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Gordon Lightfoot brings extraordinary musical tales to Nova Scotia
STEPHEN COOKE ARTS REPORTER
Published April 28, 2014 - 6:01pm
A Gordon Lightfoot concert is like an aural trip back through time. Audiences remember when they first heard If You Could Read My Mind, or summon up strong mental images to go with epic songs like Canadian Railroad Trilogy and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Thankfully, they predate the age of music videos, ensuring everyone experiences them in a completely different and wholly personal way.
But Lightfoot, still going strong at 75 — with shows in Antigonish Tuesday night and Halifax on Wednesday — had his own personal experience of musical deja vu recently. Watching the Coen brothers’ ode to the early ’60s New York folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis, he had a distinct feeling of “I was there.”
The title’s misanthropic Greenwich Village balladeer is rumoured to be loosely modelled after folk legend Dave Van Ronk, but Lightfoot saw many familiar faces mirrored in the film’s cast of characters, including some he’s pleased to call friends.
“I loved the whole idea of the film and the context of the story, and I even recognized a lot of the names and the implications of Dylan arriving on the scene,” he recalls from his Toronto home.
“But why did they have somebody beat the (crap) out of him at the start of the movie and at the end?
“I thought it was in bad taste. We already know the guy is down and out; they didn’t have to pound the hell out of him.
“But he had a bad attitude throughout the movie, and I remember when he went to meet Bud Grossman, who is actually based on Albert Grossman, at the Gate of Horn in Chicago; he makes him this offer to go with a trio he’s forming with a girl singer. That would have been Peter, Paul & Mary, but Llewyn doesn’t want to do that.
“He just wants to do his own thing, but I was like that too in a lot of ways. I used to shy away from a lot of things. It was a very interesting movie; overall I thought it was just great. It was well played, and I loved the song he did with Justin Timberlake.”
The appearance of Grossman in the film is one of its more intriguing intersections with Lightfoot’s life, as the real impresario was the singer’s manager for seven years, making him part of an impressive stable of acts that included Janis Joplin, the Band, Jesse Winchester and a Minnesota songwriter named Robert Zimmerman, who would find greater fame as the aforementioned Dylan.
“He made both of my record deals, with United Artists and Reprise,” says Lightfoot.
“He was absolutely one of the most amazing people I’d ever met. I have a picture of him hanging up right here in my study, with all the other riff-raff. He kinda looked a little bit like Ben Franklin, with the glasses that he wore.
“He didn’t say much, but when he said it, you’d hear it. When I went on stage for the first time at the Fillmore East in New York, he was with me and standing there as I told him I was really nervous. He said, ‘Just remember, Gordon, you can never give them less than they expect.’”
Another one of Grossman’s early clients also became a close acquaintance, folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, whose song Changes appears on Lightfoot’s self-titled debut album.
It’s a rare cover song in the singer’s large catalogue, recorded 10 years before Ochs killed himself following bouts of mental illness and addiction.
“It was tragic; he was done in by a combination of alcohol and politics,” Lightfoot sighs.
“I knew him very well. He was a great friend. I learned Changes from him while he was still writing it. I remember sitting on the back steps of the Gate of Cleave coffee house on Avenue Road in Toronto, and he was playing it for me.
“‘God, that’s a nice tune,’ I said to him, and I was in the middle of doing an album myself so I just added it on there. I could have probably done a better job on it — we did it rather quickly — but it’s a great song. Neil (Young) did it too just recently at Massey Hall when I went to see him in January.”
Personal demons and career-derailing illness are not unfamiliar to Lightfoot either, but since the 2002 abdominal aneurysm that put him in a six-week coma he’s been following a healthier regime and focusing on putting his best foot forward on stage. These days, he plays 70 to 80 shows a year with his band: guitarist Carter Lancaster, Barry Keane on drums, bassist Rick Haynes and keyboardist Mike Heffernan.
“I’ve reinvented myself a couple of times since those days. We keep improving our team,” he says.
“It’s like the sports business. There are a lot of details involved in that, so we kept it up to the proper level.
“By the time I was done, I’d done 20 albums, through the end of my contract. It’s amazing to think I was under contract to Warner Brothers for over 30 years.”
HALIFAX, NS article-April28-2014
