If it seems odd that Todd Rundgren is on the road right now without a band, remember that his layered sonic monuments, though they sound better with onstage help, have always served best as tributes to Rundgren's own eccentric ingenuity. It makes sense for the singer/songwriter/producer/technology-wonk to go it alone. (Consider also that he kicked off this year's live dates with a preconcert lecture in Portland, Oregon, titled "The Muse of Solitude: How Loneliness, Depravation and Reclusiveness Affect the Creative Process.") With minimal fuss -- for this tour, he's armed himself with only a guitar, a keyboard and an MP3 player -- Rundgren is offsetting his exile's setup by concentrating on his most familiar songs, particularly cuts from 1972's Something/Anything. That album, a quasi-masterpiece of quirky, Brian Wilson-on-a-budget pop, was itself a ten-fingers-ten-toes solo act, with Rundgren handling most of the instruments and vocals himself. That it holds up well thirty years later has largely to do with the relative guilelessness of Rundgren's songs and production; his albums in the years since have often been glib and cluttered. A noble impulse toward cutting-edge electronics has also hamstrung Rundgren, a still-in-demand producer whose siren call leads bands to his Hawaii home studio for what sometimes become frustrating lessons in what not to do (see Bad Religion's The New America). His obsession the past decade with the computer as musical doppelganger has led to debacles of his own, like No World Order (credited to TR-i), a nadir even for a producer with a Shaun Cassidy album under his belt. More prolific than persuasive, the onetime wizard and true star might never again be an operator on the margins rather than a marginal operator, but it's hard to refuse the chance to see Rundgren, in effect, unplugged.
