AAA Vinyl

Long time Gerry Rafferty fans were thrilled for the long-suffering artist when he finally had a hit single under his own name with “Baker Street”, taken from his late ‘70s release City to City.

It’s probably the only #2 song on the Billboard charts to have an eight bar saxophone riff star and provide the memorable hook. “Baker Street” probably would have reached #1 but for Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing”, which took the top spot for the six weeks. “Baker Street” was #2.

Few of the new fans probably knew that Rafferty was the singer on his other singles hit, the now iconic “Stuck in the Middle With You”, which was on Stealers Wheel, the group’s eponymous debut album issued on A&M Records five years earlier.

In 1969 Rafferty began his professional recording career in a group called The Humblebums, with Billy Connolly, who went on to have a successful comedic career. When the group broke up, Connolly and Rafferty recorded a pair of albums for Transatlantic Records and then Rafferty recorded a masterpiece in my opinion called Can I Have My Money Back? that was issued on Bob Krasnow’s Blue Thumb Records in America. The album, produced by Hugh Murphy, met with critical but not commercial acclaim. The Transatlantic version at least, is a sonic stunner.

Like “Baker Street”, “Stuck in the Middle” was also an unlikely hit, written and produced as a loose-fitting Bob Dylan parody that caught the popular imagination with lines like “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right”. It later caught the imagination of Quentin Tarrantino who used it in his 1992 film “Reservoir Dogs”.

While the tune was conceived and performed as a Dylan parody, the inspiration for it supposedly came from a business meeting Rafferty and Egan endured, hosted by record company executives and producers.

Following the debut album, which was produced by the famed songwriting team of Jerry Stoller and Mike Leiber (“Hound Dog”, “Kansas City”, “There Goes My Baby,” “Yakety-Yak” etc.) and recorded at Apple Studios and co-engineered by Geoff Emerick, Stealers Wheel returned to the studio—this time Island Studios—with Leiber/Stoller again producing, to record the follow up album Ferguslie Park, which was released on A&M Records in 1973. It would be fair to say that Stealers Wheel was really Egan and Rafferty since no one else credited as being in the group’s first album appeared on the second and the duo got star billing on the back cover credits. They also wrote all of the songs.

Among the musicians credited on the album were Joe Jammer, an American guitarist brought to the UK by Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant. Jammer had met Jimmy Page at a Chicago Led Zep gig and struck up a friendship with Page, eventually touring as a roadie with Led Zeppelin.

Peter Robinson, a member of the Harvest Records group Quatermass played keyboards (that band’s bassist, the late Johnny Gustafson later played with Roxy Music). The album’s rhythm section of Gary Taylor on bass and Andrew Taylor on drums had previously been members of The Herd, Peter Frampton’s first group, which he joined at age 16.

Also credited on this record, among others, are Bernie Holland on guitar, Corky Hale on harp, and Chris Mercer and Steve Gregory, both on tenor sax. Holland started with famed U.K. blues musician Long John Baldry, while Corky Hale (Merrilyn Hecht, born in Illinois), is a veteran studio musician who has played with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Tony Bennett and James Brown and has been married to Mike Stoller since 1970. Chris Mercer has played with John Mayall, Juicy Lucy, Keef Hartley Band, Bryan Ferry Band and on and on. Among Steve Gregory’s credits is the saxophone part on The Rolling Stones’s “Honky Tonk Women”. Richard Hewson arranged the strings on two songs. He also arranged the strings on dozens of songs including “Across the Universe,” “I Me Mine” and “The Long and Winding Road” for The Beatles as well as “Carolina on My Mind” for James Taylor’s Apple Records debut.

The recording and mixing engineer was Phill Brown who was the house engineer at Island Studios and engineered the sonically spectacular later Talk Talk Albums and albums for Roxy Music and of course for Bob Marley. I’m about to start reading his book “Are We Still Rolling?: Studios, Drugs and Rock'n'Roll – One Man's Journey Recording Classic Albums.” Oh, and his assistant on this album was Rhett Davies.

So Leiber/Stoller went for the deluxe package here from the musicians to the technicians. They clearly believed in Rafferty and Egan from the get go, recording at Apple and hiring Geoff Emerick as one of the engineers. Perhaps they saw the duo, writers of catchy, tuneful pop/rock as a successor to Lennon/McCartney who, with The Beatles gone, could satisfy the public’s Beatles craving.

Following the chart success of “Stuck in the Middle” the producing duo were probably eager to produce the big breakthrough album. They wanted to do right by Rafferty and Egan, which is ironic since the album mostly concerns itself with what Rafferty and Egan sung about on “Stuck in the Middle”.

Right! It’s an album in part devoted to bitching about the music business. Nothing new there: The Beatles did it, Ray Davies did it on Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Go Round and I’m sure you can add to that yourself.

“Good Businessman”, the opener is a dark, ominous one-note dirge that breaks open in the middle to sound like the opening to “Saturday Night Live”. It paints a bleak picture of a businessman and doesn’t reference the music business, but that’s a given.

“Star” is a hard, bitter number wrapped around a jaunty, up tempo melody that begins with “So they made you a star/Now your head’s in a cloud” and ends with “Tell me what will you do/When you find yourself back on the shelf”.

“Wheelin” is about a band break up and what happens when collaborative creativity runs its course. “(Waltz) You Know it Makes Sense” is a dream-state view of being sucked into the music business cycle while “What More Could You Want” expresses the exhilaration of stage performing. The side ends with “Over My Head”, a gorgeous optimistic ballad.

I’ll skip the side two play by play except to say that it’s even stronger than side one. “Steamboat Row”, about Rafferty’s hard-drinking, coal mining father Joseph is a tender number that perfectly meshes with “Mary Skeffington”, a song about his mother that’s on Can I Have My Money Back?. There are two versions of the deeply felt performance on the Transatlantic label. The earlier one is simply arranged; the later one is more complex. Another side stand-out is “Who Cares”, a song of desperation and disorientation that on a personal level expressed perfectly my 1973. It helped make Ferguslie Park one of my “go to” albums, though, again, despite strong reviews from many, it failed commercially.

Rafferty and Egan split in 1975 amid legal wrangling that confirmed every negative feeling Rafferty felt toward the music business. He had to wait three years for the legal dust to settle before he could again record. The resulting album was City to City and the monster hit “Baker Street”, which of course was about Rafferty’s disenchantment with the music business.

Ferguslie Park is a housing estate at the north-west extremity of Paisley in Renfrewshire, Scotland, bordered by the town of Linwood to the west and Glasgow International Airport to the north. In 2006, the Scottish Executive named it as one of Scotland's most deprived communities.

It’s probably not all that different from the working class community where Rafferty grew up. While his two finest albums, this one and Can I Have My Money Back? were not commercial successes, and his fan base was loyal but relatively small, City to City sold an astonishing 5.5 million copies. Royalties for that song alone annually earned him around £80,000—a song his then label United Artist did not want to release as a single.

I forgot to mention that Leiber/Stoller also had Bob Ludwig master the original at Sterling Sound so it sounds very, very good. However, this reissue mastered by Kevin Gray from ½” analog tape sounds far better, in part because it isn’t dynamically limited, which the original surely is. The sonics on this reissue are superb in every way. Even if you are a fan of this record and think you know it inside out, I think you’ll hear things previously buried in the compression that are now allowed to float freely on the soundstage.

By the way, Intervention Records is a new reissue label founded by Shane Buettner, late of Audioquest and one time editor of Home Theater magazine. Full disclosure: Shane is also a friend of mine. With Kevin Gray mastering, RTI pressing and Stoughton Press producing the covers, it’s top quality all the way—the quality the late Gerry Rafferty deserves. You do too! I've been playing this one since 1973 and never get tired of listening to it and to the always ear-catching production. Very highly recommended!