The Test Tube and the Scale

The secret language of 45s is spoken only in the vivid silence of a record’s afterplay, and may sometimes—depending upon the listener—be accessible only after repeated plays. It works like this. The first line of the record will penetrate those shadows of consciousness where concepts lie around, waiting to be called into action. For example, Ball of Confusion’s first line comes across the terms “racial bias” on the floor of my brain and carefully considers the words’ experience of reality versus what the first line itself knows of the world around you. Does the first line recognize itself in you; is your mind judged competent enough to bear the weight of what follows? It’s this initiation into the process that gives the beginnings of great songs all their excitement; how long until—when and if—the song discontinues its engagement with you. What then follows is a dialogue of dissociative imagery and concepts, axioms and non-sequiturs that challenges clarity and establishes the pop recor

  Gerry Rafferty’s brief but sympathetic account of a pair of transient lovers is told with the same storytelling brio that helped make the iconic seventies reputations of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and Rickie Lee Jones, but, unencumbered by their zeal for Beats inspired detail, Rafferty wins mass commercial radio success. Baker Street is understated FM rock whose thematic scale is broadened by a studio arrangement that includes one of the most instantly recognizable saxophone riffs by a player of narrow acclaim, Raphael Ravenscroft. Together with Hugh Burns’ equally stunning guitar solo, Baker Street’s studio personnel aggrandize the sad beauty of Rafferty’s lyric by pulling the curtain back on the lovers’ predicament to reveal the wide scale, winded attempts of a generation learning to absorb the gains and losses—personal, social—of the nineteen sixties as the decade began to calcify into myth. Though Rafferty’s lyric ends on the optimistic note of going home, there’s no discernib

  The old lady I was shopping with that day was my grandfather’s sister, Victoria, whom everyone in the extended family called Tia. She was a quiet, well mannered spinster without any children, who lived in the small bedroom in my parents’ house in between mine and my sisters’. Painted a cheerful sky blue color, her room was abuzz conducting the energy of female solitude over loneliness. She had a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a hot plate. Working as what used to be called a domestic—which is just below a maid, more or less, in the delegation of household duties; and she cooked—my great aunt was employed by a white woman who lived with her daughter and grandson in a nearby neighborhood where homeowners could afford to pay for such things. When it came time to update her wardrobe Tia and I would walk together the three blocks south to the Seminary South open-air mall to a department store called Striplings. Though it cultivated the high bourgeois, adults-only     air of consumer stillne