Breakfast in America is one of the most important rock albums of all time. With an estimated 20 million worldwide sales, Supertramp’s sixth album is in the top three of best-selling prog rock albums, only superseded by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
Breakfast in America is not only categorized as prog rock, but also as art rock, pop rock, soft rock, or ‘sophisto rock’ as one off the band members called it. Regardless of category, Breakfast in America was Supertramp’s biggest-selling album, and also an enormous critical success. It won two Grammy Awards, and was nominated for a further two, amongst them in the Album of The Year category.
When Breakfast in America was released, in March 1979, punk, new wave and disco were everywhere, and had made long hair and prog rock hopelessly uncool. On top, creative and personal tensions between the two songwriters in Supertramp, Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, were beginning to come to a head.
Perhaps surprisingly in this environment, while Supertramp did decide on an album of shorter, “fun” songs, the band managed to stay true to its roots of melodic, prog-influenced rock, and delivered a rock masterpiece. As the icing on the cake, the record came wrapped in one of the most iconic album covers of all time.
This is the story of how Supertramp managed to, under challenging circumstances, write and record their magnum opus, which became a big influence on rock that lasts till this day.
WITHOUT TRACE
Supertramp was founded in London, in 1969. Keyboardist Rick Davies recruited Roger Hodgson on bass and vocals, Richard Palmer on guitars and Keith Baker on drums. The band initially called itself Daddy, but Palmer suggested the name Supertramp, based on the book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by Welsh poet William Henry Davies.
When the band set about writing material, the creative and cultural differences between Davies and Hodgson immediately became apparent. The working-class Davies had a more down-to-earth blues, jazz, and rock-influenced musical approach, while Hodgson was middle-class and had gone to boarding school, and wrote more whimsical, melodic, pop-influenced music.
Supertramp was one of the first British bands to sign a record deal with A&M Records, and in July of 1970 its self-titled debut was released. The album contained quirky prog rock, and while it gathered some critical acclaim it did not sell well and eventually sank without a trace.
A year and several personnel changes later, the band recorded its second album, Indelibly Stamped. Only Davies and Hodgson remained from the first line up, with the latter having switched to guitar. The other members were Dave Winthrop on flute and sax, Frank Farrell on bass, and Kevin Currie on drums. Released in June 1971, Indelibly Stamped lacked in direction and musical vision, and again sold poorly.
PROG ROCK CLASSIC
Given these almost catastrophic first two years, exactly what moved Hodgson and Davies to continue to believe in Supertramp is unclear. But they formed a new band with John Helliwell on saxophones, clarinet, and vocals, Dougie Thomson on bass guitar, and Bob Siebenberg on drums. With Davies, and Hodgson, who now played keyboards as well as guitar, they formed the classic line up of Supertramp that would remain together for ten years.
The band spent a prolonged time writing and rehearsing material, and recorded eight songs at three London studios, Trident, Ramport Studios, and Scorpio, with Ken Scott producing. The resulting album, Crime of the Century, was released more than three years after its predecessor, in September 1974.
The band had grown greatly during these three years, and particularly the song writing of Davies and Hodgson had become tighter and more focused, and yielded songs that have become classics, like “School,” Bloody Well Right,” “Hide In Your Shell,” “Rudy,” and “Dreamer.”
“Dreamer” marked the first time Hodgson played the Wurlitzer keyboard, and it established the band’s main trademark sound of Hodgson’s falsetto with 8th note staccato electric keyboard accompaniment. It led to Helliwell calling him “hammer hands.”
“Dreamer” became a big hit in the UK in the beginning of 1974, which pushed the album to number 4. “Bloody Well Right” was the B-side, and American audiences preferred it to the A-side. Crime of the Century has become a prog rock classic, and has been hailed as “one of the greater rock albums from the golden era of great rock albums.”
FUN ALBUM
The band’s next album, Crisis? What Crisis? (1975), also produced by Scott, contained mainly upgraded demos for Crime of the Century, and was less successful its predecessor, both commercially and critically. The band’s self-produced fifth album, Even In The Quietest Moments… (1977), turned out to be more commercially successful because the lead single Give A Little Bit became a hit on many countries.
The entire band moved to LA in the fall of 1976, and the pressure was on for a new blockbuster album. The decision was taken to make a more fun album, though several of the songs, as well as the eventual cover, ended up containing social commentary on the American way of life.
In April 1978, Hodgson and Davies brought a new set of songs to Southcombe Studios, a rehearsal space in Burbank, California, and the actual recording sessions began in May 1978, at The Village Recorder Studio B, in Los Angeles. All these sessions were engineered and co-produced by Peter Henderson, who had also engineered Supertramp’s previous album, Even In The Quietest Moments…
NO REST
According to Henderson, in an interview in Sound On Sound magazine. “The whole idea was to get really good band performances. Even though it ended up taking about nine months to complete, there’s a really vibrant, fresh feel to the tracks. Across the whole record it was five people playing in a room. There were no click tracks and there was no splicing of the backing tracks.”
The Village Studio B had a 48-channel Harrison console at the time, and two Ampex 1200 24-track tape recorders. The drums, bass, and Rick Davies ended up playing in the studio’s main live room, Hodgson in a drum booth behind it, and saxophonist John Helliwell in the loo next to the control room.
The backing tracks for Breakfast in America took about a month to record, and this was followed by a whopping seven months of overdubbing. Perfectionism ruled the day, as Roger Hodgson remembered later…
“I was in the studio seven days a week for so long that I ended up parking a motor home in the parking lot right outside of the studio and living in it. I was working 16 hours a day every day of the week trying to complete it. I knew we had something good and I could not rest until every song was just right.”
DEADLINE PRESSURE
Strangely, despite the extreme care that had been taken over the recordings, mixing proved problematic. The EQ of the Harrison desk was judged too harsh, and after a few days everyone decamped to Crystal Studios, which had just opened a new mix room with a custom 56-channel desk.
In the end the songs were mixed three or four times, and the album was finished under serious deadline pressure. The endless second-guessing presumably was due to the fact that the album was not only make or break for the band, but also for A&M Records, which was going through a difficult time.
Hodgson recalled, “I think we all had a sense. It was a time where radio was king and with this particular collection of songs we felt that we had the songs that would get on the radio.”
The enormous attention to detail that went into the album was also reflected in the cover, which was designed by Mike Doud and Mick Haggerty, and showed an airplane view of the Manhattan skyline made out of breakfast essentials. In front was actress Kate Murtagh, representing the Statue of Liberty. The cover won the band a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package.
EXPLOSIVE IMPACT
Breakfast in America and the album’s lead single “The Logical Song,” were released in March 1979. The impact was explosive. The album spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, and went to number one in many other countries.
“The Logical Song,” also was a big hit all over the world. The song featured Hodgson’s characteristic 8th note staccato piano playing, and earned him an Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. Paul McCartney called it his favourite song of the year.
The title track was the next single, with an arrangement that
ended up featuring a large amount of unusual instruments, including tuba, trombone, calliope, tack piano, and a pump organ. Rick Davies’ song “Goodbye Stranger” was the third hit single from the album, and Hodgson’s “Take The Long Way Home” the fourth and last single.
Other songs from the album that have gone on to become classics include the opener, “Gone Hollywood.” Written by Davies, it is one of the songs with the strongest prog rock-influenced songs on the album.
The album’s closing song, “Child of Vision,” written by Hodgson, and once again featuring an 8th note piano part, also has strong prog rock overtones, and is a critique of the materialistic, TV-orientated American way of life.
BLUEPRINT
Supertramp were everywhere in 1979. The band toured widely to promote the album which resulted in a live album, Paris, which, unusually for a live album, also became worldwide hit.
Breakfast in America earned the band two Grammy’s, in addition to Best Album Package also for Best Non-Engineered Classical Recording, and it was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
The album eventually sold more than 20 million copies, but its real legacy is the fact that it was also an artistic triumph, with widespread critical acclaim. The album laid the blueprint for the AOR genre, and became a staple of FM radio in the US, and successfully bridged the gap between prog rock, pop rock, art rock, and soft rock.
BREAKING POINT
In 1980, Supertramp continued to have the world at its feet, but rather than the success of Breakfast in America pushing the band to new heights, it put a heavy strain on the five members.
The long-standing creative and personal tension between Davies and Hodgson, that had always worked in favour of the band’s music, reached breaking point. They worked together on one more Supertramp album, …Famous Last Words…
Released in October 1982, the album generated one big hit, “It’s Raining Again,” which meant that Supertramp once again topped the album charts in many countries. But reviews were overwhelmingly critical, and in later interviews Hodgson has called working on the album a “nightmare experience”
The magic had gone, and Hodgson left the band in September 1983. A year later he released a successful solo album, In The Eye of the Storm, which ended up selling two million copies. Hodgson remains active as a solo artist to this day.
GLORY DAYS
Davies and the other band members continued with Supertramp, and four more studio albums were released, Brother Where You Bound in 1985, Free As A Bird in 1987, Some Things Never Changed in 1997, and Slow Motion in 2002.
While these four albums did reasonably well, and yielded some great musical moments, they could not touch the magic and glory days of Supertramp in the mid and late seventies, particularly on Crime of the Century and Breakfast in America.
It was on these two albums that everything came together for Supertramp: great songs with intelligent lyrics and formidable, catchy melodies, fantastic playing, inventive arrangements, and top level production.
Breakfast in America added the considerable achievements of household-name worldwide success, and the fact that album became highly influential. Pop rock and art rock and FM radio never sounded the same again.© 2022 Paul Tingen
Tingen.org
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