[New 12 String Mike]

OK.

I've told versions of this before, so forgive me if it seems old.

My younger sister discovered Gord first. I'd heard IYCRMM on the radio, but she bought the album. I was 15 and learning the guitar. I'd been listening to other artists and learning chords and songs, but it was on this LP that I began to hear the mixture of guitars, voice, lyrics and variety of styles the really began to hook me.

We had a big RCA console stereo in the living room, and my sister liked to put on an album and sit in a rocker and just listen and rock to the songs. We she put on "Fleetfoot," as my mother called him, I'd come downstairs to listen. I'd only miss the first line or two of Minstrel of the Dawn. This would really tick my sister off, as I was intruding on her space. She didn't do it to me when I put on Simon and Garfunkel, so why couldn't I leave her alone when she came to listen to Gord?

But I really needed to listen. The weaving of Red Shea's guitar with Gord's, was something I had to listen to.

Sometimes my sister got up and turned the record off. She wasn't going to listen with her big brother in the room, wrecking her mood. And since I had, of course, forbidden her to touch any of MY stuff, I couldn't very well put the record on and play it myself. (At least not when she was home...)

This went on for some time. She got Summer Side Of Life and the second album of the UA songs. It didn't make it any better.

Suddenly she wanted James Taylor's Mud Slide Slim album and Carole King's Tapestry and the Gordon Lightfoot records became MINE!!! MINE!!! MINE!!! She no longer cared that I listened to them.

I bought Don Quixote soon after, and the rest they say...