One of my fondest memories from my high school years, is from Spring 1979, sitting shotgun in my buddy Bill’s Chevy Nova, managing yet another weekday afternoon drive home from Clifton High School, Supertramp’s big hit of the day, “The Logical Song” once again playing on his car’s FM radio. I will always connect that song, surely a tune you couldn’t well escape that year, with the quasi-complete freedom I thought I had in those years, cruising with my buddy, on the cusp of graduating and the best summer of my life.
With New Wave and Punk surely setting the airwaves and local concert stages alight, we classic rock fans (and prog heads like me) were aching for anything new from our heroes like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd, and Kansas. Supertramp was a band I included in that mix of my favorites, or they quickly became so (or I became ever more aware of them), with the release of their sixth studio album, 1979’s Breakfast In America, from which “The Logical Song,” comes. Ticking off some many boxes for me; songs with catchy melodies, a sure scent of English wackiness, fantastic musicianship, and more than a dose of prog thrown into their mix, this Supertramp release, coming at that last year of the decade became a classic to me, Bill, and everybody else. The ten-song masterpiece would prove to be the band’s biggest seller, spawning three US billboard hit singles, “The Logical Song,” “Goodbye Stranger,” and Take the Long Way Home,” and raise the band’s popularity to a height they hadn’t yet achieved.
And the thing about Breakfast In America, for all its breakthrough super-duper popularity, is…it’s a freaking great album! All the songs here are perfect gems, and although often stained by critics as satirizing American life, a claim the band has always pushed back on, this album is a hearty early morning meal of singular vision created by a band at the sure height of their powers: songwriter, vocalist (he has the voice with the lower range) and keyboard player Rick Davies; songwriter, vocalist (he of the higher voice), guitar and keyboard player Roger Hodgson; Jon Helliwell playing saxophones, clarinet and singing backing vocals; the ever underrated, and only American in the group Bob Siebenberg playing drums, cowbell, timbales, castanets, marimba, wind chimes, tambourine, and lastly, but by no means least, Dougie Thomson playing bass.
From the opening “Gone Hollywood,” with a lyric that could be surely seen as a condemnation of Hollywood, which I guess it is, through the hits and even some lighter love songs, the highlights here are many. For me, ‘The Tramp’ is always at their best when Davies and Hodgson tickle in some counterpoint singing as they do here across many of the tunes and co-write, as they do for the first song, the aforementioned “Gone Hollywood,” and the last “Child of Vision” for me, the two best on Breakfast.
But one needs to pay close attention to all the players here, subtle masters as they are and a production that is razor fine without ever being too commercial, a hard thing to accomplish from a release that spawned this many sure commercial hits. The Hodgson-penned tunes, “The Logical Song” and “Take the Long Way Home,” mine some rather pessimistic lyrics. But mixed with too-perfectly-poppy-to-ignore hooks and melodies, the stuff here sneaks up on you. You’re dancing and singing along to how very illogical things are, taking in what’s being said while having a great grand old time. The Davies-penned tunes, like “Goodbye Stranger,” “Oh Darling,” and “Casual Conversations,” seem to take on more of love lost, love ruminating themes, but are no lesser for it.
When it comes to vinyl, album-side song sequencing matters. This is no small point for the classic albums we all love, and as much as Breakfast in America is not a concept album, the tunes are ordered on each side of the original album release in a specific way, riding moods as well as creating them, providing the listener with a whole listening experience one simply can’t get listening to these songs off of YouTube or downloading single tracks. Here, it’s plainly clear that this surely missed ‘art’ of music dissemination is just another ingredient that makes for a hearty breakfast indeed.
The Breakfast in America dream team line up of Supertramp would release one more studio album …Famous Last Words… and touring that album in 1983 provide me with my only opportunity to see the band, thankfully. Hodgson would leave Supertramp after that tour and although they would solider on without him for albums and tours, they were by far not the same band and even though I do love …Famous Last Words… and quite other albums that came before Breakfast In America, notably the underrated Crisis? What Crisis?. Still, Breakfast in America is not only Supertramp’s most commercially successful album. It’s also their best.
~ Ralph Greco, Jr.
