Todd Rundgren

Considered by many to be the "Ultimate Rock Cult Hero", Todd Rundgren has maintained a legion of fans through four decades, rivaled only by Grateful Dead. Todd was raised in the Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) area, and his first professional bands, Money and Woddy's Truckstop, achieved much regional success. It was in the late 1960s, however, that Todd's searing guitar work reached a nationwide audience, in his role as lead guitarist for the blues-psychedelic band Nazz. he wrote and arranged almost all of the work that went into the three albums the group produced. Their music ranged from Southern blues to hard rock to heavily orchestrated symphonies.

Nazz broke up in the early 1970s and Todd released two solo albums under the name of Runt.

His first big solo success was in 1971 with "We Gotta Get You a Woman" and in 1973 from the double album "Something/Anything?" he scored big on the charts with "I Saw the Light" and a revision of a Nazz song, "Hello, It's Me. " Perhaps the superstardom that seemed imminent at this time eluded Rundgren due to his reluctance to be pigeonholed into any single type of music. He still released albums with great love ballads, but they were also laced with heavy guitar rock, and occasionally mini rock operas. Rundgren has scored huge as a music producer, most notably on Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" opus.

He presented the first live nationally broadcast stereo radio concert (by microwave), linking 40 cities around the country, in 1978.

In 1979 he opened Utopia Video Studios, a multi-million-dollar state-of-the-art facility. The first project produced by Todd there was Gustav Holst's "The Planets", commissioned by RCA SelectaVision as the first demonstration software for its new videodisc format.

His creation of the first color graphics tablet in 1980 was licensed to Apple Computers and released as "The Utopia Graphics Tablet."

His 1981 "Time Heals," video was the first music video to utilize state-of-the-art compositing of live action and computer graphics. Produced and directed by Rundgren, it became the second video to be played on MTV (after The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star").

He gave the first live national cablecast of a rock concert in 1982, which aired on the USA Network. It was simulcast in stereo to over 120 radio stations.

In 1994 he won the award for Best Composition Arrangment for "No World Order" from the Interactive Academy.

In 1996 he won the Digitial Hollywood Award for Best Music CD-ROM for "The Individualist".

Season 1, Episode 1 of That '70s Show (1998) known as "The '70s Pilot" AKA "Teenage Wasteland," features a plot revolving around Eric going to see a Todd Rundgren concert in Milwaukee. Two of Rundgren's songs are also featured in the episode, "I Saw The Light" and "Hello It's Me".

Living in Kauai, Hawaii, USA with his wife and child. [2002]