BREAKFAST IN AMERICA

I remember "spring cleaning" in "Seven"ty-Nine with my Mom and stopping in mid-swipe of a dust rag because "The Logical Song" had begun to fill the room with its captivating magic from my AM/FM radio, and I had to stop lest I miss one delicious line, one sympathetic note, one drop of the musical ambrosia that the British Isles seemed to hoard in abundance. Long before the words "progressive rock" meant a thing to me, when things simply broke down into good and bad, Supertramp was infinitely good if it existed in the universe. They straddled a world between 10CC and ALAN PARSONS PROJECT, filtering their eccentricities through (what then seemed) a symphonic understanding of pop music, geniuses sympathetic to the musical ennui an American teenager might encounter in the average day of a radio deejay. In later years, the reveries of childhood give way to what we call reality (an evil if ever there was one), and we attach an asterisk to the old gods as a preventative to a pantheism that might admit mortals into the ranks of the immortals. Having let "Breakfast In America" grow cold over the years, believing I'd outgrown its surfeit of sweetness, I was delighted to find that I had plenty of good taste even at the tender age of thirteen. Listen to "Gone Hollywood", "The Logical Song", "Goodbye Stranger", "Breakfast In America", "Take The Long Way Home" and "Just Another Nervous Wreck." Listen to the songs in between.

If Supertramp didn't have their hand on the pulse of pop music's powerful potentialities, if they weren't a revelation to radio listeners who thought the airwaves were sleeping with the enemy too often, then you weren't there in that room with me. I soon bought the album and took the magic home with me, at my beck and call whenever I felt blue or misunderstood. With time my tastes changed, the raging hormones found a better ally in THE CLASH and THE DEAD KENNEDYS, and somehow I never found the time for "Breakfast". Call it the cyclical nature of life, but I have time now, and the original wonder is there all over again. Hello, stranger.