Last time he was in town, he'd remade his classic songs - Hello It's Me, Can We Still Be Friends - into lounge-style bossa nova songs. He performed at the Paramount Theatre with a full bar, a big band and a dozen audience members handpicked to drink away onstage. That happened because "I wasn't making a lifetime commitment to bossa nova," he says. "It was a phase, and I wanted me and the band and the audience to have as much fun as possible." When he comes to Denver and Boulder on Monday and Tuesday, it's a whole new thing - stripped to a power trio of guitars, bass and drums.
"You could say it's pretty much the polar opposite," Rundgren says with a laugh. "The last time I went out with something strictly like this was probably The Nazz," his late-'60s rock group.
For the Rundgren hard core, it's a dream come true. They're used to seeing him do something different every time out, but revisiting old Nazz material is a hope many had given up on years ago.
But be warned, Rundgren says. The shows won't focus on his hits. "If someone comes expecting to hear Can We Still Be Friends, Hello It's Me - this is not going to be the show where they hear those songs," he says. "But they are going to hear me do songs from as far back as The Nazz, which they probably haven't heard me perform live before."
You can't please everyone all the time, he says. "My audience has various fractures and schisms in it," he says. "There are some people who do have open ears to everything. People are always hoping to hear one (hit) or another. Ideally, you use that desire as an opportunity to get them there, then entertain them in spite of themselves.
"I don't think I'm the kind of artist who looks forward to revisiting all my old material. I tend to be very much fixated on new things all the time."
That's an understatement. From a constant stream of new music to the Internet to reinventing his old material, Rundgren's career has been a flight from boredom. He's topped the charts with signature songs like Hello It's Me and Bang on the Drum All Day and dived into the Internet and computers while other artists were figuring out how to turn on their amps. Along the way he's produced artists as diverse as Badfinger, Meat Loaf and XTC, a consummate musician with pure-pop instincts.
"I can't remember what it's like to be bored," he says.
This trio tour is done somewhat out of laziness, Rundgren says. Members of his band had other commitments, and he didn't want to teach 30 years' worth of material to guys he might just do a few gigs with.
"I didn't want to have to teach a whole band all of this material," he says. "So what's the easiest thing for me to do?" The answer was just a drummer and a bass player he'd work with before who'd need minimal bringing-up-to-speed. Besides work from all phases of his career, his as-yet-unreleased album One Long Year will be featured in the show as well.
His decades-long involvement in high tech has been a labor of love, not business.
"People ahead of the curve don't get rich," he says. "But the reason I'm there is not to get rich; it's to satisfy some expressive urge I have, to redeem technologies that I find interesting. I get in on that process really early - taking the technology and imagining how you can do expressive things with it, rather than just financially sensible things."
He was among the first to release music via CD-ROM and interactive CDs, to put new music on the Internet. You could argue that the With a Twist tour was interactive performance art.
The Internet is the artist's best chance "to gain financial independence from the traditional record industry," he says. "The traditional industry can be very rewarding to certain artists, but most artists don't survive on it."
On the Web, "you don't need a marketing staff, and if you use a little bit of Web savvy, if you're patient and clever, you can build something of an income stream for yourself," he says.
Through his Patronet subscription service, Rundgren makes music available to fans online that they can't get anywhere else. He also does chats and special events.
"The longer you're in the business, your demographic shrinks," Rundgren says. "Even though you have an audience out there, they don't hear about you anymore. As people get older, they buy fewer CDs. Their disposable income becomes their kids' and they buy records."
It leaves him watching the Napster controversy with a bit of amusement but growing frustration. Napster - the music-"sharing" software company - is simply stealing, he says.
"People have always mistaken what their relationship is to the disc they bought," he says. "They think, 'I own this piece of plastic.' Yes, but you don't own the performance on the plastic. The plastic represents a license to listen to what's on there.
"This is the most transparent violation of copyright law I've ever seen in my life. How can this survive?
"The younger audience has developed the attitude that anything you 'find' on the Internet is free, and you're not involved since someone else put it where you can get it. You're somehow not morally responsible.
"These college kids who are downloading this music - almost every single one of them is going to wind up working for a company whose business is based on intellectual property. Then they're gonna realize maybe this isn't right after all."
Still, Rundgren is far more hopeful about the future than are many of his peers.
"I have a fairly complete vision of the music industry 10 years from now," he says. "It'll require people to actually go out and perform. The ability to perform will suddenly be important again. Everything was undercut by punk rock, where your ineptitude was a measure of your integrity. And the other side of it, *NSYNC or Britney Spears, is where everything is mechanized. It'll get down to your ability as a musician - can you sing and can you play?"
