Baker Street

Well now, Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on this one and that saxophone line comes rolling out like a late night train pulling into the station, carrying every bit of weariness and hope the song ever held. Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” from the 1978 album City to City has been riding the airwaves for decades, and it still hits hard for those who know the story behind it. Rafferty wrote it while he was caught up in the legal mess that followed the breakup of Stealers Wheel. He spent a lot of time riding the overnight train from Glasgow down to London just to sit with lawyers and try to untangle the contracts. In an interview he put it plain: “Everybody was suing each other, so I spent a lot of time on the overnight train from Glasgow to London for meetings with lawyers. I knew a guy who lived in a little flat off Baker Street. We’d sit and chat or play guitar there through the night.” Those long talks and the empty feeling of the city made their way straight into the lyrics. The friend had that look on his face, the dream of buying some land and giving up the booze and the one-night stands, but Rafferty knew the rolling stone never really settles. He once said the persistent theme running through his music was simply “alienation,” and this song carries it all the way through the city desert that has so many people but no soul.

That famous saxophone part has its own wild history. Session player Raphael Ravenscroft laid it down, and for years people argued over who really wrote the line. Rafferty always claimed it was his idea from the start. He told Folk Roots that when he wrote the song he saw that bit as an instrumental but didn’t know what instrument would fit, so they tried guitar and it sounded weak. He sang the melody to Ravenscroft. A later reissue of City to City even included the original demo where Rafferty played the part himself on electric guitar. Ravenscroft remembered it differently, saying he was handed a track with gaps and mostly used an old blues riff. Either way, he showed up with a beat-up alto sax held together with gaffer tape, and the hard way he blew it gave the song that lonely city sound. The story goes he was paid the union minimum of about twenty-seven pounds for the session, and the check bounced; he supposedly framed it and hung it on his solicitor’s wall. There was even a silly urban myth that television quiz show host Bob Holness played the solo, started as a joke in a music paper column, but it was always Ravenscroft. Rafferty said the song still brought him around eighty thousand pounds a year in royalties long after the hit faded, enough that he could live off it alone. City to City went on to sell millions and knocked the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack off the top of the American album charts, giving the shy Scotsman a taste of real success he never quite trusted.

Rafferty’s daughter Martha has pointed out that the book The Outsider by Colin Wilson was also on his mind while he traveled. The ideas of alienation and the longing to feel connected ran deep for him, and they show up in the way the song turns from cold city streets to that quiet hope in the last verse: when you wake up it’s a new morning, the sun is shining, and you’re going home. In a 1978 Rolling Stone piece he talked about the strange period after he got married and had a child, how it felt like waking from a long dream and nearly a nervous breakdown, so he left London and went back to Scotland to sort himself out. The legal fights dragged on for years, and the frustration poured into the writing. Once it was all settled he felt more in control, able to set his own pace without managers telling him what was best. He never wanted the star treatment anyway. He once quoted Bob Dylan that fame was a curse, saying he preferred to stay the observer rather than become the observed. The music business, he said later, was something he loathed and detested, a factory turning out parts of a machine.

To understand how Rafferty got to that place you have to go back to Paisley, Scotland, where he was born on April 16, 1947, into a working-class family. His mother sang Irish and Scottish folk songs to him as a boy, and those melodies stuck. His father was an Irish miner and lorry driver who struggled with drink; the household was rough, and Rafferty left school at fifteen to work in a butcher’s shop, then as a civil service clerk and in a shoe shop. On weekends he played with a local group called the Maverix, covering Beatles and Stones songs alongside his schoolmate Joe Egan. In the mid-sixties he even busked on the London Underground to make a little money. By 1969 he joined the folk-pop group the Humblebums with comedian Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey. Rafferty and Connolly recorded two albums together on the Transatlantic label before the jokes got longer and the songs shorter, and they went their separate ways. Rafferty’s first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back?, came out in 1971 and started a long working relationship with producer Hugh Murphy.

Then came Stealers Wheel with Joe Egan in 1972. Their big hit was “Stuck in the Middle with You,” a sharp little number that made the charts and later turned up in films, but the band never quite repeated the success. After the split in 1975 the legal wrangles kept Rafferty from recording under his own name for three years. He kept writing anyway, and when the dust settled he went into the studio at Chipping Norton with Murphy and a crew of session players to cut City to City. He figured if the album sold fifty thousand copies he’d be happy; it sold millions. The rest of the record has deep cuts that the Zoo Freaks still request, but “Baker Street” is the one that defined him. You can find more of the story and the music over on the official site at gerryrafferty.com, and the family keeps the page going with photos and updates. The official Facebook is at facebook.com/OfficialGerryRaffertyPage, the Instagram account is instagram.com/officialgerryrafferty, and on X you’ll find them at x.com/TheRealRafferty. There’s also a long-running Facebook group called Gerry Rafferty and Stealers Wheel Fans where folks share memories and keep the music alive; you can look it up at facebook.com/groups/gerryraffertyfans. Rafferty’s path from the council estates of Paisley through the folk clubs and the contract battles to that big American breakthrough shows how a songwriter who never chased the spotlight still wrote something that stuck. The Zoo Crew will keep spinning it for the Zoo Freaks, and you can always catch more of that freeform rock spirit over at THE ZOO.