In June of 1979 Gerry Rafferty released Night Owl, his follow-up to the Platinum-selling album City to City. In the title track, a U.K.#5 hit, Rafferty reveals his demon addiction to drink which would be his eventual undoing. The entire album is lushly produced and so gorgeous to hear that you must listen closely for Rafferty's growing dissatisfaction with life as a millionaire rock musician. Richard Thompson plays on a couple of tracks.
From the same issue ofSmash Hits that gave Night Owl a 7/10.
Rafferty's ex-partner from Stealers Wheel, Joe Egan also released his first solo album around this time in 1979. Out of Nowhere also features smoothly produced, folksy tunes that a Smash Hits reviewer defied anyone not to like. This album also scored a 7/10. Absolutely charming, though not enough to keep Egan in the game. He would retire in the early 80's.
On January 20, 1978 Scotsman Gerry Rafferty released City to City, an album that would eventually knock the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from the top of the U.S. charts. Most people bought it for "Baker Street", a US #2/UK#3 hit most famous for its saxophone solo by session player Raphael Ravenscroft.
One Saturday I rode my bike off my boarding school campus, illegally crossing the state line into Millerton, New York , four miles away, to pick up a cassette copy at Oblong Books and Music.
City to City kept me company for many, many days, becoming one of the soundtracks of my teenage years. Its wistfulness and melancholy were an apt mood setter.
Rafferty made a fortune from the album but he wasn't interested in stardom. He would spend most of his life in hiding, eventually drinking himself to death.
Ken Emerson of Rolling Stone wrote this rave review: Even in his mother's womb, Gerry Rafferty must have expected the worst. This Scotsman entitled his melancholy 1971 solo album Can I Have My Money Back? (the answer was "No!"). And when Stealers Wheel, the group he subsequently formed with Joe Egan, became an overnight success with the hit single "Stuck in the Middle with You," only to lapse into morning-after obscurity, he probably said, "I told you so." On City to City, his first LP in three years, Rafferty sticks grimly to his guns. Not only does he use the same producer (Hugh Murphy) and several of the same musicians, but a similar un-self-pitying fatalism pervades the record.
However, there is a slight but significant change for the better that makes City to City as eloquently consoling as the spirituals Rafferty echoes in "Whatever's Written in Your Heart." Indeed, there's a prayerful quality to the entire LP, a quality reminiscent of the dim dawn after a dark night of the soul. "The Ark" begins as a Highland death march, complete with doleful bagpipes, but swells into a stirring hymn to love.
And, after etching a relationship stalemated by the inability of two lovers to express their feelings, the somber "Whatever's Written in Your Heart" (whose only instruments are a piano and a hushed sythesizer) concludes with a coda of vocal harmonies that sing of sublime forgiveness. Hope, in almost all these songs, lurks on the horizon. And when it springs fully into view -- as on "City to City," with its rollicking train tempo, and on the jaunty "Mattie's Rag" -- the music almost burbles with anticipation.
Gerry Rafferty still writes with the sweet melodiousness of Paul McCartney and sings with John Lennon's weary huskiness, and his synthesis of American country music, British folk and transatlantic rock is as smooth as ever. But his orchestrations have acquired a stately sweep. For all their rhythmic variety -- from the suave Latin lilt of "Right down the Line" to the thump of "Home and Dry" -- these are uniformly majestic songs. The instrumental refrain on one of the best of them, "Baker Street," is breathtaking: between verses describing a dreamer's self-deceptions, Rapheal Ravenscroft's saxophone ballons with aspirations only to have a sythesizer wrench it back to earth with an almost sickening tug. If City to City doesn't rise to the top of the charts, its commercial failure will be equally dismaying. And our loss will be greater even than Rafferty's. After all, when was the last time you bought an album boasting more than fifty minutes of music? And great music at that.
From Robert Christgau's B- review:
A miraculously homogeneous album -- except for the breakthrough sax refrain on "Baker Street," neither voice nor instrument ruffles the flow of hard-won axioms and sensible hooks. Very nice, I mean it -- if yin and yang is your meat, this beats Percy Faith a mile. But Fleetwood Mac it ain't.
When they harmonized together, childhood friends Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan sounded like two Lennons singing through clenched teeth. This is the title cut from their third and final album, as fine as anything else they recorded together. By the time it was released the duo had already broken up for good. This song could be heard as Rafferty's final farewell to Egan. ("I've got to save myself, right or wrong"). Three years later, Rafferty would break out with his City to City album.
Also on this date in 1975: The SNACK concert
Bob Dylan joins Neil Young and The Band on stage at Kezar Stadium for a benefit concert Bill Graham organized to raise $200,000 for San Francisco public schools. Santana, Tower of Power , The Doobie Brothers, Jefferson Starship and Jerry Garcia and friends also performed.
When they harmonized together, childhood friends Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan sounded like two Lennons singing through clenched teeth. With Beatlesque melodies, producing by songwriting legends Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and the Fab Four's fave engineer Geoff Emerick at the controls, Stealers Wheel's debut album, released in October of 1972, hits that sweet spot for fans of well made pop. One problem. Rafferty had already left the band by the time album came out.Then, in 1973, the band's first single, "Stuck In The Middle With You", sold a million copies and hit the Top Ten in the US and UK. Suddenly the band was in demand and Rafferty had to be convinced to rejoin the Wheel--which he described as "a fucking shambles" -- for another album.
The debut opens with "Late Again" which showcases their harmonies.
The video for "Stuck In The Middle With You" was shot after Rafferty returned to the band. The Dylanesque voices were kind of an inside joke. The song itself is about Rafferty and Egan getting caught at a table with managers ( Clowns to the left of me) and record company execs ( Jokers to the Right)
Our deep cut is "Outside Looking In", another cut that appeared on a Stealers Wheel hit compilation I bought in 1978 after Rafferty's City to City hit the top of the charts.
