Stuck in the Middle With You

I spent a long time last night talking someone down out of a tree; someone who sees their self as powerless and who generally doesn't listen to me anyway. After the long, sometimes frustrating call, I returned to unpacking my CDs and organizing them (by genre and, yes, alphabetically within genre) in my finally assembled CD cabinets. I came across a compilation I made for a trip a few years ago and popped it in hoping it would give me the energy to keep going for a few more hours. Track 17 is the fabulous Stealer's Wheel song, Stuck in the Middle With You. I hit the repeat button a half dozen times...this is one of those songs. It was written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan about the frustrations of and the pretense in the recording industry, and was produced by the legendary Leiber and Stoller. A good measure of the song is that Dylan and the Dead went on to cover it, and Tarantino chose it for the soundtrack of Reservoir Dogs (it was also covered by Juice Newton, but that's not relevant to and doesn't negate this sentence). I think the song went to number one stateside (Stealer's Wheel was out of Paisley) because it's easily about the madness that surrounds us more generally and that if we stay center with somebody that matters, we're gonna be okay. Of course, Rafferty and Egan weren't speaking in the end, the song is always attributed to Dylan anyway, and this was the last record Leiber and Stoller would make, so you might not want to listen to me either.