Supertramp
Live '88

The album in question is really just an excuse to write something, here and now, about a musician I appreciated immensely, who gave me so much and whom it was a pleasure and a satisfaction to study for a while, trying to grasp his pianistic style, reveling in his best insights and, more generally, in his dry and brilliant white jazz rhythm&blues.

A person I now deeply miss, since he, Rick Davies, the pianist of Supertramp, passed away a few days ago, on September 6th, at last defeated after about a decade of fighting a ruthless form of spinal cord cancer. He was 81 years old.

He left us while he was hospitalized in a clinic on Long Island, near New York, where he had lived for many years. In America, he didn’t just have Breakfast… but also lunch and dinner; so, much like all his other bandmates in Supertramp, scattered throughout various states of the Union, all of them ended up staying there, abandoning fascinating but gray Great Britain (with the exception of the group’s drummer, who was Californian by birth).

Rick’s musical inclinations manifested themselves at a very young age; he started with drums and then quickly moved on to bass. His apprenticeship on these rhythmic instruments would prove useful later on, when he needed to finely arrange—even with the right swing—the backbone of those melodic/harmonic gems signed Supertramp.

Like so many British musicians born during that wartime era (Rick was born in ’44, like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Nick Mason, Keith Emerson…), he had been struck by the jazz and blues music of the black American masters, which arrived with force alongside the allied liberation troops. But soon, like everyone, he was further shocked and captivated by what the Beatles were managing to pull off, reworking American rock’n’roll and throwing in everything they could: from skiffle to music hall, from baroque to Celtic folk, from psychedelia to the Orient.

As he grew up, he added piano, organ, and harmonica to his skills, and only later came solo singing. In fact, on Supertramp’s self-titled debut album, which was rather progressive and dated 1970 (thus placing this group right at the dawn of the genre—not at all a “second generation”), the lead vocals on nearly every track belong to his partner Roger Hodgson, with Rick sticking almost exclusively to background vocals. On the subsequent “Indelibly Stamped”, released just a year later, the situation is remarkably reversed: Davies both writes and sings almost everything, and the musical style slides toward a kind of forlorn white rhythm&blues.

Incredible, what happens three years later: the two composers re-found the band, returning to the market with a third “symmetrical” album (four songs each, alternating, with lead vocals equally divided) and a perfect crossover of progressive, pop, jazz, blues, folk: cosmically more substantial and distinctive, in every way, compared to the first two works.

From 1974 to 1982 they released five hugely successful albums, the fourth of them grand, perfect, legendary, and unsurpassable. Then Hodgson left, the band rallied around Davies alone, and at first they held it together, with an initial quartet album that essentially worked. But afterwards, inspiration waned badly, and the rest of Supertramp's career was sluggish and spotty. Until, as mentioned, Davies fell ill, and that was game over for them.

Rick Davies’ piano was sparkling and recognizable, agile and lively without being showy. He had adopted from his colleague Hodgson that vaguely Beatlesque (McCartney side) tendency to pound chords on the offbeats—a true trademark of the Supertramp repertoire. But the two musicians were fundamentally different, and only that style of piano accompaniment brought them somewhat together. Hodgson didn’t have much jazz, soul, Ray Charles, and the like in his DNA; he leaned more toward folk, progressive, the mystical, the plaintive. The down-to-earth and more fun-loving Rick was his perfect counterpoint, allowing a continuous and fruitful oscillation within their band’s albums: between sadness and positivity, deep Britannia and African-American United States, introspection and irony.

Davies’ voice was a full, sober and reliable baritone, with a curious penchant for playful falsetto. He was the one imitating the falsetto experts, the Bee Gees, not Hodgson—whose super-tenor tone didn’t need falsetto, since he could reach those alto notes in head voice. It was above all their vocal styles that set these two Supertramp “Dioscuri” apart; not just the tone, but also the way they would weave their singing into the chord progressions: Hodgson more “classical”, sticking to the downbeat, Davies more rock-blues, often coming in on the offbeat with shorter, rhythmic phrases.

Ah yes, this album: what a strange genesis! Davies had himself recorded by the sound engineer—apparently even on cassette tapes—a series of concerts from the 1988 tour, straight from a stereo auxiliary output from the mixing desk. His intention was private listening, to check how the band sounded live and draw inspiration and ideas for improvement. But he was so struck by the energy and momentum of those performances that he asked—and obtained—permission from the record label to release this album with the best cuts from that round of concerts.

The album is, therefore, straightforward, rough, lo-fi, without corrections due to the limited room for optimization afforded by a simple stereo source—thus essentially unmovable in terms of volume, mixes, timbres, error correction. Today, it wouldn’t be like that anymore… but in 1988 there was still no Artificial Intelligence to extract the performance of individual musicians from a collective recording.

Oh well! The album is easy to skip. Davies may have heard some magic at the time, but honestly, I don’t feel it: Supertramp had many virtues, but not that of being… Super even live. Their music was just too layered, meticulously worked and reworked, to add any extra value on stage.

The repertoire focuses on Rick’s compositions, but a couple of super-hits by his former colleague Hodgson are present (the most… logical ones: “The Logical Song” and “Breakfast in America”). This really pissed off good old Roger, because when he left the band there’d been an agreement that each, as they continued with their respective careers, would keep to their own compositions and avoid encroaching on the other’s repertoire. Hodgson actually stuck to this; not so Supertramp, who thought it wise to break those pacts to drum up extra attention. The two Hodgson-penned tracks are sung by guitarist Mark Hart (later of Crowded House), but… it’s just not the same; Roger’s voice and talent cannot be replicated.

Thank you for everything, Rick, from the heart! The musical heroes of my youth are slowly leaving us, one by one, and I’m not feeling so well myself. But as long as old, hard-living guys like Pete Townshend and Keith Richard are still kicking, there’s hope for all of us.