with Mr. Rundgren. In fact, he almost looks healthy, nothing that a little chicken fat from an appropriately Jewish mother couldn't fix up. What's Todd's secret to spiritual success? "Evolution, I guess, I can't be more specific than that," Todd mused. "There was no event in my life that just crashed down and changed me. It was only the speed of the evolution, not the unique events. There were events that happened to me that were no more significant than events that happened to anybody else. But they triggered things in my evolution. Like, somebody died, someone I knew, knowing that person and all of a sudden they're gone, and it was not even a person in my family but it was enough. Or taking psychedelic drugs. For some people it had one effect, for me it had a totally different effect. Instead of everything be coming OH WOW to me, all of a sudden everything wasn't OH WOW. Everything was, all of a sudden, cold reality. It was more real than it was before. "And in terms of reading Eastern mysticism, I read the same books that everyone else read. I don't own any exotic volumes that no one else has. All I did was learn from them but I didn't grow attached to them for some reason. All they did was just change the way that I thought as opposed to changing me into something."

So Todd is slowly drifting away from the rock world, dabbling in video, expanding his knowledge of spirituality and the occult, growing his own food, and making his own music. As for the future, it's up for grabs. "I don't know but I probably won't be doing music as it is now when I'm 30," Todd explains, "My general lifestyle will be considerably less public. I'm sort of like the Buckminster Fuller of rock 'n roll, I'll go live in a dome somewhere and write weird things that very few people will understand. There are some things that I want to do in terms of my own personal development that I don't want scrutinized during the process. I want to go to different parts of the world and learn from other people and not have it appear as a publicity stunt. I want to be able to conduct my life outside of Random Notes."

Todd slows down, and a dreamy look crosses his eyes, "I want to do a lot of traveling, developing personal contacts in areas outside the pop business because a lot of the things I want to accomplish are outside that realm. I'd like to do some actual concrete things in terms of changing the society that we live in. This part of my life is devoted to inspiring a general feeling of change, I hope, and then I want to actually get down and get my hands into the change. Who knows, maybe join the Peace Corps."

And, all of a sudden, that image doesn't seem so bizarre, after all. Didn't Kinky Friedman spend two years in the Peace Corps in the Far East and wind up writing all the songs on the Sold American LP there, as well as introducing the Frisbee to Borneo? Todd continues: "I hope to go to China and Russia, places you hear about but know nothing about. And Tibet too, if they'd let me in." And I can see it now - somewhere on the plains north of Peking, the People's Republic of China Synthesizer Orchestra, some ten thousand strong, all hunched over their keyboards, wailing out an electronic ode to that victorious struggle over the running dog lackeys of capitalism - and there's Todd Rundgren, behind the console, producing, of course.