Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Globe and Mail -2 articles:Sept.25-03

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For lovin' him

Top Canadian artists sing the praises of Gordon Lightfoot to PETER FENIAK and pay tribute to the singer-songwriter extraordinaire on the newly released CD Beautiful

By PETER FENIAK
Special to The Globe and Mail
Thursday, September 25, 2003 - Page R1

Gordon Lightfoot's sudden illness bred a hundred rumours. And clearly he's been missed. Cheering was loud and long for him last week as he made a surprise appearance in a Toronto club at the preview party for a CD called Beautiful, which features Lightfoot classics by top Canadian artists. Absent for more than a year, the master songwriter from Orillia, Ont., re-emerged to say thanks to his fellow performers. Interest in the album has surged, and Beautiful has been rush-released this week, two weeks ahead of the planned Oct. 7 date.

Conversations with Canadian musicians leave no doubt where they place him. For Rob Baker of the Tragically Hip, Lightfoot's on Olympus.

"He's definitely breathing the rarefied air," says the Kingston guitarist. "He sets the template for Canadian musical artists."

"People write hits," says Margo Timmins, Cowboy Junkies' vocalist, "and they're hits for a period of time. But to have that last for 30, 40 years and on, to have gone into the consciousness of so many people -- that's a whole other level."

Or, as Quartette's Gwen Swick put it at the preview party: "You just love those songs."

Beautiful sparkles with new takes on Lightfoot -- from Cowboy Junkies' moody, driving The Way I Feel to Bruce Cockburn's exquisitely mournful Ribbon of Darkness. Blue Rodeo's jaunty Go Go Round is a confection from the go-go years; Drifters is a lovely rendition of later Lightfoot by Ron Sexsmith.

The 15 cuts touch only part of Lightfoot's output. Unlike Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley, none of these artists took a run at Early Morning Rain. Still, Beautiful's songs shine as a timely reminder of a brilliant career.

"He's been an overriding influence on so many Canadian writers," says Colin Linden from Nashville, the CD's co-executive producer, "a kind of presence that's all-encompassing."

His presence has been in doubt since the summer of 2002. On Sept. 7 that year, Lightfoot collapsed in his dressing room before a hometown benefit at Orillia's Opera House. He was airlifted to McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton and underwent emergency surgery for internal bleeding -- from an artery in his abdomen. It was near Halloween before he regained full consciousness. Lightfoot walked out of hospital in December. But in the months since, rumours have grown that he is far more ill than first believed. He has undergone a further operation and another is imminent.

Though the Beautiful tribute CD was in the works long before his illness, its completion represents a heartfelt get-well card. Canadians coast-to-coast-to-coast share the sentiment, including thousands still holding tickets for Lightfoot shows, indefinitely postponed. Using prerecorded vocals, he is completing a new album. But pending further surgery, the distinctive Lightfoot voice is stilled. "My abdomen is decimated. I can't hold a note for more than three seconds," he recently told a reporter for his hometown Orillia Packet and Times (the only interview he's given on his health).

A crucial operation will attempt to reconstruct abdominal muscles using tissue from the thigh. "If that works," he said, "I might be able to sing again." That would be a year away at best. And he might not walk on stage again.

"I'm counting on him coming back. I want to see him at Massey Hall," says the Hip's Baker. "That's been a dream of mine."

"Once Gordon decided he was a songwriter, he got his teeth into it and just kept going," Sylvia Tyson reminisced last week, when her group Quartette's pristine Song for a Winter's Night was previewed in Toronto. "We [former folk duo Ian & Sylvia] recorded Early Morning Rain, and then Albert Grossman gave it to Peter, Paul and Mary. They pretty much did our version and made it a hit." Then they did it again with Lightfoot's caustic For Lovin' Me.

Cockburn smiles, remembering the dramatic arrival of Lightfoot as a musical force in the mid-sixties: "I was still playing in rock bands in Ottawa when he first appeared. He was kind of a shock. Here was a guy from Canada doing songs that spoke to Canada so clearly. And they were good songs, he sang well, his guitar-playing was more or less state of the art for the time.

"It was a pretty impressive thing."

Last week at the Toronto preview party, as Winnipeg-based James Keelaghan, ("trying hard to keep the rhythm and not think about the fact that the Man was there") performed Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Lightfoot leaned back in the dark, closed his eyes and listened intently to his classic song. As Kingston folksinger Aengus Finnan introduced his tribute with a story of how he travelled to Halifax to see the famous singer-songwriter and hung out backstage just to meet him, the reclusive Lightfoot, a trim figure in a black leather bomber, rose out of the shadows and walked to the spotlight to shake the young man's hand.

You could read Gordon Lightfoot's mind this time. He was thankful for the tribute. Thankful to be there.

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Lightfoot and Bolduc among first inductees

By GUY DIXON
Thursday, September 25, 2003 - Page R1

Gordon Lightfoot, along with his song If You Could Read My Mind, was among the first round of inductees into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame yesterday -- an honour conferred not just because of the popularity of certain composers and their songs, but for their importance to the country's identity.

"When we were looking for our first inductee for the modern era -- that is, from 1956 to 1978 -- everything was based on the body of work," said Jody Scotchmer, executive director of the hall of fame.

"We wanted to choose someone truly Canadian. 'He [Lightfoot] embodied all of that. He mapped Canadian history withThe Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and Canadian Railroad Trilogy, and all those great hits. So he was a natural choice," she said.

Lightfoot attended yesterday's ceremony to shake hands with a few well-wishers but looked frail and remained at the back of the room, declining to speak when he was invited to the podium.

He was one of five inductees from different eras of Canadian music, including radio-era performer Madame Édouard Bolduc (née Mary Travers), a central figure for French Canadians during the 1930s.

Her voice danced and skipped from radio speakers and 78 rpm gramophones during the depression era, singing of Québécois life and mores with light melodies that would characteristically run off into nonsensical, dum-dittly-dum refrains.

To modern ears, the songs of "La Bolduc," as she came to be known, can seem hopelessly twee. But to listeners of her time, her ditties about ordinary people and everyday life became, for French Canada, a subtle call to resilience during the Depression. According to the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, her recordings La Cuisinière and La Servante sold 12,000 copies in Quebec -- huge sellers for their time.

Other honorees included Ontario-born Alfred Bryan, already an inductee in the American Songwriters Hall of Fame and a composer of more than 1,000 songs in the early, pioneering years of recording.

One of those songs, which he co-wrote, the beautiful Peg o' My Heart, was among 12 popular tunes inducted into the Canadian hall of fame in their own right.

The other two inductees were Hank Snow, famous for his cowboy and travelling songs, and Quebec chansonnier Félix Leclerc. Both were grouped together in the category of radio-era songwriters, along with Bolduc.

Some of the individually inducted songs included the sober hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus, radio-era songs such as Hank Snow's I'm Moving On and, from the modern era, songs such as Snowbird, Aquarius, Born to Be Wild and Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind.

In the end, the inductees were picked "for their impact on Canadian culture, regional culture and whether they created a genre of music," added Scotchmer, who runs the hall of fame office in Toronto, with one intern in a space shared with the Juno Awards and the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Records.

The hall of fame was founded in 1998 and is owned by the Canadian Music Publishers Association and the Songwriters Association of Canada. Although it doesn't yet have a physical attraction open to the public -- such as the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto -- that's the eventual goal.

First, the organization plans to create a "virtual museum" by the end of next year -- a Web site on which historically important music by Canadians can be researched and listened to, similar to the National Library of Canada's Virtual Gramophone site. (For those who may not have discovered it, Virtual Gramophone at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/gramophone/src/home.htm is a treasure trove of early Canadian music and has an extensive collection of Bolduc's recordings.)

The hall of fame is looking for help from the National Library to create a site that provides not only information on who wrote what, but as Scotchmer put it, a way "to see songwriting mapped against Canadian history."

"There's an incredible list of people we don't know about," she said, "and that's the whole rationale behind the hall of fame, to ensure that these unsung heroes get their recognition because they are the foundation of the industry."