http://qctimes.com/entertainment/mus...0f0575ae0.html
David Burke
dburke@qctimes.com
IF YOU GO
Who: Gordon Lightfoot
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 30
Where: Adler Theatre, 136 E. 3rd St., Davenport
How much: $59 and $44
Information: 563-326-8555 or AdlerTheatre.com
Ask 74-year-old Gordon Lightfoot if he entertains the thought of retirement or a farewell tour and he points to a couple of other senior performers.
Willie Nelson, who turns 80 in a few days, and 86-year-old Tony Bennett don't slow down, so why would he?
"There's lots of us still going strong doing this," Lightfoot said with a chuckle from his home in Toronto.
Lightfoot is on the road and stopping Tuesday night at the Adler Theatre in Davenport for the fourth time in the past 20 years. He's making a tour dubbed "50 Years on the Carefree Highway," but admits the lack of truth in advertising.
"I've been touring since 1965, and that's where I started," he said. "I'd done a few things road-wise before that, out promoting records. I didn't really have a band, just a couple of musicians by that point.
"My first working engagement was as an opening act for Oscar Peterson at the Masonic Temple in Detroit. And it was the first time I had worked on a work permit, a work visa for the United States," the Canadian native added. "We've been petitioning (for work permits) ever since. I never needed a green card like a lot of us did in Canada. I didn't wait for that, I just always applied for a work permit."
Despite suggestions by those in the music industry to do otherwise, he's kept his home base in Toronto, where most of his family remains in the vicinity.
"I could have hired a bus and trucked them all to California or something, but I didn't do that," he said.
Lightfoot said he never thought his career as a musician would be a cinch until he'd left the United Artists record label in 1970 and signed on with Warner Bros.
"I made five albums for (United Artists), an album a year, and was doing a lot of writing. I knew at that point that I would probably pursue it realistically," he said. "I had 18 songs written and ready to record by that particular time in 1970. They thought I had a good track record, and I ended up recording 11 albums for them."
Many of the songs he'd written had been covered by other artists by then, and he was looked at as more of a songwriter than singer.
For the 50th anniversary tour, Lightfoot said half the concert will be his "standards," such as "Carefree Highway," "Sundown," "If You Could Read My Mind" and the unlikeliest hit of all, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." The other half will be cuts from his 21 albums, in a rotation for each performance.
"We have (rehearsed) far more songs than we need," he said. "We don't like to not do songs."
Stepping onstage, he said, still holds the same thrill it has for decades.
Since 1982, the same year he quit drinking, he has had a daily exercise regimen shortly before showtime.
"It's kept my lungs working strong," he said. "When I walk onstage, I feel just as strong as I did, maybe stronger than I did then."
Davenport article
