San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Live from Chicago, it’s Todd Rundgren
Three-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominee goes on ‘tour,’ with 25 livestreamed concerts aimed at 25 U.S. cities
Connecting with his fans has never been a challenge for Todd Rundgren, who recently became a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominee for the third time in his storied career.
But connecting with fans for 25 concerts in 25 U.S. cities across four time zones, while performing all those concerts live from a single city with his nine-piece band, during a global pandemic? And gearing each of the 25 concerts to a different city, replete with backstage food catering featuring food specialties from a different city each night?
That presents a challenge — make that a lot of challenges — even for a veteran maverick like Rundgren, who has been equally acclaimed as a solo artist, band leader, producer and all-around rock and pop visionary.
“When I do a tour, it’s a big deal for me, everybody involved and, I hope, the audience,” said Rundgren, whose “Clearly Human Virtual Tour” doesn’t so much set the bar higher as create a new bar altogether.
The tour began Feb. 12 in “Buffalo” and concludes March 22 in “Seattle.” It includes a Tuesday show in “San Diego.” The quotation marks are used to denote the fact that each of these virtual tour dates actually features Rundgren and his band performing livestreamed concerts from the Chicago Theatre in Illinois.
The historic, 100-year-old venue has a capacity of 3,600. Because of Covid-19-related restrictions in Chicago, the actual in-person attendance is limited to 30 fans at each performance. That’s up from 19 when the virtual tour began a month ago today.
Rundgren, who scored such Top 40 solo hits as “Can We Still Be Friends?” and “Hello It’s Me,” estimates he is investing about $1 million in the tour. He is producing it entirely himself, and it is being livestreamed by Nocap. Ticket prices range from $35 for one show to $700 for all 25, with a variety of other options, including online meet-and-greets with Rundgren,.
Each concert will be localized with photos and videos from the city the virtual performances is targeted to each night. For an extra $20 each, 150 fans per show can appear as a “virtual audience” on video panels set up in in front of the band — a move designed to foster real-time interaction. For staunch devotees, a handful of in-person tickets are available for each show, priced at $287.50 each, from clearlyhumantickets.com. Attendees will need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken no more than 72 hours before the concert they attend.
All of this represents a major gamble for Rundgren, who has produced landmark albums by Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad, Patti Smith, Hall & Oates, XTC, New York Dolls, The Tubes and others. But creative gambles are nothing new for this seasoned risktaker. He performed the first live interactive TV concert back in 1978, created the first graphics tablet for Apple in 1979, and launched the first online direct artist subscription service, “Patronet,” in 1998.
‘No assurances’
“Well, I am a gambling person — I just don’t play in Las Vegas,” Rundgren said, speaking in a pre-virtual-tour interview from his home in Kauai. “I’m doing these shows and hope they will succeed artistically, first of all. And, secondly, that they won’t break me, and that, in the end, I won’t lose money.
“It’s often a crapshoot, even in non-pandemic times, because touring is a business that operates on the margins. In other words, all your profit usually ends up coming from just a couple of key shows. You can play 30 shows on a tour, and most of that income goes to paying the bills. Only a couple of the shows pay your profits. And if you have two shows that fall through, there goes all your profit. If three shows get canceled, you are in the red.”
He chuckled.
“One of the upsides of doing this virtual tour is that I won’t have any shows canceled, because I’ll be there for every show with my band in Chicago,” Rundgren continued.
“That was part of the basis for this virtual tour concept — the fact it’s getting more and more difficult to travel because of disruptions and other climate-related things, like almost the entire state of California being on fire last summer or half of Texas being underwater.
“But there is no assurance the audience will come out and that I don’t take a bath on this tour. So, it is a gamble from my standpoint. And we don’t have any track records of other virtual tours to look at as reference points. Other people have done one-off livestreamed performances. But doing 25 shows and narrowcasting them to specific cities and regions is not something anyone’s done before.”
Rundgren’s band largely features musicians who have worked with him for years. They include bassist Kasim Sulton, drummer Prairie Prince, guitarist Bruce Mcdaniel, saxophonist Bobby Strickland and trombonist Steven Stanley. Also on board is the threepiece Global Girls, which features Grace Yoo, Ashle Worrick and Rundgren’s wife, Michele.
The “Clearly Human Virtual Tour” takes its name from his 1989 album “Nearly Human,” which took a deep dive into classic soul music with soaring vocals and meticulous arrangements.
The 10-song album provides a bit less than half of the material for Rundgren’s virtual tour. Ever the nonconformist, he is not performing the songs from the album in the same order as on the record and is interspersing other material from his six-decade career. For good measure, he has been concluding some of his recent livestreamed concerts with “The Want of a Nail,” which is “Nearly Human’s” opening number.
“We’re not playing anything in any particular order. The ‘Nearly Human’ album is about an hour long, and our shows each night for this virtual tour are two hours,” said Rundgren, who modifies his set list nightly.
“I had dabbled in R&B before, but with ‘Nearly Human,’ I did make a conscious decision that I wanted to take being an R&B singer more seriously. There were so many influences on my singing, most notably Stevie Wonder and The O’jays’ Eddie Levert, and innumerable other great R&B singers. So, in a certain way, I bit the bullet by writing material a White guy could sing, without attempting to go out of my legitimate (life) experiences.
“I also had to build my vocal stamina. It’s not simply a matter of hitting the notes and having the stamina to get through a show, but of being able to abandon yourself to the material so that it doesn’t come out the same way every time you perform. That’s part of R&B. You don’t ever sing it exactly the same way each time, because — if you do — that’s when it starts to lose its meaning for you. You’re just doing the work, but not feeling it.”
A real bubble
Rundgren has clearly done the work for his virtual tour.
He hired a director and four camera operators. Everyone in his band and production crew is regularly tested for COVID-19 by an on-site staff nurse. They are all living in a real, not virtual, bubble.
“We’ve more or less taken over two Residence Inns, one for the band and another for the crew,” Rundgren, 72, noted.
“Essentially, everyone has an apartment with a full kitchen and a washer and dryer, so they can eliminate a lot of interactions and contact with other people. Everyone goes from their room to the van, to the venue, and then back again . ...
“We don’t have any expectations, but maybe vaccines will become available to us at some time during our virtual tour and we’ll get vaccinated, which will set our minds at ease so we won’t have to be so paranoid. Until that happens, we have a stringent medical regimen in place.”
That regimen includes a provision to replace band members should any of them contract COVID-19 while in Chicago with Rundgren.
“We are fully aware of that potentiality,” he said.
“There are a couple of situations we’ve prepared for. If someone tests positive but are asymptomatic, which means they could still perform, we would isolate them, put a camera on them and have them stand behind a 6-foottall video panel, so that they would actually still be onstage. If someone tests positive, is symptomatic and can’t perform, we have backup musicians ready for all the key positions in the band.
“The advantage is we don’t have to tear the stage set down every night and travel to 25 cities. Most times on tour, you perform for two hours and spend six to eight hours traveling to each show. We’ve eliminated the traveling, although, on balance, this is more difficult.
“We’re putting up local memorabilia and the local newspaper for each show, and eating the food you would get there. For us, each night is like self-hypnosis: ‘We’re not in Chicago, we’re in whatever locality the virtual tour is playing that night!’ ”
“One of the upsides of doing this virtual tour is that I won’t have any shows canceled.”
Todd Rundgren