Gerry Rafferty Was Born 77 Years Ago Today

by Kevin Burton

   The headline to an article in The Independent called Gerry Rafferty a “bipolar alcoholic industry misfit.” His biographers including his daughter Martha dispute none of that.

   The article was printed on the occasion of the 2021 release of “Rest In Blue” an album of Rafferty demos polished and completed by Martha and some of Gerry’s musician friends.

   Today would have been Gerry’s 77^th birthday, had he not drunk himself to death in 2011.

   The headline went on to call Gerry “one of Britain’s most treasured musicians.” Nobody is disputing that either.

   It was Rafferty I was listening to when I was an active songwriter, pumping out two or three songs a month.  I can hear little bits of him in some of my songs. Don’t know that anyone else could detect them, but I feel them.

   By that time everybody had heard “City to City,” the album that includes Rafferty’s signature song “Baker Street.” The album went to number one in the US and Baker Street was number two for six weeks.

   Baker Street and its famous sax solo are such an iconic part of popular music that someone named Peter, writing on the Writer’s Loom blog said, “I’m not normally into sax on rock records, but this sounds like it always existed. You can’t question it. It belongs.”

  “Right Down The Line” is another big US radio hit from City To City. It’s one of the songs I sing to warm up my voice.  Thomas Curtis-Horsfall, writing on goldradiouk.com, ranks Baker Street and Right Down The Line as Rafferty’s best.

   Maybe so. But I came to learn that Rafferty had many more gems.

   I was on a date with a girl named Rita, the sister of a close friend, when I stumbled upon two of Rafferty’s earlier records in somebody’s discount bin. I don’t remember anything else about that date (sorry, Rita), but those records have stayed with me. They turned out to be found gold.

  One album was “Can I Have My Money Back?” I wrote all about that fantastic album four years ago as a response to an online album challenge  (Album Challenge: Rafferty Before The Hits, June 30, 2020).

   The other album was packaged as “Gerry Rafferty” but it was actually songs recorded byone of his early bands “The Humblebums.” Of course they had to put Rafferty’s name on it to sell it, as next to nobody had heard of The Humblebums.

   If you’re looking into Humblebums tunes, check out “Shoeshine Boy,” “Coconut Tree,“ “Blood and Glory” and especially “Steamboat Row.” That latter gives you an early glimpse of Rafferty’s elite songwriting abilities.

   I have since devoured the work of Stealers Wheel, a later Rafferty band that charted with “Stuck In The Middle With You” and “Star.”

   After Rest In Blue came out, Martha Rafferty did a radio interview in which she indicated there were more demos and there could be another posthumous Rafferty album.  I sure hope so.

   Martha is one of my rock and roll heroes for her part in completing Gerry’s work. The more one researches rock and roll, the fewer will be one’s heroes.

   A BBC biographer called Rafferty “diffident” when it came to stardom, fame, publicity and awards.  It went much deeper than that. 

   He told Rolling Stone in 1978 that “To be a ‘star’ with inverted commas – that is probably the last thing I want.”

   But Baker Street was just too big. The song sent into overdrive what Joni Mitchell, in her 1974 song “Free Man in Paris” called “the star-maker machinery.”  In 2011 Martha told an interviewer from the Daily Record that it was the fame and pressure from Baker Street that sent Gerry spiraling downward into alcohol.

   “Martha claimed the phenomenal success of City To City proved the catalyst for her father’s problems with alcohol which eventually caused his death on Jan. 4 (2011) at her home in Stroud, Gloucestershire,” the article reads.

   “She recalled how Gerry, who she describes as shy and introverted, suffered a severe panic attack in New York during a promotional trip to launch the record.”

   “He was planning a tour of America but was scared by the momentum he was generating and the kind of people his success attracted,” Martha said. “He was very sensitive and had too much integrity to live that kind of life, so he just cancelled his US tour, which was unheard of.”

   “He was under pressure from his record company to carry on. If he had, he could have had the realms of fame enjoyed by the likes of Elton John but he chose not to, Martha said. “I don’t think he ever regretted it. He knew it was the right decision.”