{"id":20541,"date":"2021-02-25T05:30:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T10:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20541"},"modified":"2021-02-27T10:14:32","modified_gmt":"2021-02-27T15:14:32","slug":"todd-rundgrens-clearly-human-tour-the-ever-popular-geofenced-artist-effect-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/25\/todd-rundgrens-clearly-human-tour-the-ever-popular-geofenced-artist-effect-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Todd Rundgren\u2019s \u201cClearly Human\u201d Tour: The Ever Popular Geofenced Artist Effect (Part One)"},"content":{"rendered":"

An edited version of this feature appeared previously in <\/em>New City.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

For his latest concert tour, perennial wunderkid Todd Rundgren is revisiting his 1989 album Nearly Human<\/i>. With an expanded band featuring longtime musical associates Kasim Sulton, Gil Assayas, Prairie Prince, Rundgren\u2019s wife Michele and five others, the \u201cClearly Human\u201d tour represents the latest in a long line of crowd-pleasing tours from the genre-spanning musical hero. But the 25-city tour is taking place, start to finish, right here in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Rundgren has a long history with Chicago. \u201cI remember one of the first times I played here,\u201d he says, likely referring to a November 1973 gig with his band Utopia at the Arie Crown Theater. \u201cI was walking towards the gig and a guy stopped me and said, \u2018Hey, my name\u2019s Jerry Michelson, and I\u2019m promoting your show.\u2019\u201d Michelson had recently launched JAM Productions with partner Arny Granat; the team would go on to produce thousands of concerts in and around Chicago. \u201cI remember that because it was the first time I\u2019d ever met one of the promoters,\u201d Rundgren says. \u201cHe was really young, and I was really young, and he was just so excited.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The show was a success for both performer and promoter. Rundgren would play more than 50 live dates in Chicago in the coming years, and that\u2019s not even counting shows as a member of Ringo Starr\u2019s All Starr Band.<\/p>\n

Rundgren is a critically-revered artist who enjoys something of an outsider status, but his career has always been peppered with Top 40 hits. Those include \u201cWe Gotta Get You a Woman\u201d in 1970, \u201cI Saw the Light\u201d and \u201cHello It\u2019s Me\u201d (both 1973), \u201cCan We Still Be Friends\u201d from 1978, \u201cSet Me Free\u201d with Utopia in 1980, the MTV hit \u201cTime Heals\u201d (1981), \u201cBang the Drum All Day\u201d in 1983 and \u201cThe Want of a Nail\u201d from his landmark 1989 Nearly Human<\/i> LP. Even as styles and trends have changed and changed again, Rundgren\u2019s status as an innovator and popular concert draw has never flagged.<\/p>\n

Live shows have always been a part of Rundgren\u2019s life; he has toured as a solo artist, with his various bands and as part of revival\/reunion tours with both the seven-man progressive configuration of Utopia and its streamlined, new wave-leaning quartet lineup. As 2020 began, he had scheduled a tour dubbed \u201cThe Individualist, A True Star,\u201d revisiting two classic albums from his extensive back catalog. That 15-city run would have included three nights in May at the Athenaeum Theatre. But the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to the tour before it began.<\/p>\n

Yet Rundgren\u2019s innovative inclinations meant that he remained determined to bring his music \u2013 live in concert, after a fashion \u2013 to his audience. And Chicago came to mind once again as Rundgren began developing the concept for his 2021 \u201cClearly Human\u201d concert tour. With traditional live shows and touring unavailable as an option, he sought to develop an alternative to those things, one that would not only be practical and safe, but creatively fulfilling (for the musicians involved) and \u2013 most of all \u2013 entertaining for the audiences.<\/p>\n

As it happens, Rundgren had already been thinking along these lines long before the pandemic began. Several years ago, he started scheduling shows only in major markets, flying from city to city and skipping the more grueling bus or van approach. But he quickly took note of the ways in which climate change was wreaking havoc with his travel schedule. \u201cI found myself ever more often waiting for a delayed flight, wondering if I\u2019m going to make it in time or suddenly having a flight canceled,\u201d he says. \u201cMostly because the number of storms in the Atlantic had started to spike.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was (and remains) convinced that things wouldn’t improve. \u201cIf you had wanted to tour this past summer in California, the whole state was on fire,\u201d he says, exaggerating to make a larger point. \u201cAnd if you wanted to go to Texas, half of the state was underwater. The climate can\u2019t be ignored. And it\u2019s s a factor in terms of delivering the service that I deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faced with that challenge, Rundgren asked himself a question. \u201cWhat if you could book a tour where you essentially set up in one place, and then you sent the show [via video] out to a specific venue in a particular city, just like a regular tour?\u201d The idea had distinct advantages: \u201cSay you wanted to tour in the dead of winter,\u201d he suggests. \u201cYou could still do a virtual tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea met with some interest, but nothing took shape. Then COVID happened. \u201cAnd that brought in that additional factor of the audience not being able to get to the venue,\u201d Rundgren says with a rueful laugh. \u201cSo what do we do now?\u201d Suddenly, his virtual tour concept started to make even more sense.<\/p>\n

But then Todd Rundgren has long been known as the sort of artist who comes up with new, innovative ideas (and the infrastructure to implement them) well ahead of the pack. After years of tinkering with music videos behind the scenes, He opened Utopia Video Studio in 1979, more than a year before MTV launched. His Utopia Graphics Tablet System was proposed as a groundbreaking accessory for Apple computers in 1980. He worked with Time Warner Interactive Cable Network in the early \u201890s on a project that was a forerunner of on-demand music and video streaming. Also in the 1990s, Rundgren\u2019s championing of interactivity manifested itself in his No World Order<\/i> tour and his embrace of the CD-i music format. His Patronet artist-to-fan concept presaged Kickstarter, Patreon and a host of other 21st<\/sup> century interactive models.<\/p>\n

Not all of those endeavors worked. In fact, one could argue than none of them was ultimately successful in the ways Rundgren might have envisioned. But as part of his larger body of work \u2013 and as part of the creativity-meets-technology landscape \u2013 his insistence upon always being on the cutting edge has paved the way for others to follow in his wake. By being less innovative, those artists charted a less risky path, took lessons from Rundgren\u2019s occasional missteps and then capitalized on his ideas for their own gain.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a> \u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An edited version of this feature appeared previously in New City. For his latest concert tour, perennial wunderkid Todd Rundgren is revisiting his 1989 album Nearly Human. With an expanded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,44,62],"tags":[2228],"class_list":["post-20541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-live-shows","category-rawk","tag-todd-rundgren","cat-41-id","cat-44-id","cat-62-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20541"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20566,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20541\/revisions\/20566"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}