PHOTO COURTESY GORDON LIGHTFOOT
http://www.canadaeast.com/ce2/docroo...ticleID=140362
Over more than 40 years and 20 albums, Gordon Lightfoot has consistently captured Canada's spirit, musical and otherwise.
From cradle to middle age
Music Canadian treasure Gordon Lightfoot makes first New Brunswick visit in more than a decade.
The first grown-up song I remember hearing as a child was Gordon Lightfoot's Early Morning Rain. It was from his first record - simply titled, Lightfoot! - also the first album cover I recall laying around the house. My music-loving parents had hundreds of albums, but this one was always out, propped against the sofa-sized Silvertone console stereo in the living room.
It had a golden brown background and bright green lettering. The young, handsome man on the front wore his light brown hair slicked back. He leaned stiffly in a director's chair, boots crossed in front of outstretched legs, holding a 6-string Martin guitar in his lap, glancing away from the camera. He looked deliberate, detached, intense, cool.
Gordon Lightfoot held a place of prominence in our house. His folk songs, so many of them instant classics, were my cradle music, the soundtrack to my earliest years. My parents, and especially my father, adored him from that first album; a mono, 14-song recording that came out in 1966, the year before I was born. My dad, who played guitar, learned all of Lightfoot's songs by ear and strummed and sang them to me when other toddlers were being nursery-rhymed to sleep.
Other albums followed swiftly to join the stack by the stereo - The Way I Feel, Did She Mention My Name and an enduring favourite, Sunday Concert, a live recording of a 1969 show at Toronto's historic Massey Hall, where Lightfoot performed every March, often as many as 10 nights. Each year, my mother and father would head to at least one and often several of those shows. Two songs from those records, Black Day in July, about the calamitous 1967 Detroit riots, and Ballad of Yarmouth Castle, about a cruise ship that caught fire and sank off Miami in 1965, killing 90 of its 552 passengers and crew, stuck with me as a child. Emotional, moody and pensive, they excited and frightened me.
Along with Bob Dylan, and my mother's favourites - Johnny Mathis and Burt Bacharach, and the Kingston Trio and Nat King Cole - music was constantly playing in our house. But it was Lightfoot who ruled the stereo, and later, the cassette deck in our blue Volkswagen van, even as he was beginning to capture and define this country's spirit, musical and otherwise, something he has done consistently over more than 40 years and 20 albums.
Now 68 years old, Canada's treasured troubadour is on a lengthy tour that began in January and won't wind up until September.
Lightfoot has not performed in the Maritimes for more than a decade; a frightening and near-fatal health crisis in 2002 cancelled a scheduled tour. An aneurysm exploded in his stomach before a show in his Ontario hometown of Orillia, putting him in a coma for six weeks. A road warrior used to performing about 60 concerts a year, the singer was sidelined for 20 months and endured three operations, including one on his larynx. Fans, and Lightfoot himself, wondered if he would ever set foot on stage again. He spent months undergoing speech therapy, and working on the post-production of his most recent album, Harmony, for which the vocal tracks had already been laid down and was finally released in 2004.
"For the first seven or eight months I wondered if I would be able to make a comeback," he said last week from his home in Toronto. "I was thinking about things and working ahead, wondering if I'd be able to go ahead with (performing). But it's just a matter of having a passion for the sport. You enjoy it so much you want to continue doing it. Having the album to work on kept my mind off my condition. It was good incentive to keep going.
"The biggest problem was getting the breath in and getting out the longer phrases, but I knew it would come back. The moment of truth was when I got out on stage and started rehearsing."
SUBMITTED BY SHAWNA RICHER Gordon Lightfoot has transcended mere music; he has shaped the country's sense of romance with songs such as Canadian Railroad Trilogy and Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and mapped its emotional fabric in ones such as Steel Rail Blues and Love and Maple Syrup. He was awarded the Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003, the country's highest honour. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986 by his longtime friend and mentor Bob Dylan, who recorded a version of Early Morning Rain and said of his Canadian contemporary: "Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever."
Lightfoot had written 35 songs in the early '60s but it wasn't until he met Dylan in New York through their shared management company that he began to hit his stride.
"Dylan taught me to write lyrics," he said. "I'd written all these songs but none of them were very good. Next thing I knew I was writing Early Morning Rain and that was the first one that was any good. It wasn't until I was influenced by Dylan and I'd gotten to talk to him that came out."
Lightfoot has written more than 250 songs; when organizing a tour he settles on 30 or 40 from which he will choose 26 for a performance.
"It requires quite a bit of thought," he says. "You do ones you don't necessarily get to from one show to the next, and you leave in the ones you know really work well and that people expect to hear. But really, I enjoy every one. I love them all."
He continues to exercise regularly, four times a week for nearly two hours at a gym near his home, and on tour is tireless, taking few nights off, preferring to play as many consecutive shows as possible. He rehearses obsessively, even after so many decades of playing with the same veteran band; lead guitarist Terry Clements and bassist Rick Haynes have been with him nearly four decades. Lightfoot's attention to detail and arrangement translates to crisp, pitch-perfect performances instrumentally, even as his baritone is not as weighty as it once was.
But his songs endure, especially the earlier ones. Lightfoot has written some of the most direct, honest and intimate relationship songs ever recorded, from Sundown to Cold Hands From New York to Carefree Highway and If You Could Read My Mind.
"It's the experience of having been there so many times," he says of his well-publicized and often troubled love life. "It's been a roller-coaster ride at times, and I'm writing songs about love gained and love lost and I've had it going both ways. There's nothing middle of the road with me."
Lightfoot, who drank heavily until he quit cold turkey in the early '80s but always approached songwriting with the precision and craftsmanship of a boat-builder, acknowledged he wrote many of his best tunes while he was drinking.
"Alcohol was the fuel," he says. "When I gave it up most everything was behind me anyway. I wrote a few good things after that, but only three albums. Alcohol was a tool but it had to go.
"I'm very practical about songwriting. I like to keep up a tight schedule. I'm well organized. I keep my daily journal and I write three lines, sometimes six."
He isn't eager to take on the task of writing another album, though thinks he has one in him.
"It would take me four or five years to write another record," he says. "I don't want to have that hanging over me anymore."
His songs have been covered by everyone from Dylan to Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash and the Cowboy Junkies. His favourites? Those by Peter, Paul and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, and Elvis. He is flattered each time someone decides to sing his songs; attestation he has made an lasting impression.
"My ability to continue is what I'm proudest of," he says. "It takes discipline and I've seen that through the ups and downs of it.
"I'm a lesson in the work ethic. I keep telling people they have to start writing themselves a catalogue and don't waste time; write songs, write flat out. If you can't do it, it's real tough. You have to have a feel for it."
Lightfoot's feel is a sixth sense, a gift. His songs shaped my earliest memories and sparked a love of lyrics and melodies and poetry. He led me to Neil Young and Jackson Browne, deep into Dylan and to my truest musical love, Bruce Springsteen. Thanks, Gordon. And thank you, Dad.
[ May 11, 2007, 06:04: Message edited by: Jesse-Joe. ]