Photo by, Brian Leviel. Found on Googles...
Click on the link, and scroll down, then click where it says VIDEO, you can watch, Gord perform, "TRIANGLE," at the Square in Kitchener, last night. {10-15-2006}
http://www.therecord.com/breakingnew...s_9489685.html
Monday, October 16, 2006 | Updated at 8:26 AM EDT
Lightfoot treads familiar ground at Centre
Weakened voice doesn't mar performance
By Robert Reid
Record staff
Kitchener
At some level, you have to talk about Gordon Lightfoot in symbolic terms.
The CD booklet for Harmony, his 20th album of original songs released after his brush with death in 2002, includes a close-up photo of the singer-songwriter changing guitar strings.
New strings on a venerable guitar celebrated for the mastery of its craftsmanship -- it's an image that applies equally to an artist who wears the term legendary like a weathered pair of jeans.
Lightfoot returned to familiar turf when he made his ninth visit to the Centre in the Square since 1980, his first in seven years.
No Canadian recording artist has insinuated himself deeper into the lives of fans than the 67-year-old Orillia native.
It was abundantly evident from Sunday night's capacity crowd that many chart the contours of their lives by the compass of Lightfoot songs and albums.
Never mind, we are Canadian; we are Lightfoot. And Lightfoot is us.
The woman who sat beside me came with her 92-year-old mother, a Lightfoot fan even if her hearing isn't what it used to be.
Mother and daughter attended the concert together as an act of remembrance of a son and a brother, who died four years ago and who used to play Lightfoot songs on his guitar.
The two women held hands when Lightfoot performed If You Could Read My Mind.
A Lightfoot concert is different from what it was when he was in his prime, before the ravages of living hard began extracting revenge.
Then he would come on stage and plow through a dozen songs without so much as a nod to the audience, impervious to the adulation. Embarrassed by the adoration, he sometimes appeared disdainful of fans.
Not anymore.
Now he nods in appreciation and says thank you after every song, even if he still isn't big on between-song banter.
However, he did explain how Elvis improved the lyricism of Early Mornin' Rain by changing ''cold and drunk as I can be'' to ''cold and drunk as I might be.''
A Lightfoot concert these days resembles the visit of a favourite uncle, the one everybody in the family admires and respects, even loves, because he has wrestled with life on his own terms and accepted the consequences with grace and modesty, even wisdom.
As usual when he performs in Kitchener, family and many close friends were in attendance.
Performing might never have been so more important to Lightfoot.
Perhaps this is how it should be. After all, it is his songs and live performances that have sustained his career for more than 40 years, not television nor video nor radio play.
The passage of time was most evident in his voice, once one of the hallmarks of his performance.
His once-resonant baritone is long past reedy, raspy or wispy. It's a thin shadow of a voice that was.
Initially, it was shocking to hear such a diminished instrument when he slipped gingerly into the first songs, including Cotton Jenny and 14 Karat Gold, of two 50-minute sets.
He didn't perform many of his best-loved songs, one suspects because of vocal demands he can no longer satisfy.
Consequently, for much of the concert, the audience response was more polite than enthusiastic.
With the exception of a few songs, including A Painter Passing Through, Restless, In My Fashion and Waiting for You, Lightfoot's songs from the 1980s and '90s just don't strike the deep chords of his songs from the late 1960s and '70s.
At one point, he even asked, ''I'm doing all right, am I?'' He need not have worried.
His most familiar songs were greeted with robust applause and he received a sustained standing ovation, which he acknowledged with an encore of Old Dan's Records. He returned for a final bow with the audience still standing.
Once his vocal chords warmed up and our ears adjusted to the diminution, what was initially a weakness acquired strength, equal parts perseverance and courage.
The raw, rugged grandeur of Johnny Cash's American Recordings came to mind.
An early favourite, Ribbon of Darkness, acquired bittersweet poignancy when delivered by an artist who spent six weeks in a coma four years ago -- and recently suffered a mini-stroke.
Sit Down Young Stranger, a coming-of-age chronicle written during the Vietnam War, was transformed into a song of recollection and reflection from the perspective of maturity.
His tenderest songs, such as Rainy Day People and If You Could Read My Mind, were imbued with a fragility and vulnerability that cast an autumnal glow which was elegiac.
Heroically, he negotiated his way through The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, his epic saga of a Lake Superior shipping disaster, during the first set.
He bravely offered Canadian Railroad Trilogy, a song woven so tightly into the Canadian fabric as to be mythic, in the second set.
There were moments when it seemed like his voice wouldn't hold up. But he made it to the last magnificent lines: ''When the green dark forest was too silent to be real/And many are the dead men . . . (extended pause) . . . too silent to be real.''
Like his voice, Lightfoot's guitarwork on his six-string Martin and 12-string Gibson proved worse for wear.
He was accompanied by his longtime band of Terry Clements on lead acoustic guitar, Rick Haynes on bass, Berry Keane on drums and Michael Heffernan on keyboards.
If anything, the quartet was so effortlessly efficient and polished that they left little room for the songs to breath.
There was definite sense of denouement about the concert.
Lightfoot has been so deeply ingrained in the Canadian psyche for so long, we think he is immortal, like his songs.
But, as he confesses in In My Fashion, ''I have seen the reaper.'' Irrespective of what he has seen, Gordon Lightfoot's great, endearing legacy will not pass.
[ November 05, 2006, 16:03: Message edited by: Jesse -Joe ]
