Gordon Lightfoot Forums - on "Marie Christine"

FOUND it! I was checking web pages instead of group discussions. On Google, enter "Gordon Lightfoot" +Brita and the last entry is the [long] article (see below). Part 2, referred to at the end, is NOT on the internet, that I've found.
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This cover story from MacLean's magazine of September, 1968, gives us a
fascinating glimpse into the Ontario portion of one of Lightfoot's annual
cross-Canada tours he used to conduct by station wagon in the late 60's.
As well, in part 2, we get an inside peek at Lightfoot's 1968 appearance at
the Cellar Door in Washington, DC.
The article was written by Marjorie Harris.

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The trip north from Tornto with Gordon Lightfoot was an Arcadian dream:
there was Lightfoot, a beautiful man, driving the car through the special
luminous twilight that comes to Ontario in May, over roads that undulated
the land, just as the steam rose off the black earth like smoke. The funny
Victorian-Gothic farmhouses and villages perched inact on the horizon,
temporarily immune from the urban sprawl. This was, in fact, Gordon
Lightfoot country. He came from Orillia, 40 miles northeast of the little
town of Alliston where we were heading that night for a concert in the
high school gymnasium.

Alliston's houses belong to the 19th century, but the Frederick Banting
Memorial high school is aggressively 20th century - a sterile saltbox. It
was imbued with a different spirit that night, however. Gordon Lightfoot
was the first genuine star to play the town in years and every one of the
2000 folding chairs in the cavernous gym had been sold. The crowd that
started lining up at eight o'clock was mostly under 25, uniformly clean-cut,
scrubbed and innocent-looking. No hippies here - no sideburns or
turtlenecks, no weird clothes or wild makeup. There were knots of newly wed
tennagers, pregnant young girls, talking about finishing grade 13, about
babies, about drinking Southern Comfort and Coke and getting very sick, and
about Lightfoot: "He's pretty big, you know."

Gordon Lightfoot is pretty big indeed. He's 29 and he's had more songs
recorded by other artists in the past five years than any songwriter in
North America except Bob Dylan. For Loving Me, one of his earliest songs,
has been recorded by more than 100 artists. His albums sell phenomenally
well in Canada. His second album, The Way I Feel, has sold more than 125,000
copies and won him a gold record. He went from singing in a bar to filling
Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre in a matter of months, strictly on the
hits other people had made by recording his songs. He composed honest tunes
with an astonishing variety of textures. His lyrics are straightforward and
touching, without obscurantisn or flatulent philosophy.

At precisely nine o'clock, John Stockfish, electric bass, sporting a
pre-Elvis pompadour, and Red Shea, acoustic guitar, looking like a shambling
Paul Newman, took their places on the vast naked stage. Then, in a blizzard
of buckskins, Lightfoot was front and centre singing For Loving Me.

The buckskin jacket, with its rows of fringes, was a surprise, a holdover
from his early Country-and-Lightfoot days. The rest was hip: bell-bottom
jeans, brightly colored shirt with a California style scarf loosely knotted
at the throat. The soft curling blonde hair gave him the appearance of a
monir Greek god. He's paler and heavier than your average Greek god, but
sexy in a vulnerable kind of way. The crowd loved him. They whistled and
stamped their feet at every song, building up an empathetic rhythm as he
sang.

The star quality was all there: the presence, the pacing, the confident
patter, even corny jokes. The kids dug whatever he said. "A few weeks ago I
was in the Princess Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I met a girl named Marie
Christine Dupuis. She couldn't speak English, and being a Canadian I
couldn't speak word of French. We spent five lovely hours together. This
song is about a woman compared to a ship. It is definately ahead of its
time." Then he gave his Dick Martin-type laugh.

Lightfoot moved into Black Day In July. He wrote it just after the Detroit
riots last year. It's solid musical journalism, documenting America without
putting it down. His sense of that violent is graphic. The audience shouted
their approval. "I wish I had some answers," he replied.

Between sets, he relaxed by reminiscing about his early career. He sat with
his leg slung over the arm of a chair, his long elegant fingers fiddling
with his ring. "Alliston's a lot like Orillia physically - a small, pretty
town. I'm not sure what I feel about Orillia - that was 11 years ago and I
got out. When I first went to Toronto I was real hick. I was a clerk in a
bank for $40 a week - some financier. I lived with another guy from Orillia
in a boarding house in the east end."

Unlike many folk singers and young composers who can think up tunes and
lyrics but have to get someone else to transpose them, Lightfoot is the
complete composer. He's come the whole disciplined route: singing and
drumming in the high school band, operettas, studying piano, forming his own
singing groups and bands; a barbershop quartet that almost won a national
championship until the bass quit and the group collapsed. When he graduated
from high school in 1957, he studied at the Westlake School of Modern Music
in Los Angeles to polish all his techniques. Now he can identify any note
played and can sight-sing.

He jogged back onto the stage and started laying his very newest song on the
Young Ones, as he calls his fans. "Now this is really deep," he said. "It
took me six years to put it into words. It's about a first trip to New York
- it's called Cold Hands From New York."

After the show was over, the crowd dispersed reluctantly. About 30 girls
waited for autographs. Through the middle of them strode a tall, heavily
built girl in an orange dress. It was the ultimate groupie, or group
follower. Lynn Ackerman. She is the most devoted and obsessive of all
Lightfoot's fans. "It doesn't matter where we play," Lightfoot explained,
"if it's in Sudbury or New York, she'll show up." It's hard to understand
why. She has almost no contact with him, although he occasionally shouts
from the stage, "Is Lynn out there?" Nothing is quite as sad as Lynn
watching Lightfoot zap off out of the parking lot. I wondered how she'd get
back. "By bus, or hooking a ride with someone," Lightfoot said. "I don't
know, I can't get myself involved in her bag."

We roared along the highway drawn by the pospect of greasy chips - the first
food anybody had had since noon. "Man, I worked bars for two years after I
learned how to play guitar. I mean, when the Village Corner Folk Club thing
was happening for Ian and Sylvia, all I could pick was four-string axe - the
simplest there is. I was writing all the time and had started singing some
of my own songs. The first time I really broke out with something was at the
Toronto Teachers College in 1964. Steele's Tavern, where I was playing, let
me off for an hour. The thing at the Teachers College was all me. I went
over well and I knew it. It did something to me." It did enough to give him
confidence in his own songs, and he incorporated them into his repetoire.
One night a few months later, Ian Tyson came into Steele's with John Court,
Albert Grossman's partner and record producer. Tyson liked Lightfoot's
songs and later recorded several; Grossman, "the" New York agent for folk
and pop singers, signed Lightfoot. That did it. Calls for concerts started
coming in. "Peter, Paul and Mary did For Loving Me and they were on my
bandwagon for months. They'd shout my name out at concerts."

The next day, Lightfoot was faced with two shows in Cobourg, Ontario. In
spite of fatigue and indifestion from last-night's hamburgers, he headed out
to visit some old friends between shows. Three girls were waiting 50 yards
from his 1967 Ford sation wagon as he was leaving the school. "Don't be shy,
girls. It's okay, I'll sign. They were all carrying his latest album, Did
She Mention My Name. They giggled. One girl held out her hand to be signed.
"No way," he said, and signed the album: "Best wishes from Gordon
Lightfoot."

In drizzling rain we pulled up in front of a ranch-style bungalow huddled
uncomfortably between some elegant old, brick Victorian houses. The vast
living room of the house was covered in about a quarter of an acre of beige
carpet. Lightfoot politely removed his pointy cowboy boots. Everyone
followed his example, to the host's astonishment. We sat down to tiny
sandwiches and a drink. "We've followed Gord's career closely for 10 years,"
the host said. "When we realized Gord was in the chorus singing and dancing
on Country Hoedown, 18 of us got together and sent a petition to the CBC
demanding that they give Lightfoot a chance to sing by himself. All they did
was send back a picture of King Gannam, the star of the show."

"When I started out on Country Hoedown," Lightfoot recounted, "the producer
said, 'You're a clumsy son of a bitch, but you've got potential.' I did
every one of those 250 shows terrified that I'd forget my lines or the dance
steps."

We left the house at 6:30. Lightfoot, Shea and Stockfish needed time to tune
up for the evening performance - a holy, private ritual for musicians. The
dressing area for the band was in the school's music room. The principal of
the school came in to meet Lightfoot. He was a tall, quiet man whose eyes
popped when he saw the band's equipment strewn all over his tidy music room.
Introductions were started but Red Shea, who acts as Lightfoot's buffer
against the outside world, broke in and pushed Gordon into a small anteroom
where they were tuning up. Twenty minutes later he emaerged apologetically,
did his polite thing and signed autographs.

The hall was filled to capacity: 1,024 tickets at $2.50 and $3.50 each had
been sold. One man in the back row couldn't believe what had happened to
him: seven dollars for two people to sit 1,000 seats from the stage!

Lightfoot got thunderous applause when he ran on stage and swung into For
Loving Me. The pacing of this show was faster than the afternoon and the
night before. An electric quality was building up all during the show. The
crowd swayed in time with his music, they responded to every movement of his
body and every song he sang. Lightfoot was digging it - he kept nodding
affirmatively and smiling at Shea and Stockfish. At one point he said,
"We're really together tonight. Lord, let it stay like this."

Peter Bryson, the student organizer of the concert, had seen the Gordon
Lightfoot TV special last September. Undeterred by skeptical friends, he
approached Albert Grossman and got a signed contract back by the end of
February. When Lightfoot's third album was released in April, more than 100
copies were sold in each Cobourg record store the first day.

"I don't know if he realizes this, but he has a different rhythm," Bryson
said. "I play guitar and try to copy him, but I can't. I listen to the song
first, then the words. He puts something up against me, and I'd like to get
around it and see what the real thing is for myself." To Peter Bryson and
most very young people, Lightfoot's songs about love are just a story. But
the songs about Canada, and the documents, are different. "Take something
like the Canadian Railroad Trilogy," Bryson explained. "It makes you want to
go across Canada and have this song in your mind as you travel. I'm proud
he's a Canadian. I'm proud a famous folk singer sings about Canada."

The evolution of Lightfoot's lyrics has been from very simple, charming
songs like The Way I Feel; to more complex historical songs like the
Canadian Railroad Trilogy. This remarkable song has the quality of Francis
Parkman's histories of Canada. You can feel how empty and lonely it was - no
wisp of smoke rose over those incredible forests. His recent songs are
trickier, psychologically and symbolically. The Gypsy, written earlier this
year, is closer to the drug-oriented metaphors of Bob Dylan.

Barnstorming is an exhausting way to pay the bills. "You have to travel with
your own PA system and expect the worse about lights. Small town promoters
don't realize you can get up there with the wrong lights, bad sound and
make an ass of yourself in front of 1,000 people."

In Hamilton the following day, the seating arrangement was bad, the lights
were terrible and the promoter wanted Lightfoot to cut the aftyernoon show
short. "I can't do that, man," Lightfoot shot back. "They've paid good money
for a Lightfoot show and that's what they'll get - a complete show, and a
good one." He was right. It was a good one.

When the pressures of perfectionism and performing dry him up aesthetically,
Lightfoot takes off for England. It started in 1963, when he took his
Swedish bride Brita and spent the summer in London. He'd suffered a fearful,
arid period in his writing for almost two years. Before that songs had been
pouring out of him. Some were good, and some, like Two Kids From Cabbagetown
were awful. Through a fast-talking agent he got on British television with a
show called Rancho Vegas, fearturing live horses and Rodgers-and-Hart early
Americana. Even though the show was a seedy affair and he felt numbed by it,
Lightfoot wrote 30 songs. During a more recent fallow period, he went to
England and rode around in train compartments by himself. Sicteen new songs
came to him swiftly and he started writing poetry as well. Perhaps England
frees him from his small town background and the dominating Canadian
landscape. Now he's articulating urban fear and violence and the enormous
burden of Canadian history.

[This message has been edited by Auburn Annie (edited April 10, 2003).]

Thanks, Annie!

Pt 2 was in the alt.music.lightfoot Google archives (also posted there by Wayne Francis in 1996):

Here is part 2 which covers a stint at Washington DC's Cellar Door.

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The following day the group flew to Washington, DC to open for a week at the
Cellar Door Club. It was a relief after barnstorming. A gig in a club means
that the performer isn't being eaten alive by all thye fiddly details of
being on the road. They stayed at a dull-looking motel painted nursery
school colors. It had one great virtue for Lightfoot: it was near the
airport. He's obsessed by planes. He kept flashing out of his room into the
rain, taking movies of them with his Contax camera complete with telephoto
lens. "They have real magic. I've gotten past the point of thinking about
the people on board. All I think of is the pure magic of that bird and the
sound it makes." He picked out the different notes a jet makes. "There's a
D," he said, as a big jet disappeared into the sky.

The Washington week turned out to be an enormous success. The club was
filled every night in spite of racial tension, the Poor People's March, a
transit strike and bad business all over town. "The first night, I went
through five songs without saying anything and I told the crowd, 'You know
it's good, don't you?' and they've been coming back ever since."

At 7:30 there was a tour show: students from out of town get a dinner and a
show for the price of a ticket. These kids were from Detroit and to their
mutual astonishment they'd never heard of Lightfoot. He played it cool until
he came to Black Day In July. "This is a song about your city. I'm sorry it
has to be this way." There was an awkward pause when he finished and then
they let loose with their most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

One kid yelled, "Who wrote that?" "I did," said Lightfoot. "These are all my
songs." "Did you record that one?" "Yes I did," he replied, warming up to
one of his hobbyhorses. "But CKLW in Windsor won't play it. It's being
played on FM markets, but the top-40 stations in the States won't play it. I
don't blame them. They're not ready for that sort of thing. They've got
their ratings to think about."

His distress about this situation is kept hidden most of the time. But CKLW
is another matter. Later, as he stabbed at a steak sandwich, he said, "It's
number one in Detroit and it's the Canadian station. It's the only place in
Canada to break a record in the US. I'm not asking for hype. I've
accommodated myself, played their clubs, their hops - and nothing. I'm
canadian, man, and they won't even listen to me." Almost everyone has had a
hit out of Lightfoot but Lightfoot himself.

But his bitterness disappeared when he got on to his own songwriting and
Canadian history. Don Harron, writer of this year's Canadian National
Exhibition grandstand show in Toronto, wanted Lightfoot to perform in it.
"It's not the right thing for me to do," Lightfoot said. "Mine's very
simple, man - all I do is go and sing my songs. I don't want to be part of a
production." So Harron asked him to write a song for Catherine McKinnon and
lent him books on Louis Riel. The books have completely captured Lightfoot's
imagination. He's not trying to write a document of the period, but get a
feeling for it. "A song has to have a point of view, a philosophy to hold it
together. I get about 100 songs a year sent to me by amateurs. But they
don't have a point of view. For instance, I don't write anything on the
road. I make a few notes, maybe. I've got to feel it first, then I know what
to write."

The nine o'clock show, as did all their shows, started precisely on time. I
sat with a couple of girls, typical of that audience, who said, "We know
more about his songs than we do about him or his singing."

John Stockfish and Red Shea walked on in their super-straight clothes, and
took their positions. Lightfoot sat on the stairs, holding his axe, waiting
for his introduction. In a burst of energy, he leaped from the stairs,
bounded onto the stage and was into the second bar of I'm Not Saying before
the applause caught up with him. He smiled winningly into the smoky
blackness and introduced the next two songs with, "Here's a couple of old
chestnuts for you" - Ribbon Of Darkness and Spin, Spin. He sings these old
songs well, but there's an irony in his performance of them. They lack the
passion, his own performing passion, that he projects into his newest songs.
The old ones seem to merely evoke pleasant memories.

He sang Marie Christine and talked about his trip to England. Then into
Early Morning Rain. The crowd mellowed. He invested the song with all the
love he has for planes. The girls were adoring him. John Stockfish and Red
Shea got fixed attention, too, almost as though it was too much for some
girls to lust after the king, so they'd settle for a prince. Don't Beat Me
Down. He broke into a sweat. The curls hung in damp tendrils around his face
giving him the sweetly innocent look of an art nouveau drawing. The blue
spotlight bounced off John's bass and, as he moved it, the bass became
magical, completely disconnected from the hot smoky club atmosphere. Steel
Rail Blues and his patter became more a stream of associations rather than
one of his set pieces. He felt close to his audience. "Now I'll get off here
so we can get back for an encore."

When he finished the set, we went upstairs to the manager's office to cool
off. We talked about the poetry he'd been writing in England. "In some cases
he spends less time writing a poem than he does his tunes," Shea said.
"Well, songs take infinitely more time," Lightfoot chipped in. "After
writing 135 songs, then it seems pretty easy to sit down and crank out 40
poems. If you can put poetry into the songs, that's where it's really at.
Bob Dylan has it. I'm aware I do it."

We went back downstairs to mingle. We sat down at a table and one of the
very cool, self-possessed girls sitting there looked him straight in the eye
in her American way and asked, "Are you an Indian?" "No, why?" "Well, with
a name like yours and coming from Canada. I assumed you would be."

At this, he started asking them questions and drew them out without saying
much about himself at all. Eventually he went back upstairs to tune.
Lightfoot and Shea sat on chairs facing each other. Lightfoot banged a small
tuning fork against the desk and put it to his guitar. "This baby sounds
sick," he said. They found sympathetic chords in the guitars and picked away
at them, occasionally coming up with an old song. They talked, never
finishing a sentence. Single words sent them off into paroxysms of laughter.
They were very effectively closing themselves off. People came and left,
shuffling with embarrassment, interlopers in this private world. Stockfish
sat in a corner, dreamily leaning on his axe until they were ready for him.
The outsider who stayed sat with a fixed smile and tried not to feel lonely.

In a storm of energy they ran back to the stage at 11:30. Right into I'm Not
Saying: Lightfoot dipped his head and guitar in acknowledgement of the
applause. He poured charm past the pale-blue spotlight into the blackness.
He moved into Walls, his eyes closed, he started enjoying the warmth of the
crowd and the pleasures of performing. He'd slide to one side during a solo
lick by Shea or Stockfish and smile affectionately at Shea as they talked to
each other through their axes. Stockfish had said earlier, "We watch Gord
all the time. He could change his mind any second. We know what he's
thinking when he's singing. We know when he's going to goof, like if his
mind wanders we go with him and then it doesn't seem like a mistake. We are
very professional."

The light switched to a soft red, and Lightfoot's features seemed more
sculptural than ever. Go Go Round: "People have to get used to me," he's
said. "They don't get my songs the first time they hear them. They may have
to hear then three or four times and they know it's good. I may not be
recognized until after I'm gone - in a mass sense, I mean."

The crowd at the Cellar Door was recognizing him right now. Black Day In
July drew the longest applause. The show took a dramatic rise in intensity
at this point. He came on very strong, milking every scene in the song for
its terrible consequence.

Does Your Mother Know: He started to sweat slightly. The sensuality of his
performing held the audience completely still. Nobody bothered to touch
their drinks. He leaned back, straining, pushing the words out, working his
jaw slightly. It was impossible for any female not to love him a little bit.

Cold Hands From New York: Sweat was running like tears down his face. "It's
the listening quality that gets through to me up there. I can almost touch
it."

Then, Bitter Green. He stared into the blackness, waiting for the intense
lonliness of this new song to settle on the audience, to make the Young Ones
moodily introspective. It all came together meltingly; the mikes, his voice,
the instruments. The audience could feel every emotion he sang about, see it
in his face. The emotional level just reached the drowning point when he
started into one of his novelty songs. The audience twitched and laughed
nervously in reaction. He'd brought them down too fast. They applauded for a
long time and he started an encore to the show without moving from the
stage. He turned to Shea: "I think you know what I want to do." They started
Rosanna together, played 10 bars. Then Lightfoot lifted his guitar over his
head. "Cut it, cut it. It's not working." Then he switched into Mountains
and Maryann. He put them right back up there - traveling.

Dawn was trying to break through the rain when I finally left the club. I
hung around because it was too hard to leave the source of that much
excitement. But there was a plane to catch and all the Scotch of the long
evening was catching up with my head. I went out to the airport alone and
never felt closer to a Lightfoot tune in my life. He knows what it's about.

"In the early morning rain..."