New Jersey music fans and Todd Rundgren sure have seen a lot of each other over the decades.
“I don’t know that I’ve done a tour in any recent era that didn’t include at least some Jersey stops,” Rundgren, 78, says over Zoom from his home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
The tradition continues this summer as Rundgren—a classic rock icon and Grammy nominee who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021—brings his Damned If I Do tour to North, Central and South Jersey, a trifecta he referred to as “the whole shebang,” this August. He’ll be at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood on August 8, followed by the Ocean City Music Pier on August 11, and the Count Basie Center for the Arts’ Hackensack Meridian Health Theatre in Red Bank on August 12.
Rundgren, who was raised in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby, has had a musical relationship with New Jersey for 60 years, leaving home on his 18th birthday and heading directly to Ocean City to connect with the eventual drummer of his early psychedelic blues rock band Woody’s Truck Stop. Rundgren settled into living in a South Jersey suburb somewhere east of Camden, and found his footing as the singer and guitarist of shaggy garage rock outfit The Nazz.
“The Nazz wrote a song called ‘Wildwood Blues,’ which was essentially just about one weekend we spent in Wildwood,” Rundgren says. “When I was growing up in southeast Pennsylvania just outside of Philadelphia, the Wildwood thing was somewhat mythological but it was for the older kids and I had not really been to Wildwood; I had taken several bus trips alone to Atlantic City, because that’s a direct trip, just going to walk the boardwalk and consume anything that was free.”
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Despite immortalizing their time in Wildwood on their 1968 self-titled debut LP, The Nazz’s tenure as a Jersey Shore bar band was, in Rundgren’s recounting decades later, inglorious.
“Early on we didn’t have a lot of original material but the material that we did cop was not the typical stuff that a Jersey Shore band would learn,” Rundgren says. “You’d have to know Top 40 and dance songs and things like that, and we just knew a few Beatles and Rolling Stones songs and that sort of thing, so our gig there did not particularly bode well that it was going to be a regular thing for us and we weren’t looking to be a Jersey Shore band anyway, we had higher aspirations. I do remember we didn’t have a hotel room, we were sleeping on the tables inside the club after it closed—so our memories are not really significant musically and hardship physically.”
Something from those Nazz days has stuck with Rundgren six decades later: “Hello It’s Me,” the swooning pop-rock gem Rundgren is said to have written in high school and recorded with The Nazz for that band’s first album. He later re-captured the song in a new light on the 1972 solo double LP Something/Anything? and the number has stayed in his live repertoire since.
“I have to vicariously get into the way that the audience reacts (to the song),” Rundgren says of his relationship with “Hello It’s Me” these days. “Frank Sinatra hated ‘My Way,’ but he had to sing it every night of his career. It’s one of those things—when it becomes obligatory, you don’t have the same feeling about it. You don’t have a choice whether to do it or not, you have to freaking do it.”
While prior tours, such as the Me/We dates that brought him through New Jersey in 2024, focused on deep cuts and relative rarities, the poster for the Damned If I Do tour promises “Back By Popular Demand–The Fan-Favorite Classics Return.” For Rundgren, it’s a continuation of a career-long balancing act between then and now.
“A lot of artists from the ’70s, that was their era and then they’re not so serious about the record making after that,” Rundgren says. “If you had some hits, your career is essentially going out and playing your hits for the rest of your life, and nobody much cares if you write anything new. But me, I just keep writing, I keep coming up with different concepts for records, and they vary a lot, stylistically, so you never know from tour to tour what’s going to happen. So Damned If I Do is, essentially, I’m going to please, hopefully, as many people as I can, but you can’t please everybody.”
