Remember Baker Street

~ ~ So what’s this, you may well ask?
A music review from the “mad cabbie”!!!! Am I seeing right?
Well, believe it or believe it not, the only reason I have never written in this category before is because no matter how hard I try to attempt to get across what I want to convey, it all seems to come out all cock-eyed.
But listening to one of my favourite singers on the CD-Rom last night while I surfed around the Web, I realised that I couldn’t put off the evil day any longer.

~ ~ Gerry Rafferty was born in Paisley in Scotland in 1947, and after cutting his musical teeth with various bands in the local working men’s clubs, pubs, and dance halls, hooked up with two other Scot’s “jimmys”, one of who you will know very well.
Billy Connolly, (the “Big Yin”) the comedian and actor, has since gone on to international stardom, and is a household name the world over, but at that time was a little known artist playing the bango in a folk group called the “Humblebums” with a fellow called Tam Harvey.
It was while Rafferty was playing the pub scene with the Humblebums that I first came across him, in a well-known student bar in Edinburgh called “Ma Bells”, in the University area of the city.
I immediately liked both the band and the lads in it, and sank many a pint with them when I was still in my drinking heyday.
Tam Harvey left the band shortly after Gerry joined, but they were to produce a total of three albums, one as a trio, and two with only Billy Connolly and Gerry, before finally going their separate ways in 1970.

These albums, a mixture of traditional folk music, pop, rock, and Irish rebel songs (Gerry’s dad was Irish) achieved some measure of popular success, and for a while the contrasting musical styles and tastes of Rafferty and Connolly worked well. But it was never a marriage made in heaven, and when as Gerry later commented, "Billy's jokes were getting longer and longer, the songs shorter and shorter", the break-up was almost inevitable. To this day though, the two remain firm friends.

~ ~ Three years of legal battles between Rafferty and his management kept him silent until 1978, when he released “City To City”. The album was an enormous success, thanks in large part to the hit single “Baker Street”, and might have been even more successful had Rafferty chosen to tour the USA in support of it.
As it was, it went to number one in the American album charts, selling over 5.5 million copies, and Baker Street duly followed suit when it was later released as a single.

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~ ~ His worst album (in this writer’s opinion) was probably “On A Wing And A Prayer”, released in 1992. It featured contributions from his old mate Joe Egan from his Stealer’s Wheel days, and also from his own brother Jim Rafferty. It was heavily influenced by the break up of his marriage, (amidst rumours of his own drinking problems) and I found the songs to sentimental and sloppy, and with too many self-pitying lyrics for my own personal taste.
In 1994, he released “Over My Head”, which was basically a reworking of many of the old Stealer’s Wheel tracks.

“I try to keep it simple
Take it one day at a time
When I’m losing my direction
Well I know that ain’t no crime”