[jj]

Originally Posted by jbt1976

I asked him about Phil Ochs and if he planned on including Changes on his set list. He lit up. He told me how sad it was about Phil and that they were very good friends who used to hang out in NYC (Greenwich Village) a lot with an actor friend (forget his name). He said he remembers Phil teaching him the chords to Changes on the back steps of a Toronto coffee house.
Priceless stuff!!

first off, if this were some sort of Match Game we'd win a prize

what a neat anecdote you've posted...Ochs wrote Changes while in Toronto...i didn't know if you'd read this before:

THE BALLAD OF GORDON LIGHTFOOT by Phil Ochs


There I was in Canada, stoned out of my mind at 5:00 in the morning,
swapping songs, jokes and bottles with Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas
rock 'n' roll singer who runs an out of sight bar in Toronto and Gordon
Lightfoot, who is the Canadian Hank Williams.

The best music is usually done in situations like that, where there's no
stage, no mike or lights, and no unnatural need to please a strange
audience. You're just singing to have a good time, communicate with people
who understand you, and create those mad moments that become cherished
memories when you're too old to do it anymore.

Also when you get rolling like that you can find out who has it and who
doesn't because you drunk away all your hang-ups. And as I listened to
Lightfoot sing away that intoxicated morning, I knew he had it.

Every time I see Lightfoot he ends up apoligizing to me because he's not
writing "important" protest songs. "I'm just starting to get beneath the
surface, and I know my stuff is just too trite," he told me on Wednesday
night in a coffeehouse packed with people there to hear him and a long line
waiting outside for the next show. He says, "Damn, your Mississippi song
sure knocks me out," the week that Marty Robbins has made his "Ribbon Of
Darkness" number one on the Country & Western charts. Then this paradoxial
man picks up his two guitars and walks guiltily to the stage and wipes out
another audience which could never fully realize that his stage humility was
not put on at all.

Lightfoot, aside from having the greatest last real name of anybody in folk
music, is destined to become a pivitol figure in bridging the gap between
folk music and country & western. He can sing, play, entertain, write, put
himself down with a flair that marks an original. He's the kind of guy who
can work a bar and cut through the booze with honesty; there's a strange
poetry that lives within the country bar crowd that demands to hear the
simple truth served on a platter of realism. Ingrained in the natural
Lightfoot is the same spark of human insight that carried Hank Williams,
Jimmy Rodgers and Johhny Cash out of show business and into immortality.

Now everybody has his faults, and Lightfoot is no exception. He plays golf.
But that can be rationalized if you consider that he really is an outdoor
type, hunting and fishing, skiing, and who knows but somewhere in his past
innocent years he might even have swum naked in some chilly Canadian lake.
Think about that the first time you see him.

Those of us who know Lightfoot now are of course concerned that he won't
fall into the well-traveled pitfall known in some circles as the success
syndrome, of ignoring his responsibility to us, and writing just for himself
and a few cronies, you might say. Lightfoot (notice how many times I take
advantage of that groovy sounding name) was born and copywritten on Nov. 17,
1938, in Orillia, Ontario, and rumor has it he killed himself a b'ar when
he was only three (see how easy it is to start a legend, folks). He got a
professional musical degree from Westlake College in Los Angeles, and sold
out for the first time when he became a studio singer for the CBC doing over
250 shows, mostly in choral work. Not content with selling out in one
country, he went to England and did his own hour-long country show in a
summer replacement and reached over four million people. At the end of the
summer, not having been knighted, he left in a huff to ramble in Sweden
where he married his Swedish wife, Brita (all young record buying type girls
please forget you read that). Living overseas put him through several
changes and cleared up his mind to the point of definately deciding to be a
writer and so he returned to his native Canada.

His friend Ian Tyson of Ian & Sylvia became more and more impressed with
his songs and finally asked one of his managers, John Court, to fly up to
Toronto and watch him perform. Court sat in the shadows, puffing on his
Tiparillos, and as he became convinced, the chemistry of a large management
office took effect: Peter, Paul & Mary's next release was Gordon Lightfoot's
"For Loving Me".

The first time you see Lightfoot, if he's not singing you might walk right
by him, mistaking him for a statue. He's got classic Greek features with an
Argosy magazine jawline, and long flowing blond locks of hair always neatly
combed. So you see, he doesn't have to write songs, he could become a
sculptor's model.

Lightfoot has established himself as a recording artist in his own rite,
having had a couple of records at the top of the charts in Canada. He's also
one of the top drawing cards there, and now he has to happen in the States.
He'll be at the Newport Folk Festival in July, and will make his club debut
at Mother Blue's in Chicago. I forgot to mention before, he records for
Warner Bros., publishes with Witmark, and frankly his 16 month old son
doesn't really dig his songs.

Gordon Lightfoot may become the greatest country & western writer of all
time. But, on the other hand, he may become a forest ranger.