Utopia band 19848/28/2023 ![]() Sulton attributes much of the success he’s had in his career “is directly related to the work that I did with Utopia.” And if we do it again, there might be some new music, who knows?” “So I think that if this goes well and smoothly and everybody plays nice and gets along and it turns out to be a feel-good thing that we’ll probably talk about doing it again. “There’s not enough time to do that this time ’round because we just have a two-week rehearsal window before we play the first show,” he says. But he said Utopia is open to even creating new music. … There was some due diligence done and it turned out that it was gonna be something that people wanted to see happen.”Īt the time of the interview, the members of Utopia had not yet played together, so Sulton couldn’t talk about how it felt to be back after he long hiatus. “I think that management approached some promoters and we got a lot of interest. “It was simply a question that there was a window of opportunity that nobody else was busy doing other projects, and it made sense to try, to float the idea that we were gonna do this,” he says. “And as time progressed, people get a little bit older and a little bit less inclined to disrupt their lives.”īut late last year, they all seemed to finally find the time, setting up a reunion for 45th anniversary of the founding of Utopia. Hey, you know, what would be great is if …’ And unfortunately, scheduling-wise we’re all very, very busy people, thankfully, and it just never worked out that we all had the same amount of, the same window of time open for the four of us. “So there was always some talk of, ‘It would be nice if. There was never an announcement that ‘That’s it, the band’s broken up and we’ll see you all down the road.’ “I think that on a certain level, we were never really officially disbanded,” Sulton says. He, Rundgren, Wilcox and Powell got back together in 1992 and released a live disc, “Redux ’92: Live in Japan,” but never toured. Sulton notes that Utopia never really broke up. “We wanted to cover as much of the bases as we possibly could from the 13 albums that Utopia did.” the more poppy Utopia material from ‘Adventures in Utopia,’ ‘Swing to the Right,’ the ‘Network’ album,” he says. In what is expected to be a 2 1/2-hour show, he says the plan is to do two sets, the first of which “is gonna be more of the prog-rock stuff … material from the first two Todd Rundgren’s Utopia records.”Īfter an intermission, there will be more songs from 1977’s “Oops! Wrong Planet” to 1984’s “Oblivion” - “and some stuff in between. “I feel that, on some level, I brought that to the band and helped to guide the band more in that direction,” he says.īoth styles of Utopia will be acknowledged in the new shows, Sulton says. And he says he sees that influence as his biggest contribution to Utopia. When Sulton joined the band in 1976, Powell and Wilcox were still into the prog-rock vein, but had started to “branch out a little bit more into the pop world,” Sulton says. It wasn’t the norm in terms of what people were listening to - it was kind of niche, you know? When we were doing that stuff we didn’t enjoy a huge audience. So there were a lot of acts out there that did what we were doing and did it just as well as us. Zappa was, you know, long-form songs, that’s all he did with Mothers of Invention and on his solo records, too. ![]() “Because there were a lot of bands doing that at the time. “Were we innovators? God, I don’t know, that’s a tough call,” Sulton says. ![]() That earlier configuration of Utopia released the band’s most progressive-rock discs, and is seen as an innovator in the long-song format and extension of prog rock. The band put out an all-points bulletin for a replacement, and one of Rundgren’s sons found Israeli-born Assayas. Schuckett, who predated the other members in the band 1975-76, was tapped to replace Powell, but he also had to withdraw in mid-March because of health and family issues, publicist Paul Maloney of Panacea Entertainment says. But with issues with arthritis and hearing loss, Powell “didn’t have any interest in coming out and playing again,” Sulton says. Wilcox continued to work “in the periphery of the music business, on his own with company, Scientific Games,” Sulton says.Ĭlassic lineup keyboardist Roger Powell also stayed on the edge of the music business, working at Apple computers and Electronic Arts video games. Rundgren resumed focus on a solo career that previously produced the hits “Hello, It’s Me” and “Can We Still Be Friends.” Sulton joined him often, playing in his touring band and on six albums, including “Nearly Human,” “With a Twist,” “Somewhere/Anywhere” and last year’s “White Knight.” Sulton even worked with Rundgren when he produced Meat Loaf’s album and fronted The New Cars. Utopia’s seven-disc retrospective box set, ‘The Road to Utopia: The Complete Recordings 1974-82’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |