This one goes way back, back into the
mists of time.
I remember when my age was still in the single digits, sitting in front of the
TV on Saturday afternoons watching Mothra moves on the local independent
station (before it was turned into intestinal polyps by Rupert Murdoch, which is
to say it became a Fox affiliate).
My guess is this is where I saw the K-Tel commercial advertising the
Dynamite anthology of hacked and slashed pop hits.
K-Tel released approximately
seventy of these so-called anthologies a day, all through the seventies. They'd
take a song that was getting airplay in New York or LA, edit out anything that might
render it strange or boring to those living in Iowa (or, in my case, Ohio), give
it anything that vaguely resembled character, slap fifteen
or twenty of those babies on a slab of vinyl and sell the whole burrito for $12.95 via
U.S. Mail.
That particular one contained, among other less-tasteful things, Rick Derringer's
Rock and Roll Hoochie
Koo, Nazareth's This Flight Tonight, that turd from
Terry Jacks (which is how I learned to hate it so vehemently), Albert
Hammond's I'm A Train and Paper Lace's The Night
Chicago Died, and a handful of others. Wait -- HERE IS THE TRACK
LISTING, courtesy Allmusic.
But the song that won me over, and made me beg for this one, was Stealers Wheel's
Stuck
In The Middle. Oh, sure -- it was 1974, which put me at about ten years old, so no,
I had no concept of what the song was about. I'd heard it on the radio and liked it,
and I wanted a copy for my very own.
This was, needless to say, the last time I ever asked for a K-Tel compilation album.
Most of the songs were missing enormous chunks -- even compared to their AM airplay
versions -- because they were edited even more for time, by slashing out the gratuitous
stuff (read: TAKE OUT ALL THE GUITAR SOLOS, THE INTROS AND OUTROS, AND AT LEAST ONE
CHORUS). Now, FM 'kkklassik rokkk' stations oblige the same sort of crappy, musically
clue-free business model by calibrating their CD players to run all those great classic
songs at 25-30% over their original recorded speed. See my entry on Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street for additional
acidity regarding this phenomenon.
Speaking of Gerry Rafferty -- he was in Stealer's Wheel. Well, to be exact, Stealer's
Wheel consisted of Joe Egan, Gerry Rafferty, and a cadre of studio musicians. Lieber and Stoller (yeah, that Lieber and Stoller) produced the album with
Stuck on it, which was, of course, quite successful on both sides of the
Big Lake.
Stuck In The Middle was the biggest hit they had as Stealers Wheel, and only after Wheel
broke up, and Eagan and Rafferty went separate ways, did Rafferty surpass the success of
Stealers Wheel with Baker Street. But I wouldn't argue that
Baker Street was a better song, especially after seeing Reservoir Dogs.