Moogy Klingman died on November 15, 2011, at 61. The keyboardist and songwriter was a founding member of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, and his partnership with Rundgren extended beyond the stage. Together they built Secret Sound in a Manhattan loft, the studio used for albums including A Wizard, A True Star and Todd.
Their work together also reached Something/Anything?, Rundgren’s 1972 double album. As Pierre Perrone recalled in The Independent, Klingman helped recruit musicians for its final side, where Rundgren moved from playing the instruments himself to recording with a band. Klingman’s organ can be heard on “Hello It’s Me.” His contribution involved both playing and bringing other musicians into the room, a role he would carry into Utopia.
Klingman’s band Moogy and the Rhythm Kings provided the core of Utopia when the group formed in 1973. Its 1974 debut, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, put three keyboard players in a six-piece lineup. With just four tracks running close to an hour, the record gave that ensemble room for extended compositions. Klingman shared the writing credit on “Freak Parade” with Rundgren and bassist John Siegler, and was also a co-writer of “The Ikon,” which occupied the original LP’s entire second side.
His songwriting had another outlet in Bette Midler’s repertoire. Klingman and Buzzy Linhart wrote “Friends,” which Midler included on her 1972 debut, The Divine Miss M. The album returned to the song twice, including at its close, and it became a Top 40 single on the Billboard Hot 100. Midler made it a signature song.
The Midler connection continued behind the scenes. Klingman became her musical director and worked on Songs for the New Depression, released in 1976. He produced and played keyboards on “Buckets of Rain,” her duet with Bob Dylan on Dylan’s composition. His work with Midler encompassed writing a song she adopted, directing her band and helping make her records.
Klingman also organized a benefit for Linhart in 2002. In 2011, his own medical expenses brought his former bandmates together to help him through cancer treatment. That January, he joined Rundgren and fellow early Utopia members at New York’s Highline Ballroom. The repertoire included “Freak Parade” and “The Ikon,” returning the musicians to material they had helped create decades earlier. The set also reached back to “Crying in the Sunshine” from his 1972 solo debut, Moogy, bringing his own catalog into the reunion alongside Utopia’s.
The reunion led to more shows. “We didn’t realize there was that much latent good will for the original Utopia,” Rundgren told WBUR’s Here & Now in an interview aired in December 2011. The response encouraged the band to extend the reunion into a tour, although Klingman’s declining health prevented him from joining the fall dates.
His January 29 performance was preserved on Benefit For Moogy Klingman, released in 2020 through Purple Pyramid. The four-CD, two-DVD collection included the Highline Ballroom concert in both sound and film. After the Utopia pieces and Rundgren songs, that evening’s set closed with the song Klingman had written with Linhart: “(You Got to Have) Friends.”
