Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Supertramp Available Now
For me, Crime of the Century worked like a gateway drug to get me addicted to the amazing soundscapes found on so many 70s Prog Rock and Art Rock recordings, although I didn’t know what the term Art Rock meant or whether it even existed yet. I surely never heard anyone use the term.
I just knew I loved Supertramp’s music. Both Crime and Crisis? What Crisis? were in heavy rotation in the cheap apartment I rented three blocks from the beach in San Diego where I was living in the mid-70s.
(It shared no common walls with any other units, which was an absolute necessity for someone who liked to play his music good and loud and often late into the evening. The police came knocking on my door once at two in the morning after I got a bit too carried away with the “running around the airport” song on Dark Side of the Moon. Apparently the next door neighbors were not enjoying it as much as I was.)
MoFi Rocks
The first Supertramp album I bought on audiophile vinyl would have had to have been Crime of the Century released by Mobile Fidelity in 1978.
It was that label’s first rock release and it showed me the kind of Big Rock Sound I didn’t think was possible for two speakers to produce no matter how big they were, and mine were very big indeed.
In my mind it sounded to me like live music at a concert. I had simply never heard sound like that in my livingroom.
Partly that was because a few years earlier I had upgraded to some very big speakers and some awesomely expensive tube gear in 1976.
When I threw that super Hi-Fi Audiophile pressing on the turntable and turned the volume up good and loud, I thought there could be no question that finally, after all these years and after so many different stereo systems, I had reached the pinnacle of home audio. How could the sound possibly get any better? (Of course, although I didn’t know it at the time, I would devote the next 40-plus years to exploring that question.)