Todd Rundgren
The Music Mill
Sunday, Jan. 20, 8:30 p.m., $30, 21+

The Music Mill has been quietly flourishing in Clearwater, offering shows that would normally fly under Indy’s radar. This Sunday, they will bring us an artist who has spent most of the last 40 years consciously trying to stay under rock’s radar. Todd Rundgren will bring his latest band, The Liars, for a show that is part of a warm-up tour for his latest album release, due this summer.

undgren, lover of Bebe (Buell), stepfather to Liv (Tyler) and producer to everyone from The New York Dolls to Meat Loaf to Bad Religion, should be crowned the King of Rock Freaks.

On his 1972 major breakout album, Something/Anything, Rundgren played all the instruments, produced, arranged and even catered. Once that album made him a star, with the song “Hello It’s Me” taking up permanent residence on ’70s AM radio, he turned his back on the masses; his next record, A Wizard, A True Star, is a baffling hodge-podge of Motown, prog and free association acid-drenched noise. From then on, it was a challenge to keep up with Rundgren.

One moment he’s producing one of the most beautiful post-pop records ever, XTC’s Skylarking; the next he’s putting out an album of bossa-nova versions of his greatest hits. One minute he’s playing with the synth-heavy prog-cum-power-pop pioneers Utopia; the next he’s inexplicably fronting The (New) Cars. His last album, Liars, a concept album about lies, was hailed as his strongest work in over a decade. Even with that critical acclaim, we can never be sure what the next record will sound like; it could be a death metal polka album.

Besides making music that both titillates and confounds, Rundgren has consistently been an innovator in several other fields. He was among the first to produce conceptual music video pieces to accompany his songs. He took 1979 off to learn computer programming and helped develop the laser disc, pre-cursor to the DVD. Later, in the ’90s, he took on the moniker TR-I, under which he started offering interactive CD-ROMs and built a Web portal, Patronet, that served as an Internet-based distribution source for his music at a time when the world had barely heard the term dot-com.