[MaryEllen]

Thanks, Annie!

Pt 2 was in the alt.music.lightfoot Google archives (also posted there by Wayne Francis in 1996):

Here is part 2 which covers a stint at Washington DC's Cellar Door.

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The following day the group flew to Washington, DC to open for a week at the
Cellar Door Club. It was a relief after barnstorming. A gig in a club means
that the performer isn't being eaten alive by all thye fiddly details of
being on the road. They stayed at a dull-looking motel painted nursery
school colors. It had one great virtue for Lightfoot: it was near the
airport. He's obsessed by planes. He kept flashing out of his room into the
rain, taking movies of them with his Contax camera complete with telephoto
lens. "They have real magic. I've gotten past the point of thinking about
the people on board. All I think of is the pure magic of that bird and the
sound it makes." He picked out the different notes a jet makes. "There's a
D," he said, as a big jet disappeared into the sky.

The Washington week turned out to be an enormous success. The club was
filled every night in spite of racial tension, the Poor People's March, a
transit strike and bad business all over town. "The first night, I went
through five songs without saying anything and I told the crowd, 'You know
it's good, don't you?' and they've been coming back ever since."

At 7:30 there was a tour show: students from out of town get a dinner and a
show for the price of a ticket. These kids were from Detroit and to their
mutual astonishment they'd never heard of Lightfoot. He played it cool until
he came to Black Day In July. "This is a song about your city. I'm sorry it
has to be this way." There was an awkward pause when he finished and then
they let loose with their most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

One kid yelled, "Who wrote that?" "I did," said Lightfoot. "These are all my
songs." "Did you record that one?" "Yes I did," he replied, warming up to
one of his hobbyhorses. "But CKLW in Windsor won't play it. It's being
played on FM markets, but the top-40 stations in the States won't play it. I
don't blame them. They're not ready for that sort of thing. They've got
their ratings to think about."

His distress about this situation is kept hidden most of the time. But CKLW
is another matter. Later, as he stabbed at a steak sandwich, he said, "It's
number one in Detroit and it's the Canadian station. It's the only place in
Canada to break a record in the US. I'm not asking for hype. I've
accommodated myself, played their clubs, their hops - and nothing. I'm
canadian, man, and they won't even listen to me." Almost everyone has had a
hit out of Lightfoot but Lightfoot himself.

But his bitterness disappeared when he got on to his own songwriting and
Canadian history. Don Harron, writer of this year's Canadian National
Exhibition grandstand show in Toronto, wanted Lightfoot to perform in it.
"It's not the right thing for me to do," Lightfoot said. "Mine's very
simple, man - all I do is go and sing my songs. I don't want to be part of a
production." So Harron asked him to write a song for Catherine McKinnon and
lent him books on Louis Riel. The books have completely captured Lightfoot's
imagination. He's not trying to write a document of the period, but get a
feeling for it. "A song has to have a point of view, a philosophy to hold it
together. I get about 100 songs a year sent to me by amateurs. But they
don't have a point of view. For instance, I don't write anything on the
road. I make a few notes, maybe. I've got to feel it first, then I know what
to write."

The nine o'clock show, as did all their shows, started precisely on time. I
sat with a couple of girls, typical of that audience, who said, "We know
more about his songs than we do about him or his singing."

John Stockfish and Red Shea walked on in their super-straight clothes, and
took their positions. Lightfoot sat on the stairs, holding his axe, waiting
for his introduction. In a burst of energy, he leaped from the stairs,
bounded onto the stage and was into the second bar of I'm Not Saying before
the applause caught up with him. He smiled winningly into the smoky
blackness and introduced the next two songs with, "Here's a couple of old
chestnuts for you" - Ribbon Of Darkness and Spin, Spin. He sings these old
songs well, but there's an irony in his performance of them. They lack the
passion, his own performing passion, that he projects into his newest songs.
The old ones seem to merely evoke pleasant memories.

He sang Marie Christine and talked about his trip to England. Then into
Early Morning Rain. The crowd mellowed. He invested the song with all the
love he has for planes. The girls were adoring him. John Stockfish and Red
Shea got fixed attention, too, almost as though it was too much for some
girls to lust after the king, so they'd settle for a prince. Don't Beat Me
Down. He broke into a sweat. The curls hung in damp tendrils around his face
giving him the sweetly innocent look of an art nouveau drawing. The blue
spotlight bounced off John's bass and, as he moved it, the bass became
magical, completely disconnected from the hot smoky club atmosphere. Steel
Rail Blues and his patter became more a stream of associations rather than
one of his set pieces. He felt close to his audience. "Now I'll get off here
so we can get back for an encore."

When he finished the set, we went upstairs to the manager's office to cool
off. We talked about the poetry he'd been writing in England. "In some cases
he spends less time writing a poem than he does his tunes," Shea said.
"Well, songs take infinitely more time," Lightfoot chipped in. "After
writing 135 songs, then it seems pretty easy to sit down and crank out 40
poems. If you can put poetry into the songs, that's where it's really at.
Bob Dylan has it. I'm aware I do it."

We went back downstairs to mingle. We sat down at a table and one of the
very cool, self-possessed girls sitting there looked him straight in the eye
in her American way and asked, "Are you an Indian?" "No, why?" "Well, with
a name like yours and coming from Canada. I assumed you would be."

At this, he started asking them questions and drew them out without saying
much about himself at all. Eventually he went back upstairs to tune.
Lightfoot and Shea sat on chairs facing each other. Lightfoot banged a small
tuning fork against the desk and put it to his guitar. "This baby sounds
sick," he said. They found sympathetic chords in the guitars and picked away
at them, occasionally coming up with an old song. They talked, never
finishing a sentence. Single words sent them off into paroxysms of laughter.
They were very effectively closing themselves off. People came and left,
shuffling with embarrassment, interlopers in this private world. Stockfish
sat in a corner, dreamily leaning on his axe until they were ready for him.
The outsider who stayed sat with a fixed smile and tried not to feel lonely.

In a storm of energy they ran back to the stage at 11:30. Right into I'm Not
Saying: Lightfoot dipped his head and guitar in acknowledgement of the
applause. He poured charm past the pale-blue spotlight into the blackness.
He moved into Walls, his eyes closed, he started enjoying the warmth of the
crowd and the pleasures of performing. He'd slide to one side during a solo
lick by Shea or Stockfish and smile affectionately at Shea as they talked to
each other through their axes. Stockfish had said earlier, "We watch Gord
all the time. He could change his mind any second. We know what he's
thinking when he's singing. We know when he's going to goof, like if his
mind wanders we go with him and then it doesn't seem like a mistake. We are
very professional."

The light switched to a soft red, and Lightfoot's features seemed more
sculptural than ever. Go Go Round: "People have to get used to me," he's
said. "They don't get my songs the first time they hear them. They may have
to hear then three or four times and they know it's good. I may not be
recognized until after I'm gone - in a mass sense, I mean."

The crowd at the Cellar Door was recognizing him right now. Black Day In
July drew the longest applause. The show took a dramatic rise in intensity
at this point. He came on very strong, milking every scene in the song for
its terrible consequence.

Does Your Mother Know: He started to sweat slightly. The sensuality of his
performing held the audience completely still. Nobody bothered to touch
their drinks. He leaned back, straining, pushing the words out, working his
jaw slightly. It was impossible for any female not to love him a little bit.

Cold Hands From New York: Sweat was running like tears down his face. "It's
the listening quality that gets through to me up there. I can almost touch
it."

Then, Bitter Green. He stared into the blackness, waiting for the intense
lonliness of this new song to settle on the audience, to make the Young Ones
moodily introspective. It all came together meltingly; the mikes, his voice,
the instruments. The audience could feel every emotion he sang about, see it
in his face. The emotional level just reached the drowning point when he
started into one of his novelty songs. The audience twitched and laughed
nervously in reaction. He'd brought them down too fast. They applauded for a
long time and he started an encore to the show without moving from the
stage. He turned to Shea: "I think you know what I want to do." They started
Rosanna together, played 10 bars. Then Lightfoot lifted his guitar over his
head. "Cut it, cut it. It's not working." Then he switched into Mountains
and Maryann. He put them right back up there - traveling.

Dawn was trying to break through the rain when I finally left the club. I
hung around because it was too hard to leave the source of that much
excitement. But there was a plane to catch and all the Scotch of the long
evening was catching up with my head. I went out to the airport alone and
never felt closer to a Lightfoot tune in my life. He knows what it's about.

"In the early morning rain..."