Alas, both of my loyal readers, but this is not a Friday Night Jukebox post at last actually posting on a Friday...but rather one that's a week late. Time and tide, friends, time and tide....
My fun story intro this week involves my oldest son, who a number of years ago went on a tirade about how bad this week's featured band was...and at the time, I had no idea he even knew who they were (it'd been twenty years, give or take, since their heyday) let alone despise them. Not to scare my two loyal readers off, but my younger brother thinks they suck, too....
Supertramp formed in London in 1969 (for whatever reason, I thought they were Australian until I did this week's half-assed research). Their first couple of albums received neither critical nor commercial success, but they persevered, and their third album yielded a couple of hit songs and sent them on their way. By the end of the seventies, they had achieved superstar status, but the disparate personalities and musical tastes of founding members and chief songwriters Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies led to Hodgson leaving. The band would go on to have a few more hits but disbanded in 1988. They have regrouped three times since (always sans Hodgson) but have not performed together since 2015. For their career, Supertramp sold over sixty million records, releasing eleven studio albums with three hitting the top ten in their native U.K., and two here in the States (including a number one). They also had a live album hit the top ten in both the U.K. and the U.S. The band also released 28 singles, which somewhat oddly, overall did much better in America.
Fun Fact: For whatever reason, Canadians really took a shine to Supertramp, with two of their albums reaching diamond (10x platinum), and Canada was also home to the only two number one singles of their career.
"Goodbye Stranger" was the third single released from Supertramp's career making album, Breakfast in America. The single would reach #15 on the Billboard Hot 100, but only #57 on the U.K. Singles chart. The album was their only number one in America, and their highest charting in the U.K., peaking at #3.
Every now and again a band that usually wouldn't be your cup of tea comes along with a song (or in Supertramp's case for me, three) that catches your fancy, and you find yourself singing it again and again during your weekly research forty some odd years down the road even though every time you do you think to yourself, "What the hell?" There's a busyness to "Goodbye Stranger" that I really like, especially the way Davies baritone in the stanzas juxtaposes with Hodgson's falsetto in the chorus or the bing bong of the piano--which almost sounds like church bells--at the beginning. Hodgson also has a wicked guitar solo at the end just to put a cherry on top. In all honesty, Supertramp is like many of the vanilla pudding bands the late seventies produced (Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon to name a few), but for some goofy ass reason this week's tune just resonated with me where others did not, and so it takes its place in the annals that are Friday Night Jukebox.
Lyric Sheet: "Now some they do and some they don't/And some you just can't tell/And some they will and some they won't/And some it's just as well..."
Enjoy:
Republican = Traitor
Peace,
emaycee
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