B-side "Jose" Recorded Apple Studio, London Label A&M | Released 27 April 1973 Length 3:23 | |
Genre Folk rock, country rock, soft rock | ||
"Stuck in the Middle with You" (sometimes known as "Stuck in the Middle") is a song written by Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan and originally performed by their band Stealers Wheel.
Contents
Overview
"Stuck in the Middle" was released on Stealers Wheel's 1972 eponymous debut album. Gerry Rafferty provided the lead vocals, with Joe Egan singing harmony. It was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The song is often wrongfully attributed to Bob Dylan.
The band was surprised by the single's chart success. The single sold over one million copies, eventually peaking at number 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, number 8 in the UK, and number 2 in Canada.
The band appeared playing the song on BBC's Top of the Pops on 18 May 1973.
Music video
The video portrays the band performing in a corner of a large, empty building. Their performance is intercut with shots of Egan (who is miming to the by-then-departed Rafferty's vocal track) at a small banquet table with a number of garishly-dressed and made-up supper guests. These include an actual clown, a bespectacled bowler-hatted gent devouring spaghetti and a lavishly dressed woman eating cream cakes and grapes. The clown, who has difficulty eating a plastic chicken, continually squeezes Egan out whenever he tries to take food from the table. The guitar solo is played on a guitar played flat with an empty beer bottle used as a slide. Eventually the other band members appear, driving off the strange characters so that Egan can sit down at last.
In popular culture
Leif Garrett released a version of the song on his 1980 album, Can't Explain.
The song is used in Quentin Tarantino's 1992 debut film Reservoir Dogs, during the scene in which the character Mr. Blonde (played by Michael Madsen) taunts and tortures bound policeman Marvin Nash (Kirk Baltz) while singing and dancing to the song. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Tarantino recalled
"That was one of those things where I thought [the song] would work really well, and [during] auditions, I told the actors that I wanted them to do the torture scene, and I'm gonna use 'Stuck in the Middle With You,' but they could pick anything they wanted, they didn't have to use that song. And a couple people picked another one, but almost everyone came in with 'Stuck in the Middle With You,' and they were saying that they tried to come up with something else, but that's the one. The first time somebody actually did the torture scene to that song, the guy didn't even have a great audition, but it was like watching the movie. I was thinking, 'Oh my God, this is gonna be awesome!' "
American baroque pop band San Fermin performed a version of the song in July 2015 for The A.V. Club's A.V. Undercover series.
In one episode of the show "Malcolm in the Middle", Hal is shown listening to the song on a record as various events occur around him.
A cover by Grace Potter is the opening theme of Netflix series Grace & Frankie.