You’re tellin’ lies, so don’t you criticize
Supertramp, Cannonball
Yeah I got used, all messed up and abused
You let me down, with all your runnin’ round
Still you pretend and try to call me friend
This is where my mind went after the feedback from that last post. Supertramp’s Brother Where you Bound album. The album was a weird one, a departure from the happy but cynical tunes on Breakfast in America, the only other album that I had heard from Supertramp at the time. (I have quoted that one before) So I listened to Brother Where you Bound again, wondering if there was a piece of lyrics that summarized why I went there.
I didn’t find anything that expressed the compulsion to listen to the album well enough to use as a quote. I didn’t find anything because I started with the title track and not the first song on the album, Cannonball. What I did find was a portion of the nearly seventeen minute video that the band released before the album as a promotion for their musical change of course.
Hodgson’s departure placed the burden of delivering new material squarely on Davies, but the absence of a full-time guitarist opened up new opportunities for the band when it came time to record the title track. Although Marty Walsh filled the guitar spot for much of the record, “Brother Where You Bound” featured some major-league pinch-hitting from David Gilmour and Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham.
UltimateClassicRock.com
A quote from 1984 begins the album track, a much better intro to the album and the song than the intro that is part of the above video. Here is the album track,
It starts the second side on the cassette tape that I first heard the album on. When I would plug it into the tape player in my car, I would get to Brother Where you Bound somewhere on the back side of Lake Sweetwater. The album was the perfect length to start at the beginning of an evening ramble because it ended about the time I would get to the highway that either lead me further away from home or back home in Sweetwater, back in 1984 when the album came out. It’s more of an EP than an LP since it only contains six songs. In my searching for the full video version of the song, I stumbled across this mashup of the audio from the song with video segments from Brazil that was was worth watching.
I never did find the full video as I remember seeing it on MTV back in the day. I was bitter about my breakup with my then fiancee who had cheated on me in my absence from Garden City, Kansas where I had attended the middle years of high school. She did me a favor. I should probably thank her, as I should thank Mom or Mr. Polk for allowing me the chance to get past the volcanic rage I felt towards him. She did me a favor because her infidelity lead me to take alternate paths in life, leading me ultimately to the Wife and kids that I still call family.
but this album resonated with me because the first three songs were solidly about getting through a breakup, while I was going through a breakup myself. Cannonball, Still in Love and No Inbetween all continue the theme of the pain of separation. (Like In the Air Tonight does with violent rage) Better Days, the last song on side one of the album/cassette is an intro to the song that takes up most of side two, the title track, Brother Where you Bound.
Rick Davies and his bandmates in Supertramp going through the loss of Roger Hodgson’s input impacted me and my life directly. It is weird how the music you embrace in any given time and place reflects the emotional turmoil of one’s own life. Or maybe that is completely predictable. In any case, the miskey by some of my family on asking them for feedback on Divorce clearly caused me to retreat to music that I was listening to the last time I was spending any real time with them. Or maybe I grieve for the breakup of my extended family in World of Warcraft. Probably the latter, but the music would not have come to me without family not understanding what it was I was driving at.
So it is in all relationships. The question that remains unanswered for me, in retrospect, is what the album that featured both Brother Where you Bound and Had a Dream might have sounded like. It would have been better than Famous Last Words, there is no doubt of that. Breakups are like that.
Had a dream it was war
And they couldn’t tell me what it was for
But it was something they could lie about
Something we could die about, you know
Anytime, anyplace
When you look that man in the face
Well it is not a face you wanna see
Sleeping with the enemy, you know
