09/14/2024
ON THIS DATE (50 YEARS AGO)
September 13, 1974 - Supertramp: Crime of the Century is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4.5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Crime of the Century is the third album by Supertramp, released in the UK on September 13, 1974. It reached #38 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart and features the single "Bloody Well Right", which reached #35 on the Billboard Hot 100.
After the failure of their first two albums and an unsuccessful tour, the band broke up, and Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson recruited new members, drummer Bob C. Benberg, woodwinds player John Helliwell, and bassist Dougie Thomson. This new line-up was sent by their record label, A&M, to a seventeenth-century farm in Somerset in order to rehearse together and prepare the album.
The album was recorded at a number of studios including Ramport Studios (owned by The Who) and Trident Studios. While recording the album, Rick Davies and Roger Hodgson recorded approximately 42 demo songs, from which only 8 were chosen to appear on the album. Several other tracks appeared on later albums (Crisis? What Crisis?, ...Famous Last Words....)
The album was named after the final song, "Crime of the Century", which the band members felt was the strongest song on the album. Shortly after his departure from Supertramp, Hodgson commented, "I've had more people come up to me and say that that song touched them more deeply than any other. That song really came together when we were living together at Southcombe and just eating, sleeping, and breathing the ideas for the album. The song just bounced between Rick and I for so many weeks before it finally took form." For unknown reasons, in several interviews both before and since Hodgson has attributed the song as being written solely by Davies. He describes "School" as "my song basically" but admits that Davies wrote both the piano solo and a good deal of the lyrics.
Hodgson and Davies both stated that communication within the group was at a peak during the recording of this album, while drummer Benberg stated that he thought it was this album on which the band hit its "artistic peak".
Crime of the Century deals loosely with themes of loneliness and mental stability but is not a concept album. Davies consciously linked the opening track "School" to "Bloody Well Right" with the line "So you think your schooling is phony", and according to Hodgson, any unifying thread beyond that was left to the listener's imagination.
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
Virtually every track on this album seems to last twice as long as the actual music warrants, a vastly disproportionate of needle time seems to be devoted to pauses which, one guesses, the 'Tramps want us to find rivetingly portentous, but in fact, are only tiresome. Because, in addition to appreciable instrumental dexterity, they seem to possess the rare ability to harmonize handsomely: One is rendered sleepless by the desire to lock them in a room with the first few Beatles albums until they're convinced that it's possible to be as dynamic and atmospheric in two-and-a-half minutes as in five.
The overlapping themes of this at least very nicely produced album seem to be the repression of individuality and the world's intolerance of eccentricity, although one is hard put to infer as much from the generally graceless and not awfully provocative lyrics which, to put it as civilly as possible, seem to be something less than the long suit of 'Tramp tunesmiths Hodgson and Davies. Should their option be picked up, they ought, in addition to instructing their tape-op to allow no single track to last longer than 200 seconds, concentrate more on melody.
- John Mendelsohn, Rolling Stone, 4/10/75.
TRACKS:
All songs written by Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies.
Side one
"School" – 5:35
"Bloody Well Right" – 4:32
"Hide in Your Shell" – 6:49
"Asylum" – 6:45
Side two
"Dreamer" – 3:31
"Rudy" – 7:17
"If Everyone Was Listening" – 4:04
"Crime of the Century" – 5:32
