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 , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the '90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984, my (dearly departed and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read, just go back and skim it. I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off-and-on-again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

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