Gordon Lightfoot was the only singer songwriter my father and I shared an appreciation for. He hated Bob Dylan and the girls screaming at the Beatles. He barely tolerated Elvis Presley, my older brother’s favourite. My mother said, “Elvis Presley sings lovely gospel, John.” Ed Sullivan shows were as important in the Hay home as hockey. My first album I bought was Gordon Lightfoot’s The Way I Feel, 1967 along with a Beatles album. The store owner threw in a Dylan 45 for free. I had to get a portable turntable to play them in my room. My freckled friend Garth Robertson’s older sister was dating the man who started the CBC Radio Folk Night Show in Winnipeg in those early years long before Mitch even thought of the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Neil Young might already have been playing in the church basement coffee houses then. Within a year or two I’d hear him playing at that smoke filled folk friendly restaurant on Pembina Highway. A couple of years later I was on the student council executive of Vincent Massey High School and voted we hire the Guess Who for our high school dance. They charged a whopping $500 for the night..
Garth's father was a commercial pilot and Garth, Kirk and I would listen to turn table 33’s and 45 records in their Fort Gary suburban living room when his family was out. Kirk’s mother had plastic on her living room furniture so we didn’t go there. My mom was always home, so Garth’s was the perfect musical hang out. We all took off ours shoes and Garth made sure we didn’t make a mess of any kind or his parents would ground him.
Kirk and I age age 16 attended Lightfoot’s amazing concert in the Winnipeg Auditorium. We were, as we said back then, simply blown away. Blown away. At the end of the concert there was the beautiful gracious older sister introducing her brothers young friends, Kirk and I, to the idol and god like Gordon Lightfoot who twinkling eyed invited us to come with them after for a drink and a bite. We actually thought he was serious. Kirk and I were stumbling over apologies and other commitments making our escape saying we’d never have been able to live down the shame of being turned away as younger than 21 before our idol Gordon Lightfoot.
That album wore out from playing and several more were bought. Jon Cowtan, my first roommate, and fellow summer kitchen staff at YMCA Camp Steven’s played Canadian Railroad Trilogy the extraordinary Canadian song, Gordon wrote in 1967. I was simply impressed that Jon who went on to be a mathematic teacher and IBM programmer could remember all the words. So I set out myself to learn it too and even learned the guitar to play Gordon Lightfoot. His lyrics haunted me. I was a fledgling poet and felt Gordon Lightfoot’s writing was inconceivably perfect. Fortunately for audience’s I didn’t sing and play Gordon Lightfoot on stages much but always had his song books and spent endless nights playing and singing his songs in the privacy of my home. Admittedly I also believe learning and playing “Soflty’ contributed to my youthful experience in the bedroom. Looking back it probably had more to do with the wine.
Dan Donahue introduced us all to Gordon Lightfoot’s Edmund Fitzgerald playing his guitar as Bruce Coburn and singing like Paul McCartney this all time Canadian classic and mariner favourite. People today often hear music first recorded and much later hear a live performance. It wasn’t that way in the Rennaissance of the Rock and Roll era, the forgotten 60’s and memorable 70’s with the folk rock, country rock and jazz rock spins off. Then we heard the music live and bought albums after. Musicians would hear the music on the radio and learn the songs either from each other or wait till they’d written it down as it came on the radio once or twice a 24 hour period. All my early Dylan I heard first from Dan’s older brother, Jim. Today they say they’re playing ‘covers’ but that was just normal back then with a lot of writers like Carole King not performing. When Dan Donahue did a set despite the brilliance of his own song writing on albums like Long Distance Runner, he’d play Edmund Fitzgerald. Eventually I heard Lightfoot’s ‘version’ but liked Dan’s best.
What was amazing at Friday nights concert was how many of Gordon Lightfoot’s songs were hits and played by everyone including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. I remember being in Alabama and hearing Black Day in July. Another time in Wisconsin I heard Sun Down. Travelling as a Canadian on a motorcycle or in my mustang or VW bus I heard Lightfoot and was instantly back in Canada homesick as only a Lightfoot song can make a Canadian. How many times too have I thought ‘You can’t hop a jet plane like you can a freight train’. I’ve actually hopped freight trains but it’s all I can do to explain ‘bumpershing’ to the kids whose idea of adventure is a new game boy. Lightfoot with his songs of love and travel and loss was the epitome of a Canadian man. Stan Rogers was Eastern Canada, Lightfoot was mid west Canada and Tyson was Western Canada. Joni Mitchell and Anne Murray were the women who were the match of any Canadian song writer and they didn’t whine like the Kardashians today. God we were blessed by the music of our era. I wonder if the young people will be able to say the same but then Dad liked Gene Autry.
The next time I heard attended a Gordon Lightfoot concert was at the Morris Manitoba Rodeo. My smart country boy collegue , the amazing Dr. Bob Manness, suggested, “Bill, since you love Gordon Lightfoot, I thought you might like to take call the rodeo weekend so you could take in his concert.” I didn’t mention I was a gullible young man. I volunteered not ever being the country gp during a rodeo like Bob had the previous two years. That weekend I didn’t sleep for three nights, set a half dozen fractures, sutures countless fist fight wounds, treated a few head injuries and reduced every dislocation that a bull or a wild horse could do to a cowboy . I remember loving listening to Gordon Lightfoot as his magnificent voice and fabulous guitar carried through the soft summer night through the windows of the Morris Hospital Emergency where I was masked and gowned and suturing through the whole of his concert. We all sang along to lightfoot favourites like “Pussy Willows Cat Tails” and “Only a Go Go Girl in Love with Someone who doesn’t Care”. The nurses belted out the chorus while cowboy cried over lost loves and lost fist fights.
The last time I saw Gordon Lightfoot was in Vancouver about a decade back, I phoned up my good friend Kirk who’d first seen Lightfoot with me and suggested I’d get us tickets. Lightfoot was incredible and being there with Kirk was especially nostalgic and pleasurable. It was even funnier when we were waiting for the show to begin I saw Kirk turn and in his characteristic way sort of “hit’ on the pretty young woman sitting next to him. As older guys our chests kind of puff up a bit and our voices get deeper and lower and I sensed this happening beside me as Kirk said to the sweet much younger woman, “You like Lightfoot’s music, too.” To this she responded, “Not really, but my mother does and she couldn’t make it so I decided to come.” Kirk’s chest deflated and he turned back to continue conversing with me about how neither of us would have thought Keith Carter would have had so many children and what happened to his South Drive childhood love. And Lightfoot came on with ‘Did she mention my name name just in passing.” We were in Vancouver and both of us were nostalgic for Fort Garry.
When I consulted as a specialist to Port Hardy, North Vancouver Island, I would bring my Martin Guitar to accompany the beautiful young Scottish Canadian social worker, Anne Lindsay who played flute. We practiced , Song for a Winter’s Night "every trip I made with snow falling in the wilderness outside the cabin on on the pines and spruce So many times playing Lightfoot with friends has been so ethereal.
At this concert the standing ovation for “If You Could Read My Mind, Love” was truly amazing when you considered how much arthritis was present that night. Despite my own knees objecting I leapt to my feet to applaud “Beautiful’ and “Ribbon of Darkness”. Having sailed across the north Pacific Ocean solo in winter I was moved to the core to hear Edmund Fitsgerald again. This probably had a lot to do with memories of sailing my boat on Lake Ontario with my brother and his family mere months before he died. He loved Lightfoot too, probably after Elvis, his favourite, sang Steel Rail Blues. I had tears in my eyes with nostalgia and joy with so many songs. Lots of kleenex out around me too. Calls from the audience for songs. Just the name of a Lightfoot song explodes with associations. Song after song being the anthem for a whole country for year after year after year.
I couldn't help reflect that Canadian values for me could be summed up by Gordon Lightfoot and what his songs represented. Hard work, romance, family, love, country, spirituality, nature, identity. Songs of the maritimes, the Great lakes, city lights, the prairies, west coast, railways and planes and lakes and snow and highways. Let me slip away on you. Working people songs by this prodigious hard working wordsmith and troubadour. That's my Canada. Thank you Gordon Lightfoot for celebrating it. Having been reminded of this I'll now be proud to wear the Gordon Lightfoot 150 anniversary Canada t shirt I bought in the lobby. Canada was getting a bit sketchy there before this night.
Thank you Gordon Lightfoot yet again. Thank you Gord was what so many people were shouting when he and his long loyal band bowed farewell. “That’s what you get for loving me.”
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