Swing to the Right

Swing to the Right is a Utopia (featuring Todd Rundgren, Roger Powell, Kasim Sulton, and Willie Wilcox) album from 1982. It followed the Beatles parody/homage Deface the Music. Swing to the Right swings into hard-edged commentary on corporate raiders, warmongers, political villains, and despicable music industry moguls. There is little in the way of progressive rock on this album, which is limited to its title track.

Contents

• Swing to the right utopia
• Track listing
• Personnel
• Charts
• Songs
• References

Originally recorded in the Winter of 1981 and set for release that June, Bearsville Records was reluctant to release the album because of the album's overly political and religious tone. In protest Utopia took this material on the road for a full year begging audiences to petition Bearsville Records execs to release it, even going as far as giving out the phone number and address of Bearsville Records and instructing audiences to ask for Albert Grossman.

The cover photo is a retouched and tinted reproduction of a well-known photograph taken at a public burning of Beatles records, which took place in 1966 in the American South in response to John Lennon's controversial "We are more popular than Jesus now" remark. It depicts a group of youths standing around a bonfire, while in the foreground a boy holds an LP which is about to be thrown into the fire. In the original image, the album the boy holds is the American version of The Beatles debut LP Meet The Beatles, but on the Utopia cover this has been photographically replaced with an image of the Swing To The Right cover (thereby creating the illusion of an endless regression of the same image).