When a tune like Bang the Drum All Day gets played, it's usually as part of radio drive time leading into a long weekend ("I don't want to work ...") or when a touchdown's been scored.

The song has engrained veteran producer and musician Todd Rundgren into the North American cultural consciousness even though he says most people probably don't realize he wrote it.

The unheralded ubiquity of Bang the Drum All Day, says Rundgren, is the ultimate an artist should expect.

"In some ways, it's more subtle than having a Top-40 record, but it's more effective because it's never gone away," he says. "It's like Happy Birthday or something like that. Everybody knows how to sing it, but nobody knows who wrote it - they just know it, singing it at the top of their lungs. That's got its own special rewards, because you've achieved some sort of immortality while you're still alive.

"There are at least two NFL teams that use it as their touchdown celebration song. Once something like that happens, it's impossible to remove it. The Packers can't suddenly say they're not going to play it anymore. For me, even if I'm a bum without a penny in my pocket, I could wander into Green Bay and hear my song being played."

Rundgren and players Jesse Gress, Tony Levin and Jerry Marotta are at the Starlite Room Tuesday night.

While Rundgren's gratified about the song's longevity, he doesn't like to depend on it. Fortunately, his storied and visionary career has many other highlights.

Now 58, Rundgren released his first solo album in 1970, but drew widespread acclaim for Something/Anything?, his double album from 1972. He was declared the next big thing, thanks to hits like I Saw the Light and Hello It's Me, but turned his back on pop stardom.

"I didn't record the material intending to set myself up as a Top-40 artist," he recalls. "I consider that an accident as much as anything. Thing is, when I complete an album, I'm already moving on from it. If it happens to be successful, it doesn't change my trajectory - like maybe I should go back and do more of that. It's too late, because I've already gone on to another musical vista."

Aside from a string of diverse and sometimes experimental progressive albums, the new horizons also saw Rundgren developing his chops as a producer. Albums by, but not limited to, Hall & Oates, Grand Funk Railroad, Badfinger, Bad Religion, Cheap Trick, Patti Smith, XTC, the Band, the Psychedelic Furs and, perhaps most famously, Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell, have been guided through the studio by Rundgren - sometimes to a fault.

"There was probably a phase in my early recording career when I would have gone into the studio with any band that could get the budget together to do it," he says. "Then I'd discover that I'd end up doing too much patching up of their material in order to make it record-worthy. That would lead to my fingerprints being all over the record. It would sound as much like me as the act I was producing."

The most telling example, he says, is probably the Tubes' Remote Control, which was released in 1979. Musically, the band came into the studio with structures in place, but lacking lyrical ideas. Rundgren's songwriting touches on the album didn't go undetected by critics.

Like anything else, it was a learning experience for Rundgren, one that made him more stringent about who he would and wouldn't work with.

"Many acts expect a producer to be a cheerleader and not to focus so much on the shortcomings," he explains. "But I have to be critical of the demos and be very specific about what's missing. Sometimes people will be very enthusiastic about a song and the run out of gas, leaving some parts of the song in a half-finished state. I'll have to say this part is trite or this rhyme is bad ...

"That's one of the reasons I produce so few acts (now). You'd either come out with an unsatisfactory product or it would be so unpleasant for the artist, maybe even painful, that it wouldn't be worth it."

By the time the 1990s rolled around, Rundgren became less of a commodity, but only because "music" industry dynamics had changed so dramatically. Labels wanted hits, while he remained interested in crafting complete albums. He butted heads with the majors in other ways, too.

About 15 years ago, Rundgren was in on the ground floor of a music-on-demand service that could transmit music directly from mainframe servers to users through the same coaxial cable TVs used. Today, transferring data that way is commonplace, from high-speed Internet to video-on-demand services. But back then, the labels refused to offer their music, so the project died.

A few years later, he was one of the first artists to offer music downloads directly through his website, bypassing the labels and predating services like Itunes. Rundgren says he gets props for coming up with an idea that was ahead of its time, but just as many rocks for not exploiting it further.

"The whole idea of the Internet was about democratization. When it started, the idea of it being a commercial entity was the furthest thing from people's minds. They thought it was going to be a community of ideas. In a sense, it still is, particularly for something like Myspace, which isn't immediately commercial - it's a way to find out about stuff.

"I saw the importance of the phenomenon when most people probably didn't know what it was. But I didn't dream it would become as important as it has. Now, it would be catastrophic to the economy of this country, and possibly even the world, if the Internet disappeared. The whole phenomenon has so pervaded people's lives that they forget that 10 years ago they didn't know what the Internet was.

The Internet's evolution has been rapid, he notes, and as such, it's been something dinosaurs at the majors have been slow to react to. The 'net may represent a broad, free exchange of ideas and information, but it's unwieldy for entities as slow and resistant to change as major record labels.

"Most of the major labels collude to get money out of everybody, but not necessarily to ensure the health of the art form, whether the audience is getting what it needs or whether it's good for music in general. It's a commercial business and they much prefer it to be controllable and malleable rather than something that's wild and woolly. It's good for them, but for the rest of us, those who are into music, there are fewer times when things are really exciting. Like, what's all this Mariah Carey stuff for?

"It's inevitable, regardless of how much record labels want things to be pedestrian, and that something will slip through the cracks and cause the dam to break.

"The last time I remember that happening was when Nirvana happened - just some local band that managed to scrape up money to get its record finished. And somebody else took it from there - it certainly wasn't the label. They didn't pick it up saying this is the next big thing. They probably begrudgingly released it because people demanded it.

"Now the majors are complaining that satellite radio is going to destroy their business. For me, it's just yadda-yadda - the same old thing. Their business is putting out good music and they don't even do that right."

Now living in Hawaii, Rundgren is far from music epicentres like L.A. or New York, but says he doesn't mind. His autonomy and reputation still enables him to take on various passion projects, like fronting the New Cars, risen from the ashes of the original Cars less deceased bassist Benjamin Orr and former lead singer Ric Ocasek.

Rundgren was actually supposed to be driving around with the New Cars this summer. However, because of an unforeseen accident, no pun intended, the tour was cancelled.

Instead, picking up seven Canadian dates, including Edmonton, presents more of those new vistas he loves so well.

"It's an opportunity to explore a part of the world I never get to. I'm touring with musicians I've never toured with before and that's always interesting for me. The alternative was to sit at home and twiddle my thumbs or get out there and do something. So, I'm out there doing something."