Baker Street. Gerry Rafferty. 1978. United Artists.

 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 discernible indication that anything has changed for anyone, while Ravenscroft’s saxophone provides the song’s outro that, in just one more year, and in another part of London, will become the siren’s wail heard round the world, exhorting the zombies of death to quit holding out and draw another breath.

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