Hurtling along the Ohio Turnpike earlier this week (a day before the nasty nasty weather hit again), I was listening to some old friends.  One of them, in particular, exploded into my car with an unexpected revelatory force.

Crime of the Century is an album that I procured when it was newly released, when “Bloody Well Right” was reverberating across the airwaves in the U.S.  I liked it, and listened to it a lot.  It always struck me as enigmatically light-hearted, though I did  get it, even then, that it was very dark.  (Liking light-hearted darkness was probably a prerequisite for being a prog fan.)  All along, I think I’ve classified it as “a great album,” but probably would not have placed it in my top five, or (a bit less sure on this part) even my top ten.  Until now.

Supertramp went on to become huge, especially with Breakfast in America.  Their output from that point on always struck me as mixed, and this was partly a function of many of the songs being over-played.  I’ve always been aware that Crime is considered by many (including members of the band) as the peak of their career in terms of creativity and quality.

But I just was not prepared for the near-shock of listening through the entire album on Tuesday.  During the opening lines of “School,” it suddenly occurred to me:  This album was released half a decade before Pink Floyd released The Wall!  That thought set the tone for my experience of the album that day.  I was an enthusiastic admirer of The Wall when  it came out, but I have since generally thought even more highly of Wish You Were Here and Animals as albums.  But it had never hit me so hard before how much more of a borderline-psychotic edge there is to the dark alienation of Crime.  Perhaps I was in just the right mood.  The experience reminded me a bit of the first time I ever heard Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert.  That was in a college radio station in about 1978, over nice JBL studio monitors, and I was basically blown to emotional bits that splattered across the opposite wall of the studio.  Hearing Supertramp’s magnum opus again was measurable on that same scale, though perhaps with not quite as high a reading, intensity-wise.

I hope that my attention was still sufficiently on my driving, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.

Ken Scott’s amazing production is a key player here, of course.  I was very aware of producers, and knew this even back in the 7o’s.  But I think some kind of blockage was jarred loose as I drove and let this latest listening wash over me.  It had to do with my ambivalence about the band’s subsequent output, but I suspect there may have been even more to it than this.  It was as if the blockage had an indeterminate number of tendrils, reaching out into my soul and anchoring the blockage at various angles, making it not only difficult to dislodge, but so much a part of my listening apparatus that it had never even presented itself as a blockage.  Apparently, enough of those tendrils had been broken or loosened, and the blast had enough force that day, that the blockage just snapped away.  It was as if I was really listening to the album for the first time on the one hand, though I already knew every sound, every aural nook and cranny of what I was hearing on the other hand.  Everything old was new again.

Despite some of the edges actually being sharper (to my ear, anyway) than those we find in The Wall, they are deployed with an amazing subtlety and restraint, especially lyrically.  “School” does in one song what The Wall takes most of its first side (of four) to accomplish.  And it does it with a more deeply disturbing Hitchcock-like minimalism.  When heard in its proper context, between “School” and “Hide in Your Shell,” one can hear the peppiness of “Bloody Well Right” with a more clear awareness of the droplets of darkness that fall from its edges.  And then “Hide in Your Shell,” which otherwise might strike n0n-proggers as typically bombastic, is at just the right intensity.  “Hide” has always been my favorite track.  But perhaps you know that feeling of discovering even more depth and richness in a favorite.

“Asylum” comes across best in context, as does “Bloody Well Right.”  Again, the Floyd comparison intrudes.  Its positioning between “Hide in Your Shell” and “Dreamer” allowed me to notice, as I had not before, how similar is its austere power to the title track of Wish You Were Here.

Another aspect of the revelation came when I realized with some dismay that my interest on prior listens had always tapered off, at least a bit, after “Dreamer.”  This is not too unusual in my experience of entire albums.  I could name a bunch of them for which my interest begins to lag on the final side (whether a single or a double album).  This is even true of my listenings to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.  I’ve already noted elsewhere that the final track is my least favorite on the latter, and my recent efforts at listening with disciplined differences each time have not yet brought significant change there.

But this time, with Crime, it was different.  “Dreamer,” more than on any previous listen, truly announced the opening of the second act.  The familiarity was still there for the final three tracks, but it was a familiarity brought before judgment.  It was a familiarity challenged, asked to show its papers, please.  And its papers were not fully in order.  It was as if both Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies knew that I had always shirked in my listening on these tunes; I could hear it in their voices.  I still had demons in my closet, and these guys had the number of those demons.

If I’m going to make further progress in coming out of my shell, in overcoming the tendency to hide, if I’m to discern how well I’m doing at not being complicit in the crime, then more listening (and more work, more soul-work) is required.  That’s what I heard them saying to me this week.

They’re bloody well right, you know.  And I will listen more (as opposed to simply listening again).

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