You Never Forget Your First Time. RIP Rick Davies of Supertramp

Supertramp's Breakfast in America tour was my first concert, the show that hooked me.

Rick Davies, 1944-2025

Rick Davies, founding member and co-vocalist of Supertramp, died this week at 81. Davies was the band’s only member there for the entirety of Supertramp‘s career. I cannot claim to be a Supertramp expert, but they’ve always had a special resonance for me, because they were my first concert - June 4, 1979, at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena, on the Breakfast in America tour, which was really the biggest, hottest thing going at the time.

Because of this connection and my fond memory of the concert, news of Davies’ passing hit me in the gut, though it is realistically just the latest in the passing of a generation of musicians who formed the bedrock of what we now know as classic rock. Breakfast in America was Supertramp’s breakthrough, and it included the hit single “Goodbye Stranger,” which Davies wrote and sang. Rodger Hodgson was the singer with the high voice heard on “Breakfast in America” and “The Logical Song.”

The bootleg below from a few weeks later is pretty much the show I saw, maybe precisely so. While I don’t remember many details of the songs played, I sure do remember my excitement, the thrill, the crowd, the long wait for them to come on, the beach balls being kicked around, the heavy smell of weed, the joints being passed around. My feeling that I was in the middle of a carnival and that I loved it. I was finding my tribe.

Over the next couple of years, I’d see the Eagles, Santana, Tom Waits, the Allman Brothers Band, the Kinks, the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen, at the Arena, the Stanley Theatre the Beacon on a visit to New York. I was hooked and I never really looked back. Everyone of those shows was like a secret adventure out of my high school life, a portal to another dimension that felt both truly exotic and utterly comfortable. It felt like home. My taste has certainly changed and gone through various stages, but I’d jump at the chance to see see any of those artists tomorrow if I could. Thank you to David Aranson, who got the Supertramp tickets and those for many of the shows that followed.

From The New York Times obituary, by Alex Williams and Jenny Gross:

Like the Beatles and a thousand other bands, Supertramp was fueled by the creative tension between two strong and highly distinct personalities: Mr. Davies and the band’s other creative force, the vocalist and songwriter Roger Hodgson.

Mr. Davies grew up working class in Swindon, England, and tended toward an acerbic, world-weary tone, reminiscent of John Lennon, in both interviews and lyrics. He and Mr. Hodgson shared songwriting credits, but it was Mr. Davies who wrote and sang the group’s first hit, “Bloody Well Right,” a sharp-tongued rebuke of Britain’s privileged class. It rose to No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975. Then came the FM radio staple “Goodbye Stranger,” which climbed to No. 15 in 1979. Mr. Davies’s intricate stylings on the Wurlitzer electric piano were a bedrock of the Supertramp sound.

Mr. Hodgson, a product of British boarding schools, was known for his celestial tenor and his Paul McCartney-esque ear for melody. He composed and gave voice to hits like “Give a Little Bit,” which climbed to No. 15 in the United States in 1977, as well as “The Logical Song” (No. 6) and “Take the Long Way Home” (No. 10), both from “Breakfast in America.”

Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s was my third straight book to debut in the New York Times Non-Fiction Hardcover Bestsellers List, following Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan and One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band. My first book was Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, about my experiences raising a family in Beijing and touring China with a popular original blues band. It was optioned for a movie by Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Productions. I am also a guitarist and singer who fronts two bands, Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, the premier celebration of the Allman Brothers Band.