By Robin Platts
The Supertramp story is, in many respects, the story of Hodgson and Rick Davies, the two singer-songwriters whose contrasting styles – musically and personally – created the dynamic at the core of the band’s appeal.
They met in 1969. Six years older than Hodgson, Davies had been paying his dues on the music scene for several years by that time.
“The first band I was in on the road was the Lonely Ones,” Davies recalls. “We were formed in 1966. Originally it was formed by Noel Redding. By the time I joined, I think he’d already left. We were a strange outfit. We managed to survive without any agents or record companies or managers or anything. And we ended up stranded in Europe fairly seriously.”
Fate stepped in the form of Dutch millionaire named Sam, who rescued the struggling outfit.
“We’d done some sort of B-movie music and met a fellow called David Llewelyn, who knew Sam,” Davies says. “Things were pretty rough, and he decided to try and get Sam to sponsor us. And he actually went from Munich to Geneva to see Sam and was gone for weeks and weeks. In the meantime, we were actually pretty much starving. He eventually called and said Sam was interested. And Sam came down in his plane from Geneva and met us. Shortly thereafter, we went back to Geneva to Sam’s house, which was rather big, and started to rehearse in his basement in order to make a record and get a contract and all kinds of stuff.”
Despite Sam’s backing, it soon became clear that the band, by this time known as The Joint, was going nowhere fast.
“The band was not very good,” Davies says now. “We actually signed with Robert Stigwood in London and came and played a couple of shows at the clubs there. It was pretty much a disaster. Sam kind of pulled the plug on us, and when I went to try and save the situation, it ended up with him offering me a chance to try again. And that’s really how Supertramp began, when I came back over to audition [people].”
Back in London, Davies placed an ad in the Melody Maker, through which he met a young Roger Hodgson. By that point, Hodgson had already released a single – essentially a solo record – under the name Argosy. That record, pairing “Mr. Boyd” and “Imagine,” has since become quite collectible.
“I was 19 at the time, fresh from school and had never been in a recording studio,” Hodgson says of the Argosy session. “It was an eye-opening and thrilling experience, however not what I expected.
“The publisher who had discovered me, Lionel Conway, had hired a first-class session musician band to play the songs and all I really did was do the vocals and backing vocals on top of them. That session band included Reg Dwight on piano, who later became known as Elton John, as well as a few of his future band – Nigel Olsson on drums and a great guitarist called Caleb Quay.”
“I was living with my mother in England at the time and she saw an ad in the Melody Maker which said ‘Genuine opportunity for musicians’,” Hodgson recalls. “It was chaos at the auditions. Rick was just sort of hanging out in the background looking overwhelmed. And after I auditioned, we went to a pub and talked. We hit it off, and the seeds were sown for Supertramp that day.”
Hodgson “came in as a guitar player,” Davies recalls, “but he switched over to bass initially, because I’d already found a guitar player – a guy named Richard Palmer.”
Palmer had previously played in a band called Tetrad, which featured future King Crimson member John Wetton on bass and vocals.
With the addition of Keith Baker on drums, the group took the name Daddy, and headed back to Europe to start gigging. The first attempt didn’t gel, and Daddy returned to England in early 1970, where they acquired a new drummer, Robert Millar, and a new name.
Since there were concerns that Daddy might be confused with an American group of the time called Daddy Longlegs, Palmer suggested they call themselves Supertramp, after the W.H. Davies novel Autobiography of a Super-tramp.
The foursome entered London’s Morgan Sound Studios in June 1970 to cut the tracks that would make up their self-titled debut LP.
Although later Supertramp albums benefit greatly from the contrasting vocal styles of Hodgson and Davies, the first featured Hodgson as the sole vocalist.
“I hadn’t really sang much with the Lonely Ones,” Davies says. “I was pretty much an organ player, harmony singing. It was only when I started to get into writing a bit that I started to sing more. The Lonely Ones didn’t really want me singing much.”
In Supertramp’s early days, the songs were written by Hodgson, Davies and Richard Palmer, with Palmer writing the lyrics.
That dynamic changed in early 1971 when Palmer departed during a tour of Germany. “Essentially, he met somebody in Munich and he wanted to stay there,” Davies says. “And he’s still there to this day, married to a lady in Munich.”
(Post-Supertramp, Palmer wrote film music in Germany and, through his association with John Wetton, penned lyrics for King Crimson in the early ‘70s.)
“Richard Palmer was a very dominant force in the band,” Hodgson says. “On the first album, he had written all the lyrics. When suddenly it was up to Rick to write his lyrics and me to write my lyrics, we had to discover that ability within ourselves.”
When Palmer left, bassist Frank Farrell joined and Hodgson switched to guitar. Shortly after the first LP’s release, the band added saxophone for the first time, courtesy of Dave Winthrop. The drummer changed, too, with Kevin Currie replacing Robert Millar.
The group’s second album, 1971’s Indelibly Stamped, featured another significant change. Rick Davies emerged as a lead vocalist, his nasal, bluesy voice carrying half of the album’s numbers. The change was Hodgson’s idea.
“I got the nod from Roger,” Davies recalls. “He was into bands such as Traffic and Spooky Tooth, which had a couple of vocalists that played of each other. At that time, he wasn’t particularly comfortable being the only singer. He thought bands with just one singer were a little boring, so I stepped up to the plate pretty much and found a voice, as it were.”
“Rick didn’t really think of himself as a singer,” Hodgson recalls. “When I auditioned for the band, he chose me because he intended me to be the lead singer. Rick’s confidence in singing really happened over time.”
After Richard Palmer left following the first album, “there was uncertainty as to how it was going to work, and you can hear that on Indelibly Stamped,” Hodgson recalls. “I always think of it as an album without direction, without cohesiveness. It reflected a time of transition in a lot of different ways and it took a few years before things really jelled.”
Supertramp was edging slowly towards the sound that would bring them massive international success, but they didn’t find it on Indelibly Stamped. The record, housed in a sleeve depicting a bare-breasted woman covered in tattoos, did little to help their cause, and the sounds inside were little more than hints of what was to come. Davies shines on the rockers “Your Poppa Don’t Mind” and “Remember,” and the honky-tonk “Friend In Need,” while Hodgson delivers wistful acoustic numbers and an out-of-place heavy rocker called “Potter,” but the contrasting styles hindered rather than complimented each other.
“We hadn't found our direction as a band or as song writers,” says Hodgson. “Our first album feels metaphorically like we were just learning to walk. Indelibly Stamped feels more like the teenage cycle of our growth. There was confused testosterone going off in all directions. There is no theme or continuity to the album or its artwork, but there is some interesting stuff on it.”
The musical identity crisis, abetted by a cover that some retailers refused to display, resulted in commercial disappointment, with the LP failing to chart.
“The first album did pretty badly,” says Davies, “and the second album did worse.”
Supertramp slogged away for the next couple of years, without making much progress.
“We played colleges, we played clubs. We’d go and do our show, and then we’d go back six weeks later or three months later,” Davies recalls. “We did that for a couple of years or so, really not getting anywhere.”
There were times when Hodgson and Davies considered calling it a day. “But then what would we do?” Davies says with a chuckle. “We were both pretty much useless at anything else.”
“We talked it over and decided to give it one more chance,” Hodgson recalls, “and I’m glad we did. Because even at that point I had a lot of great songs just waiting to be recorded.”
As the band went round in circles, Hodgson and Davies kept writing. The 1971-73 era yielded a number of songs that never made it to vinyl, including “Pony Express,” “Mexico,” “Hey Laura” and a rocker called “Black Cat.”
“Some of the early songs were recorded at different times,” Hodgson remembers. “The versions weren’t really good enough to be put on an album, although ‘Mexico’ and ‘Hey Laura’ and ‘Pony Express’ were songs we played live. Later we either lost interest in them or other songs came along and replaced them.”
Supertramp gigs in the early days were very different from the polished, structured sets that came later on. “In the early days it was a strange eclectic mixture of songs,” says Hodgson. “ ‘Try Again’ on the first album was our peak and we use to end with a couple of rockers, ‘Black Cat’ was one of them. When I look back I have to say it was pretty strange and pretty eclectic.”
You are one of the best bands ever -luckydays
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