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  Gerry Raffery City to CityBy Daniel JohnsonAugust 19, 2007 Respect the cover. Rafferty is painted emerging majestically from the parting firmament in God-size, his bearded facial expression rendered neutral from his enormous trucker shades. He's shoving a guitar that would be the size of an aircraft carrier into the painting's foreground while underneath it his crouched legs meet at the shadows of his ominously sized crotch. It's gaudy and surreal, and encapsulates all that was and is beautiful about '70s embroidered wall hangings. It's also completely ridiculous. Sure, Rafferty's lyrics have contained their fair share of profundity over the years, but beards alone do not make one Moses and the ten songs of City to City, while a pinnacle of '70s pop production, are not quite the holy commandments of God. The cover may be style sacrilege, but it sheaths a record of pure gold, making it the perfect setup for the Gerry Rafferty experience: some of the hokiest song intros of all time segueing into infectious pop brilliance that is nearly impossible to hate. Rafferty's songs are sad by way of sunny, sung with a restrained, honey-throated voice in the style of Harry Nillson or Elliott Smith. His secret weapon is the harmony stack - dense, chunky rainbows of tonal blend that bathe his angular melodic hooks in a glow of stained-glass glory. By the time Rafferty began recording City to City in 1976, it had been over five years since Marvin Gaye's groundbreaking "What's Going On," which so conspicuously exploited the studio's ability to combine multiple layers of the same singer. For Rafferty's first solo album since the breakup of Stealers Wheel (of "Stuck in the Middle With You" fame), he took full advantage of that cloning power, multiplying his voice until he was a one-man Beatles. City to City will always be remembered for its back-to-back hits "Baker Street" and "Right Down the Line," which are the rare instance of a single being an example of an artist's deepest work. "Baker Street" starts off as a reminder of just how cheesy the saxophone can be in the wrong hands, with its zesty opening lick prefiguring the rayon banality of Kenny G by nearly two decades. But the rest of it is classic Rafferty, sporadic shifts between major and minor underscoring the autobiographical story of a broke dick street musician living off luck. "Right Down the Line" was a slightly smaller hit but a better song and its windblown backbeat and Mark Knopfler-esque guitar are the very sound of the California dream. It's effortlessly top 40 while still even managing to smuggle in a contrapuntal, fugue-like bridge. As good as the singles were, cuts like "Ark," "Stealin' Time" and "Whatever's Written In Your Heart" are just as hook-heavy while being more expressive. Rafferty's got soul, and it shows up in the way he pronounces "Through" as "T'ru" or in the Zen cool of lyrics like you know I always set my sights too high/you take the easy way and still get by/I know there ain't no special way/we all get there anyway. '70s top 40 has largely gone bad with time, but City to City was a soulful diamond in a disco rough. Rafferty was writing at the peak of his gentle power and the album's crisply compressed sound managed to be warm but glistening at a time when the freeze of '80s slick had already started to set in. If Rafferty felt the album was a gift from heaven, at least he was putting his God-like powers to good use.
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