Friday, Sept. 10, 2004 | 9:25 a.m.
Deception makes Todd Rundgren angry, and he's taking it out on the Easter Bunny. OK, not exactly. But the veteran singer-songwriter has a serious problem with the many untruths he says he encounters these days.
So in the cover photo of his latest album -- April's "Liars" -- Rundgren don furry rabbit ears and a whiskered nose to prove a point.
"The idea (of that shot) is that if parents are responsible for conveying the concept of honesty to their children, certainly the job is tha much more difficult because socially, there are all these lies that you're obligated to tell," Rundgren said in a phone interview from a Raleig, N.C., hotel room.
"You know, like about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. If the kid is younger than a certain age you have to lie to them. And I don't know tha kids are better for the fact that they've been told things that are false from the beginning."
Pretty heavy stuff, and that's just the beginning. On "Liars," Rundgre rails against conventions of love, religion and government he feels are dishonest. Even today's R&B scene draws the ire of the wel-traveled 56-year-old Philadelphia native.
"I certainly don't have much respect for people who have no respect for the truth," Rundgren said "But the big issue, from my standpoint is who's more culpable: the people who tell the lies or the people who want to believe the lies, and therefore don't care abou the truth?"
Rundgren brings his frank approach, along with his four-piece band, the Liars, to the House of Blues on Sunday. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. for the 21-and-over event.
Rundgren said he plans to spend about half the night presenting material from "Liars," an electronically textured disc that has been hailed by more than a few critics as his best work in 25 years.
Look for Rundgren to spend the rest of the show sampling from his 36-year recording career, one that includes such radio hits as "Hello, It's Me," "I Saw the Light" and "Bang the Drum All Day."
Those songs brought Rundgren a measure of commercial success, particularly "Hello It's Me," which reached No. 5 on Billboard's Pop Singles chart in 1973.
But Rundgren has never chased fame and fortune at the expense of artistic integrity. Instead, he has dabbled in musical genre after musical genre, moving from power-pop to prog-rock to blue-eyed soul to techno and beyond.
Even when, as a respected producer, he worked on such chart-topping albums as Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" and Grand Funk Railroad's "We're An American Band," Rundgren says he didn't entertain hopes of achieving sales similar to those records.
"Partly, I recognize that I'm not capable of getting to that point," Rundgren said. "Not that I couldn't calculate it, but the calculating itself is not fun for me.
"Calculating success is not as much fun as just out-and-out musical experimentation and trying to do things that you haven't done before and possibly haven't been heard before."
That desire to break new ground has also helped Rundgren earn a reputation as one of rock 'n' roll's savviest acts when it comes to technology.
Predicting many of his industry's modern applications, he staged the first interactive televised concert in 1978, released the first two commercial music videos in 1982 and devised the first full-length enhanced music CD in 1994.
Today, Rundgren is attempting to revolutionize two key aspects of live performing: sound and lighting.
His 2004 stage set includes no traditional amplifiers. Instead, Rundgren and his band utilize a sound system featuring digital modeling, with instruments plugged directly into notebook computers running through the PA system.
"It makes the stage a lot cleaner, and it makes the show easier and quicker to set up," Rundgren said. "It makes it more flexible as well. We have a sort of virtual stack of every different kind of amp head there ever was and every different speaker cabinet that ever was, all of which gets modeled in computer software.
"So if somebody wants to get a different or better sound on something, it isn't really an ordeal."
In place of the usual stage lights, Rundgren relies on an LED lighting system, which generates little heat.
"We have more or less the ultimate control on where the light is and what color it is and what kind of pattern it's cycling through," he said.
"It's an improvement over the standard incandescent-style lighting, which has to be hung from the rigging because it's too heavy and consumes too much power to be placed anywhere near the players. We'd get fried to death."
Comfortable as Rundgren seemed chatting about technological advancements, his pace quickened and his words became a little more intense while discussing his disdain for the duplicity he perceives throughout modern-day society.
"It's a very curious thing because you don't know where the truth lies or who's responsible for it," he said. "You could make the assumption that our religious leaders are responsible for the truth, but they're not. And obviously corporate America is not going to be the protector of the truth.
"Is it the Boy Scouts? I don't know. Is it the schools? Likely no. I'm sure they're always making things up about their performance in order not to be penalized for the fact that they can't seem to educate kids."
And though Rundgren insists "Liars" is not intended as an outright attack on the Bush administration, as many critics have assumed it to be, he admits "they do get a little bit of tar on them from the broad brush that I'm using."
"I don't know whether this particular administration is even good at lying, but they certainly have a propensity for it, the same way that Richard Nixon did," Rundgren said.
"They've got some real professional liars, guys who essentially do it for a living. And I think what they have is the capacity to believe their own lies, in a sense."
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