For Kasim Sulton, returning to the live performance is a pleasure – and almost a necessity. Between the studio and the road, he’s typically playing and singing somewhere with someone, but the pandemic scuttled most of his plans. Still, the longtime bassist and vocalist with Todd Rundgren didn’t take the last 18 months off. He worked steadily on his own music and other projects, while playing some small-scale shows.
He’s been back on the road to Utopia, or at least to select cities across the country with one of the newest members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He said he’s been ready for quite some time, though given the past year and a half it’s different than he’d become used to.
“On the one hand, it’s like riding a bike. On the other hand it’s strange,” Sulton tells us in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown. “I was home for the longest period since the ’80s. I got used to mowing the lawn.”
Not that he’s been idle. Kasim Sulton has worked on his own music, and even played a series of shows with Rundgren that toured the country early this year – all from Chicago. “We did the virtual tour. It was a lot of fun,” Sulton says.
The Clearly Human tour demonstrated Rundgren’s never-say-die attitude, and his ability to think outside the box. While many artists did streaming shows from home, he put together a band that recalled the tour behind the album Nearly Human back in the ’90s, and played a set very similar to those shows. Accompanying him were Sulton, keyboardists Gil Assayas and Elliot Lewis, Bobby Strickland on reeds, Steven Stanley on trumpet and trombone, longtime Rundgren drummer Prairie Prince, guitarist Bruce McDaniel and a trio of backup singers, including Rundgren’s wife Michele.
The band performed live from a shuttered venue in Chicago with a small in-person audience and a select group of live-on-video attendees, with the show then streamed live to audiences around the country. “It was really fun,” Sulton says. “We did 27 shows from one venue.” The club where the band performed had opened just a few months before it had to shut down, so it benefited the club and Rundgren and fans.
Todd Rundgren’s latest tour recently concluded with two shows at the Fillmore in San Francisco. He was joined by Kasim Sulton and other familiar faces Prince, Strickland and Assayas, with regular Rundgren guitarist Jesse Gress back after a successful lung transplant. He contracted pneumonia and influenza, then developed sepsis and an incurable lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. “He’s doing well. He’s back into it and playing like nobody’s business,” Sulton says.
The show itself was broken into two parts. The first set was dubbed “The Individualist,” consisting of familiar Rundgren fare like “Real Man,” “Love of the Common Man,” “I Saw the Light” and others well-known by his fans. The second set featured one side of his 1973 epic A Wizard, A True Star. He switched from Side 1 to Side 2 nightly.
“It’s always a lot of fun. It’s never the same tour. I love working with Todd. He keeps you on your toes,” says Sulton, who joined Utopia in 1976 and has been an associate of Rundgren’s ever since. He’s played on all the Utopia recordings and tours since then and most of Rundgren’s solo output, as well as many of the albums Rundgren produced, including efforts by Steve Hillage, Rick Derringer and Meat Loaf. Kasim Sulton later served as music director for Meat Loaf and has worked with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Daryl Hall and John Oates. He’s also toured and performed with everyone from Shaun Cassidy to Blue Oyster Cult.
Sulton and Rundgren memorably played together in 2018 with the reconstituted Utopia, alongside drummer Willie Wilcox and then-new recruit Assayas on keyboards. Former Utopian Ralph Schuckett was announced as the keyboard player, but health problems kept him off the tour. He passed away in April of this year.
Sulton also manages to work in some shows as Kasim Sulton’s Utopia each year, playing some smaller venues showcasing the songs he recorded and performed with the original four-piece group. He typically enlists Rundgren associates like Gress and Assayas, along with other stalwarts such as Brand X keyboardist Chris Clark.
Beyond his work with Rundgren and his own Rundgren-approved version of Utopia, Kasim Sulton has a couple personal tricks up his sleeve. One is a new solo album, released last month. Available on streaming services like Spotify as well as on physical media, Kasim 2021 showcases bright pop-rock not dissimilar from much of his efforts with Utopia, with nods to heavier work such as Jett’s output.
“It’s always a juggling act,” he said of maintaining a solo career while playing with Rundgren and assisting on recordings by other artists. “It’s really, really difficult for artists like me [who are] independent. I have to divide my time as well as I can. I want to do solo [work], then the phone rings,” he said.
Another new effort is a serialized podcast, “Unsung,” loosely based on his life. “I had an idea for a television pilot,” Sulton says. He and his manager developed the idea into a podcast which explores the life of the (semi)-fictional Alec Sulton. The real Kasim Sulton has had his share of highs and lows in the business – such as playing at Madison Square Garden a month after joining Utopia, and exchanging bass tales with Paul McCartney.
“It’s the juxtaposition of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and real life with responsibilities,” says Sulton, speaking of the podcast – but also, of course, his real life.
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