Something/Anything?

How I discovered Todd Rundgren

Only fools laugh at failure, wise men laugh at the lazy and the too-contented and at those who are so timid that they dare undertake nothing.¹

I knew nothing about Todd Rundgren when I read a newspaper article about him. I had heard Open My Eyes by Nazz as I had the Nuggets box set of great garage rock, but I’d never really thought about who were in the band or anything else they’d done.

Sometime around 2001 the was an article in The Guardian comparing Todd Rundgren to Prince, and citing Something/Anything? as the prime example. Excited, I managed to buy it fairly soon afterwards and sat down to listen.

I was disappointed.

I was disappointed because it didn’t sound like Prince. But I was disappointed because I’d not really read the article. Rundgren was being compared to Prince, cited as an influenced not because he was a new funk genius but because he was a multi-instrumentalist. Rundgren played every instrument of sides 1 to 3 of the double album, as well as producing. So, stupidly, I st…