Todd Rundgren with Rick Derringer and Band
WLIR Pre-FM #16
Party In The Park II
Belmont Park, Elmont, NY
August 23, 1980

Todd Rundgren-guitar and vocals
Rick Derringer-guitar and vocals
Donnie Kisselback-bass and vocals
Benjy King-keys and vocals
Jimmy Wilcox-drums and vocals

1-WLIR stage intro of Todd 1:23
2-Couldn't I Just Tell You 3:42
3-One World 4:24
4-Bag Lady 3:48
5-The Wheel 5:53
6-Hang on Sloopy 7:50

This was part of a 6 cd set from this event that was broadcast on Long Island's WLIR radio. The other acts who show up on the cd's from this included The Good Rats, Al Dimeola, Blotto, Pure Prairie League, Flo and Eddie, David Bromberg, Southside Johnny, and Rick Derringer. A few video clips from the Rats, and this Todd set can be found on youtube. Maybe some of the others are there too.
In any case, this came to me courtesy of burnboy, along with many other Todd shows that he's allowing me to share on his behalf. Part of just passing it along, and many thanks to him and to those from whom he'd acquired these shows in the first place. This excellent capture is pre-FM, and there is a little story about that which can be read over at the TR Connection boot page. The essence of it was that this came from someone who'd been a soundboard tech at the event. He'd gotten a bit miffed that details about the event had gotten confused over time, including the fact that it was all somehow headlined by Rick Derringer. He subsequently sent his pre-FM of everything as one giant WAV file over to Warren at the TR Connection Boots. This, of course, is only the section featuring Todd, but some other parts of this do circulate too (I don't have any of them except for the Good Rats set).
From the info available, it seems that Utopia's 1980 Adventures in Utopia touring had just ended with the 2 NYC Central Park shows recently shared here by Floating. This one off appearance was sandwiched in between the Utopia NYS shows and some sitting in with the Tubes San Francisco. Todd then did a few shows in the company of Ian Hunter as benefits for 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson through the Fall before Deface the Music was released and a few Utopia shows were played in support of that.
Todd and Rick Derringer had been buddies going back at least to the early 70's and a scene at NYC's Max's Kansas City. Rick had actually appeared on Todd's Initiation album playing bass on The Death of Rock And Roll and guitar on Fair Warning. Not sure how close they'd been since those days, but Todd was at this event without Utopia and wound up playing the songs here in a pretty loose set with Rick and his band of that time. Rick's drummer was actually the brother of Utopia's drummer John "Willie" Wilcox. This is a bit of a curious set in that the tracks on video show Todd playing a cream colored Fender Mustang throughout, and doing songs that usually included his lush vocal arrangements played here in almost stripped down demo form. Bag Lady from Hermit of Mink Hollow isn't part of any video I've seen, so it's unclear as to whether Todd is playing piano on that, or if it's Benjy King. Sloopy had been a hit for Rick in his early days, so that became a pretty long and meandering jam with Todd and Rick trading off on guitars.
You'll hear that it takes them until about 1/2 way through Couldn't I Just Tell You to get Todd's vocal mic set. This was tracked in Audacity for this share, and EQ and Mastering tools there were very lightly applied to add a little more depth and clarity to the set. The musicians listed above may not be totally accurate, but they were the folks accompanying Rick Derringer on his 1980 studio release, Face to Face. Many thanks again to the LIR soundguy who made this available, the trader who got it to burnboy, and to burnboy himself for the generosity in getting this out to the rest of us.