‘Baker Street’ singer Gerry Rafferty dies at 63

By Ben Wener | Orange County Register

January 4, 2011 at 6:00 p.m.

Every year seems to start with a sad passing worth noting, but this year’s first RIP post has arrived sooner than expected: Gerry Rafferty, the Scotsman who hit big in the ’70s with first “Stuck in the Middle” and then the sax-infused “Baker Street,” has died of liver failure at 63 after a long battle with alcoholism.

Born near Glasgow, in a town called Paisley, Rafferty got his start busking in the London Underground after dropping out of St. Mirin’s Academy at 16. Soon after he hooked up with future actor-comedian Billy Connolly in a folk group called the Humblebums before cutting his first solo album, the somewhat prophetically titled Can I Have My Money Back, in 1972.

I say “somewhat prophetically” because Rafferty’s next group — Stealers Wheel, formed with friend Joe Egan — encountered nothing but disagreements and legal problems in its three short years together. Yet one indelible smash from that time endures: “Stuck in the Middle,” with Rafferty, in his best nasally Dylan drawl, trying to determine “why I came here tonight / I got the feeling that something ain’t right.”

Something of an English answer to Randy Newman‘s “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” the song also might be seen as quasi-autobiographical, as its perplexed and worrisome (and drunk?) singer, “so scared in case I fall of my chair,” wonders how he’ll get down the stairs, ponders if it’s cool to just sleep on the floor, and ultimately tries to make some sense of it all — “but I can see that it makes no sense at all.”

More... Chugging along a simple acoustic strum, handclaps punctuating the beat, the infectious tune — “Clowns to the left of me / Jokers to the right / Here I am / Stuck in the middle with you” — would go on to be repeatedly covered, by everyone from Michael Bublé to Eagles of Death Metal, while gaining notoriety via that particularly gruesome ear-slicing scene from Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs.

But it was “Baker Street” that gave Rafferty his biggest success, nearly topping the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1978 (its accompanying album, City to City, actually did reach No. 1) and reportedly still netting the songwriter £80,000 a year in royalties more than three decades later.

An unusually structured and deceptively breezy soft-rock classic with picturesque verses and bridges that keep resolving into the same memorable saxophone riff, the midtempo ballad that at the time seemed to speak volumes for the shallow emptiness of the late ’70s now seems all the more autobiographical in retrospect.

“Winding your way down on Baker Street,” he begins, “light in your head and dead on your feet / Well, another crazy day / You’ll drink the night away / And forget about everything.” The environment is as bleak as the singer’s disposition: “This city desert makes you feel so cold / It’s got so many people but it’s got no soul.” Even though by the end of the tune the “rollin’ stone” protagonist is waking to a new morning and headed home, it’s the final lines of the opening verse that seem to say everything about his permanently muddled state, now that the Big City has let him down: “It’s taken you so long / To find out you were wrong / When you thought it had everything.”

Ranked in 2008 by Rolling Stone readers among the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs and recognized by BMI this past October for racking up 5 million plays worldwide, “Baker Street” remains a marvelous piece of pop-rock craftsmanship that deserves to be heard at its full, six-minute length (and then in a heavier version by Foo Fighters). But Rafferty would never again scale such commercial heights, though two more Top 40 singles, “Home and Dry” and “Right Down the Line,” helped City to City knock that disco Goliath the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack out of the top spot. (The album went on to sell 5.5 million copies.)

Seven more studio albums followed, though only 1979’s Night Owl managed to crack the Top 50 on the Billboard albums chart. After 2000’s Another World, Rafferty essentially retired, although in 2008 he re-teamed with Egan for a brief Stealers Wheel reunion and soon after issued another prophetically titled disc, a compilation of traditional fare, holiday carols and reworked favorites called Life Goes On.

However, he mostly garnered the wrong kind of press, as British journalists speculated about his whereabouts (he turned up in Tuscany) while rumors of chronic liver disease circulated. He was admitted to a hospital in Dorset in November, where he learned there would be little chance of recovering from liver failure. The Guardian reports that he died peacefully at home with his daughter Martha at his side.

Also leaving us today: Mick Karn, bassist for the influential English synth-pop group Japan (fronted by David Sylvian), who died at 52 after being initially diagnosed with advanced-stage cancer in June. Born Andonis Michaelides in Cyprus, Karn helped anchor the group from 1974 until its split in 1982.

Japan itself would help give rise to England’s New Romantic movement, alongside outfits like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Karn would go on to work with Gary Numan, Kate Bush and Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy, with whom he formed the short-lived Dalis Car in 1984. Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, in a post today on the band’s website, called him “one of the great visual and sound stylists of the late 70s/early 80s.”

Photo by Rex Features.

Rest in Peace 2010: