Rick Davies, the British musician who founded the prog-pop band Supertramp, died on Sept. 6 at the age of 81. He'd been battling multiple myeloma for over a decade.
Supertramp, which spurred hits like "Give A Little Bit" and "The Logical Song" in the 1970s, shared the news of Davies' death in social media posts. "His soulful vocals and unmistakable touch on the Wurlitzer became the heartbeat of the bands' sound," reads the statement.
Born in Swindon, England in 1944, Davies gravitated towards music from an early age, when he first heard Gene Krupa's "Drummin' Man." He fell in love with the piano and played jazz and blues in the beginning of his career. Then, in 1969, Davies took out an ad in the music magazine Melody Maker looking for bandmates.
He heard back from a posh, Beatles-loving teenager named Roger Hodgson. Together, they went from playing Bob Dylan covers to crafting rock songs that would eventually give way to grandiose saxophone solos, melodic pop hooks and fluttering harmonies. "Davies and Hodgson could not have been more different — working-class grit meets dreamy idealism — but in those differences lay their magic," reads the band's biography.
Supertramp's international commercial breakthrough came in 1977 with the album Even in the Quietest Moments, which rose to No. 16 on the Billboard 200 chart. In 1979, the band struck gold with Breakfast in America, a playful yet sweeping exploration of American excess at the end of a decade defined by idealism and disillusionment. The album landed three singles on Billboard's Hot 100, including the Davies-penned "Goodbye Stranger," which features Davies' jaded baritone contrasted against Hodgson's vibrant falsetto and devolves from a snappy sing-along to a roaring guitar solo.
Supertramp released one more studio album called …Famous Last Words… in 1982 before Hodgson left the band. Davies continued playing with several iterations of the group on and off for decades to come. Although Hodgson never returned to the lineup, Supertramp played its final show in Madrid in 2012.
Davies' cancer diagnosis made it difficult for him to tour, but he kept playing music close to home for several years with a group of friends dubbed Ricky and the Rockets.
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