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(Photos by Dion Ogust)
If not for that single, tantalizing word on the windowless white wall — six black capital letters, spaced wide, like a line on an eye chart: U T O P I A — a passerby might conclude that this is the blandest building in Bearsville, a place where a ladder lies abandoned at the foot of an unmarked gray door and little worth seeing or hearing is likely to happen, inside or outside.
That passerby would be mistaken. In fact this building, at 293 Tinker Street, is a preserve of Woodstock’s still-unfolding modern musical history. For decades it has been the home of Radio Woodstock 100.1 (WDST), whose offices — entered on the south side of the building, opposite the Bearsville Theater — teem with music memorabilia and include the former Utopia Video Studios, now known as Utopia Soundstage.
Those stark, sans-serif letters on the buildings’ north side signify a seminal period that began 35 years ago, when the legendary impresario Albert Grossman, a k a the Baron of Bearsville, presented his newly built Utopia Video Studios to one of his clients, Todd Rundgren, a k a the Hermit of Mink Hollow, the innovative rock guitarist, founder of the band Utopia, and incipient second-careerist as an engineer and producer of music videos and explorer of a largely uncharted technosonic universe.
It was here, at Utopia Video and other outposts of Grossman’s Bearsville Studios complex, as well as at his home studio in Lake Hill, that Rundgren in the 1970s and ‘80s engineered and produced not only his own music (including the hit singles “Hello It’s Me”and “I Saw the Light” and the virtuosic double-album Something/Anything?), but also parts of Meatloaf’s landmark album Bat Out of Hell and, before that, work by the Band, Jesse Winchester, and Badfinger. His circa 1980 music video “Time Heals” is reportedly the first to blend live action with computer graphics and the second to appear on MTV.
Rundgren’s relationship with Grossman’s Bearsville Records grew frayed. Released from his contract in the mid 1980s, the musician left Woodstock and eventually settled on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. From there, at age 65, Rundgren remains active as an occasional solo performer and an intrepid investigator of Internet-based music distribution technology. From time to time he pops up, strumming a guitar or ukelele poolside at his Kauai digs, as a guest on Live From Daryl’s House, the live-performance TV show hosted by Daryl Hall.
