Hometown Hockey in Canada - Lightfoot

[charlene]

RON MACLEAN: THE LIFE LESSON I LEARNED IN KELOWNA
BY RON MACLEAN ON NOV 16 2014

VIDEO at bottom of post:

Hometown Hockey in Canada - tonight from Kelowna BC - In 1980, I was 20-years-old and vacationing in Kelowna.

I had been there many times before, but this was the first time I travelled there with my then-girlfriend Cari, now my wife of 30 years and counting. Back then we felt so sophisticated simply going for pizza and ordering a bottle of Summit Rouge from Calona Vineyards.

I likely should have been taking inventory of “All the Things I Wasn’t “(a song by Grapes of Wrath, a wonderful Kelowna band), but the Okanagan can remove anvils from one’s shoulders with its endless spa landscape.

That bliss did however come to an abrupt end one morning as Cari and I were driving to the Capri Mall to shop for a few beach items.

I was about to make a left-hand turn to park when I suddenly noticed a better spot ahead, so instead of parking I stepped on the gas and accidentally struck a pedestrian. A local resident had stepped out from the passenger side of my Accord. She had gone up over the hood and onto my windshield before falling back down in front of my car.

The ensuing moments were a blur as I checked to see how she was, before racing across the street to call 911, all the while being yelled at by everyone around for my recklessness.

In the end, the woman was bruised and shocked but she was fine. She was also gracious throughout. I meanwhile, was all over the local news.

“Alberta man causes accident in downtown.”

I will always be grateful for two things that day: The victim surviving unscathed and the work of the attending police. The police were an incredible comfort to Cari and me. We were scared. I recall a senior officer looking us straight in the eye and saying, “Look, it could always be much worse. Learn from it. Get over it.”

For me, gratitude is the most tear-inducing emotion. Cari and I have spent nearly every summer in Kelowna and our favourite painter, Kelowna’s Rod Charlesworth, fills our home with art.

To help paint an image of Okanagan’s spell this week, I asked for and received permission from Gordon Lightfoot to play “Sundown” at the outset of our show this week.

At midnight Nov. 17, Gordon Lightfoot turns 76. I can’t see Gordon perform without crying at the beginning and bawling at the end. It’s pure gratitude. He is our song laureate. He’s the man who first sang about what life in Canada looks and feels like.

By the time he recorded his 19th album, “A Painter Passing Through,” he had won 17 Junos. In 1966, Prime Minister Lester Pearson wanted a television extravaganza to celebrate the nation’s centennial. Pearson thought that there should be a song or a sketch about the National Dream, the railway upon Canada came together.

CBC producer Bob Jarvis asked Lightfoot to compose a song for the New Year’s Day show, 100 Years Young, so Gordon wrote “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy.”

I recently saw Gordon play at Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary and I could tell the simple act of seeing him stride out onto the stage had the same impact on everyone there.

To see Barry Keane, the drum engine, and Carter Lancaster, the guitar virtuoso, poised to accompany a legend, was to instantly recognize how blessed the scene was. It’s a quintet with Rick Haynes on bass and Mike Heffernan on keyboards.

As in hockey, five sticks are better than one with Gordon, the captain, standing arrow-straight, shining in humility.

For tonight’s opening essay I borrowed a written depiction of a live performance of Lightfoot’s Sundown, by Calgary singer/songwriter Lorrie Matheson.

On Feb. 7, 2010, Matheson wrote on his web site a masterful account of the Lightfoot experience. Lorrie grew up in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. He listened to Edmonton Radio station 630 CHED for his rock and roll and watched Hockey Night in Canada for his favourite game, just like me.

The touchstones from childhood are powerful.

So in addition to CHED and Hockey Night, I would like to add Kelowna, and thank Kelowna.

It’s no accident I offered up Gordon Lightfoot on the eve of his 76th birthday.


http://www.hometownhockey.com/news/m...ed-in-kelowna/

[charlene]

Lorrie Matheson piece referred to in essay: http://www.lorriematheson.com/2010/gordon-lightfoot/

Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown
Sunday, February 7, 2010
When I was a kid on the farm in Northern Saskatchewan, I didn’t know all that much about the outside world. My main sources of information were the CBC and 630 CHED (the top-40 AM station) out of Edmonton. CBC was the only television we had on the farm (we would have had to get a separate antenna to put on the roof of the house to pull in the CTV feed) and I would endure that snowy signal to see my favorite player on Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night. CHED was my main new music source (when I could pick it up) and I spent hours taping my favorite songs onto my little shoebox cassette recorder, setting the radio next to the little mic on the recorder when “Video Killed the Radio Star” came on, cranking it up full volume and pleading with my sister to “shut up! For 2 minutes!”. Lotsa cassettes of badly distorted, static-y mono recordings, with faint (sometimes not-so-faint) traces of yelling in the background.
Although this huge country of ours was largely a mystery to me (Montreal was home to the Canadiens, and they spoke a different language there, which is why there was French on the cereal box), even at an early age I felt very proud to be Canadian, that this was a great and noble land. Obviously too young to understand the politics, I was so confused by Rene Levesque and the Parti Quebecois’ urge to separate from Canada – why would anyone want to leave the best country on earth?
Even though the struggles between French and English and white and Aboriginal citizens were well documented, and we spent a lot of time learning about them in school (I was a massive Louis Riel fan), I naively thought it was all in the past, that we all could live in harmony, that the biggest conflict was whether the Leafs or Habs sucked.
It wasn’t so, and all through my school years the tension between aboriginals and whites was a daily reminder of our differences. To get a really good idea of the situation up there, I would encourage you all to read Warren Cariou’s “Lake of the Prairies” (He was a year or 2 ahead of me in school, I was pals with his brother and once had a heartbreaking crush on his sister). I read his book in one sitting – incredibly powerful, and the most honest and accurate portrayal of the place I grew up there will be. If you’re in town, give me a call – I’ll lend it to you.
After I left school and Meadow Lake, I found myself in many strange and wonderful places, one of them being BC’s Okanagan Valley, where there is a rich aboriginal culture as well, and where I fell in love with a girl who was actively involved in the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. They were one of many groups in strong opposition to plans for a logging road through the Stein Valley on the West Coast, one that would disrupt land sacred to the Nlaka’pamux people who lived there. In order to raise funds an awareness, the Stein Valley Festival was launched, and in 1990 (partly because of my politics, partly because of the girl, but mostly because of the music) I went to the festival, which was held on the Tsawwassen First Nation, just south of Vancouver.
There was a heightened sense of urgency at the festival that year, not only because of the fight to preserve the Stein Valley and the spiritual home of its indigenous people, but also because of the crisis happening at the same time 5000 km across the country in Oka, Quebec, – just a few miles from the Montreal Forum I’d see almost every Saturday on HNIC – where the Mohawks were trying to preserve their sacred lands. Tons of media attention on the struggles of Canadian aboriginals and the electric atmosphere at the festival really made me feel like I was part of something really important.
Many of Canada’s biggest musical acts came to Tsawwassen that weekend, none bigger than Gordon Lightfoot, who headlined the show. Lightfoot was a staple on the radio and TV when I was a kid – you heard/saw him on the CBC on a weekly basis – and I was fascinated by him. Not only did he have dozens and dozens of amazing songs, but he (along with Tom Thomson and Guy Lafleur) was somehow the very definition of ‘Canadian’ to me.
I hadn’t listened to him in a long time (I was more into Husker Du by then), and many of my friends who were there with me were guffawing about the ‘old man’ who was about to play.
Admittedly, I was not that enthused either, but I was interested enough to hear him that I wandered away from my clique, to the back of the field, in order to listen to the show without distraction. It was a beautiful summer night on the ocean, the full moon was rising as the sun was setting, directly behind the illuminated clam-shell stage, the entire crowd in front of me. I really wish I had a photo – the sight was mind-blowing.
Lightfoot was on fire, too. “Whooo! Whooo! How are you tonight, Tsawwassen?!?! Whooooo!!” I did not expect him to be so gleeful at such a gravely important event – all the other acts had been far more earnest and sober, and he, being the elder statesman of the bunch… well, it was a bit incongruous. Anyway, the set was amazing. He played all of his classics, singing beautifully with that rich tenor of his, the band supporting him flawlessly. I was taken back to my younger days when I would be in the truck on the farm with my Dad and “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” would come on the radio, or seeing one of his countless TV appearances, cross-legged on the living room floor, entranced.
Now, it’s easy to be revisionist here, but this is how I like to remember it:
The dusk has settled and the full moon is shining brightly over the ocean as the drummer goes into this hypnotic, insistent beat. Lightfoot thanks the audience for coming, says a few words about the reason we’re all there, and starts strumming his guitar. Bass player kicks in, and they settle into an unreal, trance-inducing groove, which seems to go on forever. Just when you think vertigo is gonna take over, he begins to sing:
“I can see her lying back in her satin dress/in a room where you do what you don’t confess”

Sundown. Could it be more perfect? I don’t think so. I was utterly mesmerized, one of my favorite musical moments, ever.
The Oka Crisis came to and end, and the Stein Valley is now protected – I guess we were in some small way taking part in something important that weekend – but to say that tensions between the various segments of our country are settled would be a lie. Maybe if we all got together to watch a game or 2 on Saturday night and then had a listen to “Gord’s Gold” it would all be better… at least I’d like to think so.
After many repeated listenings of the song over the past 20 years, combined with my memory of the one time I saw him perform it live, I seriously suspect that Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s Folk Laureate, was a Velvet Underground fan. Chances are I’m totally wrong, but that sure wouldn’t be the first time.