TODD RUNDGREN SCORES: Pop star and composer...

TODD RUNDGREN SCORES: Pop star and composer Todd Rundgren has been reading “the bible” a lot lately. But that doesn’t mean he’s getting ready to join the Swaggart crusade. Rundgren is using TV lingo for the plot-and-character synopses for Michael Mann’s ballyhooed TV series “Crime Story,” which debuts next month on NBC. Rundgren has been hired to write the score for the first 22 episodes of the series, which is no small feat, since the show chronicles nearly two decades in the life of a crack Chicago police crime expert. With Mann at the helm, the show promises to focus enormous attention on period detail (Mann has already boasted about how sales of 1962 T-Birds will boom after the series debuts), so the challenge for Rundgren is finding a way to capture the precise pop mood of each piece of time spotlighted in the show.

“I’m trying to capture the mood of the era without sounding baroque or corny,” said Rundgren, who’s been locked away in his studio trying to meet a fast-approaching deadline. “Mann is very big on authenticity. Even the police car sirens have to be from the early ‘60s, not the ones that came along in 1966. And the music has to have that same period context, so for example, I can’t use synthesizers for the early ‘60s shows.” He laughed. “Or at least I can’t use synthesizers that sound like synthesizers. The sophistication has to be in the arrangements, not the technology.”

Rundgren’s biggest dilemma isn’t re-creating the sound of a ‘60s city--after all, he’s the popster who once did an entire album (“Faithful”) of letter-perfect recreations of hits by the Beatles, Beach Boys and other pop faves. His battle is against TV time. “I just got the tape of the pilot last weekend and now I have less than a week to score a two-hour show,” he said. “Since I’ve never really scored a film before, this is going to be interesting. Right now, it’s pretty hellish, but I figure if I start somewhere, hell isn’t such a bad place.”

“Crime Story” is just the first project on Rundgren’s slate this summer. When he gets a break, he is also scheduled to deliver the score for three episodes of Pee-wee Herman’s Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” which debuts this fall on CBS. And he’s also been hired to write a dozen songs for an upcoming Joseph Papp theater production of “Up Against It,” an unproduced screenplay by the late British playwright Joe Orton that originally was commissioned by the Beatles as the script for their follow-up film to “Help.”