Crime of the Century

Classical composers, employed by court and church, were the first musicians to benefit from patronage, where the wealthy and important would commission specific pieces to honor and celebrate. The modern world—post-industrial, post-capitalist, mass-market—pushes people toward record labels, professional managers. It individuates. But there are still stories of successful adoption of this method. Let’s look at Supertramp, with perhaps one of the weirdest genesis stories for a band that I have ever encountered.

The group was initially assembled and bankrolled by Stanley August Miesegaes, a Dutch millionaire who had married Rick Davies’s former girlfriend. He subsidized the band for the first couple of records, and then it became clear that they needed a hit, or otherwise they would have to disband. The big prog rock albums had come out by this point, like In the Court… or Dark Side or Fragile, but Supertramp explicitly decided to use the same symphonic and grandiose approach to augment pop songs. They wrote 42 demos, winnowed down to the eight that appear here.

The producer Ken Scott made some choices to foreground piano, saxophone, clarinet, strings, possibly inspired by his recent work on Ziggy Stardust. Many people cite the rich dynamic contrast and textural instrumentation as reasons why this is one of the best produced albums of all time. I personally don’t know about that, but that’s because I never lived with this record to the degree that I have others.

Clearly, this is another record from my father’s side of the collection. I hear shades of Steely Dan in the music, particularly the bluesy Wurlitzer vamp on “Bloody Well Right,” and some of the other stop-start musical segments that connect riffy interludes between effected guitar solos. It’s pleasant, and the version of me that listens to records for the sonic space they occupy might consult this record again in a different context, perhaps as a producer in my own right. But I’m not sure I need this in my collection to do so.

Verdict: Set it Free

Whose patron would you be?