Love the guitar work here.
And Todd singing on it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VC_wiiFABE
The Nazz were somewhat underrated and had a slightly peculiar story: Todd Rundgren and
bassist Carson Van Osten formed the group (they took the name from an album track by
the Yardbirds, "The Nazz Are Blue") with drummer Thom Mooney and singer/keyboardsman
Robert Antoni (who went by his nickname Stewkey) in 1967. They landed their first gig
opening for the Doors and attracted the attention of managers who insisted on keeping them
to private rehearsals while fitting them in stylish clothing and finally landing them a record
deal.
They cut their first album and stiffed with their first single ("Hello, It's Me"), then their
managers insisted they would only play large halls, a rather audacious and foolish stance
for a band who were barely known and whose first single bombed. (Small wonder: it's a
great song but the Nazz's version was a dirge; Rundgren would remake it into a monster
hit in a jazzier version in 1974.) The Nazz got a lot of publicity in teen magazines by
way of their managers planting puff pieces and glamour photographs, but that was it
until the album began getting good reviews.
So they rolled the dice, went to England to record (kind of no surprise considering the
overt British influences in their music), came home after work visa problems, and
recorded what was supposed to be a double album called
Fungo Bat. It ended
up getting trimmed to the single-disc
Nazz Nazz and provoked the beginning of
the end, since Rundgren had written and cut a lot of new, more introspective stuff
that didn't go over big with the rest of the band. He left the group after their 1969
tour and Van Osten walked out shortly afterward, leaving Antoni to take over. He
wiped the vocals Rundgren recorded for the
Fungo Bat material left shelved,
recorded his own vocals on it despite saying publicly he didn't like the material (it
wasn't quite the rock and roll he signed on for, with Rundgren having become
enamoured of Laura Nyro as well as the the Philadelphia school of soul music, which
originated not far from his native Pennsylvania town of Upper Darby), and the result
was
Nazz III. The album bombed despite having a lot of good songs on it (Antoni
was no Todd Rundgren as a singer or writer, and the material provided about half
the blueprint for Rundgren's solo career to be) and the rest of the band split.
For years it was believed Antoni wiped the Rundgren vocals out of his own idea;
he did it under record label pressure. He was also staggered when
Nazz IIIwas released---after he'd joined an Illinois group called Fuse, following the Nazz's
collapse in Texas, where they were stranded on a rare tour, which prompted
Rundgren and Van Osten out of the band.
Two members of Fuse---Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson---re-organised it into
a band called Sick Man of Europe, but after returning to Illinois after a short-lived
relocation to Philadelphia, Antoni left---his wife was pregnant with their first child,
and he chose domestic life and eventually became a five-time grandfather---and
Nielsen and Petersson eventually morphed the project into Cheap Trick.
