It's easy to forget how big Barry Manilow was in the 1970s -- his deliberately unfashionable brand of melodic pop songcraft had a large and enthusiastic audience, and there was no shortage of little faux-Manilows on TV and the airwaves back then: people like Eric Carmen, Christopher Cross, and -- in his solo albums -- Gerry Rafferty (1947 - 2011).

I was just listening to Rafferty's hit single, "Baker Street" and thinking about an era in which this minor-key ode to alcoholic regret could reach #2 on the Billboard pop chart (April, 1978). Rafferty's an underpowered vocalist, but the song is defined by a bold alto sax riff and a very good guitar break, heavy on the whammy bar -- Steely Dan without the jazz snobbery. The lyrics, written in the second person, form a vignette about a character who's staggered through "another crazy day" and stops at a friend's place, where they talk long into the night about nothing in particular. The friend swears he's gonna "give up booze and settle down in a quiet town," but our POV character knows that's never gonna happen. (I can't imagine either of them sitting there talking all night without a drink in hand.) Worse, he sees himself in his dicey friend, and when he wakes up the next morning our character is determined to go home and get his shit together. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. Maybe his resolution will last until he remembers why he left home in the first place.

It's important to offer the listener at least a glimmer of hope for our character. You may've noticed the bittersweet quality of so much adult pop songwriting of the 1960s and '70s: Barry Manilow, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jimmy Webb, Laura Nyro, Boz Scaggs, Colin Blunstone, and other writers who got a lot of creative mileage out of busted dreams, betrayal, loneliness, and a sense that the present could never measure up to a vanished past or a vaguely imagined future; a pipe dream, but it was still better than emptiness. So why not set grown-up problems to grown-up melodies steeped in jazz and blues? (Which brings us closer to understanding the idiom Gerry Rafferty was working in, once he emerged from three years of musical silence following the breakup of his old band, Stealers Wheel.)

"Baker Street" is no masterpiece, but does it matter? Hearing it again, I realize it's indelible -- another well-crafted, melancholy pop/soft rock snapshot of its time.