Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson testifies about band’s 1970s rise at royalties trial

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Roger Hodgson, who wrote most of Supertramp's classic hits from the 1970s, recounted the band's rise to fame at the trial brought by three former bandmates who claim he owes them a cut of his songwriting royalties.

Hodgson testified Friday afternoon in federal court in downtown Los Angeles about his youth in rural England and his time at boarding school that inspired some of the band's biggest hits, including "Dreamer" and "The Logical Song."

"Dreamer," Hodgson told the jury, "literally sprang out of me. It came to me within an hour."

He wrote the song when he was 19 and still living with his mother, Hodgson said under questioning from his attorney Alan Gutman. They had just bought an electric piano and set it up at her house, when he wrote the song that years later became Supertramp's first hit single and caused the commercial success of the 1974 album "Crime of the Century."

"It was about me," Hodgson said. "I was definitely a dreamer, but could I make it real."

The genesis of Supertramp's songs, with some of them written long before the band even existed, may be relevant for the jurors to decide if the three former band members that sued Hodgson — bass player Dougie Thomson, saxophonist John Helliwell and drummer Bob Siebenberg — are still entitled to a cut of the songwriting royalties that Hodgson stopped paying them in 2018.

The former rockers, now all in their 70s, dispute the validity of a 1977 agreement under which Hodgson and Rick Davies, the band's other songwriter, shared part of their songwriting royalties with the three other members of the band because they had no money coming in at the time.

Davies had been defendant in the lawsuit as well but the three plaintiffs settled with him last year.

Hodgson recalled how his mother had seen an ad in Melody Maker, a British music magazine, and had sent him to London for an audition with Davies who was putting a band together. The first two lineups of Supertramp in the early 70s failed to make much an impact and fell apart soon after they had put out their two respective albums.

After Thomson and the other joined in 1973, the band got a new record deal with A&M. Although they had had a previous contract with A&M for the first two album, Hodgson recalled, the people at the record company had no idea who the band was when they came back in with their new songs.

The new lineup gelled, Hodgson testified, and the band's music became much more cohesive and complete than it had been before.

The problem was that they didn't make any money, according to Hodgson, because the record company fronted them the money to record their albums and invest in expensive sound systems for the live shows, and the bulk of the revenue from record sales went to the record company to recoup their investment.

Although he and Davies had some income from their songwriting royalties, Hodgson said, the other three band members didn't have anything, and their manager in 1977 more or less told them to share some of their songwriting royalties with the other three. That is, he said, until royalties from record sales were coming in.

The 1979 album "Breakfast in America" became the band's biggest commercial success, and — according the Hodgson's testimony — also meant the beginning of the end. With all the band members now having an income from record sales, they became more independent from each other, and Hodgson moved to Northern California where he built his own studio in the mistaken hope, he said, that the other band members would want to come up there to record.

"Famous Last Words," released in 1982, was the last Supertramp album that Hodgson participated in, and he recalled the financial disaster of the 1983 European tour in support of the record, where they played in soccer stadiums and yet failed to make any money.

In spite of his departure from the band that year, Hodgson said he continued to pay the other three a share of his songwriting royalties because he never felt that the time was right to terminate the original agreement.

That changed in recent years, after the copyrights for "Breakfast in America" and "Famous Last Words" had reverted back to him and he negotiated a new deal with Universal Music. That, and Rick Davies publicly stating that Supertramp would never tour again, were among the factors that made him end the arrangement, he said.

"It was time for me," Hodgson said. "I was strong enough to go through with this, and Supertramp was over. There was no reason to continue paying."

Follow @edpettersson

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