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It is 35 years since Todd Rundgren released the spellbinding A Wizard, A True Star. With the sometime Runt about to release his new Arena, it's time to pose the question: Is Wizard the greatest album ever made?

"Sometimes," Todd Rundgren sang, "I don't know what to feel." But sometimes you do know what to feel. And right now I feel like saying what I've contended for many years, which is that Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star is simply The Greatest Album Ever Made.

You heard me right, pardner. Better than Pet Sounds. Better than OK Computer. Certainly better than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Farts Dub Band. An album of vaulting ambition – of wizardry and true stardom – released into an unsuspecting world by a contrary, super-precocious wonderboy who should have been the biggest thing to happen in the '70s but who was just too complex and polymorphous for lasting pop success.

A Wizard, A True Star came out 35 years ago but still sounds more bravely futuristic than any ostensibly cutting-edge electro-pop being made in the 21st Century. A dizzying, intoxicating rollercoaster ride of emotions and genre mutations, the album was substantially the work of Rundgren himself, pieced together in late 1972 at his own Secret Sound studio on NYC's West 24th Street.

Where its immediate predecessor, the more fondly-regarded Something/Anything? , was choc-full of good toons – limpid ballads and winsome boy-in-his-bedroom doodles – Wizard was the sound of Philly's finest rabbit-toothed soulboy going into interstellar prog-psych overdrive, taking the listener on a seamless sonic journey whose map was substantially sketched by hallucinogenic drugs. (And not just for Rundgren, since the other musos on the record – from keyboardists Moogy Klingman to drummer John Siomos to stellar axeboy Rick Derringer – were out of their skulls on one potion or another.)

"Psychedelics brought me to an awareness of myself that I'd no comprehension of previously," Rundgren told me in 1997. "You don't know your 'You' until you've had your ego stripped away and you realize you're all that stuff. You begin to see your ego elements as these weird, goofy, aberrational appendages."

Rundgren claimed that surrendering to "this sort of flow of stuff" made him question his usual musical procedures: "So much musical product is just a function of habit and ego, in that you wanna come off a certain way. So many people use music as obfuscation, as a wall between them and the audience." Wizard, Todd said, was "me just mapping my head right onto a record... battling against any sort of filtering process".

For some, the lack of filter makes A Wizard, A True Star TOO MUCH – an exercise in epic self-indulgence. But to such nay-sayers I exclaim Pish!. For surely the point of pop, to a large degree, is that it permits us to go too far. Not all rock and roll has to be tidy, generic, circumscribed within formal limits.

"When I listened to Something/Anything? six months after I'd made it, I realised there were songs on there that had taken me twenty minutes to write," Rundgren said. "And I thought, 'Are you just going to be writing to these same formulas you essentially come up with in high school?'"

Herein lies the rub, I suspect. For just as Phil Spector flew too close to the sun with "River Deep, Mountain High," its hubris ultimately derailing his entire career, so Rundgren, in declining to capitalize on the pop success of "I Saw The Light" and "Hello, It's Me," turned away from the mainstream to fashion a mind-blowingly experimental, radically unpunctuated opus that conspicuously lacked hit singles.

Wizard was a voyage through the cosmos garnished with synthesizers that twinkled like stars, 19 tracks that leaked into each other or tripped over each other's heels, jumping from the fuzztone metal of "Rock And Roll Pussy" to the surreal ephemera of "Dogfight Giggle," from the delirious nonsense of "Just Another Onionhead" to the anthemic rush of "When The Shit Hits The Fan," even finding room for a medley that drew on Rundgren's love for Curtis Mayfield ("I'm So Proud"), Smokey Robinson ("Ooh Baby Baby") and the sweet Philly soul of Thom Bell (The Delfonics' "La La Means I Love You").

Listening to it again, three decades after its birth, what strikes me more than ever is just how inventive, playful, clever, funny, mind-warping and downright BEAUTIFUL A Wizard, A True Star is. In her Circus review of the album, Todd's friend Patti Smith described it as "Rock and Roll for the Skull." Sadly, this endorsement failed to help the record rise any higher than No. 86. For Rundgren's label Bearsville it was the beginning of the end.

"Todd could have been the biggest and most important artist of the era," recalled Paul Fishkin, Bearsville's general manager (and the inspiration for Rundgren's early pop hit "We Gotta Get You A Woman"). "If he had taken a little more time to work with me and whoever else saw that potential in him, there's no question in my mind that we could have had it all. Todd's whole thing was, he was who he was at any given moment and everyone else be damned. The egomaniacal part of that is that he expected everyone to go along with it."

To his credit, Rundgren has always been unrepentant about his refusal to play safe. "The things I'm involved in, and the ideas that I have, are as accessible and as fascinating as anyone's music," he told NME's Paul Morley. "It's not my loss if no one discovers it. I have more important priorities. By the time people discover where I am, if they ever do, I'll be someplace else anyway."

If you've never heard it, do yourself a favor and go buy Wizard today. And no, you don't have to be out of your skull to take the trip.

Hear an audio interview with Todd Rundgren, and read dozens more articles about him, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 13,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.