S$# 042 Gerry Rafferty | Baker Street

Baker Street was a big hit for Scottish singer Gerry Rafferty in the summer of 1978 (reaching no. 1 in Canada, no. 2 in the US and no. 3 in the UK), and one of my favourite songs from that memorable year.

Gerry had already had some success in Britain with the Humblebums (with Billy Connelly) and later Stealers Wheel, with a hit in Stuck In The Middle With You. After that group melted down, he recorded his second solo album, City To City, in 1978.

Baker Street was hugely successful, a sophisticated rock song that eschewed the traditional verse-chorus-verse format of most popular songs. (You may recall that "Baker Street" is mentioned only in the first line of the track.) As Bruce Eder writes at allmusic.com:

The song itself was a masterpiece of pop production, Rafferty's Paul McCartney-like vocals carrying a haunting central melody with a mysterious and yearning lyric, backed by a quietly thumping bass, tinkling celeste, and understated keyboard ornamentation, and then Raphael Ravenscroft's sax, which we've had a taste of in the opening bars, rises up behind some heavily amplified electric guitars-it was sophisticated '70s pop-rock at its best [and better yet, it wasn't disco! -- author's note], and it dominated the airwaves for months in 1978, narrowly missing the No. 1 spot in England but selling millions of copies and taking up hundreds of cumulative hours of radio time.

The lyrics tell of a lonely ne’er-do-well who is tired of the isolation of big city life; he meets a friend who has big dreams of settling down... But things might not work out quite like that.

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head, and dead on your feet
Well another crazy day, you drink the night away
And forget about everything

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

You used to think that it was so easy
You used to say that it was so easy
But you're tryin, you're tryin now
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

Way down the street there's a light in his place
You open the door, he's got that look on his face
And he asks you where you've been, you tell him who you've seen
And you talk about anything

He's got this dream about buying some land
He's gonna give up the booze and the one night stands
And then he'll settle down, to a quiet little town
And forget about everything

But you know he'll always keep moving
You know he's never gonna stop moving
Cause he's rolling, he's the rolling stone
And when you wake up it's a new morning
The sun is shining, it's a new morning
And you're going, you're going home

Baker Street is available on City To City and several compilation albums.