Gerry Rafferty is dead.

by Harry on January 10, 2011

For very personal reasons, depressing as it is, I cannot hear this one without smiling:

{ 17 comments }

1

Darius Jedburgh 01.10.11 at 5:15 pm

The ultimate pop-rock ballad, in a line of descent from Abbey Road. Oddly constructed, like many great songs: no middle eight, and a sax solo instead of a chorus. The lead-out is one the all-time great air-guitar opportunities. Note the two rueful references to booze in its three short verses.

2

dsquared 01.10.11 at 5:33 pm

oddly enough, the guitar solo on Baker Street was played by the same musician (Hugh Burns) who played the tasteful classical guitar solo on “Careless Whisper” by George Michael. He is therefore, unless anyone knows different, the ultimate king of being overshadowed by saxophonists.

3

mrearl 01.10.11 at 8:52 pm

The sax-guitar segue was almost a trademark of Al Stewart and may have been an influence here and on Michael. Indeed a great song, and a favorite, but I’ve often wondered whether our narrator is truly off-stage or is “you” or “he.”

4

Russell Arben Fox 01.10.11 at 9:50 pm

One of my essential lazy/nostalgic/melancholic summertime songs. I have no idea if there’s any coherence to the fact that I can’t hear this song without thinking of late, hot, tired August evenings, with the summer coming to an end, but an night of quiet possibilities still before you, but that’s the way it is. (Cool video, Harry, but I prefer the original.)

I should also confess that, as pop goes, I like “Right Down the Line” even better–but the sax solo in this tune can’t be beat.

5

Harry 01.10.11 at 10:11 pm

It’s about his own distaste for the life he was living — the fame etc — and I gather that the song and City to City just made it worse. I haven’t yet seen reference to Stuart Maconie’s Bob Holness joke. I think your associations are completely appropriate, Russell, though they’re not mine.

6

giotto 01.10.11 at 11:09 pm

The sax work was done by Raphael Ravenscroft, a true Scotsman. He was paid all of 27 pounds for playing on the cut. And the check/cheque bounced. More on that, and on Rafferty’s struggles with life here.

7

Shay Begorrah 01.11.11 at 12:15 am

I have very strong memories of, as a teeenager in the mid eighties, standing outside at night listening to Baker Street on a Walkman and imagining a more melancholic, meaningful and hard boiled life. It was a strangely contented feeling but then that was 1986 and the standards for contentedness were set much lower.

I believe that The Dock of the Bay and Laurie Anderson’s Language is a Virus were on the same tape.

8

Harry 01.11.11 at 12:49 am

wow, that’s sad.

9

Red 01.11.11 at 12:54 am

Thanks, giotto, for that Scotsman article.

10

tomslee 01.11.11 at 4:01 am

Like everyone else I love the saxophone chorus – but as a musical ignoramus I don’t know why. On the surface there is not much to it. Could someone who knows their music explain what makes it special?

11

chris y 01.11.11 at 8:33 am

He is therefore, unless anyone knows different, the ultimate king of being overshadowed by saxophonists.

I’m reasonably confident that I could refute you by reference to the bebop era, but life is too short.

tomslee, few notes, well chosen. This is almost always what makes improvised music special, unless you’re the sort of specialist nerd who rates rock by how fast the lead guitarist can play.

12

ejh 01.11.11 at 8:46 am

The joke Stuart Maconie reckons he made, would be another way of putting it.

13

Alex 01.11.11 at 9:44 am

That piece in the Scotsman is brilliant. There was further indignity when the friend refused to take delivery of Rafferty and eventually he was deposited in a drying-out clinic run by the Church of Scotland.

I like the use of “take delivery”. And this would be difficult to improve:

Later he became embroiled in an extraordinary feud with his elder brother, Jim, who set up a website called Effing Peasants, after the insult he alleges Gerry hurled at Jim and his friends. On the internet, Jim Rafferty taunts his brother as “the Great Gutsby” and “the Human Bottlebank”, claiming that Rafferty had become overweight, drink-addled and paranoid. Oddly, the site is also a gathering point for Rafferty’s fans…

On balance, is the WWW a good thing?

14

NomadUK 01.11.11 at 12:35 pm

On balance, is the WWW a good thing?

I’ve yet to be completely convinced.

15

chris y 01.11.11 at 1:07 pm

The WWW is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to the WWW.

So you can have a ton of negative stuff in there, without it being a bad thing on balance.

16

ejh 01.11.11 at 2:06 pm

I never knew Rafferty had been a DHSS clerk. I wish I’d known that when I was a DHSS clerk.

17

giotto 01.11.11 at 10:06 pm

tomslee, I would agree with that “few notes, well chosen” is key, but would go on to say that the secret here is that it is a sax solo. Those same notes, I think, would not have the same effect or cultural reverberation had they been played on an electric guitar, which was the original choice for that chorus. This song, with its solo, fits somewhere on the timeline of the history of jazz sax becoming a pop culture cliche. I’m just not sure where on the timeline it would fit. But at some point, the saxophone came to be a symbol of the very idea of a jazz club, which in turn can refer to any of a number of related cultural ideas, from simmering sexual passion to noirish femmes fatales to broken dreams, shattered hearts and late-night urban ennui. I think this solo nails the urban ennui pretty well, the sense of lost souls trading hard-luck stories over badly-mixed drinks. Though I suspect the exact same solo, in a different context, could also serve to signify just about any of these notions. I can certainly see it accompanying a noir scene, with the private eye sweeping into his arms the dame with the gams. Which is to say, that a sax solo has come to signify a narrow range of moods, the actual content of which is determined by context. Certainly by the early 80s this sort of a solo was becoming fully entrenched as a cliche in popular music, as documented here.

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