 |
| O.G. |
Nope. Didn’t know this one either…
The Hit
The only remarkable thing about Utopia’s “Set Me Free” is that it came from the primary musical project of one of the most prolific men in 1970s music. Maybe. And yet, no great tales surround it’s creation - it’s the opposite, if anything - it didn’t make Utopia famous (already there), and it came less from a sound that defined them as an act than it dropped a marker on their evolution. According to Wikipedia, that single and the album it appeared on (Adventures in Utopia) derailed their career arc.
It does sound like its time, with the warm 1970s sound (especially on the keys) blending with the cooler synth production the 1980s made popular. If I had to compare it any song I’d ever heard before, I’d go with “Believe It or Not,” the song Joey Scarbury wrote for TV’s The Greatest American Hero.
It didn’t chart that high - it only reached No. 27 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and didn’t blow up internationally - but that’s entirely on-brand for Utopia.
The Rest of the Story
“Utopia as a group is to convince people of the potential reality of the concept. Utopia isn't even the greatest potential reality, it's just what we can afford now. We're the Disneyland of rock and roll bands. Anyone can get into it with a little bit of effort.”
- Todd Rundgren, a 1973 feature in the UK Guardian (reissued in 2013)
Utopia started as “Todd Rundgren’s Utopia,” and it was very much his baby. The original members included various musicians he’d worked with on his post-Nazz solo material, and even all that happened somewhat by accident. Shortly after Nazz petered out, Rundgren found himself without a job, a band and, as he explained to Songwriter Universe in a 2018 interview, “I did not have any confidence as a solo artist.” He had, however, started writing songs for Nazz “because that’s what bands did…after the Beatles.” Rundgren’s first songs trafficked in the usual themes - e.g., the ecstasy and agony of romantic love - and, after having to force himself to sit down to write the first few, it didn’t take him long to understand how easily the process slipped into formula. And hold that thought for now.
Rundgren’s path to his solo career started on the other side of the creative process, i.e., producing. Not too much time passed before he landed with Albert Grossman, the founder/Svengali of the famous/infamous Bearsville Records based in upstate New York (near-ish to Woodstock), but unlike, say, Randy Van Warmer (I have details on Grossman in there), he managed to work with the man without stumbling onto the dark side of that dynamic. Producing paid the bills, but he continued to write songs. After reaching a point where he felt he had something coherent, Rundgren approached Grossman about releasing what he dubbed “a vanity project” on Bearsville. Grossman didn’t give him the advance, but blessed the project: that would become his solo debut, 1970’s Runt. And the start of a great career.
I’m almost to Utopia (bear with me), but one of Rundgren’s elaborations on songwriting in the Songwriter Universe interview sets up a good pivot:
“I realized that I was writing out of a formula, and that a lot of the subject matter actually was imaginary in a sense. It was still about the relationship that I had in high school, but it wasn’t about what was really going on in my head. It took an album called A Wizard, A True Star for me to break out of the formula and start to using greater possibilities. Ever since then, I can write ballads, I can write rock songs, I can write for guitar or for orchestra. I can write for anything because I’ve unburdened myself of the idea that a song has to be a certain way, a certain length or about a certain subject.”
That was where Rundgren’s head was at when he launched Utopia. As noted above, Rundgren built the original Utopia line-up out of the people who’d played on his solo albums (about 1970-73), and that version of the band was very much his baby. Utopia’s debut - Todd Rundgren’s Utopia (1973) - ran (on) for the length of a regular album, but had just four songs; one, “Ikon,” clocks in at over 30 minutes. Tempos change, a guitar dominates here, a synth (or several of them) dominates there, but it all goes for it, and in every sense of the phrase but marketability. It’s still unmistakably “rock,” more than enough, honestly, only overflowing with ambition (pretension?), unbound by radio playtime, and with fervid disinterest in familiar pop-song structure. AOR at its drunkest, in other words.
As already noted, Rundgren brought in musicians he’d played with on his solo stuff to form Utopia’s original line-up. Not one of them was around by the time Utopia recorded its debut; and literally all of the dudes who recorded that debut checked out by 1975. The Utopia line-up most (of the few) people would recognize took shape over the years 1975 and 1976; it started with Rundgren (lead guitar/vocals generally), Roger Powell (synths/keys/vocals generally), and John “Willie” Wilcox (drums/percussion/vocals generally) and rounded out when Kasim Sulton (bass/vocals generally) came onboard. That line-up held together (more or less) for a decade, and released 10 albums. And, as noted in a 2018 retrospective on a site called Morning Call, it had some moments:
“Utopia was so popular among audiophiles that, in 1976, it shared the bill with The Rolling Stones at England's Knebworth Festival, and three years later returned to play aside Led Zeppelin for one of that band's last live performances before 300,000 people.”
As should surprise no one, Utopia built that following through a combination of prog rock and live performances. The rank among early adopters in a number of ways, projecting a video behind them as they played, for one, but also things like this:
“For Utopia's live shows, Powell created the Powell Probe; the first remote, hand-held polyphonic synthesizer controller, which featured a custom-made shell used to access a complex stack of sequencers and other peripherals offstage”
And:
“Wilcox's most memorable drumset was a motorcycle-shaped electronic percussion configuration nicknamed "Trapparatus". It consisted of pads and pedals which triggered electronic percussion sounds, mounted on an actual motorcycle frame and topped with conventional cymbals. Wilcox can be seen playing the Trapparatus in early '80s Utopia concerts.” [Ed. - “Trapparatus” perished in flames in 1986. #RIP]
Man, I haven’t even got to “Set Me Free” yet…stepping on it…
The later 1970s saw Utopia become a studio band and - I didn’t see this anywhere, but it feels like a good bet -that gave them the freedom to put out whatever they wanted without the risk of rejection by a live fan-base with expectations. They stayed in the prog lane on 1977’s Ra (e.g., “Magic Dragon Theatre” and, more so, “Singring and the Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale),” also 18:22 long), but they flipped to their spin on new wave/head-on rock within the same year with, Oops! Wrong Planet (e.g., “Trapped” and the deliciously corny “Love in Action”). Despite a nod to their past (“Caravan”), 1979’s Adventures in Utopia sounded like it came from a totally different band. Again, this was the album that included “Set Me Free,” and that’s kind of the punchline for this chapter: Utopia’s only charting single was a song they released as part of their day job.
That doesn’t mean it happened totally by accident. Utopia’s sound didn’t just reference shifts in style and production, it became poppier. Despite Sulton’s willingness to take the hit/credit (read at as you will) for that, the few sources I checked agreed that Utopia was a collaborative project by that time. Different members wrote songs (e.g., I’m still not clear on whether Rundgren or Sulton wrote “Set Me Free”) and handled lead vocals, but they collectively pushed toward accessibility. Rundgren recalled the writing process to Songwriter Universe:
“When we write for Utopia, we’re trying to make sure that there are a couple other factors in there. One is that [the song] highlights the playing abilities of the band. You know, we are all players, and the history of the band is as much about our live performances as it was about our studio recordings. So we would write stuff that was something of a challenge to play and sing. The writing process was always more collaborative.”
Utopia put out several more albums from there - Deface the Music (1980), the reasonably compelling Swing to the Right (1982), Utopia (1982; also, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” was the only song I’d ever heard by them; goofy damn video, btw), Oblivion (1984), and POV (1985) - and then they quietly called it quits. Or, rather, Utopia did.
The Hit
The only remarkable thing about Utopia’s “Set Me Free” is that it came from the primary musical project of one of the most prolific men in 1970s music. Maybe. And yet, no great tales surround it’s creation - it’s the opposite, if anything - it didn’t make Utopia famous (already there), and it came less from a sound that defined them as an act than it dropped a marker on their evolution. According to Wikipedia, that single and the album it appeared on (Adventures in Utopia) derailed their career arc.
It does sound like its time, with the warm 1970s sound (especially on the keys) blending with the cooler synth production the 1980s made popular. If I had to compare it any song I’d ever heard before, I’d go with “Believe It or Not,” the song Joey Scarbury wrote for TV’s The Greatest American Hero.
It didn’t chart that high - it only reached No. 27 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and didn’t blow up internationally - but that’s entirely on-brand for Utopia.
The Rest of the Story
“Utopia as a group is to convince people of the potential reality of the concept. Utopia isn't even the greatest potential reality, it's just what we can afford now. We're the Disneyland of rock and roll bands. Anyone can get into it with a little bit of effort.”
- Todd Rundgren, a 1973 feature in the UK Guardian (reissued in 2013)
Utopia started as “Todd Rundgren’s Utopia,” and it was very much his baby. The original members included various musicians he’d worked with on his post-Nazz solo material, and even all that happened somewhat by accident. Shortly after Nazz petered out, Rundgren found himself without a job, a band and, as he explained to Songwriter Universe in a 2018 interview, “I did not have any confidence as a solo artist.” He had, however, started writing songs for Nazz “because that’s what bands did…after the Beatles.” Rundgren’s first songs trafficked in the usual themes - e.g., the ecstasy and agony of romantic love - and, after having to force himself to sit down to write the first few, it didn’t take him long to understand how easily the process slipped into formula. And hold that thought for now.
Rundgren’s path to his solo career started on the other side of the creative process, i.e., producing. Not too much time passed before he landed with Albert Grossman, the founder/Svengali of the famous/infamous Bearsville Records based in upstate New York (near-ish to Woodstock), but unlike, say, Randy Van Warmer (I have details on Grossman in there), he managed to work with the man without stumbling onto the dark side of that dynamic. Producing paid the bills, but he continued to write songs. After reaching a point where he felt he had something coherent, Rundgren approached Grossman about releasing what he dubbed “a vanity project” on Bearsville. Grossman didn’t give him the advance, but blessed the project: that would become his solo debut, 1970’s Runt. And the start of a great career.
I’m almost to Utopia (bear with me), but one of Rundgren’s elaborations on songwriting in the Songwriter Universe interview sets up a good pivot:
“I realized that I was writing out of a formula, and that a lot of the subject matter actually was imaginary in a sense. It was still about the relationship that I had in high school, but it wasn’t about what was really going on in my head. It took an album called A Wizard, A True Star for me to break out of the formula and start to using greater possibilities. Ever since then, I can write ballads, I can write rock songs, I can write for guitar or for orchestra. I can write for anything because I’ve unburdened myself of the idea that a song has to be a certain way, a certain length or about a certain subject.”
That was where Rundgren’s head was at when he launched Utopia. As noted above, Rundgren built the original Utopia line-up out of the people who’d played on his solo albums (about 1970-73), and that version of the band was very much his baby. Utopia’s debut - Todd Rundgren’s Utopia (1973) - ran (on) for the length of a regular album, but had just four songs; one, “Ikon,” clocks in at over 30 minutes. Tempos change, a guitar dominates here, a synth (or several of them) dominates there, but it all goes for it, and in every sense of the phrase but marketability. It’s still unmistakably “rock,” more than enough, honestly, only overflowing with ambition (pretension?), unbound by radio playtime, and with fervid disinterest in familiar pop-song structure. AOR at its drunkest, in other words.
As already noted, Rundgren brought in musicians he’d played with on his solo stuff to form Utopia’s original line-up. Not one of them was around by the time Utopia recorded its debut; and literally all of the dudes who recorded that debut checked out by 1975. The Utopia line-up most (of the few) people would recognize took shape over the years 1975 and 1976; it started with Rundgren (lead guitar/vocals generally), Roger Powell (synths/keys/vocals generally), and John “Willie” Wilcox (drums/percussion/vocals generally) and rounded out when Kasim Sulton (bass/vocals generally) came onboard. That line-up held together (more or less) for a decade, and released 10 albums. And, as noted in a 2018 retrospective on a site called Morning Call, it had some moments:
“Utopia was so popular among audiophiles that, in 1976, it shared the bill with The Rolling Stones at England's Knebworth Festival, and three years later returned to play aside Led Zeppelin for one of that band's last live performances before 300,000 people.”
As should surprise no one, Utopia built that following through a combination of prog rock and live performances. The rank among early adopters in a number of ways, projecting a video behind them as they played, for one, but also things like this:
“For Utopia's live shows, Powell created the Powell Probe; the first remote, hand-held polyphonic synthesizer controller, which featured a custom-made shell used to access a complex stack of sequencers and other peripherals offstage”
And:
“Wilcox's most memorable drumset was a motorcycle-shaped electronic percussion configuration nicknamed "Trapparatus". It consisted of pads and pedals which triggered electronic percussion sounds, mounted on an actual motorcycle frame and topped with conventional cymbals. Wilcox can be seen playing the Trapparatus in early '80s Utopia concerts.” [Ed. - “Trapparatus” perished in flames in 1986. #RIP]
Man, I haven’t even got to “Set Me Free” yet…stepping on it…
The later 1970s saw Utopia become a studio band and - I didn’t see this anywhere, but it feels like a good bet -that gave them the freedom to put out whatever they wanted without the risk of rejection by a live fan-base with expectations. They stayed in the prog lane on 1977’s Ra (e.g., “Magic Dragon Theatre” and, more so, “Singring and the Glass Guitar (An Electrified Fairytale),” also 18:22 long), but they flipped to their spin on new wave/head-on rock within the same year with, Oops! Wrong Planet (e.g., “Trapped” and the deliciously corny “Love in Action”). Despite a nod to their past (“Caravan”), 1979’s Adventures in Utopia sounded like it came from a totally different band. Again, this was the album that included “Set Me Free,” and that’s kind of the punchline for this chapter: Utopia’s only charting single was a song they released as part of their day job.
That doesn’t mean it happened totally by accident. Utopia’s sound didn’t just reference shifts in style and production, it became poppier. Despite Sulton’s willingness to take the hit/credit (read at as you will) for that, the few sources I checked agreed that Utopia was a collaborative project by that time. Different members wrote songs (e.g., I’m still not clear on whether Rundgren or Sulton wrote “Set Me Free”) and handled lead vocals, but they collectively pushed toward accessibility. Rundgren recalled the writing process to Songwriter Universe:
“When we write for Utopia, we’re trying to make sure that there are a couple other factors in there. One is that [the song] highlights the playing abilities of the band. You know, we are all players, and the history of the band is as much about our live performances as it was about our studio recordings. So we would write stuff that was something of a challenge to play and sing. The writing process was always more collaborative.”
Utopia put out several more albums from there - Deface the Music (1980), the reasonably compelling Swing to the Right (1982), Utopia (1982; also, “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” was the only song I’d ever heard by them; goofy damn video, btw), Oblivion (1984), and POV (1985) - and then they quietly called it quits. Or, rather, Utopia did.
 |
| Even got back together...mostly. |
Rundgren wasn’t the only member whose career kept going (and going and going), but he certainly the most famous. He’s produced dozens of albums for as many artists - Grand Funk Railroad (who were polished) and the New York Dolls (who were not) among them and around the same time (and the list keeps going) - but my favorite anecdote was his memory of the most famous album he recorded, Meatloaf’s explosively best-selling Bat Out of Hell (1977). Once more, from Songwriters Universe:
“In my mind, that record was always a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. And I think subconsciously, it was that for Jim Steinman, although not necessarily for Meat Loaf. [It had] the overly long material and the arcane imagery and iconography of the ‘50s and that sort of thing. You know, here it was the late ‘70s when the album was recorded, and they’re still singing about switchblades and motorcycles, and so I viewed the whole thing as sort of a spoof. And fortunately, the rest of the world took it seriously (laughs), and it became one of the most successful records ever made.”
It wasn’t easy to tell the story of Utopia without the whole thing inevitably diverting to Todd Rundgren. They’re all working musicians, but no matter how democratically Utopia functions as a band (they toured again in 2018), Rundgren’s the only legend of the bunch. As such, all the signs on this road have his name on it. At the end of the day, though, they all just showed up and did a job. It might sound, or even be, better than yours, but they talk about it that way…unless you take the time to read that 1973 Guardian feature on Rundgren, in which he sounds as grandiose as any of the peers of his time. Suffice to say, he got over the issue with confidence…
About the Sampler
My hope is that the journey that is the sampler makes up for that dry narrative. I decided to keep it chronological for starters, so that people can hear Utopia take the next step into their (and others’) musical future. I slipped a couple into that dry narrative, but still have a couple blanks to fill in. Going in order, as Todd intended…
Todd Rundgren’s Utopia: I went with “Utopia Theme” and “Freedom Fighters” (live clip, btw; I hestitated to use them for the sound quality, but it's good to see what they looked like) on the grounds that they’re both much shorter than “Ikon.” “Freedom Fighters” is damn-near normal.
RA: After the two linked to above - and precisely for the excessive prog-ness - I also included “Hiroshima,” a clearly political song about American imperialism.
Oops! Wrong Planet: As with RA, I flagged the more representative songs above, but I thought “Back on the Street” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” fills out the impression nicely. A lot more plain rock on this one...
Adventures in Utopia: Just “Rock Love,” which gets a lot of 80s into one song.
Swing to the Right: I’d rate this album (or the next one) as Utopia’s best. It’s still pretty damn 80s - e.g., “Fahrenheit 451,” if a later stage - but it has more tonal variety, something I tried to capture between the polished (satirical?) “Lysistrata” and the more coarse and abstract, “Shinola.”
Utopia: “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” definitely counts as the oddball of the catalog, but this album felt like a hiccup in general, something that threw back to rawer sounds of their prog days while still keeping the polish - e.g., “Princess of the Universe” and “Infrared and Ultraviolet.”
POV: Pretty damn poppy, very smooth - e.g., “Style” and “Wildlife.”
Well, that went on longer than I’d hoped, but I still hope it gave you a taste of Utopia. Till the next one…oh. Oh my…
“In my mind, that record was always a spoof of Bruce Springsteen. And I think subconsciously, it was that for Jim Steinman, although not necessarily for Meat Loaf. [It had] the overly long material and the arcane imagery and iconography of the ‘50s and that sort of thing. You know, here it was the late ‘70s when the album was recorded, and they’re still singing about switchblades and motorcycles, and so I viewed the whole thing as sort of a spoof. And fortunately, the rest of the world took it seriously (laughs), and it became one of the most successful records ever made.”
It wasn’t easy to tell the story of Utopia without the whole thing inevitably diverting to Todd Rundgren. They’re all working musicians, but no matter how democratically Utopia functions as a band (they toured again in 2018), Rundgren’s the only legend of the bunch. As such, all the signs on this road have his name on it. At the end of the day, though, they all just showed up and did a job. It might sound, or even be, better than yours, but they talk about it that way…unless you take the time to read that 1973 Guardian feature on Rundgren, in which he sounds as grandiose as any of the peers of his time. Suffice to say, he got over the issue with confidence…
About the Sampler
My hope is that the journey that is the sampler makes up for that dry narrative. I decided to keep it chronological for starters, so that people can hear Utopia take the next step into their (and others’) musical future. I slipped a couple into that dry narrative, but still have a couple blanks to fill in. Going in order, as Todd intended…
Todd Rundgren’s Utopia: I went with “Utopia Theme” and “Freedom Fighters” (live clip, btw; I hestitated to use them for the sound quality, but it's good to see what they looked like) on the grounds that they’re both much shorter than “Ikon.” “Freedom Fighters” is damn-near normal.
RA: After the two linked to above - and precisely for the excessive prog-ness - I also included “Hiroshima,” a clearly political song about American imperialism.
Oops! Wrong Planet: As with RA, I flagged the more representative songs above, but I thought “Back on the Street” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” fills out the impression nicely. A lot more plain rock on this one...
Adventures in Utopia: Just “Rock Love,” which gets a lot of 80s into one song.
Swing to the Right: I’d rate this album (or the next one) as Utopia’s best. It’s still pretty damn 80s - e.g., “Fahrenheit 451,” if a later stage - but it has more tonal variety, something I tried to capture between the polished (satirical?) “Lysistrata” and the more coarse and abstract, “Shinola.”
Utopia: “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now” definitely counts as the oddball of the catalog, but this album felt like a hiccup in general, something that threw back to rawer sounds of their prog days while still keeping the polish - e.g., “Princess of the Universe” and “Infrared and Ultraviolet.”
POV: Pretty damn poppy, very smooth - e.g., “Style” and “Wildlife.”
Well, that went on longer than I’d hoped, but I still hope it gave you a taste of Utopia. Till the next one…oh. Oh my…
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