Davenport article
 

http://qctimes.com/entertainment/mus...0f0575ae0.html

David Burke dburke@qctimes.com

IF YOU GO

Who: Gordon Lightfoot

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 30

Where: Adler Theatre, 136 E. 3rd St., Davenport

How much: $59 and $44

Information: 563-326-8555 or AdlerTheatre.com


Ask 74-year-old Gordon Lightfoot if he entertains the thought of retirement or a farewell tour and he points to a couple of other senior performers.

Willie Nelson, who turns 80 in a few days, and 86-year-old Tony Bennett don't slow down, so why would he?

"There's lots of us still going strong doing this," Lightfoot said with a chuckle from his home in Toronto.

Lightfoot is on the road and stopping Tuesday night at the Adler Theatre in Davenport for the fourth time in the past 20 years. He's making a tour dubbed "50 Years on the Carefree Highway," but admits the lack of truth in advertising.

"I've been touring since 1965, and that's where I started," he said. "I'd done a few things road-wise before that, out promoting records. I didn't really have a band, just a couple of musicians by that point.

"My first working engagement was as an opening act for Oscar Peterson at the Masonic Temple in Detroit. And it was the first time I had worked on a work permit, a work visa for the United States," the Canadian native added. "We've been petitioning (for work permits) ever since. I never needed a green card like a lot of us did in Canada. I didn't wait for that, I just always applied for a work permit."

Despite suggestions by those in the music industry to do otherwise, he's kept his home base in Toronto, where most of his family remains in the vicinity.

"I could have hired a bus and trucked them all to California or something, but I didn't do that," he said.

Lightfoot said he never thought his career as a musician would be a cinch until he'd left the United Artists record label in 1970 and signed on with Warner Bros.

"I made five albums for (United Artists), an album a year, and was doing a lot of writing. I knew at that point that I would probably pursue it realistically," he said. "I had 18 songs written and ready to record by that particular time in 1970. They thought I had a good track record, and I ended up recording 11 albums for them."

Many of the songs he'd written had been covered by other artists by then, and he was looked at as more of a songwriter than singer.

For the 50th anniversary tour, Lightfoot said half the concert will be his "standards," such as "Carefree Highway," "Sundown," "If You Could Read My Mind" and the unlikeliest hit of all, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." The other half will be cuts from his 21 albums, in a rotation for each performance.

"We have (rehearsed) far more songs than we need," he said. "We don't like to not do songs."

Stepping onstage, he said, still holds the same thrill it has for decades.

Since 1982, the same year he quit drinking, he has had a daily exercise regimen shortly before showtime.

"It's kept my lungs working strong," he said. "When I walk onstage, I feel just as strong as I did, maybe stronger than I did then."

Re: Davenport article
 

Char,

Thanks for the post. Erin and I are looking forward to the concert and meeting Gordon and the band again. Like always I'm sure we're going to have a great night, only problem is my sinuses and allergies are really acting up. I will try to take and post some photos and do a setlist/ review. I have some great photos from last year in Peoria that I haven't posted, because I haven't found a good way around the photo size limit. We had a couple of t-shirts made with the 50 Years Poster and added the concert site and date.

Re: Davenport article
 

Yes Kevin and anybody else interested( i.e. excluding disrespectful folk from the Sydney slums!!) the size of image files from multipixel cameras is a problem here. for two reasons
1.The maximium file size of a jpg that can be attached is 500MB
2 if the size of an image exceeds the usual page width of 640 pixels it will be displayed as a reduced image of 640 pixels with an invitation to click it to see the original full sized image.
Fortuneately there are countless free software programs that can resize a jpg , in particular the Open Source GIMP (GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program )
But in fact the humble and somewhat derided Microsoft Paint that comes with Windows is fine.I have found that the latest incarnation that is bundled witrh Windows 7 is capable of just about any image editing task that I need,whether it be cropping, resizing, rotation,inserting text annotations,colo(u)r editing or format conversion all of those actions are catered for just ask Mr Google for help!!

Re: Davenport article
 

Thanks John. I read the limit size for Jpg as 500KB maybe I'm wrong? I try that after Tuesday night

Re: Davenport article
 

VERY Nice t-shirt!!
What file size is the photo on the shirt??
Never mind about the sinus/allergy problem...just go!
lol

Re: Davenport article
 

Thanks for the info John,
I figured there where some programs out there to shrink the pictures down.. The size limit for jpg is 500 KB.. I know my typing fingers don't always work either as you can tell from reading some of my previous posts.

Re: Davenport article
 

Thanks, I thought they looked pretty good. Where we had them done they could only do white. I would have liked another color, but white does go with everything. My Wife works a 2nd job at Hobby Lobby on Saturdays. so we able to get a discount on the T-shirts and it only cost us $16.00 to have both shirts printed. so that wasn't to bad.. The file size of the photo was 110KB. No doubt I'm going. Only thing is when my sinus act up. My ears clog up and I can't hear as well. And I do want to hear everything!!!

Re: Davenport article
 

Oops.I just hate to give the ex convict imbecile an opportunity to smirk but yes the limit is indeed 500KB you are correct it wasx yet another of my frequent one finger typing style typos, in addition I guess my thoughts were on the fact that my digital camera on a reasonable quality setting (5 magapixel) produces images of the order of 2592 x1944 pixels and a resultant filesize of well over 500KB and they can be over 2MB

Re: Davenport article
 

OH the size of the Picture on the t-shirt is 8.5 x 11