http://www.tulsaworld.com/entertainm..._H3_spanc36302
Touring Again: Gordon Lightfoot is back in Oklahoma for Tuesday show
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
6/24/2007
Gordon Lightfoot has what he calls a strange Oklahoma connection.
He doesn't remember where it was in the state, but one night many years ago he shared a stage with John Hartford.
"He used to do a song on the banjo called 'Good Ole Howard Hughes and All His Blues, '" said Lightfoot, in an interview from his Toronto home. "He was up there stomping that out and after that we got invited to a party out on the back ranges of Oklahoma on the open country."
It was one of those spots out on the plains where, on clear days, you can see what looks like the curvature of the earth on the horizon. But this was nighttime, and the stars were out in the sky as well as at the party.
"I will never forget it, being out in those hills," he said. "I just remember that star-filled night."
In his 40-year career Lightfoot, 68, has written and recorded songs that showcased his gentle style that carved himself a niche out of the 1960s folk-country movement.
His lyrics deal often with love troubles, especially in his hit "Sundown," and love lost. Lightfoot's clear, honest, common-man style is especially evident on his hit, "Carefree Highway," on which he sings "Turnin' back the pages to the times that I love best/I wonder if she'll ever do the same/Now the thing that I call livin' is just bein' satisfi ed/With knowin' I got no one left to blame."
Lightfoot found his limelight while competing with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, with whom he shared a management company.
"We always had to fight against the Beatles, you know. I fought for space in charts with the Beatles from 1963 onward," he said. "You still had to produce and you still had to try to break through … (because) there might not be a Beatle album that month," he said, laughing.
He had recorded five albums for United Artists by the time he signed with Warner Bros. in 1970, he said.
He recorded 14 albums until his contract expired in 1998 – a rarity for any artist these days – and turned out his best-known material while on the label. His hits include his classic and much-covered song, "If You Could Read My Mind," "Carefree Highway," "Sundown" and "Rainy Day People."
But he continues to be surprised and pleased at his unlikely hit, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." The song is the story of a 729-foot iron ore freighter that sank in a storm on Lake Superior in November 1975. Twenty-nine sailors died.
No one expected the song to be a hit, Lightfoot said, and it's still one of his favorites to play live partly because of the relationships he's had with the sailors' relatives. It came at a time when the folk movement was fading from its widespread popularity, more nihilistic rock was popular and party-friendly disco was arriving. In honor of the sailors, Lightfoot started a scholarship at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City.
"I would never write a song like that and never put anything back from it," he said. He runs into relatives of the sailors at shows all over Michigan and the United States, he said.
He continued recording until he suffered an abdominal aneurysm in September 2002 during a concert in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario. He woke up from a six-week coma to Halloween decorations in his hospital where he stayed.
The next two years and four months he spent in surgery and recuperating, at times attached to a colostomy bag and bed-ridden.
He worked on the his most recent album, "Harmony," while hospitalized, although many of the parts were recorded before the aneurysm. He spent 14 months of his recovery thinking of nothing else but the album, he said.
His 20th album came out in 2004 and features the ballad "Harmony," and the "River of Light," and the single, "Inspiration Lady," delves into usual Lightfoot territory of love and women.
What keeps him healthy these days is good food and exercise, he said. He follows politics in the U.S. and Canada and spends his time looking after a few of his six children, including a 25-year-old son who is in college in Los Angeles, he said.
Lately, he's graced a Canadian stamp series along with Paul Anka, Joni Mitchell and Anne Murray.
He's still got a few song ideas kicking around, too. He keeps them in a desk at his Toronto home.
"I have about six ideas in my side desk that I'd like to start on, and the only problem is that I'm having to spend quite a bit of time with a couple of my kids these days. I'm not blaming them for socking my time, because I'm really not under contract and I really want to help out as much as I can," he said. "I've gotta admit that I'm really not involved in trying to produce another album.
"Does the world need another Gordon Lightfoot album? No, it does not. There are many more important issues to do," he said. "What the world needs is security. I don't know. I'm watching the current events, events of historical proportion beginning to shape up here. I'm not afraid, I'm not scared. I'm just happy I live where I do."
"I'm not really qualified to talk about this stuff," he said later, after discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I'm a musician."
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What: GORDON LIGHTFOOT
When: Doors open 6:30 p.m., show 7:30 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady St.
Tickets: $43 - $63, available at
www.bradytheater. com or the Brady Theater box offi ce, 582-7239.
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
[ June 26, 2007, 15:59: Message edited by: RJ ]
