Because Rafferty doesn't dare to hope, he doesn't dare at all, and in playing it suspiciously, Night Owl ultimately pays it safe. Night Owl is beautifully and immaculately crafted, but it smacks of a certain cowardice - as if the artist were so wary of being deluded he couldn't trust even the free play of his own melodic imagination. If Rafferty's insistence that living is hard, grueling work is admirable for its stubborn integrity, it also encourages him to settle for the merely workmanlike in his music. The gospel influence is gone, replaced by the dour, earthbound strains of country music, and the rhythms tend to trudge - like life itself, in Rafferty's view. The arrangements are dense and clunky, with no open spaces in which soloists can kick up their heels. Night Owl, however, offers no easy, exuberant escapes. You could feel the exhilaration in Ravenscroft's saxophone riff in "Baker Street," a song about those hassles, while the gospel music that served as a subtext of sorts throughout the LP provided a subliminal uplift. There was an expansiveness to City to City that reflected Rafferty's relief at having finally extricated himself from the contractual hassles that, according to his version of events, sabotaged Stealers Wheel (the group he co-led with Joe Egan) and kept him out of the studio for years. Which brings us to the crucial difference between 1978's City to City and Night Owl, an album I suspect won't sell quite as spectacularly. Thus the new record's title track begins with great promise as Hugh Burns' guitar snaps, crackles and pops percussively in the style of Robbie Robertson, only to disappoint when it comes to a sagging Polymoog bridge. The inevitable result of such resignation is a certain lack of energy - the blandness that endears Rafferty to AM radio programmers. A remarkably unsexy singer, he's grateful to his wife not because she turns him on, but because she occasionally lightens his gloom with a glimmer of understanding. In "Take the Money and Run," Raphael Ravenscroft's saxophone wails like a bagpipe on a blasted heath.īecause Gerry Rafferty expects so little from the long haul of life and love, his music is devoid of anger or self-pity - and even of desire. Though Rafferty and Hugh Murphy's production is once again glossy and up to the minute, the music is given an archaic, Gaelic feel through the use of accordions, mandolins, fiddles, recorders and penny whistles. Night Owl harks way back to the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond. No sooner does "Baker Street" hit the jackpot than it's simply "one more memory/Way back here in the twentieth century." "I'm travelin' this long road with you/Still got a long way to go," he sings to his wife. But, for Rafferty, the present is a piddling blip in time that's "already gone," overwhelmed by both the past and the future. After all, most rock is about instant gratification: we want the world an we want it now - and if we don't get it, we protest or whine. Gerry Rafferty is the odd man out of rock & roll because his perspective is so radically different. "You gotta learn by your mistakes/You gotta die a little every day/To try an' stay awake." I'll stack that unsentimental insight up against the best of Graham Parker or, for that matter, Neil Young. Unlike, say, Elvis Costello, who's toured America indefatigably in pursuit of a stardom he purports to despise, Rafferty, the night owl, never blinks.Īnd what Rafferty sees is as tough, brutal and truthful as anything the New Wave has yet washed up. But his vision is clear, unclouded by psychoses or contradictions. Success will have a tough time spoiling Gerry Rafferty, because he always looks a gift horse in the mouth with his jaundiced eye. Those lines are from "The Tourist," a title that sums up Rafferty's attitude toward rock & roll: he wouldn't want to live there, and it isn't even a particularly nice place to visit. Way back here in the twentieth century," he sings with weary bemusement - and complains that his feet hurt. But on his new LP, Night Owl, Rafferty shrugs like Atlas when he describes receiving the news that "Baker Street" was Number One in America, where he couldn't be bothered to tour. It isn't every day that an artist breaks a three-year silence and immediately enjoys an international hit like last year's "Baker Street," not to mention several successful followups from the same album. Instead, he seems to be carrying its weight on his shoulders. Gerry Rafferty should be sitting on top of the world.
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