Goodbye stranger, it’s been nice
Ever wonder how rock bands come up with their names? For example, what, exactly, is a Supertramp?
Around 1900, the legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw took an interest in an unknown writer named W.H. Davies, who had spent several years traveling the rails in the United States as a vagrant and beggar while developing a talent as a poet. In 1908, Davies wrote about his peculiar life in the critically praised book “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.”
More than sixty years later, a fledgling British band known as Daddy was founded by two songwriting musicians — Rick Davies (no relation to the author) and Roger Hodgson. Soon enough, they wanted a new name to avoid confusion with another group called Daddy Longlegs, and their guitarist Richard Palmer, a fan of the Davies’ book, suggested Supertramp. It took a few more years before the group found success, but Supertramp went on to become one of the more popular progressive rock/pop groups in the UK, the US, Canada and much of Europe during the late ’70s and early ’80s.
This week, Rick Davies, who co-founded the group, played keyboards, sang and wrote more than half of their celebrated 10-album catalog, died of cancer at age 81.
I confess I wasn’t much of a fan of Supertramp at first, based on the early singles “Dreamer” and “Give a Little Bit,” written and sung by Roger Hodgson, whose high-pitched voice grated on my nerves in much the same way that Rush’s Geddy Lee did. (Well, not THAT bad, but it can be pretty annoying at times.). So I didn’t buy Supertramp’s albums, and therefore wasn’t exposed to the more bluesy, progressive rock songs that Davies wrote and sang, which were every bit as fundamental to the group’s oeuvre as Hodgson’s more melodic pop.
That changed big-time in 1979 when, along with millions of other music fans, I heard the song “Goodbye Stranger,” featuring Davies’ gritty voice and an explosive rock arrangement. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is Supertramp? This is way meatier and more interesting than the other stuff I’ve heard from them.”
The tune emerged as one of four hit singles from their multiplatinum #1 LP “Breakfast in America,” which brought the band worldwide fame. While Hodgson’s songs and vocals dominated the airwaves (“The Logical Song,””Take the Long Way Home” and the title tune), Davies’ keyboards and sax man John Helliwell’s powerful riffs gave the overall sound serious heft, and the album’s stellar production won a Grammy that year.
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When Davies and Hodgson first joined forces in England in 1969 as founders of the band that would become Supertramp, they were an unlikely pair. Davies came from working class roots and preferred blues and jazz; Hodgson was a private school kid who leaned more heavily toward pop and music hall genres. Their earliest recorded songs were joint efforts, but starting with their third album, Davies and Hodgson wrote independently and always sang lead vocals on the songs they wrote.
Supertramp began recording around the same time as other British progressive rock groups like Genesis and Yes, but those groups found their audiences more quickly and had significant commercial success in 1971 and 1972. Supertramp didn’t catch on until their lineup changed in 1973-74, adding Helliwell, bassist Dougie Thomson and drummer Bob Siebenberg, and they came up with the quality material that comprised their breakthrough album “Crime of the Century,” which included Davies’ compelling “Bloody Well Right,” a bitter critique of the British economic caste system, and other sophisticated works by Davies like “Rudy” and “Asylum,” and Hodgson’s “School.”
It’s not a stretch to make a few comparisons between the songwriting of Davies and Hodgson and the John Lennon-Paul McCartney partnership. In The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney started out writing songs together, but their different sensibilities and influences led them to write separately, and their final three or four albums contained songs written almost exclusively by one or the other. The same thing happened in Supertramp. Also, Lennon’s love for the rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley contrasted with McCartney’s preference for the pop of Buddy Holly, much like Davies’ rough-edged tunes were at variance with Hodgson’s sweeter melodies.
Hodgson ruminated on that difference in a 1979 interview: “We realized that a few of the songs on ‘Breakfast in America’ really lent themselves to two people talking to each other, and at each other. I could be putting down his way of thinking and he could be challenging my way of seeing things. Our ways of life are so different, but I love him. That contrast is what makes the world go ’round, and it’s what makes Supertramp go ’round as well. His beliefs are a challenge to mine and my beliefs are a challenge to his.”
Sadly, though, that divergence in styles and inspirations proved to be, eventually, Supertramp’s undoing. Where the two songwriters had initially respected each other’s work in an “opposites attract” sort of way, Hodgson felt he was growing apart from not only Davies but the rest of the band, both musically and spiritually. As the group contemplated their follow-up to “Breakfast in America” in 1982, Hodgson made it clear he wanted a pop album, while Davies had his sights set on returning to the prog rock of past albums, even putting forth a complex 16-minute piece that would be the album’s cornerstone. They both bristled at having to compromise their own vision, and the resulting LP, “…Famous Last Words…,” felt jarringly contradictory to many critics and to the band members themselves.
Said Davies at that time, “It’s been said that there’s a certain amount of friction that’s inevitable when you’re involved in a creative process. It’s like two people are painting a picture on the same canvas. Somebody wants to put red there and somebody wants to put blue. You have problems, and the picture doesn’t get finished. In the past, we’ve always been able to work around it, but as we’ve progressed, it has become more difficult.” Said drummer Siebenberg, “It became a diluted version of what it started out to be. It was really neither here nor there.”
Still, Supertramp charted a triumphant world tour in 1983, and I saw them perform in September of that year in what turned out to be one of Hodgson’s final dozen shows as part of the group’s lineup. I found it to be a superb, professional gig, full of both songwriters’ better songs, including their two hits from “Famous Last Words” — Hodgson’s “It’s Raining Again” and Davies’ “My Kind of Lady.”
Hodgson then made good on his vow to go solo, and within a year, he charted respectably with his debut LP, “In the Eye of the Storm,” reaching #46 in the US, and the singles “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy)” and “In Jeopardy,” which peaked at #11 and #30, respectively, on US rock charts. A follow-up LP in 1987, stalled at #163. His third and (so far) final studio album, 2000’s “Open the Door,” didn’t chart at all in the US. Hodgson has devoted most of his energies in the ’90s and beyond to performing, sometimes with a band, sometimes on his own, including several high profile events in Europe and Canada.
Davies, meanwhile, forged ahead with Supertramp, firmly in control as they followed his progressive rock vision on the 1985 LP “Brother Where You Bound,” which peaked at #21 on US album charts. The remaining foursome of Davies, Helliwell, Thomson and Siebenberg augmented their instrumentation with a handful of additional musicians (including Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour) on the ambitious 16-minute title track and the brilliant “Cannonball” single, and they toured relentlessly in Canada, the US and Europe.
In 1987, they tried a new approach for their next project, “Free as a Bird,” setting aside their progressive rock and employing synthesizers and dance-beat rhythms instead. Said Davies years later, “I thought we could be more modern and build it up with computers and drum machines and have people come in one by one, but that makes you lose the band spirit a little bit. Each time we went in, we would try to give it something different, and it ended up a lot more machine-based than anything we’d done before. That was good and bad, but I think it had some interesting songs on it.” (I agree; tracks like “Thing For You,” “An Awful Thing to Waste” and the title song are all worthy entries in the Supertramp repertoire, but in general, it’s a failed experiment that stalled at #101 on US album charts.)
They toured behind “Free as a Bird” for six months in 1987-88 before collectively agreeing to call it quits. But in 1997, they rallied with additional musicians on the album “Some Things Never Change,” which failed to chart in the US, and again in 2002 with “Slow Motion,” which suffered the same fate. Davies conceded in 2007, “These were last-ditch attempts to make things happen again, but the life had gone out of the band by that point.”
An effort was made in 2010 to honor fans’ requests for a true Supertramp reunion with both Davies and Hodgson on stage together, but that fell through. “I know there are some fans out there who would like that to happen, and there was a time when I had hoped for that, too,” said Davies. “But in order to play a great show, you need harmony, both musically and personally. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist between us anymore, and I would rather not destroy memories of more harmonious times between all of us.”
A final Supertramp tour of Europe was announced in 2015, but Davies’ first bout with cancer interfered, and although he fought it off for a while, it returned and eventually claimed him.
“It was an honor to share the stage with Supertramp back in the ‘prog-rock’ days of the ’70s,” said David Pack, guitarist/singer/songwriter of Ambrosia, the LA-based band with a similar prog rock/pop dual personality. “Rick along with Roger wrote and sang so many classic songs that were the soundtrack of our lives way back when. What a legacy. Bloody well done, Rick!”
R.I.P., Rick Davies. It’s an egregious omission that you and Supertramp are not yet in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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The Spotify playlist below features the Supertramp songs written and sung by Rick Davies, in honor of his recent passing. For the sake of completeness, at the end I’ve added eight songs written and sung by Hodgson.
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