I-95 Drive Home Featured Artists

Tonight’s featured artists had a song they had written as a joke on Bob Dylan become one of their most memorable hits.

So whose joke about Bob tuned into bucks? Well to the surprise of co-author Gerry Rafferty is was ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ also known simply as "Stuck In The Middle," this Stealers Wheel classic was co-written by the band’s guitarist Rafferty and keyboard player Joe Egan.

In Rafferty's obituary in the January 5, 2011 issue of the Daily Telegraph, Martin Chilton said of this song that it was "Written as a parody of Bob Dylan's paranoia, it ridiculed a music industry cocktail party, with the lyrics:

Clowns to the left of me
jokers to the right
here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

To Rafferty's utter disbelief his parody, composed as little more than a joke but with a catchy Pop arrangement, struck gold, selling more than a million copies. The song reached a new generation of listeners when Quentin Tarantino used it in the notorious ear-slicing scene in his 1992 movie Reservoir Dogs."