Gordon Lightfoot

[Live Music Alert: Gordon Lightfoot will appear Wednesday September 30 in the arena at the Civic Center in Fargo ND, 8-11:30 pm. Tickets: $46.00 and $36.00 purchased at the Civic Center Mon-Fri Noon-4:30PM or at ticketmaster.]

The first and only time I saw Gordon Lightfoot live was at a college show in Ohio in the mid-70s. It was a seminal moment for me as a music lover. I was surrounded by a group of local folkies who were making their own attempts at writing and covering the great songwriters of the day. These musicians soaked up Dylan, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and delivered their versions of this material to coffeehouse audiences in the area. This was music that said more than the fluffy bubblegum of the 50s and very early 60s. It chronicled events. It told deeper stories of love. It brought issues like injustice to an audience that might never have thought about those thing. And, it wove poetic words together in ways that spoke of intense thought and harder living.

And, it wove poetic words together in ways that spoke of intense thought and harder living.

Though each of my musician friends had a sampling of these covers in their repertoires, depending on their specific styles and their own personal tastes. It was the music of Gordon Lightfoot that always was present in every set by every musician. Everyone knew the words to “Early Morning Rain,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” and the “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Moreover, my musician friends weren’t the only ones covering Lightfoot. His songs have been covered by established artists and emerging ones, often making their careers because of their renderings of his beautiful lyrics.

Born in Ontario, Gordon Lightfoot grew up singing in a local church choir and performing in local operettas and choir extravaganzas. When he was a teenager, he balanced track and field and piano lessons, while teaching himself drums, percussion, and eventually folk guitar, learning a lot of old Stephen Foster tunes. In the late 50s, he moved to California and studied jazz composition and orchestration at Westlake College of Music in Hollywood. Lightfoot’s stint at singing on demo records and writing and recording jingles exposed him to a broader range of music, eventually including Pete Seeger, The Weaver, and Bob Gibson.

When Lightfoot returned to Canada, he sang with The Swinging Eight, a choral and dance group, on a local country TV show. He appeared at local coffeehouses, testing out some of his own material and released a couple of singles in the early 60s that received some airplay in Toronto. Lightfoot started playing folk festivals and began to be recognized as a folksinger. During this time, he re-connected with fellow Canadians Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker.

“They came to see me at a bar that I was playing in,” Gordon Lightfoot said in a recent phone interview. “Ian got interested in ‘Early Morning Rain,’ in particular. Ian and Sylvia were quite instrumental in getting a couple of my songs to Peter, Paul, and Mary. Also, I got a management deal as well. They did a very unselfish thing there.”

Ian and Sylvia recorded not only “Early Morning Rain,” but also “For Lovin’ Me,” both of which began hits for them. Both of those songs were also recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, who took them to a broader audience. One of the other of these two songs eventually were recorded by Elvis Presley, Chad and Jeremy, Judy Collins, The Kingston Trio, Gorge Hamilton IV, and the Johnny Mann Singers. Other artists began to request Gordon Lightfoot songs. Ritchie Havens recorded “I Can’t Make It Anymore, and country music legend Marty Robbins recorded “Ribbon of Darkness” early in his career, and Leroy Van Dyke, who was famous for the country song, “The Auctioneer,” recorded “I’m Not Saying.”

Over the years, more and more artists have recorded these songs, bringing them to new audiences, often another generation. “If You Could Read My Mind” has been recorded by artists you would expect, such as Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell. But it has also been covered by Carroll Baker, The Bells, Johnny Mathis, Liza Minelli, Barbara Streisand and Andy Williams. Instrumental arrangements were done by Herb Alpert, John Arpin, James Last, and The Boss Brass. Unfortunately, I’m sure there’s even a Musak version.

But Lightfoot is generous himself. He recorded “Red Velvet,” a song by Ian Tyson, on his A Painter Passing Through album in 1998. That song was picked up for Tyson’s 2008 tribute album, The Gift: A Tribute to Ian Tyson.

Gordon Lightfoot has earned 15 Juno Awards (the Canadian Grammy) and has been nominated for 5 Grammys here in the US. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2003, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada, that country’s highest civilian award.

Twenty albums and 200 songs later, you would think by Lightfoot’s fifth decade in music, he would be eager to write new material. But this isn’t the path for this remarkable musical pathfinder. “I was under contract with recording companies for 33 years,” he said. “I was under pressure to write and keep recording all of the time…. I actually completed my entire contract with Reprise. I was contracted to do 14 albums from the time I started with them. I had two renewals during my tenure there. Before that, I was with United Artists….Since the pressure came off of being under contract, it’s kind of a relief not to have to live up to that….It’s really impractical to think that we might all of a sudden, as they say, catch a ‘big one.’ It’s not really my desire to do that.”

He does realize that other songwriters are still producing. “There are some who are very good at it: Bob Dylan and Neil Young. They keep putting albums out. The output is absolutely amazing with these guys, and they’re good albums,” he said. “I know them both of course. I envy them a little bit. Boy, that’s a lot of pressure.”

Since 2000, Lightfoot has been concentrating on doing concerts. “We have a wonderful repertoire, and we work with it very well,” he stated. “We’re doing 70 concerts this year.”

Lightfoot’s current tour started in April in Canada and has him and his band dipping into the US for several weeks, including a stint in Fargo on September 30. He will wind up his tour back in Canada at the end of the year.

Touring with him are veteran players, many of which have been with him for years. “Terry Clements is the lead guitarist. He’s been with me for about 30 years,” Lightfoot said. Assisting Clements are Rick Haynes on bass, Mike Heffernan on keys, and Barry Keane on drums and percussion. “They’ve all been with me a long, long time,” Lightfoot added. “I can work a long time with a group of guys like this. They are stellar musicians. I had many other musicians before them, though. I had another brilliant guitar player over a long stretch of time. That was Red Shea. He and John Stockfish were the original group. It was just the three of us on the concert tour. I increased that to five when we got the hit with ‘Sundown’ around1974 because we needed the drums. Now, we needed the drums anyway. We use a backbeat drums, of course. But drums can also involve a lot percussion and special effects.”

Barry Keane is a session drummer who is in much demand in studios in Canada. He and the other musicians also work with other artists and must clear their schedules for a tour with Lightfoot. “We have to plan well ahead and then remain in a state of preparation in the meanwhile,” Lightfoot explained. “We rehearse every week, just to practice the technique and the intonation, which is usually three or four hours on a Friday afternoon, when the week’s business is looked after.”

To produce the quality of that Lightfoot expects during a performance, he not only rehearses but works out. “I go to the gym regularly because I want to store energy and be able to stand up to the pressure of putting out those concerts every night because I really love it,” he admitted. “I like to feel the adrenalin flowing into things because it creates a kind of communication. To feel the way I do when I do the work, the concert, is a wonderful feeling. To have that communication—it’s almost tangible. I’m sure the audience can feel it, too.”

What Lightfoot and his band bring to a concert certainly will be a look at his work through the decades. “We will be dipping into the past all the way from album number one because we still have requests for ‘Early Morning Rain’ and songs like that,” he said. “Then we work all the way through to the very last album we made [Harmony, released in 2004 independently], which we do quite constantly. The rest of the show includes what would be most the familiar and then dip into some of the real good stuff that we use as backup material. We’ve got some good songs throughout the repertoire that I can rotate.” This way Lightfoot puts together two different shows, alternating on consecutive nights. “Each show is in a different order and each night I’m able to rotate perhaps 8 or 9 songs that we didn’t do the night before. Some of the songs, of course, I do every night, like the hit songs: ‘If You Could Read My Mind,’ ‘The Wreck of the Edmonton Fitzgerald,’ Sundown,’ ‘Carefree Highway,’ “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,’ ‘Don Quixote,’ ‘Rainy Day People.’ And the rest of it is the real good stuff that gets me that communication that I’m talking about.”

Yet, the pace is grueling. He is doing 21 shows in 26 days. “I find that to be a challenge,’ he said. “I’m ready, and we’ll be well prepared by the time we hit the Civic Auditorium in Fargo. We played there before many years before.”

Gordon Lightfoot also insisted. “We’ve improved a lot since the time you saw us in the mid-70s. We’ve improved a great deal.”

I have no doubt that Gordon Lightfoot’s appearance in Fargo next week will be polished and all that an old folkie could hope for—and more.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Issues, September 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.