Rick Davies 1944-2025

Supertramp gets very little respect. For a band that has sold 60 million albums worldwide and had one of the bestselling albums of the 1970s (Breakfast In America, 18 million sold), a decade bursting with classic albums, it’s sort of mindboggling how this band is never in any conversation of the greatest rock bands. 

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

A Spoke In The Wheel

"Just a spoke in the wheel."

It’s a line uttered in the operatic, multi-layered 2000 film Magnolia, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The words come from a barfly played with wry perfection by Henry Gibson. If you’re my age you remember Henry from the late-60s sketch comedy Laugh-In, where he played “The Poet,” reciting verse while holding a giant artificial flower. In Magnolia he appears as Thurston Howell — a name lifted from Gilligan’s Island — itself a nod to the absurd collisions of class and circumstance. That’s what Anderson’s film does too, only here it’s not castaways on a remote Pacific island, but lonely souls adrift in Los Angeles.

At the center of the film is a game show, "What Do Kids Know?" The answer the movie suggests is: far too much. Anderson shows us how children absorb more than we’d ever admit — the anger, shame, and regret of their parents. They inherit the fallout.

That’s why Gibson’s line stuck with me, especially when paired with something I heard this week from a dry-witted YouTuber who calls himself The Functional Melancholic. In a post titled "America Alone: How We Lost Connection", he observes, “This is what happens when you have 10,000 Instagram followers, and not a single person to pick you up at the airport.”

Magnolia is about connection. Family, society, love, hate, denial, reconciliation. It insists there’s no such thing as living independently. We’re bound together whether we acknowledge it or not — just as the past binds itself to the present and the future. Anderson hammers this home at the end of the film with a biblical plague of frogs falling on L.A., smashing through car windshields and rooftop skylights, the bloody slimy amphibian carcasses littering the pavement — a warning about the cost of refusing responsibility for each other. 

The movie was released at the dawn of the 21st century, before Facebook (2004), before the algorithms fully rewired us. Today the film almost feels quaint, even naïve, in how seriously it took human connection.

Anderson clearly had scripture in mind. The “spoke in the wheel” line echoes Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel in the sky, a symbol of divine presence and power. Wheels moved by cherubim, in a city named Los Angeles — the City of Angels. That’s why Gibson’s other line in the bar cuts so deep: “It’s dangerous to confuse children with angels.”

Our children are no angels, indeed. They’re not even spokes in the wheel these days. They’re test subjects in the largest uncontrolled social experiment ever attempted. And the results are plain: adolescent addicts, suicidal teens, isolated incels.

If only they were still just spokes in the wheel.

But the wheel is gone.

Always Between

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I've got me a job,

I guess it's okay.

Don't care very much,

But it's worth the pay.

I got me a girl,

Yeah, she's alright.

Watch movies, have dinner, 

Almost never fight.

Sometimes I think, 

There's another way.

Choices I could make,

Before I go gray.

Take myself down,

A different road.

Where the sky is wide,

The air not so cold.

Ain't as young as I was,

Or as old as I'll be.

It feels somehow,

Like I'm always between.

My girl ran away,

Took a part of me.

All she left behind,

Was a mountain of lonely.

Used to have buddies,

Shared a game and a beer.

They're off doing something,

Or so it appears.

My folks worry 'bout me,

Say my life's a dead-end.

I'm happy they're talking,

Since their marriage did end.

I may not go far,

Whatever 'far' means.

I'm heading somewhere,

I'm always between.

Ain't as young as I was,

Or as old as I'll be.

It feels somehow,

Like I'm always between.

Dangerous Delusions

On Friday Bob Rae, Canada’s estimable Permanent Representative to the UN, a man whose decades long political career includes being Premier of Ontario as a New Democrat and a federal Liberal Member of Parliament, was interviewed on the CBC. The topic was Canada’s plan to recognize a Palestinian State on the first day of debates of the UN’s General Assembly this month, specifically when the Prime Minister will be in attendance on September 22nd. I’m not sure he could see the irony - that day also being the beginning of the Jewish New Year. Although he might, seeing as Mr. Rae is married to Arlene Perly who is Jewish and a past Vice President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Rae also raised their three daughters as Jews, and perhaps the family will be celebrating the High Holidays at the venerable Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto where they are members. Rae himself was raised an Anglican, but as an adult learned that his paternal grandfather was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant to Scotland.

In both his personal and public life Rae has expressed a strong affinity for the Jewish people and staunch support for the State of Israel. So I was a little more than disappointed listening to him defend Canada’s decision. He didn’t hedge, as I expected he would, by saying that Canada’s decision was conditioned on the Palestinians reaching several benchmarks, which they haven’t reached and are unlikely to.

Rather he doubled down on the decision, saying that it was long overdue, and harkens back to the UN’s original 1947 Partition Plan, only half of which was ever fulfilled - no mention of the fact that it was the Palestinians who had rejected it and the surrounding Arab states who attacked Israel after they declared independence with the aim of destroying it. He rather obliquely (and shamefully) said, “out of battle and war came one state.”

Rae argued that Canada’s decision was well thought through, and the result of a great deal of discussion and coordination with a number of other countries including France and Britain. He said, the move would in no way reward Hamas terrorists for their October 7th attack, but rather achieve the exact opposite. Instead of wiping Israel off the map, which is Hamas’s objective, recognition of a Palestinian state would be predicated on two states living side by side to ensure the peace and security of their respective peoples. Rae offered no further details about how exactly that would happen, under the current dire circumstances. He said that it would be the PA (Palestinian Authority) which would be supported to provide the new interim government and elections would have to be held within a certain reasonable delay. Hamas would not be permitted to play a role in the new government, he said, although he didn’t provide any idea about how to ensure that would happen. 

Rae, and one presumes France and Britain, are convinced that this maneuver is a logical step to bringing peace and security to the region. The approach appears to be that if the Palestinians have demonstrated over and over that they are utterly incapable of creating responsible and rational political governance themselves, do it for them. It’s never worked before, but hey, we’ve tried everything else. 

Rae even went so far as to suggest that it was Israel who was preventing the Palestinians from self-governance. No mention that Israel left Gaza unilaterally 20 years ago and we see the results. If today there is zero appetite within Israel to let the Palestinians give it another try, maybe it’s because they’ve learned their lesson.

To his credit CBC host David Cochrane pushed back a bit saying with Israel’s operations to take over Gaza City, settlements expanding, and no will in the Netanyahu government, there doesn’t seem to be any capacity to have a state. Rae’s answer: We can’t let that prevent the Palestinian people from exercising their rights. 

Say what? In other words don’t let reality get in the way of our fantasy. I have never heard Bob Rae sound so muddled and delusional. 

Rae ended by saying “If we succeed (in creating a Palestinian State) you know who will be the most unhappy… the people who preach hate… Hamas.”

I think he may have unwittingly admitted why the fantasy he is living in (and Canada’s approach) is so dangerous. 

___________________________________

PS. No sooner do I post the above commentary and Israel suffers the deadliest terrorist attack in two years. Six were killed at a bus stop outside Jerusalem when gunmen opened fire. The perpetrators were two young men from West Bank villages close to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, I fear we are in for more of this kind of terrorism. It should be a signal to the western allies that any move for recognition of a Palestinian State is at the very least premature.    

Rogue Regime, Journalistic Malpractice

The CNN headline reads, “US military kills 11 in strike on alleged drug boat tied to Venezuelan cartel, Trump says.”

I’ve seen several reports on the incident, but not one asks the most basic questions. Since when can the United States attack vessels in international waters and kill their occupants—on mere allegations? No arrests, no trials, no due process?

Even if we assume the boat was filled with narcotics, and further assume those drugs were bound for the United States, do drug dealers suddenly lose their legal rights? In America, being suspected of a crime—even a serious one—does not carry an automatic death sentence.

Trump himself took public responsibility for the strike. “We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat,” he told reporters at the White House. And yet not one journalist in the room pressed him on the legality.

The administration is trying to frame the incident as an act of self-defense, calling the occupants “narco-terrorists.” But that’s a sleight of hand. International law permits interdiction of stateless drug vessels under certain conditions, but it does not authorize extrajudicial executions at sea. Standard practice is seizure and arrest, not summary killing. Even the U.S. Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act—often criticized for its overreach—envisions prosecution in court, not military strikes.

Reuters at least called the operation “unusual.” Adam Isacson, Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, put it bluntly: “Being suspected of carrying drugs doesn’t carry a death sentence.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted, “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.” In other words, the supposed threat to the U.S. homeland wasn’t even credible.

This action raises broader concerns. Domestically, trump has already deployed federal troops into Democrat-run cities under the pretext of combating “rampant crime.” Now he’s sending warships into Latin America to combat drug cartels. What’s next? Every time he wants to distract from scandal (Epstein) he seems ready to conjure a new “war” that expands executive power and erodes the rule of law.

This incident alone should be grounds for indicting trump. It was a deliberate killing outside combat conditions—an extrajudicial execution in violation of international and domestic law. But it’s also an indictment of the press, which failed in its most basic responsibility: to question government power and defend the principles of law. By uncritically repeating the president’s talking points, the media normalizes actions that in any other context would be called what they are—rogue state behavior.

In Praise of Gidget

I’ve been watching a lot of classic movies lately, mostly from the forties and fifties—the post-war period. You might think the attraction is nostalgia for a more ‘innocent’ time, but these were far from innocent years. Many post-war films wrestled with difficult social and personal issues, often rooted directly or indirectly in the experience of war. Noir, the era’s most popular genre, depicted the underside of urban society: crime-ridden cityscapes and the toll of human cruelty. Its protagonists were often returning soldiers, quietly tormented by what we now call PTSD. The war may have ended, the economy may have been booming, but many veterans didn’t feel like winners—or free.

One film I watched recently is 1959’s Gidget. Yes, that Gidget: the much-maligned CinemaScope cultural phenomenon that launched the careers of Sandra Dee and teen heartthrob James Darren, inspired a wave of 1960s beach party movies, spawned a Sally Field TV series, and brought surfing into the mainstream.

Most critics have dismissed Gidget as fluff—the story of a 16-year-old girl reluctantly discovering boys and pulling away from her loving, conventional parents. This isn’t James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), or even Splendor in the Grass (1961). For one thing, the protagonist is a girl—bookish, nerdy, tomboyish, not particularly interested in romance. For another, her struggles are played for laughs, not tragedy. This is a feel-good movie where all turns out well in the end—which may explain why critics dismissed it. They prefer tortured characters, paying in blood or sanity for their lost innocence. Getting dunked while learning to ride a wave hardly seems dramatic enough.

But there’s more to Gidget than critics admit. At its core is a character who places the film squarely in the post-war tradition: the rugged Cliff Robertson as the “Big Kahuna.” He’s the leader of the surf bums, charismatic and unapologetic, living free in a ramshackle hut. Idolized by teenage boys, he represents the rejection of school, work, and parental authority in favor of endless horizons.

Yet Kahuna is no simple hero. We learn he chose this life after returning from the Korean War. Nothing specific is revealed, but the scars are visible. His real name—Burt Vail—hints at the tragic secrets he is keeping. His decorative “tribal” mask, supposedly a gift from a chief, is later revealed to be store-bought. By summer’s end, the fantasy collapses. The teens return to class, and Kahuna to his airline job. He is the tragic figure of the film, emblematic of both the end of the 1950s and the unrest that will erupt in the 1960s.

Inspired by Gidget—a story about a girl struggling to separate from her parents as her society struggles to emerge from its own post-war adolescence—I see a larger theme: the tension between individual freedom and the pull of social and familial attachment. This describes the dynamic of history itself. The pendulum swings: from individuality, the period from the late 19th century to the Roaring ’20s, for example, to collapse (the Great Depression and the World Wars), to conservatism (the 40s and 50s), and back again. Today’s American authoritarian turn can be read as a reaction to the social upheaval and rampant individualism of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The pendulum swings again, from post-war liberalism and globalism to tribalism, nationalism, and isolationism.

So no, Gidget is not just beach-party fluff. It’s about the most important force in our lives: the struggle between individual freedom and attachment. Zen thinkers tell us attachment is the root of suffering, and so we should resist it. But from birth we are wired for attachment—it literally ensures survival. Alone, we perish; together, we endure. But we attach ourselves not just to other people, but also to material objects, and even to ideologies. The problem isn’t attachment itself, but what we attach ourselves to. After all, what is meaning if not a form of attachment?

It Happened To Us

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It happened to us,

We called it love.

It came from below,

It came from above.

When we first met,

You had something in mind.

Because you believed,

That I was your kind.

There were things that you wanted,

But you weren’t in control.

It didn't take long,

For it to take a toll.

The mattress has gone soft,

On my side of the bed.

Most times when we talk,

It's all in my head.

It happened to us,

Like it happened to them.

It happened before,

It’ll happen again.

I won’t feel alone,

So go do your thing.

I'll build an altar,

For your next offering.

I'm down for this trip,

Wherever it goes.

Cause half the fun,

Is that we don't know -

But I will admit,

I'm pretty damn scared.

To hand my heart over,

I'm so unprepared.

I'll remember the saying,

Nothing new under the sun.

When one cycle is over,

Another's begun.

It happened to us,

Like it happened to them.

It happened before,

It’ll happen again.