A&M 3708
Producer: Supertramp and Peter Henderson
Track listing: Gone Hollywood / The Logical Song / Goodbye Stranger / Breakfast in America / Oh Darling / Take the Long Way Home / Lord Is It Mine/ Just Another Nervous Wreck / Casual Conversations / Child of Vision
May 19, 1979
6 weeks (nonconsecutive)
Success for Supertramp certainly didn’t happen overnight. The British group was founded in 1969, after millionaire Stanley August Miesegeaes caught singer/keyboardist Rick Davies’s band the Joint at a gig in Munich, Germany. The Joint fell apart, but Miesegeaes offered financial support to: Davies to start another band. Supertramp was formed with the players who responded to Davies’s ads in a British music paper.
The band went through numerous personnel changes as its first few albums failed to chart. Finally, in 1974, the group landed its first chart album with Crime of the Century, which reached number 38. The 1975 follow-up, Crisis? What Crisis?, only reached number 44, but the band rebounded with 1977’s Even in the Quietest Moments, which peaked at number 16, thanks in part to the top 20 hit single “Give a Little Bit.”
With its newfound success, the group relocated to America, and A&M re-released the band’s 1970 self-titled album. “We were pretty much settled in Los Angeles at that time,” says Davies. “We had a little bit of success with Quietest Moments, but we had no idea that Breakfast would do what it did.”
To record the album, the group took its time, first booking Southcombe Studios in Burbank, California, for weeks of extensive rehearsals before moving into the Village Recorder in Los Angeles for approximately six months. “[Guitarist] Roger [Hodgson] and I had our own demo setups to write with four-track recorders,” Davies says. “It was the first time we came in with a little more arrangement ahead of time.”
With a 10-year history under their collective belt, the band members worked like a fine-tuned machine during the making of Breakfast in America. “Supertramp at that time was a very easy band to be in,” Davies says. “Everyone had their own function and part. We still weren’t that big saleswise to start causing the usual friction when the songwriter gets more money than the drummer.”
With continued touring and increasing acceptance on FM radio, Supertramp was primed for a breakthrough. “Somehow people seemed to know it was going to be big, I don’t know how,” Davies says. “We got a tremendous amount of advance orders before the thing was even finished.”
Highlights included “The Logical Song.” Says Davies, “It was all so easy. The saxophone solo was done at the time of the backing track. John [Helliwell] used to respond to the other players. If there was a good rhythm track, the solo was almost always there.”
Breakfast in America was a group effort in the truest sense. “I insisted that we shouldn’t have an orchestra on the album, that it should be the band, so whatever noises are on the album, they were produced by the five guys in the band,” says Davies. The only exceptions to that rule were the tuba and trombone played by “Slide” Hyde on “Breakfast in America.”
The title track and concept of the album originated years before the formation of Supertramp. “It was from a song that Roger had written when he was about 15, long before he had seen America,” says Davies. “We were just looking for songs and that one came up. It made sense with us moving to America in 1975. We started to bend some of the other songs to that theme, like the track ‘Gone Hollywood.'”
Fans ate up Breakfast in America, as the album became Supertramp’s first and only chart-topper in its eighth week on the chart.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of May 19, 1979
1. Breakfast in America, Supertramp
2. 2 Hot, Peaches & Herb
3. Desolation Angels, Bad Company
4. Minute by Minute, The Doobie Brothers
5. Spirits Having Flown, Bee Gees