The scream is the school, then the band comes in
Before the band, you hear children. School opens Crime of the Century with a playground, then a scream, then Rick Davies’s harmonica. Roger Hodgson has said the scream is not only a sound effect. School can be a fine place. The scream stands for more than the yard. He was not long out of boarding school when he wrote it. He has called the song basically his, and he has also been clear that Davies wrote the piano solo and a good share of the lyric. The sleeve still printed both names. That was already the rule.
Supertramp took the song into Trident Studios on Wardour Street in February 1974. Ken Scott, who had engineered for the Beatles and produced David Bowie, had turned the demos down until he saw the band play. A&M and the group’s soundman Russell Pope kept asking. Scott agreed after he saw them play, then took as much time as the label would stand. Sessions ran into June, also at Ramport, the Who’s studio, with the mix at Scorpio Sound. Bob Siebenberg remembers weeks on drum sounds before the backing tracks. John Helliwell remembers Jerry Moss of A&M coming in when the budget looked frightening, hearing what existed, and letting them continue. A&M issued Crime of the Century in 1974. It was the first album by the lineup that would hold: Hodgson, Davies, Helliwell, Dougie Thomson and Siebenberg.
Hodgson’s vocal is the boy being talked at. Don’t forget your books. Be like Johnnie Too Good, who never shirks. After school, don’t stay out. Don’t do this and don’t do that. The questions in the lyric are blunt: what are they trying to do, make a good boy of you? Davies’s harmonica, the same instrument that will open Take the Long Way Home five years later, is already the band’s way of starting an argument without a speech. Helliwell’s woodwinds colour the edges. Scott’s mix keeps the playground in the picture instead of wiping it for a clean rock intro. Then the band hits, and the song stops being a skit.
Everything, especially that scream just before the band comes in, does represent a lot. School is a wonderful place. Obviously it’s a school playground, but that scream does represent a lot more.
(Roger Hodgson)
School was not the single that carried the album in Britain. Dreamer was. In the United States, Bloody Well Right got the push. The record itself did the larger job. After two albums that had not stuck, Crime of the Century reached the top five in Britain, Canada and Germany, and it set the sound people mean when they say Supertramp: piano, sax, harmony, and a lyric that worries at institutions. Hodgson’s school songs did not stop here. The Logical Song, five years later, asks the same building a more polished question. School is the rougher draft, and it is better for that. You can still hear the yard.
Davies’s harmonica returns, briefly, at the end of the title track, so the playground and the “crime” stay in one circle. That was Scott and the band thinking in album sides, not in singles. If you start Supertramp anywhere before Breakfast in America, start with this opening. The children are real tape. The scream is a decision. Then the harmonica, Hodgson’s vocal, and a group that had finally been given the weeks to get the drum sound right.
