FEATURE:
Groovelines
Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street
___________
ONE reason why I am…
including Baker Street into Groovelines is that its writer, Gerry Rafferty, would have been seventy-five on 16th April (he died in 2011). Released in February, 1978, it is a classic track that is seen as one of his greatest songs. It spent four weeks at number one in Canada, number one in Australia and South Africa. It went to number three in the United Kingdom. Rafferty received the 1978 Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. The legendary Scottish artist, with Baker Street, created a song that has this gorgeous saxophone riff (played by Raphael Ravenscroft). Released as the second single from his magnificent 1978 album, City to City, Baker Street is one of the all-time classics! There are a couple of articles that I want to explore relating to the song. The second looks at the iconic saxophone part, in addition to Baker Street’s searing and fabulous guitar part. First, this blog celebrated Baker Street’s fortieth anniversary back in 2018:
“Sung in second-person, “Baker Street” was a melancholic reflection of Rafferty’s then-recent past, inspired by his own break from a previous business relationship (during his post-Stealers Wheel days) and his subsequent regular commute from a town outside Glasgow to a friend’s flat on an actual Baker St. in London.
In just two thoughtfully crafted verses, Rafferty conveyed the despair of being tired, wasted and depressed in a city with “no soul,” the solace one finds in connecting with a trusted friend, and the hope offered by the prospect of a new morning and the euphoria of finally “going home.”
“Baker Street” was as unlikely a big hit as there could be in mid-1978. At a time when disco was dominating and most songs followed a typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus vocal pattern, Rafferty crafted a mid-tempo, mostly instrumental tune (nearly four of its six minutes are sans vocals) that couldn’t have been less danceable and less conforming.
Most notably, Rafferty replaced what would normally be the chorus (i.e., the vocal hook) with that now-famous sax lead, the origins of which are nearly as controversial as the song’s ultimate chart fate (which I’ll get to momentarily).
But first, the sax.
By virtue of having sole songwriting credits for “Baker Street,” Rafferty is also credited for writing the sax part (despite claims to the contrary by Ravenscroft, who died three years after Rafferty in 2014). According to some accounts, Ravenscroft once claimed he not only played but created the sax part to “fill a gap” in Rafferty’s demo. However, a demo of the song has since surfaced where Rafferty plays the sax part with his guitar, suggesting that Rafferty had already created the part when Ravenscroft was called in to work his saxophone magic.
Then in more recent years, to further fuel the controversy surrounding the sax solo’s origins, tapes surfaced of a different song from a decade earlier with a similar sounding sax riff, leading some to speculate that neither Rafferty nor his erstwhile sax player, Ravenscroft, created the famous section, having instead interpolated it from the earlier tune”.
There is a sense of escape on Baker Street. Rafferty wrote the song at a time when he was trying to free himself from his Stealers Wheel (his former band) contracts. Staying at his friend’s house in Baker Street, there is a feeling of coldness to the song. Being sued and having to travel to his lawyer, there is no wonder that Baker Street contains a bit of dread. One listens to the song and it has this romance and smoothness. Look at the first couple of verses, and you get a sense of where Gerry Rafferty’s head was when writing this classic: “Winding your way down on Baker Street/Light in your head and dead on your feet/Well, another crazy day/You'll drink the night away/And forget about ev'rything/This city desert makes you feel so cold/It's got so many people, but it's got no soul/And it's taken you so long/To find out you were wrong/When you thought it held everything”. Although it is a second-person song, it is hard to ignore Rafferty describing the hard situation he was in: “Another year and then you'd be happy/Just one more year and then you'd be happy/But you're cryin', you're cryin' now”. I want to finish off with a piece from The Atlantic from 2015. Hugh Burns discussed lending incredible guitar to Baker Street:
“The guitarist Hugh Burns has scored movies like Die Another Day and The Hobbit, and played with the likes of Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Jack Bruce, and George Michael throughout his storied career. Burns is responsible for the blistering guitar solo on “Baker Street ” and considers working with Gerry Rafferty one of his life’s great honors.
“Quite frankly, I loved his songs. I regard it as a great good fortune that I was able to meet and contribute something to Gerry’s music,” he told me over the phone from England. “I did six albums with him. I probably did more music with him than any other musician.” He was also friends with Ravenscroft and toured with him.
Burns was performing on the road with Jack Bruce in 1978 when he made arrangements to visit the London studio where Rafferty’s album City to City was being recorded. “I went to the studio after I played the gig and I think one of the first songs we played was ‘Baker Street.’ And I said, ‘This is fantastic. This is a great song.’”
Burns told me that there’s no question that Rafferty came up with the music that became the famous riff line on “Baker Street.” After Burns laid down the solo, Rafferty asked him to “have a go at what obviously became very famous, which was the sax line.” Burns tried it on guitar, but the two men agreed that it would be better on the saxophone. “That’s the way I always saw it,” he remembers Rafferty telling him at the time”.
Although there is a myth around how much Ralphael Ravescroft (who died in 2014) was paid - according to legend, he was only paid £27 for his contribution, while Rafferty was said to have made £80,000 in annual royalties until his death in 2011 -, Baker Street is an iconic song. Ahead of what would have been Gerry Rafferty’s seventy-fifth birthday on 16th April, I wanted to investigate and salute his most-famous song. It still sounds remarkable and hypnotic after nearly forty-five years. With its personal, fascinating and memorable lyrics alongside the brilliant saxophone and guitar (in addition to the brilliant work of the other musicians on the song), Baker Street is…
AN absolute classic.