Brandon picked it, Nate had never really listened to it, and our guest, Patrick Simon (musician, audio engineer, and Brandon's bandmate of a bazillion years) is a full-on Supertramp nerd. So we're putting Breakfast in America on Playback.
This week: Supertramp – Breakfast in America (1979) — the album that turned a band of British transplants into the biggest pop act on Earth, sold 20 million copies, hit #1 in 12 countries, and somehow left the band so unrecognizable that any of them could walk around your city right now and you'd never know. The album where Roger Hodgson got so deep into the recording that he bought a Winnebago and parked it outside the Village Recorder so he could sleep next to the console.
Brandon's pitch: this is the album where, in the same exact moment punk was telling the world you don't need to know what chord that is, a different breed of British musician was answering "but what if you did?" This is the Steely Dan / Rush / Alan Parsons / late-70s nerds-take-over-rock-and-roll moment. And it might be the greatest Wurlitzer album ever made.
Chapters:
00:00:00 - Intro - Why did we pick Breakfast In America?
00:23:55 - Supertramp Went To Hogwarts
00:54:53: Production (But Mainly Wurlitzer Talk)
01:42:59 - Standout Songs + Favorite/Best
02:27:52 - Final Thoughts…. SIKE More Wurlitzer
02:41:23 - Ok FINAL Thoughts.. SIKE 9/11
02:45:33 - Final Final Thoughts, Mailbag, and Next Pick
What we get into:
- Yacht rock or dad rock? (We land on one of them — and it's not yacht rock)
- The Davies / Hodgson duality — blue-collar blues guy vs. boarding-school castle kid
- The Dutch millionaire who paid for Supertramp to exist, then walked away when it didn't work — and let them keep the money
- The Wurlitzer vs. the Rhodes — what the difference actually is, why this is a Wurlitzer album, and why a Wurlitzer mixes itself
- Boss CE-1 chorus pedal + DI + a tiny 64-key range that only really speaks in the middle = the entire sound of this record
- The making-of: 1 month tracking, 7 months of overdubs, 1 month mixing — they only stopped mixing because the deadline came
- A full week of just drum sounds
- Why they had to leave the Village and mix it at Crystal Sound in Burbank
- Favorite vs. Best vs. Standout — three different picks, three different reasons, and one heated argument about whether The Logical Song's vocal performance is grating
- Casual Conversations as the negative standout
- Why "dated" isn't a bad word, and why "timeless" isn't a compliment
NEW SEGMENT (continued): We read your YouTube comments from the Bad episode. Leave us your Favorite vs. Best Supertramp song (or your opinion on Nate's reordered Breakfast in America track list) and we'll read the best ones on the next episode. Email us at blackmarketreggae@gmail.com.
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