When Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty’s band Stealers Wheel signed a recording deal in 1972, their record company threw a lavish party for them in a chic Chelsea restaurant.
“There was a huge table with about 50 people there and the wine was flowing,” Rafferty remembered. “It was a boisterous evening but we were sandwiched between two rather boring record label executives and their wives. Two days later Joe and I sat down and we wrote a song about it.”
The song — which took them just half an hour to write — was Stuck In The Middle With You. With lyrics such as “I don’t know why I came here tonight, I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right” and a chorus that complained of “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right”, the song expressed the duo’s unease over the evening and distaste for the absurd backslapping ways of the music industry and its assorted hangers-on.
Yet the song had a broader resonance too and seemed to speak to the experience of anyone who had found themselves trapped in an uncomfortable social setting or relationship.
With Rafferty taking the lead vocal and Egan providing sweet harmonies, Rolling Stone called Stuck In The Middle With You “the best Dylan record since 1966” and on its release as a single in 1973 it reached No 8 in the UK charts and No 6 in America.
Advertisement
However, by the time the single charted, Rafferty had left the band and when it came to making a video to promote the song, Egan was required to mime to his former colleague’s vocals, accompanied by a clown eating a plastic chicken, a bowler-hatted executive with his face in a plate of spaghetti and a vampish woman devouring cream cakes. Egan, of course, was stuck in the middle.
With the single flying out of the stores on its way to going gold, Rafferty was persuaded to return and Stuck In The Middle With You went on to become a folk-rock classic. Assuming a life of its own, the song found a new audience when Quentin Tarantino used the song to chilling effect in his 1992 film Reservoir Dogs.
As Mr Blonde, played by Michael Madsen, tortures a tied-up cop, played by Kirk Baltz, he asks his victim, “Do you ever listen to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies?” In one of the film’s most memorable scenes he turns on a radio and as Egan and Rafferty’s song comes out of the speakers, he declares it to be his “personal favourite”.
It was Tarantino’s directorial film debut and so central was Stuck In The Middle With You to his vision that he reportedly blew his entire music budget on buying the rights to the song.
Joseph Egan was born in 1946 in Paisley, west of Glasgow, into a Catholic family that had emigrated to Scotland from Ireland. He and Rafferty grew up together, attending the same primary school and then St Mirin’s Academy. “Gerry was around six months older than me and was also a year above me at school,” Egan recalled.
Advertisement
“Like Gerry I was always interested in music, but I was also into football and hoped to make it as a player. When it became clear that I thought I was better than I actually was, I threw myself head first into music.”
They played together in local bands the Sensors, the Mavericks and the Fifth Column, performing covers of Beatles and Rolling Stones songs. They went their separate ways in 1970 when Rafferty teamed up with Billy Connolly in the Humblebums and Egan took to session work.
After Connolly had left to find fame as a comedian, Egan sang backing vocals on Rafferty’s 1971 debut album Can I Have My Money Back? and the following year the pair formed Stealers Wheel.
Their debut album, which included Stuck In The Middle With You, was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, hotshot American producers who had written several of Elvis Presley’s early hits including Jailhouse Rock, and whose involvement catapulted Stealers Wheel straight into the big time.
A second album, Ferguslie Park, appeared in 1973 but by the time of the group’s third release Right or Wrong in 1975, Stealers Wheel were no more. Torn apart by growing tensions between Rafferty and Egan and conflict with their record label and management, they were, according to Stealers Wheel’s own website, “a perfect example of a group who threw it all away”.
Advertisement
Rafferty went on to solo success, most notably with the worldwide hit Baker Street, and Egan also went solo, recording the album Out of Nowhere in 1979 and Map two years later. Egan’s wife, Sylvia, who survives him, sang backing vocals on the albums but neither sold well and he faded from the scene.
He mended his friendship with Rafferty and re-emerged to sing backing vocals on his old friend’s 1992 solo album On a Wing and a Prayer. He was devastated by Rafferty’s death from liver failure in 2011. “We lived in each other’s pockets for so long and later we would talk on the phone for hours and reminisce about the old days,” he told the Paisley Daily Express. “Gerry’s death has left a huge gap in my life.”
He spent his final years living quietly in Renfrewshire, where he ran a music publishing company from his home, no longer stuck in the middle and more than content to have escaped from the treadmill of rock’n’roll celebrity.
Joe Egan, singer and songwriter, was born on October 18, 1946. He died of
undisclosed causes on July 6, 2024, aged 77