This City Desert Makes You Feel So Cold (Gerry Rafferty R.I.P.)

It's always easy to inflate the talent or significance of anyone who's just died, out of sentimentality or just the confusion of "news" with "importance." So with all due respect to Gerry Rafferty, who exited Tuesday at age 63, I'll try to refrain from making exorbitant claims on his behalf. He was a fine singer and songwriter who produced a handful of legitimate pop classics, at least two of them major--"Stuck in the Middle With You" and "Baker Street"--and that's enough to make him worth a nod on his passing. It is hard to read his unsparing obituary in The Guardian, which details a childhood of abuse and later decades of increasingly desperate alcoholism, without retroactively reading gloom into his songs. But the gloom was always there, however cloaked it may have been in the lush production and studio grooves of his late '70s/early '80s prime. The soaring saxophone of "Baker Street," with its implicit promise of escape, is belied by lyrics that make clear that its characters aren't really going anywhere: "He's got this dream about buyin' some land/ He's gonna give up the booze and the one-night stands."