It’s not about the musicianship. Rick Davies, who passed away this week at the age of 81, was as gifted a pianist as Elton John or Billy Joel, but is never mentioned in that company. Songs like Dreamer, Bloody Well Right, Give A Little Bit, The Logical Song, Goodbye Stranger, are catchy, melodic, lyrically meaningful and expertly crafted. The songwriting duo of Davies and Roger Hodgson, the former a jazz and blues influenced Yin, to the latter's hipppie-folk Yang, has been compared to Lennon and McCartney. Supertramp albums like Crime of the Century (1974), Crisis? What Crisis? (1975), Even In the Quietest Moments (1977) and their massive selling Breakfast In America (1979), are some of the best sounding albums of all time. As a concept album, Crime of the Century must certainly be considered a benchmark of the genre, and yet it didn't make Rolling Stones' top 50 list.
So what gives? I have a theory.
But first a personal anecdote. Crime of the Century was the first album I ever bought, I may have been 14 years old. I’m sure I’d heard the single Dreamer on the radio - it was ubiquitous on Montreal FM radio - but that was not why I bought the album. I bought it because of the artwork - the image of two hands gripping jail bars, floating through dark space, spoke to me. I didn’t know it consciously at the time, but those hands were mine. I felt locked in the emotional prison of adolescence: I was lonely, not taken seriously by my parents, didn’t care about school, and resented all the crap the teachers were trying to stuff into my daydreaming head. I brought the album home, set the needle down on the stereo, and started reading the liner notes. By the end of Hide In Your Shell, I was a weeping mess.
Too frightening to listen to a stranger
Too beautiful to put your pride in danger
You're waiting for someone to understand you...
Don't let the tears linger on inside now
Because it's sure time you gained control
If I can help you, if I can help you
If I can help you, just let me know...
It was the first time in my life that I felt like a song was written specifically for me. In fact, I can remember having that strange feeling, the very first time I heard the song, like I’d heard it before, as if in some mysterious way the song had always existed. It seemed perfect.
That mysterious feeling kept happening on every Supertramp album I bought, and I bought them all. There was one or two songs that reached my very core in that indescribable way, like it was somehow fundamental, like it was part of nature itself. It happened on the orchestral Fool’s Overture, a song that contains the epic beauty and majesty of history. It's a song about Britain during The Blitz, and uses a recording of the famous defiant speech of Winston Churchill marshalling his compatriots during its time of existential crisis to 'fight on the seas and oceans whatever the cost' and ‘never surrender'. If that song doesn’t count as a masterpiece of classic rock, I don’t know what does.
So why don't people ever talk about Supertramp in the same category as they talk about other progressive/art rock hitmakers like Pink Floyd or Yes or Genesis or Steely Dan? Incidentally, of the preceding list, only Genesis had more Billboard top 10 singles than Supertramp.
My theory is that Supertramp, according to the critics, commits the cardinal sin of rock n' roll: Their music doesn't offend enough. The one defining characteristic of rock in all its permutations and combinations, from hard rock to progressive rock, is edge, and Supertramp's music has very little. Rock and roll is the music of rebellion. If it's not blatantly offensive (like Punk), or ironic (like New Wave), it has to at least push musical boundaries (like Prog). But even when they are singing about serious subject matter, like the pressures that society puts on a child growing up (Crime of the Century, The Logical Song), Supertramp does it with depth, sensitivity, sweetness and consolation.
Take a song like Bloody Well Right, a Rick Davies penned tune on the edgier side - Davies had the working-class perspective of the songwriting partners - he sings:
So you think your schooling's phony
I guess it's hard not to agree
You say it all depends on money
And who is in your family tree
It's an indictment of the British class system, and yet, the round timbre of his voice almost croons, and the carefully arranged horns and Wah-Wah guitar make the song sound almost too neat. Don't get me wrong, there's much to appreciate about the polish of Supertramp's songs. But there is such a thing as being too polished, and that's a rock n' roll no-no. It's also part of the reason their music defies the standard categories. It's not quite as Prog as Genesis or Yes, and not quite as Jazz/Blues as Steely Dan. Supertramp's biggest hits, like Give A Little Bit, have a melodic catchiness and straightforward message, like many Beatles songs (obviously they were a major influence on Hodgson), but none of the Beatles experimental tendencies. Supertramp always stays tightly within musical and lyrical boundaries, and that's part of the reason they fall through all the cracks and are overlooked.
I also think it's the earnest child's point of view that works against Supertramp. It figures in so much of their music, accompanied by Hodgson's almost child-like soaring tenor. At a certain point you grow out of that perspective. Not coincidentally, I lost interest in Supertramp at Breakfast In America, just as they were achieving their major commercial break-through, and I was graduating high-school.
It's sad to lose Rick Davies, more so at a time when irony is dead, some say rock music is dead, and we can all stand to share a little more goodwill - Give A Little Bit seems written for exactly this moment:
There's so much that we need to share
So send a smile and show you care...
I'll give a little bit
I'll give a little bit of my life for you
So give a little bit
Give a little bit of your time to me
See the man with the lonely eyes
Oh, take his hand, you'll be surprised
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