Credit: Danny O’ConnorTodd Rundgren‘s old band Utopia embarks on its reunion tour tonight in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
Rundgren tells ABC Radio that for its first tour since 1986, the group has put in a lot of time rehearsing, knowing “it’s not the kind of thing that we’re gonna do every year…It’s a special event.”
Regarding what inspired the reunion trek, Todd notes that Utopia never officially broke up.
“We just realized that everyone had to kind of spend some time getting their own thing together, and then that stretched into decades,” he explains. “And now, over 30 years later, it seems like that thirst to hear what the band was all about is still there, and so we decided let’s just bite the bullet and do it.”
Meanwhile, Rundgren says fans who attend the shows will get their money’s worth.
“It’s a long show. It’ll be broken up with an intermission, because there is so much music to cover,” Rundgren reveals. “And we are going to go from the very first record [1974’s Todd Rundgren’s Utopia] to the very last record [1985’s P.O.V.].”
As previously reported, Utopia’s reunion tour lineup includes three-fourths of the band’s longest-lived incarnation — guitarist Rundgren, bassist Kasim Sulton and drummer Willie Wilcox — while on keyboards is Gil Assayas, a young musician hired after founding Utopia keyboardist Ralph Schuckett bowed out because of health issues.
Meanwhile, Todd says he hopes the tour satisfies both the people who “have gauzy memories of the early band ’cause it was maybe one of the first big rock shows they ever saw,” and those who “want to experience something that they’ve heard a lot about but maybe didn’t get a whole lot of firsthand experience of.”
Here are all of the Utopia reunion tour dates:
4/18 — Jim Thorpe, PA, Penn’s Peak
4/20 — Englewood, NJ, Bergen Performing Arts Center
4/22 — Houston, TX, House of Blues
4/23 — Dallas, TX, Majestic Theater
4/25 — Fort Lauderdale, FL, Broward Center for the Performing Arts
4/27 — St. Petersburg, FL, Mahaffey Theater
4/28 — Atlanta, GA, Tabernacle
4/29 — Durham, NC, Carolina Theater
5/1 — Huntington, NY, Paramount Theater
5/2 — Washington, D.C., Warner Theater
5/3 — New York, NY, Town Hall
5/5 — Upper Darby, PA, Tower Theater
5/6 — Boston, MA, Orpheum Theater
5/7 — Ridgefield, CT, Ridgefield Playhouse
5/9 — St. Louis, MO, Peabody Opera House
5/10 — Cincinnati, OH, Taft Theater
5/12 — Milwaukee, WI, Pabst Theater
5/13 — Minneapolis, MN, State Theater
5/15 — Grand Rapids, MI, 20 Monroe Live
5/16 — Toronto, ON, Canada, Massey Hall
5/17 — Detroit, MI, The Fillmore
5/19 — Northfield, OH, Hard Rock Rocksino Live
5/20 — Northfield, OH, Hard Rock Rocksino Live
5/22 — Chicago, IL, Chicago Theater
5/24 — Denver, CO, Paramount Theater
5/26 — Las Vegas, NV, The Joint at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas
5/27 — Phoenix, AZ, Comerica Theater
5/29 — Los Angeles, CA, The Wiltern
5/30 — San Francisco, CA, The Masonic
6/1 — Seattle, WA, Moore Theater
6/2 — Portland, OR, Revolution Theater
6/4 — Sacramento, CA, Crest Theatre
6/5 — Riverside, CA, Fox Performing Arts Center
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