TODD

This was the very first TR record I ever bought or heard all the way through. It made me an instant fan for life. 1974 was shaping up to be a bummer of a year for me already and it was only Feb. I had just seen an installment of Don Kirshner's Rock Concert with Todd as one of the main performers and I was blown away. He opened with a few tunes done solo and his whole attitude and performance style won me over immediately. Later in the program, after sets by Wishbone Ash and Graham Central Station Todd was back on and with his brandy new band, Utopia. This was a watershed moment in my music-listening life. It was so great that since I was lucky enough to have cable tv, the show aired on another station immediately after finishing up on the 1st one and I dutifully watched it again. That was a Saturday night. Since I lived in Pennsylvania and the stores were all closed on Sundays back then (blue laws) I had to wait one day to act upon my new found fandome. But, during my break at the Nichols Dept. Store I was working at I rushed over to the record dept and I plunked down my $5.99 for Todd and anxiously waited for the store to close so I could go home and explore it's treasures. I was not dissappointed. The whole record, from start to finish, was the single greatest auditory experience of my adolescence and remains, in my mind and ears, the greatest record of all time. Todd takes both the electric guitar and the moog synthesizer to astonishing places, leaving other experts, like Pete Townshend, in his rear-view mirror in the process. Technical brilliance, expert wordplay and sly humor are all in heavy abundence. The ballads are lush and poetic, the heavy rockers totally kick ass. "The Spark of Life" is jaw-dropping musical spectacle, "Heavy Metal Kids" thunders with unequalled power and "Sons Of 1984" is a perfectly brilliant finale'. And to think, this Genius grew up less than 100 miles from where I did. Pennsylvania had a big reason to be proud of one of it's native sons for certain.