Baker Street Gerry Rafferty

Baker Street Album: City To City (1978)
Gerry Rafferty

...And Then They Blew Up

Baker Street is the most sentimental of all Gerry Rafferty's songs. It is about a man who dreams of owning a house and living away from his neighborhood, but he is a drunk, and cannot achieve that goal. He drinks to forget what he doesn't have, and never realizes he's a rolling stone with no direction.

Rafferty was a member of Stealers Wheel, who had a hit in 1973 with "Stuck In The Middle With You." His first band was a folk duo called "The Humblebums." His singing partner was the famous Scot comedian Billy Connelly.

Baker Street is a real street in London; Rafferty often stayed with a friend who lived there.

The song was the Scottish singer's first release after the resolution of legal problems surrounding the acrimonious breakup of his band Stealers Wheel in 1975. In the intervening three years, Rafferty had been unable to release any material due to disputes about the band's remaining contractual recording obligations, and his friend's Baker Street flat was a convenient place to stay as he tried to extricate himself from his Stealers Wheel contracts. Rafferty explained to Martin Chilton at the Daily Telegraph: "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."

In the last verse, Rafferty expresses his exhilaration as his legal and financial frustrations are finally resolved:

When you wake up it's a new morning
The sun is shining, it's a new morning
You're going, you're going home

Raphael Ravenscroft played the sax solo. Rafferty wrote the song with an instrumental break, but didn't have a specific instrument in mind. Hugh Murphy, who produced the track, suggested a saxophone, so they brought in Ravenscroft to play it. Ravenscroft has played on records by Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Abba, Alvin Lee and many others.

The "Baker Street" saxophone gets a lot of attention, but there's a rather impressive guitar solo in the song as well. It was played by Hugh Burns, a Scottish session musician who played on the City To City album. Burns had been touring with Jack Bruce of Cream fame, so he was in a blues-rock mindset. He went on to play on various George Michael tracks, including "Faith" and "Careless Whisper."

One of the most famous residents of Baker street is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. He lived at 221-B Baker Street.

In 1992 the UK group Undercover reached #2 in the British charts with their cover of this song. Their name was apt as their only other UK Top 20 hit was another cover, this time of Andrew Gold's "Never Let Her Slip Away." Both original versions were in the UK Top 20 in April 1978. Undercover's keyboardist Steve McCutcheon, also known as Steve Mac, later teamed up with Wayne Hector to form a successful songwriting partnership including some of Westlife's UK #1s.

This song was covered by the rock band Foo Fighters, who reworked it with the famous sax line replaced with a guitar. They performed the song on occasion and issued their version as the B-side to some releases of "My Hero." In 2007, the song was included on the 10th anniversary reissue of their album The Colour and the Shape.

Ravenscroft was reportedly paid only £27 for his sax contribution. The check that he was given bounced, so the musician framed the useless payment and hung it on his solicitor's wall.

Speaking in a 2011 radio interview, Ravenscroft said the song riled him. "I'm irritated because it's out of tune," he said. "Yeah, it's flat. By enough of a degree that it irritates me at best."

The period of 1977-1982 produced from very memorable soft rock songs that made their way onto playlists decades later. This genre came to be known, sometimes dismissively, as "Yacht Rock," with this song often cited as an exemplar.

More so than most, "Baker Street" resonates with listeners, drawing out strong emotions. Nicholas Niespodziani of the Yacht Rock Revue told us about performing the song: "'Baker Street' is really all about the sax riff, which actually, is not an exceedingly difficult sax riff to play, but one that brings out emotions in people that they didn't think they had. You play that in front of a crowd of dudes that hadn't heard it performed live before, and they get just wild. They get the crazy eye."

When Ann Wilson of Heart covered this song on her 2018 album Immortal, she included this elegant discourse: "Who hasn't dragged their tired soul home after long days of pounding the pavement in pursuit of some dream; when everything has been tried, everyone talked to, everything possible done, your very best, most complete shots taken... yet still there are no takers? Such moments can be incredibly discouraging and depressing. They can also be cathartic."

"Baker Street" shows up at the end of the 1997 Simpsons episode "Lisa's Sax," when she receives a new saxophone after her old one was destroyed. While the sax solo plays, clips of her playing the old sax are shown.

The long-running financial advice radio show/podcast The Dave Ramsey Show uses "Baker Street" as its opening theme. Why? Because the song was popular when Ramsey graduated high school, and it got stuck in his head.

In 1969 Gerry Rafferty became the third member of a folk-pop group, The Humblebums, which was also composed of Billy Connolly and Tam Harvey. Billy Connolly would later find fame as a comedian and comic actor. Harvey left shortly afterwards, and Rafferty and Connolly continued as a duo, recording two albums for Transatlantic Records.

The Humblebums disbanded in 1970 and Rafferty remained with Transatlantic for a solo album released in 1971, before forming Stealers Wheel the following year. He left them after recording their debut LP, although he was persuaded back when "Stuck In The Middle With You" hit the US and UK Top 10s.

Stealers Wheel disbanded in 1975 and legal issues after the break-up meant that, for three years, Rafferty was unable to release any material. He eventually resurfaced as a successful solo artist in 1978, achieving five US Top 40 hits, including "Baker Street," the song he is most identified with.

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 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 trying, you're trying now

Another year and then you'd be happy
Just one more year and then you'd be happy
But you're crying, you're crying now

Way down the street there's a light in his place
He opens 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
In some 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