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By Richard Ouzounian Theatre Critic .
Gordon Lightfoot releases All Live Tuesday
DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR- photo
Gordon Lightfoot was going to save All Live as a posthumous release, "but then I listened to it all again and said, 'Why wait until I'm dead?'"
Apr 19, 2012
For Gordon Lightfoot, it’s all about the music.
You wouldn’t expect anything else, really, from the most enduring singer/songwriter in Canadian history, but it’s still a joy to discover that, after more than 50 years, he cares so much.
His latest recording, released on April 24, is entitled All Live and it consists of 19 of the songs he sang during his iconic concerts at Massey Hall from 1998 to 2001, territory he can’t wait to revisit.
He’s waiting for me to arrive, standing on the front steps of his mansion just off the Bridle Path, squinting into the sun. At 73, he’s thinner now, the long wispy hair giving him a kind of elfin quality, but there’s nothing whimsical about the way he leads you into a study dominated by guitars and photos and awards, all saying one thing:
This man has spent his life singing songs.
“We started recording those sessions at Massey Hall just to see what we were sounding like back then. We were pretty hot!” he roars with approval. “But then I nearly died and well, that kind of changes things.”
In September 2002, Lightfoot suffered a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, went into a coma for six weeks and had a series of operations over the next two years to find his way back to health.
“During those long months of recovery, I’d listen to those tapes we made at Massey. At first I was thinking of having them released posthumously, as my last album. Yeah, I know that’s a little morbid, but that’s how you think when you’re vulnerable after so much surgery.”
But Lightfoot, an admitted perfectionist, kept listening to the hours of music, trying to pick out his favourites and “it kept my mind off my condition.”
Then he put it aside to record his last new album to date (2004’s Harmony) and continue his non-stop touring.
“But then I listened to it all again and said, ‘Why wait until I’m dead? Let’s put it out now!’”
So the songs and the life that created them are both on the table this sunny morning and we start with the first song that made him famous.
“Early Morning Rain” is one of Lightfoot’s most haunting numbers, about a guy at the end of his rope, “cold and drunk as I can be,” sitting at an airport, longing for a life he lost.
But that’s not what he was thinking about or where he was when he wrote it.
“I was babysitting my first child, who was 4 months old at the time, while the wife was out doing the shopping. I kept thinking about the music school in California where I went to study when I left high school.
“It was 1958 and one of our favourite things on a Saturday or Sunday was to drive out to LAX, go right out on the runways and come real close to the planes. The 707s were brand new then. I’d watch ’em taking off into the clouds and rain, and just disappearing. I was so overwhelmed that I never forgot that.”
But what about “Oh, the liquor tasted good and the women all were fast?”
Lightfoot laughs. “Yeah, I know I wrote that, but all I was really thinking about was a kid from Orillia who was more than a little homesick.”
Dozens of people recorded the song, even before Lightfoot himself did and he grins as he says, “I never heard a cover recording I didn’t like.”
Another number heard on All Live that ranks high in people’s memories of Lightfoot is the “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” First heard on Jan. 1, 1967, it was commissioned by CBC for a special broadcast to begin Canada’s centennial year.
“Yeah, it started out as just a job, but it opened up to me when Bob Jarvis, the great CBC producer asked me to do it, then sent me to the CBC library and had me pick up the biography of Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, the chief architect. He was my door into the project.”
People remember two other things about the work: its formal structure, so unlike Lightfoot’s other writing and its deep love of the wilderness, “when the green dark forest was too silent to be real.” Lightfoot addresses both of those.
“I’ve done 10 major canoe trips to the north of this country. I have a tremendous feeling for those vast, lonely spaces and I put it into the music.
“The structure? I borrowed the format from a friend of mine, Bob Gibson, one of the unsung heroes of folk music who wrote ‘The Civil War Trilogy.’ We talked about it later and he was fine with what I had done.”
Then there’s the song that’s probably Lightfoot’s best known single, “If You Could Read My Mind.” Written around 1970, when his first marriage was coming to its painful conclusion, he admits it’s from “a low dip in the roller coaster at that point. Most of the time I’ve been happy, but there have been times when it’s gotten pretty rough with stress involving my relationships.”
When he first finished the number, in fact, his daughter Ingrid asked him to change a lyric from “the feelings that you lack,” to “the feelings that we lack.” Lightfoot recalls her saying that, “She felt (her) mother would have been offended.”
But the number nearly vanished altogether.
“It was on the first album I did for Warner Brothers. They’ve been great to me over the years, but this one just stiffed: 80,000 copies and that was it. And no one picked a single from it.”
Then chance intervened when the head of the promotion department’s younger brother and his girlfriend took the album to a weekend getaway in Venice, Calif., and came back raving about “If You Could Read My Mind.”
They took a chance, got it playlisted on a few radio stations and the rest was history.
Whitney Houston’s death brought the song back to mind, because Lightfoot sued the composer of her hit “The Greatest Love of All” in 1987 for seemingly copying 24 bars of music from “If You Could Read My Mind.”
Lightfoot looks ashamed. “At the time I felt quite vehement about it, but after a few weeks, I just dropped the charge. I’d made my point and I didn’t really want to ruin anybody’s reputation.”
Fate intervened in one more Lightfoot classic, 1976’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a story ballad quite unlike most of his songs.
“I was living in a big old house in Rosedale at the time. I was on the top floor trying to write and I remember thinking ‘God, it’s windy tonight.’ I took a break, turned on the TV news and heard that an oil carrier had sunk three hours before.
“I went back upstairs with a melody in my head, but it didn’t catch fire and so I dropped it.”
But the story haunted Lightfoot and he finally tracked down the details about the 29 men who died that night on Lake Superior.
When he went back to write the song a second time, it stuck. And, beyond the success of the recording, “I maintain a scholarship at the Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich., and I’ve done so since 1977.”
There’s a long pause and Lightfoot looks up, exhausted. “I think I just fried myself.
“So many songs, so many stories. That’s my life, friend.”
FIVE FAVE PEOPLE IMPORTANT TO LIGHTFOOT’S CAREER
Albert Grossman
He was my manager. He handled Peter, Paul & Mary, Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, Odetta and me.
Ian Tyson
He was the first one to record me and he became my mentor.
Elvis Presley
I think he did the best version of one of my songs. His “Early Morning Rain” is so poignant.
Sir William Cornelius Van Horne
An American from Illinois who spent the last 20 years of his life in New Brunswick and taught me to really love this country.
Frank Sinatra
The night he was supposed to record “If You Could Read My Mind,” he sang a half a chorus and threw the music on the floor. But I understood. And I always respected him.
Toronto Star interview-Apr.19,2012
