Super Supertramp Stub Story

My first “real” concert. After talking Mom into taking me to see Elvis a few years earlier I was now 18 and ready to see my first real show for being a ‘teenager’. To me there were two albums that came out in high school that sum up ‘High School’. Meatloaf’s “Bat out of Hell” and Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America”. As my tastes in music were developing and I was getting past my younger phase of “The Night Chicago Died” and “Season’s in the Sun” I was too young for the Beatles but the Paul and his Wings? well, “Live and Let Die” baby! But as FM with it’s “…no static at all…” was coming into the forefront, I started to really enjoy art rock, or progressive rock. Electric Light Orchestra, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Pink Floyd were showing how classical music and rock could merge. And whereas Supertramp might be seen a bit more “pop” than all those other art rockers, it was just this appeal to the “simple man” caught up in a world where the "questions run too deep", a world that was too "logical" and "cynical". This is what hit so hard and visceral for a kid about to head off to college. I saw a DVD from about 2 years ago, I think, of a Roger Hodgson concert and the introduction included the line something like, "... a master of song writing from the soundtrack of our lives... " Oh how true!

My best friend whom I turned onto their music, enjoyed singing falsetto with Roger and me, so we decided to get tickets. Probably the last time I saw a show that I was not totally aware of a band’s entire repertoire, so most of the show was ‘new’ to me, yet every song burned into my brain. When that almost eerie harmonica started from the beginning of the song “School” and the crowd roared in thunderous applause, the absolute, amazing rush of a shared experience had me hooked. When all the band members walked out in tails and top hats, I was ecstatic.

With songs like “Rudy” that had the speed up footage of the train behind the band while Rick and Roger traded lyrics back and forth,
Roger: “How can you live without love, it's not fair?” Rick: “Someone said give but I just didn't dare”  I was transported to another world showing what special effects and music could do for an audience while also enhancing the lyrics of a song. I mean a song where the “hero” was an outcast, an overweight loner? Pink Floyd was too cool for that stuff…

And even though almost all the pre-“Breakfast…” songs were new, when they started “Give a Little Bit” ... it was probably the first and last time I said these words: “I didn't know they did this song!”. Fast becoming a music connoisseur I soon lost my innocence for such pleasures…...

To this day, I still remember the radio commercial on Q95 in Indianapolis(waaay pre Bob and Tom if you know their syndicated show) Anyway, that little piano riff from “Crime of The Century” was hauntingly addictive, “Coming to Market Square Arena..” and then seeing it live as the hands grasping the square cell bars floating in a moving star field grew larger and larger on the screen behind them and the music built so dramatically… well... it just now sent a shiver as I typed this.

A short 4 years later I was living in California and saw the very last show Roger Hodgson did with Supertramp in America. I think I researched they did one last show in Europe after ending their American tour and never played together again. So, there were a few concerts in between then, but look for that story later!…

Well... that was it for the stubs I scanned in last week for my Facebook beginnings. From this point on... I’ll have to scan in any ticket specifically for a journal entry…



Click below if you want to see the set-list I started and added what songs I knew of... so there's only a handful of songs... OR click the other link to see what "should be" the entire show set-list from around a week earlier.

Song-Set: (Work in Progress) Set-list I created


Song-Set: Rochester, New York concert around same time 1979