Gordon Lightfoot Forums - PASADENA NOW article-March 12, 2019

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Gordon Lightfoot To Illuminate The Rose

By STEPHEN SICILIANO Managing Editor
Published : Tuesday, March 12, 2019 | 5:04 AM

The perennial Gordon Lightfoot’s current tour, which will settle into The Rose, March 17, highlights his arrival and survival as an octogenarian in the music business. That he can sustain quite so many dates in quite so many places attests to the multigenerational appeal of his music. When you are 80, you’ve lost a goodly portion of your cohort.

Lightfoot, like many Canadians, comes without an edge. His songs can be full-on folksy and, after so many years, conjure up a quainter world no longer evident. But he never was labeled a bland, commercial force.

A balladeer, Lightfoot’s craft as a songwriter was too strong, the yarns seasoned with just enough booze and sex to make it more… interesting. He could do history with elegiac drama (Canadian Railroad Trilogy), grasping philosophy (Sit Down Young Stranger), literature (Don Quixote) to name a few topics covered over 50 years of picking and strumming.

But his triumphs, culminating in “If You Could Read My Mind,” were about love divine. Through songs like “Affair on Eighth Street,” “All the Lovely Ladies,” and “Go-Go Dancer,” Lightfoot examined the vagaries of romance, plumbed the bittersweet endings, the loves unrequited, and sometimes found himself, “in a room where you do what you don’t confess,” as in “Sundown,” which cracked the American Top 40 when Jimmy Carter was president.

Sandy-haired, whisky-complected, rangy, Lightfoot made a believable, sympathetic philandering songman with a woman in every town, very much the Westerner and solitary countryman.

He has lived his life in a business that thrives on instability; a road warrior with a guitar. In 2011, Lightfoot lost his guitarist of 40 years, Terry Clements, a man he said could play anything he asked of him. No one would have blamed Lightfoot if he had folded the tent then, but he didn’t and Pasadena, on Sunday, will be the richer for it.

The Rose, 245 East Green Street. Show starts at 9 p.m.