Supertramp - "... famous last words ..."

I remember when this came out in 1982. It was just in time for Christmas and I bought two copies. One for me, and one for my best friend Mike. At the time I didn't know the album would be a mostly forgettable collection of songs, with one really annoying "hit" with an S song in "It's Raining Again".

There was a certain degree of pent-up excitement at the thought of a new Supertramp album and the stopgap release of the obligatory live album certainly didn't count, at least to me. Heck, let's be honest, the live version of "Dreamer" got a second life no one saw coming, needed or wanted ... again, just me.

Breakfast in America was huge in Canada going Diamond, with over 1.5 million copies out there. I suppose the pressure to try and have lightning strike twice was enormous. With the benefit of hindsight, and the internet, there's a lot of information out there about the tumultuous gestation period that birthed "...Famous Last Words...". The delicate push and pull that balanced Roger and Rick was gone. Roger wanted to keep pushing the pop elements that make Breakfast in America so good, while Rick wanted to pull the band into darker territory and incorporate more of the band's progressive elements back into the music. The joint collaboration that shaped the direction and theme of an album ... the rudder, so to speak, had broken.

What we got with "...Famous Last Words..." were last words that never became famous. Infamous maybe. Now, to be fair I did actually like this in my own way. The back and forth between Roger and Rick was still in place, with each alternating vocals on the track they wrote. The publishing for the nine songs on the album still listed the compositions as by Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson, which gave this a sense of unity that likely wasn't there in reality.

I've been pretty consistent in my dislike of "It's Raining Again" since it came out. A song that, while a hit, just felt like the worst of the '70s bottled up and puked out as a single. However, I also remember wanting to like it. Much of the album was thin and lifeless, but there were some highlights that I really liked, "Know Who You Are" and "C'est Le Bon" are both really nice songs. Centred on Roger and a twelve-string doing what he did best. Probably the one that stuck with me from back in the day was the album's closer, "Don't Leave Me Now" that to me felt the closest to the magic of old.

I like many of the songs by Rick Davies, and considering he's just passed away, I was hoping there were songs here I'd forgotten. For the most part the songs I enjoyed more tended to be Rogers. I'm not sleeping on the Rick, "Waiting So Long" is pretty good, but let's be honest this wasn't the band's best work. The album still moved a hundred thousand copies in Canada, which is still a lot, and went gold in the US, but compared to the band's high-water mark set by their previous release, the tide had gone out ... way out.

The classic Davies / Hodgson era was over. The band would go on a farewell world tour filling stadiums, playing to millions of fans. I remember this time, and it certainly seemed like a friendly curtain call allowing Roger to bow out. It must have been a surreal experience.

Famous last words.

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock band, almost progressive at times, who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , ...

David Baerwald - Bedtime Stories

The little sticker on the shrinkwrap says, "You may remember David Baerwald from David & David's Boomtown ..." You bet, I remembered David Baerwald. Back in 1986 Boomtown was an album with moments of sheer brilliance. The whole album may not have been as top shelf as the first few tracks, but that didn't matter - it is an excellent album. I waited for a follow-up ... and waited, and then in 1990 it was a solo David, David Baerwald, who dropped Bedtime Stories . I snapped it up. "All For You," the opening cut, is still my favourite song on the album. It was mesmerizing. I'm not sure if the song got any airplay, it may have, but that may have been wishful thinking on my part as it was on a lot of mix tapes at the time and I heard it a lot in the car. The CD had a great booklet with all of the musician credits and lyrics. Oddly, when I found a sealed copy of the record (a great score), it just had a plain paper insert - the picture of David walking wit...

Gary Numan - The Pleasure Principle

"Cars" was really the only song I knew by Gary Numan. I knew the name of the album the song came from. Over the years bits and pieces of trivia are accumulated, but in terms of his music it was still distilled down to one song ... It would be too easy to write Mr. Numan off as a one hit wonder, and I suppose in terms of actual chart hits this was his defining moment as a solo artist. Of course this really means nothing, as Gary Numan would drop an album a year pretty much through to the end of the '80s. He'd then slow down a little but continued to make music. While The Pleasure Principle was Gary Numan's debut solo release in '79, he actually cut his teeth on a couple of albums in a band called Tubeway Army, first with the band's self-titled release in 1978, and then on Replicas that came out in April of '79. By the end of Tubeway Army's run most of the band would follow Gary into his solo career. Paul Gardiner, who had been with Gary from the b...

Old Enough to Forget

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