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Lightfoot would Rather Press On
STEPHEN COOKE ARTS REPORTER
Published May 1, 2014 - 12:12am
“I’m Gordon Lightfoot, and the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated!”
And the 4,000-odd Lightfoot fans gathered at the Halifax Metro Centre on Wednesday night couldn’t have been happier to hear him say it, greeting the Canadian folk icon with a standing ovation for him and his four-piece band.
This week’s shows in Halifax and Antigonish mark Lightfoot’s second visit to Nova Scotia since that false report of his passing on a Toronto radio station in 2010, which he seemed to take as a challenge of sorts.
At 75, he means it when he sings I’d Rather Press On, striving to present songs from all corners of a 40-year catalogue in the best possible light onstage.
Early on in the evening, he explored the latter years of that catalogue, partly to let his voice warm up and also for the sound to be adjusted for a room now full of warm bodies. But songs like The Watchman’s Gone and A Painter Passing Through also set a stage with wistful lyrics about love and loss, and passing your prime.
There would be plenty of time for a trip down the memory lane hit parade, but even though he hasn’t released an album of new material since Harmony in 2004, the singer from Orillia, Ont., felt like keeping us in the here and now before going way back when.
“I first came to Halifax in 1967,” Lightfoot told the crowd early on.
“Then I played this very hall in 1978, the week it opened.
“I remember I had a couple of bloody marys on the flight back to Toronto, and our ride from the airport got stuck. The trip home became more of an ordeal at that point.”
Apparently he doesn’t hold it against Halifax, as the radio hits started flowing soon enough, with Rainy Day People and Beautiful generating enthusiastic responses right off the bat. His seasoned band kept the sound smooth as silk, allowing for standout moments like Sundown, with Rick Haynes’ eerie bass line and the snakelike solo rendered flawlessly by guitarist Carter Lancaster.
As often happens at Lightfoot shows, audience members attempted to influence the setlist, with one cry for Song for a Winter’s Night earning a response.
“We can do that!” the singer replied enthusiastically. “We can do it later … not too much later, you hope.
“Don’t worry, there are two sets.”
Lightfoot and the band started strong after intermission with Sweet Guinevere off 1978’s Endless Wire and a song you’d expect to hear closer to encore time, his signature 1976 hit The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
While a few of the songs played no longer match the current timbre and range of Lightfoot’s voice — Cotton Jenny especially comes to mind — this was not the case with the famous tale of a Great Lakes freighter tragedy, which has become a modern sea shanty thanks to the patina of time on his vocals.
The power of the song remains, in Lightfoot’s grimly frank delivery, as well as the band’s chance to unleash itself a bit behind the drive of Barry Keane’s drums.
“You might be thinking, ‘Where does he go from here?’” he said with a grin, echoing the thoughts of myself and some of the fans sitting around me.
With that, he made a lateral move, opting for Never Too Close, from the same album, Summertime Dream. Not a hit, but still a welcome friend, and another tune that’s taken on added meaning with the passing of time.
By the time he got to If You Could Read My Mind, the wispiness from the early part of the evening was gone, and the song’s beauty was perfectly intact, although these days the song has the poignant tone of a conversation with someone who left the room a long time ago.
The same held true for Baby Step Back, introduced by Lightfoot with a chuckle as “Meet Me By the Rockpile Honey, I’ll Get a Little Boulder There.”
“I think he used that one when he played the Horseshoe Tavern in 1964,” groaned one fan near me. It doesn’t matter, we all laughed anyway.
It’s easy to forgive, after all, this is the man who invented the concept of the Canadian singer-songwriter, as he reminded us all too clearly with a set-ending Canadian Railroad Trilogy, a continent-spanning vision that has yet to be surpassed. And if it’s performing that keeps Lightfoot feeling young, we’ll gladly have him back again.