“Right Down The Line” by Gerry Rafferty

Singalong 019: a confused son of a gun

“You know I need your love / You've got that hold over me / Long as I've got your love / You know that I'll never leave”

It starts with one musician connecting with one listener. The wheel turns from there.

This song brings me into the present moment like no other. And that's all you need a song to do.

A few different times, someone said to me that I should perform this song, and I categorically refused. I said it was because I hated the chord progression. Imagine that? But hate it I did. The bassline felt lackluster to me, it gave me such a rash I couldn't listen past it.

The single came out on July 27th, 1978, the day before I turned five. It stayed at #1 all summer, but as a five-year-old I wouldn't have known or cared. It would be an early example of what would later come to be referred to as "adult contemporary" music, the radio format that evolved out of the "easy listening" and "soft rock" formats. But who talks about format anymore? Radio is so last century.

Even though my parents never played this record around the house, I get a big whiff of nostalgia from it. My parents were in their early 30s, raising their toddlers in the country. Reagan and the 80s and MTV were just around the corner. 70s music was about to go screamingly out of style for a while.

Music in those days was constantly moving forward, so I ignored Gerry.

I never paid one lick of attention to this song until I was in my late 30s. And by then I was one confused son of a gun.

“When I wanted you to share my life / I had no doubt in my mind / And it's been you woman / Right down the line”

I dismissed the song for years, just like I kept pushing love out of my life: like an idiot. But life is short and choices like those have a way of biting you in the butt.

It took two things for me to fall in love with this song: I had to finally find my way into a real relationship, and I had to hear a woman sing it. I feel slimy admitting this, but I'm not trying to impress you. The version by Lucius (on their album “Nudes”) opened my ears to it, and Bonnie Raitt’s cut finally brought “Right Down The Line” home for me.

“I know how much I lean on you / Only you can see / The changes that I've been through / Have left a mark on me”

Hearing Gerry Rafferty as a gen Xer hit me awkwardly. I could tell that this was a grownup making grownup music for other grownups. I wasn't grown yet but I wanted to be, I wanted to get past the petty mysteries of childhood and roam the "real" world as a "man".

My life, like many of yours I imagine, has been a tunnel of puzzles and paradox. We take the journey before us and strive through the hard parts, learning what we must change about ourselves in order to move forward. I look back with embarrassment when I remember my reliance on unconscious, obsolete beliefs as I tried to put my own life together, failing repeatedly and then failing to ask why.

Beliefs like "I am my wounds", "life is short", "good things don't last", "I have to fit in" and "a real man makes it on his own" were monosyllabic microplastics that cut me off from being truly present to my own existence. I kept them in my brain for several decades too long.

“I just want to say this is my way of tellin' you everything I could never say before”

I hid behind musical conceit, but what really repelled me about "Right Down The Line" was the voice of male surrender in the lyrics and melody.

I couldn't admit this, of course, I was already masquerading as a sensitive guy. Machismo didn't fit the script. But my string of relationship and career derailments was eating at me and the song touched a nerve.

Here was a man, singing melodically, saying that not only was he grateful to have a woman in his life he could rely on, who stayed with him through dark times, but also admitting that he struggled to communicate his deepest feelings and that the love he felt with her was healing and changing him on a daily basis. Transforming him.

To top it off: he was declaring his commitment to staying, to being someone she could rely on. Woah! I was so far away from that guy! Light years.

“'Cause you believed in me through my darkest night / Put somethin' better inside of me / You brought me into the light”

I carried with me a lifelong habit of orphaning myself in love, and a pattern of sabotaging my work environments. My Scylla and Charybdis were undiagnosed ADHD and depression, but who's keeping track? All I knew was that Life is Hard and that the man in this melody was openly a softie. I knew that I, Trevor, could not afford to be a softie. I'd taken too many knocks.

My pain brain kept shouting "I'm not the guy in the song, I'm the man behind the curtain."

"Stay behind the rope, people of the public! I do the work so you can feel the feels.”

I sell you the feels, I do not indulge in feeling them myself. The certainty with which I dismissed this song!

But that was then.

“Threw away all those crazy dreams / I put them all behind / And it was you, woman / Right down the line”

I am still the same messed up guy, of course, but my story managed to continue. I did finally find my way into love, after a few more wrong turns. And around that same time, Lucius's album "Nudes" found its way to my ears, with a hypnotic cover of "Right Down The Line". Then I saw Bonnie Raitt play it in a way that changed how I heard this song forever. Changed me.

I don't want to get too cliche about gender roles in songs, but something about hearing Lucius's voices (fine enough to make you melt, even if they just sang about weed wackers and garbage cans) stopped a wheel of pain which had been silently cranking away in my psyche since childhood.

I don't know how to say *how* it happened. Or even what happened inside me. But I know that I fell head over heels in love with this song after years of hating it. I know that when I went back to the Rafferty track, I was suddenly able to take it in. I somehow even fell in love with the chord progression. I fell a little bit more in love with life, and then I was able to move on from some things I’d clung to, beliefs which were holding me back.

So here I am singing it years later. Hello from the other side, lol.

“If I should doubt myself / If I'm losing ground / I won't turn to someone else / They'd only let me down”

It starts with one musician and one listener. Let me take a crack at this one: