Stealers Wheel – Stuck In The Middle With You

Critics heard a Bob Dylan parody. Gerry Rafferty said any resemblance was an accident, and by the time the song charted he had already quit the band.

Two stories are told about the voice on Stuck in the Middle with You, and only one of them belongs to the man who sang it. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Martin Chilton described the song as a parody of Bob Dylan’s paranoia, and listeners in 1973 were convinced enough to credit it to Dylan himself. Gerry Rafferty told it differently. He admired Dylan’s phrasing and dark humor, he said, but the resemblance came about by chance. Either way, the song that made Stealers Wheel famous was a joke about the music business that the music business turned into a hit.

Keep watching: Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street · explore more →

The joke started at a party. Newly signed to A&M Records, Stealers Wheel was the guest of honor at a label launch in Chelsea, and Rafferty spent the evening seated between executives he had nothing to say to. He and Joe Egan, his songwriting partner from their hometown of Paisley, Scotland, wrote the song about that night in roughly half an hour. The narrator is trapped at a table of people he doesn’t trust, in a room he wants to leave, and the chorus puts a name to the fools on either side. Rafferty summed up the industry he had just joined as a beast that can chew people up.

Stealers Wheel recorded it in 1972 at Apple Studios in London for its self-titled debut album, with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller producing. The Americans behind Hound Dog and Stand by Me ran the sessions on a strict clock, starting at two, breaking for coffee at five and stopping at eight wherever the take stood. Rafferty found the gap in age and culture hard going and later said they “didn’t share a sense of humor or much of anything.” He cut his lead vocal in a single take. Fans of the record still point to its slide guitar, played on a guitar laid flat with an empty beer bottle as the slide.

The hit he wasn’t there for

A&M released the album in October 1972, and by then Rafferty had already walked out of the band he co-founded. Stealers Wheel went on without him, appearing on The Old Grey Whistle Test that November. The single took off in America first: it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on March 3, 1973, and peaked at No.6 that May, the year’s No.36 song. It reached No.2 on Canada’s RPM chart and No.8 in the UK. When the band played it on Top of the Pops on May 18, 1973, Egan mimed to Rafferty’s recorded vocal.

The promotional film made the joke literal. It cuts between the band playing and a surreal banquet, with Egan at the table miming the words Rafferty had sung, surrounded by the kind of company the lyric describes. The success pulled Rafferty back into the band, but the reunion didn’t settle anything. Disputes over management and contracts produced a legal standoff that kept him from releasing new music for three years. Stealers Wheel broke up in 1975, and the frustration of that period fed into Baker Street, the 1978 solo record that would outsell anything the band made.

The joke got a second life in 1992. Quentin Tarantino put the song under the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, where Mr. Blonde dances to its easygoing shuffle while a bound policeman waits. Tarantino told Rolling Stone that nearly every actor auditioning for the part brought the same song to that scene. Rafferty eventually conceded that the pairing worked. His daughter, Martha, has said that many people never realize her father wrote and sang it, and that in America it now turns up in everything.

The parody question ends up mattering less than the room the song came from. Whether Rafferty was aiming at Dylan or only sounded like him, he was aiming at the table in Chelsea, and the industry he was mocking bought the song and sold it back to the world. He died in January 2011 and Egan in July 2024. The song they wrote in half an hour to mock a party they couldn’t escape has outlasted every label executive who sat at that table.