Todd Rundgren gets back in the lead-guitar saddle

Todd Rundgren has jumped genres throughout his long music career, but he returns to straight-ahead rock with his latest album, "Arena."

Over four decades of making music -- as a band member, as a solo artist and as a producer -- Todd Rundgren has remained predictably unpredictable.

Todd Rundgren has jumped genres throughout his long music career, but he returns to straight-ahead rock with his latest album, "Arena."

"I don't think about what the success will be of any particular thing that I do," Rundgren says. "I just figure if I keep doing it, then by definition I am a working musician."

Rundgren started as a teenager in Philadelphia in the late '60s, playing in a Paul Butterfield Blues Band knockoff, Woody's Truck Stop. He then formed the Nuggets-worthy garage-rock outfit Nazz, a group that took its cue more from Britain's psychedelic movement than San Francisco's.

By the early '70s, Rundgren had morphed into a more straight-ahead singer-songwriter, first with Runt and then as a solo artist. His 1972 solo debut Something/Anything? is early power pop and features a couple of his biggest hits, "I Saw the Light" and "Hello It's Me."

True to form, however, Rundgren could not stay true to form. Next came a series of increasingly out-there projects, including the prog rock of Wizard, A True Star, and the cult favorite band Utopia, whose sound over the dozen-or-so years of its existence ranged from progressive to New Wave. He also became a top-name producer, working with everyone from androgynous punk pioneers the New York Dolls to Meat Loaf to British popsters XTC.

In the '90s, Rundgren, a vigorous intellect who has always indulged a passion for artist-freeing gadgets, adopting keyboards, sequencers and video when they were still infant technologies, redubbed himself TR-I and created a pair of interactive projects. Those projects foresaw, by more than 15 years, things like the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games and Brian Eno's acclaimed iPhone music creation application, Bloom.

Since then, Rundgren has changed sounds as regularly shirts, from With A Twist, an album that put a bossa nova spin on some of his best-known songs, to his 2004 pop concept album Liars. He also extended his wide-ranging musical vision onto the stage, pursuing collaborations with Ringo Starr and most recently the Cars, for whom Rundgren stepped in as a replacement to Ric Ocasek in an incarnation simply titled the New Cars.

That gig directly inspired Rundgren's most recent record, last year's hard-charging, guitar-drenched Arena, an effort that combines the mod-bent blues rock of Nazz with the sonic sophistication of Utopia.

"It's an homage to all those big, aggressive arena-rock records of the '70s," says Rundgren. "Of course, part of the purpose of making an arena rock record was to fulfill a prophecy. Hopefully, if the music succeeds, you eventually end up in an arena."

Rundgren spoke to The Commercial Appeal from a recent tour stop in Florida.

Q: After all your genre jumping, what made you decide to return to straightforward rock?

A: There was sort of a long era there of me being more of a front guy, either just as a singer or maybe in an acoustic-style show. But the electric guitar had been marginalized a bit in terms of my own presentations.

When I got involved with the New Cars, I was essentially the rhythm guitar player, and I was playing guitar every song. So I was at least halfway back to being a lead guitar guy like I had been in the '70s. But about three weeks into our maiden tour we had an accident on the bus, and [guitarist] Elliot Easton broke his collarbone. The tour just came to a halt. I had nothing to do for the foreseeable future so I decided: Well, my fingers are in shape. Why don't I put together a guitar quartet and go out on tour?

Q: And Arena grew out of that?

A: The more I did it, the more enthusiastic the fans got. So I decided maybe it was time to get back in the saddle, guitar-wise, and write a record that affords me the opportunity to noodle around and play the big power chords and windmills and things like that. I think the reason I got such good response was that a lot of my fans picked up on stuff I was doing back in the '70s.

Q: You've been playing Arena in its entirety on some of your recent tour dates. Can we expect to hear older material as well?

A: There will be songs from throughout the career, but they will be mostly guitar oriented. Most of them were originally guitar anthems of one kind or another anyway. And we're constantly trying to work new old material into the set. For a while we were doing a couple of cover songs and replaced them with songs of my own that I think people would rather hear. A little bit of Utopia and going all the way back to my first solo record.

Q: After releasing an album of live covers and new studio tracks, the New Cars kicked off their first, admittedly truncated, tour here in 2006. Are there any plans for you to get back together?

A: We do occasional dates, but we don't tour. It's kind of an irony. The Cars are stuck in a place, touring-wise, where it costs more money than you make to go out on the road. Unless you want to pretend you're starting all over and drive around in a van. For me, personally, there's no reason to do that because I can do that on my own behalf, which is what I'm doing now.

Q: Your next project is a reunion with the New York Dolls, whose debut album you produced 36 years ago. What was it like to revisit that band after all these years?

A: The band is not really the same band. There are only two original members, (singer) David Johansen and (guitarist) Sylvain Sylvain. And the three other guys are fairly experienced musicians. It wasn't like the original Dolls, where that was the first band any of them had ever recorded with or had had any success with.

The difference here is that everyone knows they're not what the New York Dolls were. They know that they're not a bunch of snotty-nosed, upstart youngsters in drag playing sloppy music with abandon. These guys can't play sloppy. They don't know how and wouldn't like it if they did. So it's a whole different thing. The musical boundaries are much broader. The experiences David and Sylvain have had over the years factor into it and makes the music different. The three other guys have a template they are working to, which is the original Dolls, but they don't attempt to play like them. They just want to play that kind of music, and they play it better than the original Dolls could. If people are expecting this to be the next best thing to a tribute band, that's not what this is.

Todd Rundgren

8 p.m. Saturday at Minglewood Hall, 1555 Madison Ave. Tickets are $25; available at Minglewood box office (open 10 a.m.-4 p.m.), by phone at 866-609-1744, and online minglewoodhall.com.

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