Rick Davies. The leader of the vagabonds who escaped through music

Some of us were almost lulled by the strange seduction of Supertramp, the ecstasy of their wild harmonies, a kind of celestial vertigo with a profound emotional impact. It all took us on some late-night car trip, long before we had erected our defenses, before we could put up any resistance. They were there in those days before the formation of taste, musical expectations, or even aesthetic demands, and a certain vigilance against excessive sentimental inflammation. There was a time when our ears were completely virginal, we didn't even know the dimensions that music would later unleash in our intimacy, we were nothing more than uncultivated terrain, and this English band took upon themselves the adventure of this symphonic madness. There was an infectious glow to Supertramp's songs, with those melodic hooks, that dreamlike trepidation, but then counterbalanced with deeply ironic elements, a melancholy that spoke of a profound disillusionment with life, as if music itself were a compensatory plot, an escape, a desperate joy. And at the root of it all was Rick Davies, who placed an ad in Melody Maker magazine in 1969 looking for musicians to join the new band he was forming, to which musician Roger Hodgson responded. Roger Hodgson was the first to respond. Richard Palmer-James, Robert Millar, and Dave Winthrop would later join. After a brief period performing under the name Daddy, the group renamed itself Supertramp, with Davies and Hodgson both taking on the role of lead vocalists.

Rick Davies died at the age of 81 last Saturday at his home on Long Island, USA, after a decade-long battle with multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer. The band made the announcement in a statement early Monday morning, paying tribute to its warm and resilient founder, "the voice and pianist behind Supertramp's most iconic songs," who left "an indelible mark on the history of rock." Through his initiative and the impetus he gave the band, it was able to break out of the rut and rise to prominence, transforming from a faltering English progressive rock group into a prog-pop colossus whose album Breakfast in America (1979) sold over 18 million copies worldwide.

Davies grew up in a working-class family in Swindon, England, and cultivated a distant, gruff tone, revealing his world-weariness. As with the Beatles, Supertramp thrived on the creative tension between the two vocalists, two strong and contrasting personalities who shared songwriting credits and instigated each other to imbue the band with a captivating soul. It was Davies who wrote and sang the group's first hit, "Bloody Well Right," a scathing diatribe against Britain's privileged class. Then came "Goodbye Stranger," a radio staple that reached No. 15 in 1979. "Davies's intricate phrasing on the Wurlitzer electric piano was the touchstone of Supertramp's sound," notes The New York Times. Hodgson, a "product of British boarding schools, was known for his heavenly tenor and a Paul McCartney-like melodic ear," and was responsible for and featured in hits such as Give a Little Bit, which reached No. 15 in the US in 1977, as well as The Logical Song (No. 6) and Take the Long Way Home (No. 10).

That rare alchemy Supertramp achieved in the studio and on stage is explained by this kind of fundamental contradiction. While they could have been one of the most popular bands, constantly playing on the radio, they never became rock idols, but were instead a near-phantom entity. Without great drama, without effusiveness, without scandals to fuel the press, Supertramp seemed to exist in limbo—too pop for progressive rock, too esoteric for mainstream pop, too adult for adolescent iconography. But it was precisely in this void that some of the most recognizable music of the 20th century flourished, and perhaps this can be explained by the loneliness that never dissolved between them, but which allowed for an absurd combination, a dialogue impossible by other means. A profile of the band published the following year in the British magazine Melody Maker described the introverted and taciturn Davies as "the realist" and the more expansive Hodgson as "the philosopher." "We're both eccentric, and we've never been able to communicate very well verbally," Hodgson admitted. "When it's just the two of us playing, there's an incredible empathy."