By Robin Platts
In October 1972, after two unsuccessful albums, Supertramp and Sam parted ways. But the band forged ahead. Although commercial success eluded them, their sound was evolving rapidly. “We were keeping an eye on what was going on with the music scene,” says Davies. “We were noticing bands like King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Spooky Tooth, who were making pretty decent records.”
“There was transition within the band, finding the other band members and a transition musically, and also during that time Rick and I became stronger as songwriters,” says Hodgson. “It was a very fertile time of song writing for both of us. So when it was time to record Crime, we had a lot of really great material to choose from.”
As 1972 drew to a close, Supertramp’s repertoire already included half of the songs that would eventually make up the breakthrough Crime of the Century LP – “Rudy,” “Dreamer,” “If Everyone Was Listening” and “School.”
But the songs alone weren’t enough. “We came to the conclusion that we needed to try and revamp the band,” Davies says. “It’s kind of a difficult thing – bands are a little bit more than just session men, so it becomes more than just a job. It’s rather an emotional thing when you have to change personnel. But then we got lucky enough to get John, Bob and Dougie.”
Towards the end of 1972, Glasgow-born Dougie Thompson took over bass duties, followed in mid-1973 by drummer Bob C. Benberg (an American, previously with Bees Make Honey) and sax-man John Helliwell (who had previously played with Thompson in the Alan Bown Set).
“Dougie asked me when I was just finishing a gig in Germany,” Helliwell recalls. “I went along to one or two rehearsals and was impressed. I was never officially asked to join, I just stuck around!”
The new line-up gelled almost immediately, and their repertoire was bolstered by the addition of such new Hodgson/Davies numbers as “Land Ho,” “Another Man’s Woman” and “Just a Normal Day.”
At the time he joined, Helliwell remembers being particularly impressed by a new number called “From Now On,” which would eventually appear on the Even in the Quietest Moments LP. “I thought it was a terrific song,” he says, “and it was the main reason I stuck around.”
The new Supertramp entered the studio for the first time in July 1973, recording two tracks, “Land Ho” and “Summer Romance.”
After the initial results were deemed unsatisfactory, A&M asked producer Ken Scott to remix them. The results appeared as a single in March 1974, shortly after A&M – clearly impressed by the progress the group had made since Indelibly Stamped – renewed the band’s contract.
“We had just finished recording ‘Land Ho’ and ‘Summer Romance’ for a single, then A&M decided they wanted us to focus on making an album,” Hodgson recalls.
With a new line-up, new material and determined to make their third album a more memorable effort that the two that preceded it, Supertramp took the “getting it together in the country” approach. From November 1973 to January 1974, the group was ensconced in a farmhouse in Somerset, “to go and find ourselves,” Davies recalls. “That’s what bands used to do.”
“A&M had faith in us as a band and rented a farmhouse in the English countryside for us to practice in for three months,” says Hodgson. “It was during that time that we experimented and really gelled as a band.”
The farmhouse setting brought with it one or two quirks.
“One time, as we were all relaxing after dinner, through the external speakers we heard the high-hat cymbals played in the studio and no one was in there,” Helliwell recalls. “We concluded it was a ghost - quite scary! We had to almost physically restrain Roger from going off on a spiritual search to India instead of rehearsing and recording.”
“Bob called the wonderful fresh milk we got in a pail from the farm next door ‘cholera juice’ and refused to drink it,” Helliwell adds. “So we just kept one or two milk bottles and filled them up with the offending liquid, smoothing out the foil cap each time, and he drank that quite happily!”
Rural challenges aside, the group put considerable effort into select the perfect song line-up for their next album. “We literally worked it out,” says Davies.
“We wrote some new [songs] and dug up some old things and revamped others and tried to make it all work from one song to another. It was the first album we were trying to design from beginning to end, a sort of concept.”
“I spent hours and hours and days and days trying to come up with the right combination of songs that would all fit together,” Hodgson recalls. “I’d piece them together to see how one song would flow into the next song and the next song to see how the musical journey emotionally would be for the whole album. I wasn’t just focused on one song. I was focused on the overall feeling of the album – how were you going to be left at the end? It was very important to me in those days to put together a musical journey and I feel we were successful – after you finish listening to Crime, you go, ‘Wow, that took me somewhere’.”
The arrival of producer Ken Scott, who had previously worked as an engineer for the Beatles, Elton John and Nilsson, and had recently produced David Bowie, was the final piece of the puzzle. According to Davies, Scott “made a big difference [in terms of getting] better quality sounds.” Previously, the group had produced their own records, because, Davies says, “we thought that was the hip thing to do, but we weren’t really ready to do that.”
In February, Supertramp and Ken Scott were in a London recording studio where, over the next several months, they would perfect the eight numbers chosen for the new album, to be called Crime of the Century.
The opening track, “School,” was one of the most memorable results of the Roger Hodgson-Rick Davies songwriting partnership.
“We needed something to open the album. ‘School’ came out of Roger, the first part of it,” says Davies. “I think I did some of the lyrics for it, and I did the harmonica thing and the piano solo. There was a lot of interplay on that song. It went on quite a bit in those days.”
“There was a certain amount of collaboration on ‘School’,” Hodgson agrees. “The structure of the song and 90% of the lyrics were done by me, and where Rick gave input was coming up with the amazing piano solo and some of the lyrical back and forths, like ‘what are they trying to do, make a good boy of you, do they know where it’s at?’”
Although the Crime of the Century era marked the beginning of the new, improved Supertramp, it was also more or less the end of Hodgson and Davies’ songwriting partnership. Although their songs carried the joint credit until Hodgson’s departure in 1983, latterly the two wrote separately.
“As we got more and more successful, we were in our own situations, you know,” Davies says. “Originally we were all in apartments, where we’d sit down – I’d have a Wurlitzer and he’d have a guitar. Any little bits we had, we would jam on and work it up from that. I think, as you get older and you get a little bit more independent, then you have your own situation – you have your own tape machines and stuff.”
While Rick and Roger’s songwriting partnership was ending, Supertramp was finally having some real success. Crime went Top 10 in Britain and the “Dreamer” 45 was also a big hit.
The album and the single “Bloody Well Right” both went Top 40 in America, supported by a string of U.S. concert dates in early 1975.
The new live show, like the album that preceded it, was a well-ordered affair. The band played the entire Crime album in sequence, with four yet-to-be-released songs – “Sister Moonshine,” “Just a Normal Day,” “Another Man's Woman” and “Lady” – sandwiched between the two album sides.
Aside from his musical contributions, Helliwell had taken on the role of front man onstage, doing most of the between-song talking. “Nobody else wanted to do it!” he says. “We found that my ‘bonhomie’ was an effective antidote to the seriousness of some of the songs, especially those from Crime.”
In the wake of Crime of the Century, the pressure was on for a follow-up. With that in mind, and with an eye to building on their success in the United States, Supertramp relocated to Los Angeles to record their fourth album.
“We’d got a pretty big audience in Europe established and it was suggested that we try and break it in the USA,” Davies recalls.
The Stateside move was intended to be a temporary thing, but the group ended up staying, and the new environment influenced them over time.
Says Helliwell, “We grew up fast, and our musical and lifestyle boundaries expanded.”
“For me, when I went to America, a whole vista of possibilities opened up in my life,” says Hodgson. “And for me it was the spirit of California, not America, that I connected with. California has always been on the forefront of technology, spiritual investigation, and new ways of thinking – just a very free place where you can be who you want to be very easily. Having lived in England for the first 23 years of my life, my spirit really took to it. It was very liberating for me.”
Although the group had a good backlog of songs, the pressure to get new product out in a hurry resulted in an album that lacked the focus of Crime.
The record’s title – Crisis? What Crisis? – was a nod to the slightly strained circumstances under which it came together.
“I think some of the songs were quite nice,” says Davies, “but it was a tough album. We toured Crime and then of course they’re wanting us to follow up Crime and we were scraping around for material a bit more.”
“It’s a wonderful collection of songs on the album and they did not all fulfill their potential,” is Hodgson’s assessment. “I remember being disappointed with Crisis because I really did love the songs. The final mixes were not what I had hoped them to be. The biggest difference was there was a lot of pressure on us. We had a tour coming up and we did not have the time we needed to get it the way I wanted it. We didn’t have the months of planning and rehearsing prior to making it like we did with Crime. And we had the pressure of a tour coming up to prepare for. I think for that reason, it suffered and we weren’t able to go back and remix some of the tracks that I wanted to.”
Despite the challenges, the Crisis? What Crisis? album included some of the band’s best work, notably Hodgson’s “Lady,” “Two of Us” and “Sister Moonshine,” and Davies’ “Another Man’s Woman” and “Ain’t Nobody But Me.”
Another standout track was “Just a Normal Day,” an example of a true Hodgson-Davies collaboration. “Rick came up with a beautiful verse and didn’t have anything else to go with it,” Hodgson recalls, “so I wrote an answering chorus which I then also sang, so we were both solo vocalists on that song and it really works nicely.”
Crisis saw Hodgson raiding his own back catalog of unrecorded songs with the gorgeous “Two of Us” and “A Soapbox Opera,” both written, or at least started, before he joined Supertramp. “Beginning after Crime of the Century we also started to record some of the songs I'd written during a very fertile period of creativity in my teens and early 20s, before Rick and I had even started Supertramp,” Hodgson says.
The album was preceded by a single release, “Lady,” which featured the non-album cut “You Started Laughing” on the flip side.
Although neither “Lady” nor the follow-up single “Sister Moonshine” charted, the Crisis album came close to matching the success of Crime, again supported by extensive touring.
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