Song:Hello It's Me
Album:Something/Anything?
Hello It's Me is the biggest hit in the career of pop music icon Todd Rundgren. Rundgren has experimented with boundaries of pop throughout his career. He was born July 22, 1948 in Upper Darby, PA. He started out as a teen with his band Woody's Truck stop and then formed Nazz in 1967. Nazz was a failure mostly due to record company bungling. So when that ended, he formed Runt with bassist Tony Sales and his drummer brother Hunt Sales. They are the sons of comedian Soupy Sales. Rundgren signed with Albert Grossman's new label Bearsville with distribution from Ampex. We Gotta Get You A Woman was a top 20 hit in 1971. But the Sales brothers left and Ampex closed. So Grossman switched Bearsville's distribution to Warner Bros. and Rundgren released his first solo album Something/Anything? in 1972. The first single I Saw The Light reached #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 but Hello It's Me did even better and reached #5. Hello It's Me was an old song that was on the first Nazz album and it's almost like Rundgren added it on side four of Something/Anything? as filler. Rundgren had already been producing albums and doing his own engineering. So side four has studio musician while Rundgren played all the instruments on the rest of the album. Regardless, Something/Anything? is a pop music masterpiece and I recommend Rhino's 2CD reissue instead of a career retrospective. Rundgren could have been very successful as a pop singer but instead he has constantly experimented with different kinds of music, electronic equipment and he was an early adopter of computer technology. And he has had a lot of success producing other artists. So I will probably look at him again in the future. His latest CD Arena was released last year on HiFi Records. Here's Todd Rundgren performing Hello It's Me on The Midnight Special 1973.
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