Trivia / Supertramp

• Creator Breakdown: Many of their well-known songs involved Davies and Hodgson taking shots at each other. "Casual Conversations" and "Child of Vision" were these Word of God.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Roger Hodgson named Crisis? What Crisis as his favorite Supertramp album.
• Flip-Flop of God: Hodgson's thoughts on Crisis? What Crisis? seem to polarize differently with each passing decade; sometimes he calls it a disjointed mess of an album, other times he goes as far as to say it's his favorite work he's done yet.
• He Also Did: Bob Siebenberg composed the soundtrack for Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While most of their albums are readily available, four of them (Supertramp, Indelibly Stamped, Some Things Never Change, and Slow Motion) have yet to be released on streaming services.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Breakfast in America is the band's most popular album, but the band members believe that Crime of the Century was their best album.
• Milestone Celebration: The 70-10 Tour was this for Supertramp's fortieth anniversary.
• No Export for You: Their first two albums, Supertramp and Indelibly Stamped were not released outside of the UK initially due to being commercial failures. It was until Supertramp became more successful down the line when they were imported. The Live '88 album was also not released in the US.
• Real Song Theme Tune: "Fool's Overture" has been used for the Canadian news program W5 from the late seventies to early nineties.
• The Pete Best: Anyone on their first two albums not named Rick Davies or Roger Hodgson, although Richard Palmer-James did have future success as a lyricist for three of King Crimson's most well-received albums (Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red).
• Similarly Named Works:
  • "Lover Boy" is also a Billy Ocean song.
  • "Oh! Darling" by The Beatles is similar in title to "Oh Darling".
  • "Free As A Bird" (the album and its title track) also predates The Beatles' "comeback" single by seven years.
  • Rick Davies has the same surname as Ray and Dave but is completely unrelated. Rick is also unrelated to the author W.H. Davies, whose book The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is what the band named themselves after.
  • "Don't Leave Me Now" shares a name with a Pink Floyd song from The Wall.
  • "Lady" (Styx; Kenny Rogers); "Two of Us" (The Beatles) and "Dreamer" (Ozzy Osbourne; Hilary Duff) also count.
  • "Take the Long Way Home" is also the name of a Bloodhound Gang song.
• Troubled Production: Both of their most successful albums were followed by things going awry.
  • Once the Crime of the Century tour was cut short after Roger Hodgson broke his hand, the band decided to instead go into the studios in L.A. to record their next album. And given Hodgson and Rick Davies hadn't even begun to think about their next album yet, a two week break was taken to add new songs to whatever unused compositions they had left... leaving the band, despite their original surfeit of time, with no time left to rehearse the new songs before having to record them. The bandmembers' girlfriends and wives also started bickering and over-influencing in a Spinal Tap manner. The eventual album's title, Crisis? What Crisis?, was even an ironic comment on the situation - as Hodgson summed up:
    "'Crisis' means more to us than it did to other people because it was really a crisis album. We learnt how not to make an album, coming right off the road and going into the studio. We had a lot of bad luck in the studio. We really didn't enjoy making it and in the end it was kind of a patch up job."
  • After the success of Breakfast in America, the band was starting to fall apart given Roger Hodgson was growing disenchanted with the L.A. lifestyle, the music industry and touring, and also losing the fun of being in the band, while also not liking how Rick Davies fired longtime manager Dave Margereson and employed his wife Sue as manager. The album was done at Hodgson's home studio... except for Davies' parts, which he did at his own home. Hodgson even said the title ..Famous Last Words... was a preemptive statement that the duo would never record together again, and indeed, he left the group in 1983 after a successful world tour.
• What Could Have Been:
  • After leaving Supertramp, Roger Hodgson nearly became the lead singer of Yes.
  • Disney nearly hired the band to score the rock soundtrack for the movie TRON, but the band (which by then were breaking up) pulled out of the project. The rock soundtrack was ultimately scored by Journey.
  • Hodgson wanted to appear as a special guest performer with the Davies-led Supertramp on their 2010 70-10 Tour, but Davies refused, to Hodgson's disappointment. It would have marked the first time since a brief tour in 1986 that they both shared a stage.
  • Scott Gorham left the US in 1973 and travelled to the UK because Bob Siebenberg (Scott's Brother-in-law) thought he'd be able to join the band. This didn't end up happening, and eventually after scraping some work from playing in pub bands for a few months, his visa soon due to expire, Scott eventually found some luck and joined Thin Lizzy in 1974.
• Working Title: "Goodbye Stranger" was originally titled "Hello Stranger".

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