Two Words, One Answer.
America\
 Breakfast in America $13.98 Even though, in 1979, I was a sort of full-time musician; and I guess I believed my guitar player when he told me that the Who had had to change their name to "Supertramp" after that disasterous concert. Thankfully, "Goodbye Stranger" and "The Logical Song" surpassed most of everything else that was released in 1979 (yeah..."Bad Girls"..."The Wall"..."The Long Run"...even Mick Taylor's long-awaited solo album...you know, YOU were there...) And to a you-know-what-besotted 25 y/o musician, I learned of the veracity of the old adage, "You can always tell a good album by its cover" after gazing at the "Breakfast" album cover with an..."enhanced" set of eyes. It HAD to be good, and I wasn't wrong. Between gigs in Atlanta and Mississippi, my band spent the rest of that summer giggling at the cover and trying to learn "Goodbye Stranger." Great music here, folks, and this is probably where Supertramp peaked. They'd shortly lose guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist-extraordinare Roger Hodgson to general ennui and "bad vibes." And after seeing that gent with Ringo in 2001, I realized how important he'd been to the Supertramp sound. Be that as it may, "Breakfast" was where Hodgson and other keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Rick Davies were in perfect synchronization. And that factor, along with the beneficial contributions of reeds player John Halliwell, bassist Dougie Thompson, and drummer Bob Seibenberg, made "Breakast In America" THE album of 1979. Oh and BTW, be sure to read reviewer Alan Caylow's appraisal of "Breakfast" (above) - and if you can ever access the story where Supertramp and Procol Harum shared a gig, and only Procol's Chris Copping and Supertramp's Seibenberg actually showed up, and the two of them actually almost pulled the gig off, playing all the instruments - read it: it's hilarious, and it shows why Rock and Roll was so much more..."prolific" then as compared to anything post-1980. Enjoy yourself!  The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America $27.00 Timothy Egan is a talented writer, and his book doesn't lack drama or excitement. THE BIG BURN grippingly recounts the events surrounding the Great Fire of 1910, including the response of the federal government through Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and it offers an interesting snapshot of American life in the early twentieth century. All in all, it's a great story, nicely told. But . . . as a work of historical scholarship, the book has the weaknesses typical of "popular history." There is a good bit of supposing and psychologizing, of quotations that sound oddly modern. While Egan includes some citations at the back, the text is not footnoted, so it's difficult to trace the provenance of any particular piece of information, let alone the quotes. I wouldn't necessarily recommend against reading the book because of these flaws. I would just say to read it primarily for pleasure and avoid taking every last detail as historical fact (which is probably good advice for reading almost any work of history). |
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