Well, enough about the technical flaw. Todd is a great performer and entertainer which really connects with the crowd, like i've read in so many stories. The jokes he made inbetween (Donna Summer, the alternative parts in Bang On The Drum All Day) made people laugh out loud.
Things really started to work for me when he did some of his more famous songs like Tiny Demons, I Saw The Light, Love Of The Common Man, Hello It's Me and after You've Got To Hide Your Love Away i was truely amazed. The only thing that sometimes annoyed me were the extremely long and boring vocal improvisations on songs like Hawking... "happy, hap-py, hhhhhaaaaaapy, ha-ha-ha-happy". Maybe i'm used to the studio recordings...
I was stunned when he did one of my favorite songs, Pretending To Care with Ethel. I never thought instruments could replace the original backing vocals so well, great! After this Joe, Todd and Ethel performed together, which was excellent. I wished they did this all the way, things really started to live now. Too bad it was only 2 or 3 songs!
After all, it was a great live introduction for a relatively new Rundgren fan. I think i'm just too used to the studio albums, which gave me a slightly wrong impression of the performance, but i'm really glad that i went to this show, i missed the one last year when he was on tour for the Liars album. I hope that Todd will return in the future to do more gigs, i really do; he's my favorite alltime artist.
Cheers,
Maarten (Netherlands - 12th of june 2005)
ps: By the way, the people in the US who can attend the shows with Hall & Oates are lucky bastards, i would love to see them too with Todd!
