Supertramp is one of the many groups or artists who started in the late 1960s or early 1970s as artsy, offbeat, or even underground unknowns and, by sometime before the end of the 1970s, became multi-million-selling blockbuster album artists.
The British band released their self-titled debut album in 1970 and quickly followed up the next year with Indelibly Stamped, establishing them as a quirky and uncompromising group that created richly drawn albums of deeply thematic pieces, with indescribable music. Not quite prog, something more than jazzy or folk rock, the group’s music was something entirely new and original.
After a three-year hiatus, they released Crime of the Century, an album that was a massive leap forward, with such FM faves as “Bloody Well Right” and “Dreamer,” and a recording that immediately became an audiophile landmark as the first UHQR Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab release.
Their next album, Crisis? What Crisis? released the following year only further solidified their growing stature in the FM album rock world and set the stage for their massive commercial breakout. Even In The Quietest Moments…, released two years later and now available as one of three new Supertramp reissues, began the group’s ascension to massive breakout success, mostly due to the album’s opening track, the epic sing-song “Give a Little Bit,” which dominated FM radio at the time.
The group didn’t so much alter their sound to enter this new era of success as refine and amplify what was so inviting about their music, and the group’s two primary singers and songwriters (Roger Hodgson, Rick Davies) truly came into their own. The album was also the first one the British group recorded solely in the United States, setting the stage for how America would greatly inform what would eventually become their outright breakout success on their next album.
Breakfast in America, released in 1979, was one of those albums that defined 1970s album rock, and it became a colossal success. It was yet another album in the ’70s from a group or artist who had reached blockbuster album sales status by building a following through touring and letting their music evolve naturally to a point where their fans were gradually drawn to their sound and were ready to fully embrace them as they hit the peak of their powers.
The album yielded several hits, and deeper cuts dominated FM radio. “The Logical Song” hit number 6, “Take the Long Way Home” climbed to number 10, and “Goodbye Stranger” rounded things out at number 15. The album hit number one in the US and was the fifth-biggest-selling album of the year. Very much a product of the group’s full immersion into American culture, the entire album was recorded at the famed Village Recorders in Los Angeles.
It would take the group three years to follow up on Breakfast in America. Like some other groups or artists before them who made blockbuster albums in the ’70s, the follow-up not only didn’t meet expectations, but also became their undoing.
For example, Peter Frampton and Boz Scaggs never rebounded from their blockbuster ’70s follow-ups, and the Eagles and Steely Dan had only one more album in them after their big album of that era, then broke up. With Famous Last Words, Supertramp seemed to lose the thread.
While “It’s Raining Again” did well, the rest of the album didn’t resonate with that larger audience. It would be Roger Hodgson’s last album with the group. It’s good that the album is being reissued now, because listening to it without the expectations of the time, it’s actually quite a good album and builds as it moves along.
These reissues exactly replicate the album jackets, custom sleeves, and labels. The vinyl is 180-gram heavyweight vinyl, pressed at Optimal in Germany, with half-speed mastering by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. The sound is quite good on these reissues and is not made to sound more modern, which unfortunately can happen in remasters of albums produced in the 1960s and 1970s.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
Even In The Quietest Moments…
A-
Breakfast in America
A
Famous Last Words
B
