[charlene]

What led you back to the U.S. and to Warner Bros?

We had a folk revival going on that was pretty big time. There were great performers, too. Canadian folk singers Ian and Sylvia [Tyson] were there during that time, and I got to meet their manager. He took two of my songs that I had written — Early Morning Rain, and For Loving Me — to Peter, Paul, and Mary, to record. For Loving Me went up to number five on the billboard chart. As a result, I received an offer to sign with him, which I did. That was my entry, song writing.
In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, there was that whole southern California rock, Laurel Canyon thing happening, and there were a number of Canadians, like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, heading to America to pursue their careers.

Did you get to know many of them?

I knew Neil Young very well. I met Neil when he was in Buffalo Springfield. We used to have breakfast together at one of the restaurants here in [Toronto]. I met Joni in Detroit, right at the start of our careers. I was with her when Tom Rush picked up three [of her] songs for his eighth album, The Circle Game. I was there when she sang through that repertoire in her house with Chuck, her husband. We were sitting at the kitchen table; Tom Rush, myself, Joni, and Chuck, listening to her play those songs. She asked me, “Can you get me in touch with Albert Grossman?” I had just signed with Albert at that point, and I said, “Well gee,” I was feeling kind of insecure... this professional insecurity. I said that I would, but that he might not follow up.

Three weeks later, she signed a deal with David Geffen in LA!
If You Could Read My Mind came out in 1970, got repackaged eight or nine months later, and went on to sell over a million copies.

What’s the story behind the song?

It’s a song about the failure of marriage. It gets into the emotional trauma that went along with all this stuff, because I was writing about relationships. I was always unhappy, distressed, and it all came up in my songwriting. Many, many times that has happened. There’s always been something, some kind of emotional trauma going on that finds its way into my song writing. It happens by osmosis.

When I did If You Could Read My Mind, I was right in the middle of [leaving] my first wife. We had two kids. I wasn’t thinking about the divorce, I wasn’t thinking about the lawyers. I was thinking about the content of what was in there. I was drawing from the emotional experience that I was going through. It found its way into the song. No matter how much it stung, you had to keep on writing tunes. You had a band and a recording contract, so you pressed on.

Nobody dreamed that it would become a hit; the album [originally entitled Sit Down Young Stranger before this became the title track] was out seven or eight months before the song emerged, and I was glad it did. It’s about peace through acceptance. It’s stood the test of time, about 30 years, and I never get tired of doing it. There are about nine tunes I play every concert, and this is one of them.

One of my favorite songs of yours is Carefree Highway. I’m sure that it has a great story.

Well, that was a road sign. We were driving from Flagstaff to Phoenix one night, after a show. It was about 1:00 AM, and we drove by a road sign that said, “carefree highway.” And I said to the bass player, who was driving, “Doesn’t that look like a song title?” So, the following week when I got back to Toronto, I sat down with it and got the job done.

But there was a real Ann. [The song] reaches way back to a time when I was about 20 or so. It’s one of those situations where you meet that one woman who knocks you out and then leaves you standing there and says she’s on her way. I heard from her after a Massey Hall concert many years later; she stopped by to say hello. I don’t think she knew that she is the one the song was about, and I wasn’t about to tell her.
Carefree Highway somehow reflects the feeling of the quintessential American road trip.

Have you done any road trips across America yourself or with your family?

Yes, but for work. I could’ve gone on motor trips, some of us did. Our lead guitar player, Terry Clements, used to take road trips. And a couple of them did Route 66 a couple of times.

I had a chance to do one by bus one time, but I didn’t have time to do it. The bus driver asked me if I wanted to, if he could take me on a trip across the country with my wife and a couple of my kids. I didn’t have time to do it.

You wrote The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald after reading about the disaster in Newsweek. The song has a lot of verses in it. Were you concerned that it may be too long for airplay on the radio?

I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I mean, it was a folk song for an album. The whole thing is chronologically correct. The whole thing, start to finish. I called the record company to find out if there was some way that they could shorten the song to get it on the top twenty stations in LA.

I said, “Shorten the instrumentals.” So, I got them to shorten all the instrumentals by eight bars, right in the middle, and it brought it down to four minutes and fifteen seconds. And it didn’t affect the recording at all. It worked itself out well. And then I tried it on stage. My guitar player came up with that guitar part, which reminds us so much of water and wind and rain and hail, and everything that you want to think of. Rain and hail on a tattered sail. The old sea chanty thing crept into it.

I heard it on the radio one night; I was sitting at the bar of a place in San Francisco, and it worked out fine! I hadn’t heard it until it was on the radio. The song made it into the top twenty.

Were you surprised that a story about a shipwreck on the Great Lakes received such widespread, mainstream acclaim?

It was played all over, everywhere, and it made it up to number one on the charts. Knowing that I had the song in proper chronological order was important to me. I could talk about it with people — all kinds of relatives [connected to the disaster], younger people and older people, and I got to know some of them really well. It boiled down to a ladies’ committee in Madison, Wisconsin, that I stayed in touch with. One of them, Ruth Hudson, had a 23-year-old son, Bruce Hudson, on the boat. I remember she told me that he had a brand-new Dodge Challenger, and it sat in the parking lot out there in Superior, for five months, through the whole winter, before anyone came and took it away.
That is very sad.

Sundown is probably your biggest hit in America. It has a very interesting premise. What inspired the song?

It’s a song about infidelity. I was in a relationship where I didn’t trust the other person. I suspected infidelity. I didn’t trust her. When I wrote it, she was in town with all her girlfriends hitting the bars. She got me to move out to the country. She said that living in my apartment was like living in a bird cage. So, we moved out there. I rented a farmhouse. I started writing out there, and it was working, the sun would set, every night we would have this gorgeous sunset. We moved back into town a year and a half later, and that’s when the breakup with that one occurred. Then I moved into Rosedale. Shortly after I did that, I went to Australia and did a tour.

I was writing a whole bank of tunes for the Sundown album. Lenny Waronker, a producer and former Warner Bros. Records president, and all of us at the studio realized when we laid it down that it would be the single. There’s nothing like unrequited love with a touch of infidelity to capture people’s imaginations. In the whole time I’ve been recording, I’ve never had the sense that a song was going to click the way it did with this one.

What about Early Morning Rain?
I was babysitting my oldest boy — who’s now 56 years old — Fred, great kid, he’s got two kids, and a nice wife. I was babysitting him, and he was just old enough to be sleeping in his cradle. About one and a half years old. We were living in a basement apartment, the first wife and the two kids. After I came back from Britain, Brita, that was her name, she was a Swede, was out getting groceries, so I was babysitting. I said, “Well, if he’s gonna sleep, I guess I’m gonna write.” I was always writing.

Did Peter, Paul, and Mary sing it in the way that you envisioned?

Not at all, but it was a wonderful arrangement. They were really great, that was a great trio. Albert also managed them, of course. They had a different arrangement. They changed the chord progression. I loved it. I loved what they did with it. I have never found a miniscule amount of fault with anything that anybody has ever done on any of my songs.