http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/art...ad-trilogy-so/
Gordon Lightfoot: The Queen likes my Canadian Railroad Trilogy song
Martin Chilton, culture editor
21 JANUARY 2016 • 10:51AM
Gordon Lightfoot, who was born in Orillia, Ontario, on November 17, 1938, released his first album Lightfoot! in January 1966, 50 years ago. It contained the Canadian's gorgeous song Early Morning Rain. In the decades since, he has written some classics of popular music, including If You Could Read My Mind, The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, Canadian Railroad Trilogy and Rainy Day People. Lightfoot will return to Europe in May 2016 for his first UK dates since 1985. In this Q&A with Martin Chilton, Lightfoot talks about his career in music.
You hosted a BBC show when you were 25. How did that come about?
It was in 1963 and it was called The Country and Western Show. It was a summer replacement series on the BBC and it was like a variety show. There was a lot of choreography and singers involved and a fine little orchestra. We did eight shows and my job was to be a compère at the beginning. Later on I dropped that job for lack of ability in that direction. I was given to doing a song each show and it happened because I was in Britain that year and some music publishing people in Denmark Street in London suggested me to the BBC. So I found myself in front of a British television show, which was a nice surprise.
And you were over from Canada when the Swinging Sixties were all the rage?
Both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones broke on the music scene the summer I was in England. I can vividly remember hearing She Loves You in August 1963. There was also a TV show called Thank Your Lucky Stars, with the catchphrase "I'll give it five!" The Beatles and Stones were so popular when they were on it. One week The Beatles were number one and then the Stones were right on their heels.
It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point Lennon and McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of". I also worked with a female singer called Clodagh Rodgers, who was managed by her father. We did some demos but nothing came of it. Once the summer was over I returned to Canada to get a few things happening back there.
And you loved London?
I can remember it so well. I lived at 56 Gloucester Road. On the fourth floor. I used to take the subway out to Shepherd's Bush. I was happy to be in England, because my mother had always loved the royals, and so do I. My mother had every memento you could find on the Queen. Some years later I met Queen Elizabeth II, in our capital Ottawa at a Canada Day celebration. David Foster and I were doing the show and we both met her afterwards. She told me how much she loved the Canadian Railroad Trilogy. She looked at me and said, "oh, that song", and then said again, "that song", and that was all she said.
You recorded a Ewan MacColl song on your debut album. Did you meet him in the UK?
I took the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face from a folk singer called Bonnie Dobson. I knew her and she had a record with that track on it. I never met Ewan MacColl, though, or heard him play. He also did a song called Springhill Mining Disaster, about a tragedy that happened in Canada in the Fifites. MacColl did a few songs about disasters, which was not a common writing form. I liked the fact that he wrote about working guys who did tough jobs. I also liked the American folk style of Woody Guthrie [Lightfoot broke out into singing Guthrie's 1935 song So Long, It's Been Good to Know You at this point].
Who got you interested in music in the first place?
My parents got my sister and I to go to church and have piano lessons. We were keen and they could see that. I got to sing solo in the junior choir when I was 10 or 11 and won a competition, and my sister's piano playing improved to a certain level. One time my sister and I worked together. The first song we ever sang in High School was Rags to Riches by Tony Bennett.
A lot of people influenced me as I was learning but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential, because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot. Through him, the Irish stuff started coming out, because a lot of songs he did like Galway Bay were about the Irish and their traditional music and I caught on to it. Bing had a very mellow voice but he sang some deep songs.
One of your first songs was Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That's an Irish Lullaby) and you were there when Van Morrison sang it at The Last Waltz in 1976. Did you not fancy joining in?
Well of course I knew The Band's Canadian keyboard player, the late Richard Manuel, but I didn't play that night because I was there as a guest with my record executives. People ask, "why didn't you play?" If I had known I was going to be playing then I would have been prepared for it. I didn't hear about it until the last minute, when Robbie Robertson asked me to play, and I said "I haven't even warmed my chops up". I was there with the record producer Lenny Waronker and Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones, so I was socially engaged. What an event. It was an amazing evening. Van Morrison stole the show, but Bob Dylan was great, too.
It is an often-quoted tribute but Dylan has said when he heard a Lightfoot song he wished "it would last forever". Did you enjoy working together?
I went on tours with Dylan – the big one was in 1975 and called Roaring Thunder Review. I knew him well because I met him around the time he did his second album, in 1963. He recorded one of my songs called Shadows. In the 1970s, it was suggested that we do a duet, because we had the same manager, Albert Grossman, who also managed Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan and I respected what each other did, but I just decided not to do it. But it was good to hang around together and it was a great music team to work for. They invited me up to Woodstock, for New Year's Eve, right after Janis Joplin had died in October 1970. There was such a group of musicians there, including Bob and Odetta. At midnight, no one spoke for 15 minutes. We were all in a room and no one spoke. Certainly not me. I would have hated to have been the one to break the silence in that gathering.
The list of people who have covered your songs is astonishing, isn't it? Even Telly Savalas is on it.
It really is amazing and I never heard one that I didn't like. Harry Belafonte recorded five of my tunes. He would come to my home in Toronto. One time I went to Harry's office and Eartha Kitt was sitting at the desk. It was a time of meeting interesting people out of the blue.
Did anyone surprise you with their interpretation?
Marty Robbins surprised me in 1975 with Ribbon of Darkness, because he sped it up and it went to number one in the country music charts. Another one was Viola Wills, a girl who had a hit disco version of If You Could Read My Mind. You should check it out. It came out right when disco music was hot. She was with a shaky little record company at the time and it just couldn't get over 35 in the Billboard charts. I also like the version of that song that Diana Krall does with Sarah McClachlan. Diana's husband Elvis Costello is pretty good, too, and they make a hot couple.
Do you still write songs?
My first song was Hula Hoop Song, in 1955. It was a novelty song. I had to find someway to reach out and it was with a novelty song. Now, all of my recording obligations have been taken care of. I made 14 albums for Warner Brothers. Five for United Artist before that.
There is always something wrong with a song, you can't be perfect. I could be doing songwriting again. I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation. We had our three big ones in the 1970s – Read My Mind, Sundown, Wreck. I once performed The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to about 15 sea captains. The song was about a ship that broke in half and sank.
One of my favourites is 10 Degrees And Getting Colder from 1971 . Do you remember much about writing that?
I can remember sitting in a cabin outside of Denver writing that with a can of soup on the stove. I drove to Denver and rented a car and drove into the mountains and parked where they had cabins and I went to the grocery and got supplies and wrote some tunes and that was one of them.
And were you influenced by literature. I'm thinking of the song Don Quixote?
I wanted to borrow from the concepts that Cervantes was writing about while I was up to my ears thinking about empathy for what was going on the Vietnam War. Don Quixote was a song for a 1969 Michael Douglas movie called Hail Hero! I wrote the title song for the film and they also used the Don Quixote one I had submitted. I had lots of friends who were fighting in Vietnam and I am still friends with veterans of the war. The song was written in empathy about the people who were having to go out there in their thousands.
part 2 - next post
LONDON Telegraph interview- part 1-jan.2016
