Todd Rundgren, Willie Wilcox and Kasim Sulton of Utopia. Photo by Danny O’Connor.
Seekers of forward-thinking pop and rock active between the mid-’70s and mid-’80s were likely to be found on the roads to Utopia, bound for local record shops and concert venues in order to experience one of the era’s hardest-to-define bands. The story of Utopia, though, must be prefaced with the story, however abridged, of multi-hued artist/songwriter/producer Todd Rundgren. Debuting on vinyl in 1974 as a six-member band, half of those on keyboards, Utopia was the ever-restless Rundgren’s experiment with forming a collaborative musical unit after briefly reaching the pinnacle of pop success with music he recorded mostly alone, using early multi-track equipment.
The traditional pop-song formulae that informed enduring radio favorites “I Saw the Light” and “Hello It’s Me,” both Top 40 hits in 1972, quickly became old hat to Rundgren, who in short order alienated much of his growing fan base with a hard left turn toward notably more adventuresome music-making. This creatively fertile period would soon see the birth of Utopia, whose first album contained four chunks of thought-provoking progressive rock, one of them exceeding a half-hour in length and sporting a complex musical structure indicative of Rundgren’s own bent toward higher forms of expression and his disregard for commercial expectations.
Utopia’s shifting membership had settled into a stable four-piece lineup by 1977’s Ra, followed by seven more albums that encompass a breadth of musical and lyrical perspectives. In 1985, the band did its final 20th-century tour of the States and released the album P.O.V., largely informed by then-emerging digital synth, drum machine and sequencing technology championed in particular by Utopia drummer, songwriter and co-producer John “Willie” Wilcox. Wilcox, in a recent interview for the Pulse, recalls initially getting “in trouble with Utopia” over his interest in then-popular dance music by the likes of Prince and Madonna.
“My ear perked up to wanting to use drum machines,” says Wilcox, an admitted fan of catchy pop whose commercial inclinations departed somewhat from Utopia’s musical methodology during the earlier phases of the band’s 11-year existence. Now a writer and producer of contemporary dance music, Wilcox holds down a day gig creating video game soundtracks as the senior audio director at Las Vegas-based Scientific Games. Later this month, he’ll join old friends and bandmates Rundgren and bassist/vocalist Kasim Sulton (and new, last-minute substitute keyboardist Gil Assayas) as the best-known incarnation of Utopia embarks on its first full-scale American jaunt since 1985, with enticing possibilities for Tennessee fans willing to hit the road to Utopia in Atlanta (the Tabernacle, April 28) or Cincinnati (the Taft Theater, May 10).
Wilcox explained that he would soon be making final adjustments to a new custom Ludwig drum kit upon his early-April arrival at a rehearsal facility “in of all places, Woodstock, New York, where it all began,” says Wilcox. Woodstock is within spitting distance of Bearsville, home of Bearsville Records, the label that carried Rundgren and Utopia from the beginning of their respective careers until 1982. During those years and beyond, Utopia produced albums heavy not only on musicality but also on innovation, becoming known for the use of cutting-edge technology in both audio and video. In concert, Utopia used elaborate stage sets and effects, with Wilcox’s electronic, motorcycle-styled kit being an especially memorable bit of high-tech ’80s business.
So, how will the band’s now-decades-long geek-out with technology manifest itself on tour in the tech-saturated 21st century? The answer is surprising, yet not all that surprising for a band that never marched in step with trends: the performances on the tour will be a 20th-century throwback of sorts, with an emphasis on the analog sounds heard on the bulk of the band’s recorded work. For Wilcox, that means using acoustic drums, period.
“For this tour I’m really going back to my personal roots, which was starting with Ludwig drums when I first started playing,” Wilcox says. “And with the fact that this prog-rock and this Utopia band came from a time period when there was 24-track analog recording and analog synthesizers, I thought it would be appropriate to pay homage to this particular body of music with the analog, traditional perspective. So there won’t be any electronics on this tour,” reveals Wilcox, originally a jazz drummer who first met Rundgren in 1974 while playing with Daryl Hall and John Oates.
“I think the analog perspective of this music, and doing it for real is a lot more enticing than, you know, recreating all this stuff with new digital stuff that kind of sounds like the old stuff but it doesn’t. I think part of the beauty and the enjoyment of that music was the analog-ness of it,” he muses. “Because today, everything is not that.”
Describing the evolution of Utopia’s sound, Wilcox noted that by the early ’80s Utopia was “more of a power-pop four-piece band that was doing traditional songwriting as opposed to the very early music that was really kind of born out of jazz fusion. But that music was very player-oriented . . . and then later the songs became songs and that stuff kind of faded away,” he says.
With its increasing emphasis on hook-based songwriting, Utopia found itself winning a modest degree of chart success with such early ’80s hits as “Hammer in My Heart” and “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now.” Both were released in then-novel video treatments that appeared on a Grammy-nominated video compilation, The Utopia Sampler, and gained considerable exposure on the then-new MTV (though Todd Rundgren’s pioneering work in music video had in fact predated the emergence of MTV and the many acts who leapt on the video bandwagon).
The eventual shift from long-form progressive rock to compact, melodic pop-rock brought Utopia back to the same street, if not exactly the identical intersection, where Rundgren had abandoned relationship-based mainstream-styled songs in favor of the brainier, more expansive fare that had earned him, and Utopia, an avid cult following. The difference was that the streamlined sound belonged to a quartet of which Rundgren was only one-fourth, though on the concert stage it was common for the band to perform Rundgren’s solo material alongside its own. His natural leadership, production expertise and strong musical personality helped Utopia to retain the left-of-center sensibility that had basically made Utopia fans out of most of Rundgren’s already-established fan base.
Still, his bandmates’ musical preferences and individual strengths became part of the equation, particularly in such cases as Willie Wilcox’s affection for the sequencers and drum machines that were exerting influence on pop music in the 1980s. This early digital equipment, Wilcox explains, enabled him to contribute more significantly to Utopia’s songwriting process. “As a drummer, you’re just sitting there playing the drums, and you can keep the beat for a song but you can’t contribute harmonically and say, ‘hey, let’s go to this chord change, here, I’ve got this idea.’ So I thought, hey, I could write all this stuff on my own by having a drum machine, a sequencer, with bass lines and synth parts . . . and bring that into the band, whereas before I couldn’t do that.”
Wilcox affirms that Utopia’s shape-shifting musical identity unfolded organically, a natural result of working closely for several years. “[We spent] a long time together, melding into this patina of individuality that only comes from playing together all the time,” he says. “You see it in the Stones, you see it with Aerosmith, you see it with The Beatles . . . groups that spend a lot of time together, and the chemistry of the people making that music.”
None of the bands Wilcox mentions were in fact as fully collaborative as Utopia, who from 1977 onward made music featuring songwriting, lead vocals and production input from all four members. The deep, diverse body of work that resulted was tough to narrow down to an evening’s worth of material, says Wilcox, who adds that he is “enjoying the versatility and the difference of all those things throughout the years and doing them all at one time, you know. There’s so many different styles, so I get the chance, along with the fans, to time-travel. I guess that’ll be fun.”
(Wilcox is giving fans an inside look at the tour and its preparation via his Instagram page @willieontheroad2utopia; tickets for regional shows can be sought online via Ticketmaster and other outlets.)
