1971: Philadelphia Academy of Music
I knew the name, but I was first lured by the venue, one of the best places to hear music in North America. When the show began–always late in those days–the house lights dimmed and a circle of light spilled onto center stage. Gordon Lightfoot stood in its midst and began to strum his 12-string. Then came a rolling baritone that seemed to sweep in from the Canadian prairie. Thirty seconds into “Early Morning Rain” I knew what I had to do next.
When I returned to my South Central Pennsylvania home, I drove to a music store in Hagerstown, Maryland, to buy an acoustic guitar. I figured I’d better start with six strings, a good choice as I didn’t know an Am from an auxiliary verb. I picked up a cheap piece of junk a step up from a Sears Silvertone and the man at the counter refused to sell it to me. He handed me an Epiphone and said, “This is more money, but if you buy that other guitar you’ll be back in two weeks. This one will last you.” He was right. I still own that old Epiphone, though I seldom play it anymore. But you can guess what song I played after I learned three chords.
Imagine how I felt when I learned, on May 1, that Lightfoot had passed away at the age of 84. People often ask me to name my favorite musician. That’s a dumb question as tastes change over time and I’ve run through dozens of “favorites.” There are none, though, whose impact on me has been as profound as Gordon Lightfoot. Bob Dylan once said he never heard a bad Gordon Lightfoot song. I could probably name a few, but I know what he meant. I have a binder full of Lightfoot songs I play that keeps getting thicker, though my hands and voice are shot.
A lot of them aren’t hard to play because Lightfoot was always about the song, not the performance. He once told me that almost everything he did was capoed so he could re-use the same chord shapes. That’s not entirely true, but if you hear anything really complex on one of his songs, it’s probably either Rod Shea or Terry Clement you’re hearing. Lightfoot was a storyteller, not a showman.
He is probably best known for epic songs such as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” the latter of which was once (and might still be) part of the soundtrack for a documentary film on Canada’s first transcontinental railroad shown at the Museum of Civilization on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River across from Parliament. Ironically, though, a lot of his very best were marked by concision. Listen to “I Heard You Talking In Your Sleep,” which lays out a world of pain in just two short verses. Or “River of Darkness,” which Marty Robbins covered and brought Lightfoot to public attention. “The way I Feel’ was the first song I ever finger-picked. Why? Just 16 lines–four of which are repeats–and two chords (Dm/Am7).
He has been called a pop star and a folk singer. True enough, but he was also an acoustic country throwback to the days in which country music wasn’t tarted up with pretense and bullshit. If “Second Cup of Coffee” and “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder” aren’t country songs, no one is yet to write one. The man sang about roadside diners, snow falling on windowsills, hitch-hiking, ice on the river, Chinook winds, the Rockies, and the bottle on the table. Yeah, country.
He tried the Greenwich Village scene and a stint in La-La Land, but they didn’t take. He went back to Ontario and spent most of his life no further from his home in Orillia than Toronto, 90 minutes to the south. On “Highway Songs” he sang: …headin’ north across that line/Is the only time I’m flyin’. Because he stuck, unlike Canadian-born stalwarts like Drake, April Lavigne, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot became a symbol of Canadian pride. I was in a B & B in Ottawa just before COVID and got into a music discussion one morning and talked about how Lightfoot almost died of an aneurysm. When I mentioned that I had interviewed him twice, the room hushed: “You interviewed Gord!?” I got so much cred I didn’t have the heart to tell them I only earned $50 a pop from those interviews.
He was no saint. Gord married thrice and freely admitted he was a heartless Lothario in his youth. Listen to “I’m Not Sayin’” or “For Lovin’ Me.” They’re catchy and brutally honest, but are definitely bad boy fantasies. You sometimes wonder how they came from the pen of the same guy who wrote the gorgeous “Song For a Winter’s Night” or the regret-filled “If I Could read Your Mind,” both of which vie for the status of my all-time favorite Lightfoot composition.
I could go on and on about Gordon Lightfoot, but I’ll just say that the news of his death hit me like a line from “one of his songs: I’ll be alright/I’ll be alright if I don’t have to smile.
Rob Weir
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