Gerry Rafferty RIP

I will have to confess a probably lifelong weakness for Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street", both as hook-addicted to that terrific sax riff by Raphael Ravenscroft, but also its particularly winsome, third-person reflection on aging and giving up the chase for buzz and women and glitter, in favor of solitude and peace and quiet and sanity.

It came at a particular time, too, the summer I worked as a none-too-responsible barkeep on a tourist ferry between Nantucket and Hyannis, a job that I parted ways with on mutually suspicious terms, right after stepping through a ship hold and landing, with full body weight, on the hatch's iron lip, driven pitilessly up into my scrotum. That was about 32 years ago, and it still hurts.

That experience - the job - did not end particularly well, but "Baker Street" conjures pleasant and reassuring memories of that time, in a way few songs or artists of that period ever could.

Anyway, RIP Gerry Rafferty.