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UPDATED AT 1:56 AM EDT Saturday, Oct. 11, 2003
'The bottom line is the songs'
Gordon Lightfoot gives a rare interview to talk about his upcoming album
Photo: J.P. Moczulski/The Globe and Mail
Canadian songwriting legend Gordon Lightfoot attends the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame awards in Toronto.
By ERIN ANDERSSEN and JAMES ADAMS
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
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The walls are lined with mahogany, like the hollow of a grand old tree, in the room where Gordon Lightfoot put down on paper the last songs he may ever write. He would stand at the desk, with its plain legs braced up on a pair of speakers, and its surface scarred with the half circles of drinks left too long, and make notes in pencil, with his precise, tidy hand.
The windows of this room look out on the front lawn of his mansion in Toronto's exclusive Bridle Path neighbourhood, but the desk faces the wall. There are a few paperbacks tossed on the shelves, a trio of guitars leaning in stands on the floor, a play list from his annual Massey Hall concert framed in one corner. It is an unpretentious, disordered space fit for a man who dreamt some of his finest music on trains heading west and rivers going nowhere and, as he still remembers in particular, one rainy morning spent with his newborn son.
On this October morning, perhaps to avoid talking more about himself, the most legendary of Canadian troubadours is fast-forwarding through a CD on a small stereo by the door. He finds the song he wants a sample from a yet-to-be released, unfinished album and presses play. The guitars strum, the strings swell, that familiar voice drifts unhurried into the words: "Headin' off on a river at peace in the cool of the evening/ Headin' off on a river of light, to be part of a river tonight/ Nice to be on a river sometimes, like a June bug travellin'/ Heading off on a ribbon of song, been away from the river too long."
He listens, his head bent close to the speaker. "This is just a song about life," he says with characteristic simplicity. Then he stops the CD, as if not wanting to give too much away, and starts back to the chair in his living room, down the hall. Under the cathedral ceilings, he looks small and ancient. He walks with the ginger shuffle of someone taking care with his bones, and his face bears the gaunt mark of illness. The hair is slicked back, the moustache flecked grey. He is wearing sweats and a red T-shirt with "Canada" across the chest. When he talks, he folds and unfolds his long, manicured fingers. His voice is low and husky.
But as much as he hopes to get it back, he cannot now sing with this voice, not even, as he jokes without heart, in the shower. He woke up from the edge of death last October with a hole in his abdomen, and his larynx shredded from surgery; 12 months later, he can find the tune, but not the breath to hold a note. The song on his CD player was written in 2000, and recorded, in a stroke of luck, not long before an aneurysm exploded in his belly on the night of a benefit concert in his hometown of Orillia, Ont.
In the last decade or so, there was a tendency to take Lightfoot for granted. True, he kept writing songs and making albums. But the consensus held that his most resonant work was in the past, that he was better placed with the likes of Pierre Berton and Farley Mowat, enduring fixtures on our cultural landscape, present but in the background, crafting those durable songs like well-made canoes.
His sudden illness rattled that complacency, and among those who had not been complacent, his failing health brought a deeper appreciation of what the man had done, and what he might be capable of in the future should there be a future.
As for that, he doesn't know. Weeks from his 65th birthday with the recent release of a new tribute album, called Beautiful, as well as his own offering, Twenty, planned for the new year plus more surgery now scheduled for January, Lightfoot is confronting the prospect of retirement. "I am not pondering retirement," he says with some testiness. "I may have to. I may be forced to."
By spring, he expects, the doctors will have ruled on his voice. If he cannot sing, he says, it's not likely he will write. "To go out and start flogging tunes is not what I am about."
It's just not the Lightfoot way. Here is a man who still likes to watch the planes circle, out through the picture windows of his casually decorated $4-million mansion, where the white couch has a face doodled in blue ink on one arm, and a wall wears a dozen paintings of the Edmund Fitzgerald, with a framed list of the men lost inside her.
As a poet, he distilled a country's spirit but has rarely been comfortable speaking to its politics. "I'll let the songs," he says, "do the talking."
His music ranks among the most covered in history, he has a stack of awards, and yet, after 40 years performing, he still seems uncertain of his own talent. In his study, he carefully hauls out a stack of lead sheets written by hand on onionskin paper "just to show you that I am capable of it."
Says Lightfoot's long-time friend, Murray McLauchlan, who sings an early Lightfoot song, Home from the Forest, on the tribute album, "Contrary to popular opinion, he doesn't have a huge ego. He's paranoid about things. Basically he's a simple guy from Orillia who's this hardworking craftsman."
The craftsman has been called, unfairly, a recluse he is not much for public appearances and he hates having his picture taken but every Christmas Eve for 17 years he played a song for the congregation at Rosedale United Church. His last appearance was in 2001; he performed Bob Dylan's Ring Them Bells.
He rarely gives interviews, dreading the constant pressure to be profound. But in person, even so ill, he is charming and candid. "A lot of people find it difficult to understand what I am trying to explain," he says. "It becomes frustrating I've been trying to do it all my life. ..... The bottom line is the songs."
Settled in a high-back chair, he speaks about the death he no longer fears, as well as "the job" of writing songs, and the trick of luck in a musician's life. "You can't just be recording," he says. "You have to have a show."
What he doesn't say, though the meaning is clear, is that Gordon Lightfoot wants his show back.
In early September, 2002, he lay down on a piece of foam on the floor of a dressing room at the Orillia Opera House, while his band was warming up on-stage above him, and could not get up. "I just went down like a ton of bricks," he says. He was airlifted to hospital in Hamilton, where doctors performed emergency surgery to stop the bleeding from a main artery that had burst between his pancreas and liver. For six weeks, he lay in a coma. Several times, he almost died.
He does not remember any of it, although he recalls a vague sense of "fading directly into black." It has reassured him about death, he says: "If that's what it's like, you don't know what is going on." But it has also raised questions about God. "The business of heaven was always strong in my mind," he says, imprinted by a mother who pushed her young son to sing in church. "But when you get into a coma, it tends to make you wonder a bit. But then, we'll see. I just try to be a good person. I try to look after my responsibilities."
When he woke up around Halloween, after weeks with a tube down his throat, he could not sing. Until that point, he had been performing about 60 concerts a year and was about to head down East for a tour.
If age has thinned the baritone, and he's never been truly comfortable with on-stage banter, it didn't much matter: He could sing 15 straight songs and the audience would chant every word.
"Seeing him at those Massey Hall gigs really clarified my own approach. It wasn't about lights and effects with him," says Toronto's Ron Sexsmith, perhaps the most internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter to come out of Canada in the last 10 years, who (along with the Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo, the Cowboy Junkies and Bruce Cockburn, among others) has a track on the Lightfoot tribute album. "It's all about the songs. It's never been about jumping up and down."
On the night before he collapsed, Lightfoot played to a sold-out crowd in Orillia, at one point even sprinting downstairs for the 12-string guitar he needed to play Cotton Jenny, requested from the audience.
"He looked a little tired at the end," says Toronto lawyer Dan MacDonald, who saw him that night. "But the show was great. You wouldn't have been able to tell anything was wrong with him."
He was in excellent shape then. At this time, he had largely recovered from Bell's palsy, the facial-nerve disorder that had plagued him in the seventies. And he had famously given up the bottle cold turkey in the early eighties after years of heavy drinking. "It was hard to do because alcohol was like fuel for me, for the writing. But I began to do irrational things toward the end of that stretch of time."
He declines to elaborate, though much of his private life was public then: his long, losing court battle over a drunk-driving charge, his crumbling relationship with the mother of his fourth child. He turned to running, pounding out a regular 16 kilometres a week (though he still smokes). "I wanted to be strong for the work that I did," he says. The doctors think the new regimen saved his life.
When he came to last fall, he says, the first thing he thought of was the collection of songs that were waiting for him. His musicians had been planning to go into his Hamilton studio with a five-piece band at the end of November to lay down the final tracks. He had his voice already on tape; he had recorded the 18 songs earlier with guitar, to test them out.
They would have to form the final product now. From the hospital, he began co-ordinating the overdubbing; each night, someone would bring a CD to his room with the day's results. "It's as good as I can make it," he says of the new album, which ultimately came to include 11 tracks. "I had a job to do, and my job was writing songs."
This is how he speaks of it, as though he were a plumber fixing the kitchen sink. When he talks about songwriting, he focuses on the mechanics, not the product. As for his career success, he credits luck, specifically when, in 1965, Peter, Paul & Mary made a hit of his song For Lovin' Me. "All I can tell you is that songwriting is the key to everything," he says, naming Avril Lavigne as an example of a "brilliant little songwriter. ..... All the great ones do it."
He took his cues early on from Bob Dylan, who established, as Lightfoot puts it, "that you could crank out songs" even when maybe you didn't feel like it. He takes pride in the fact that he can write his own music and arrangements, skills he picked up during three semesters at the Westlake School of Modern Music in Los Angeles, where he moved when he was 19. "He writes like Mozart," McLauchlan says. "He writes down actual notes. Everybody else just gets a bottle of Scotch and hammers away."
Westlake was his choice over university, and the only time he lived outside the country. "I missed my relatives," he says. "I was just that kind of guy."
He grew up typically middle-class in Orillia, a blue-collar town located north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe, and was raised by a strict father who managed a dry-cleaning plant, and a homemaker mother who encouraged her son's musical side. His older sister, Bev, helped manage his career for a while. Lightfoot's roots, in many ways, define him; he's been known to call himself a "cosmopolitan hick."
He has written more than 250 songs, a sweeping catalogue of storytelling ballads and love poems. He's penned them on trains travelling across England, and after canoe trips in the wilderness. Sometimes he finds a new melody practising his guitar in front of the television. "It comes to you," he says, "and you gotta get it down."
He can write a song in a few hours, or work on four or five over several weeks. When he wants inspiration, he consults a file of about 300 ideas snippets of lyrics, and chord sequences that he has filed away "like a comic collecting jokes."
He writes what he sees as much as what he feels. And he often combines the two: As one of his protιgιs, Aengus Finnan, puts it, Lightfoot has a knack for "mapping the landscape of a love affair."
Certainly he has had plenty of personal fodder. McLauchlan recalls Lightfoot's "darker periods" in the glaring celebrity of the mid-seventies, when "he was a troubled guy, having a hard time with relationships, with his wealth, with wondering who his friends really were."
Lightfoot himself is blunt about his past: "My emotional life has been a roller coaster. I have six children with four women." He declines to talk specifically about where things have gone wrong, but he is not ready to blame his career or travel schedule. That may have been part of it, he says, "but then you reach a point when your conduct can change. My conduct changed in 1982 when I gave up alcohol."
Before that, his first marriage had ended with what was then reported to be the largest alimony payment in history. He also had a stormy romance with Cathy Smith, believed to be the subject of his hit Sundown, and who was later sentenced for delivering a lethal dose of heroin to actor John Belushi.
After more than a decade of marriage, he and his current wife have now separated. "We're living under separate domicile," he volunteers. "But we won't overplay that."
One of his most famous songs, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, was born from a Newsweek article, which now hangs on his wall, detailing the tragic 1975 sinking on Lake Superior. Early Morning Rain came to him while he was caring for his five-month old son, but it is really about his days in L.A., when, short on cash and missing home, he would go out to the airport and watch the planes land. After the morning with his son, he wrote the song in two hours. "Songs have to be like that, they have to flow," he says. "They have to create themselves."
Still, he says, it is exhausting and he has not been writing since his recent illness. "Sometimes it's easy, and a lot of the time, it isn't," he says. "You have to keep pressure on yourself all that time, and right now I don't want that pressure."
Since the Orillia concert, he has had another round of major surgery. Two weeks ago, he had to go to the emergency room because his saline IV became infected. In January, he is looking at several more months in hospital, while surgeons try to graft tissue from his thigh to reconstruct his abdomen. But at least, he says, he can still eat on his own, and he even jokes about his frequent bathroom breaks, which keep his public appearances short. "I have to be close to a washroom all the time," he grins. "I prefer if it is my own."
One of those brief appearances came last month, when he stood in the back of the room for the release of the tribute album. He has listened to it several times. "I give that thing a whole lot of stars," he says. He has a hard time, though, identifying his place in Canadian music history. "I've embodied something," is about the closest he gets. "I gotta say, I have never taken myself too seriously." When asked why he thinks Canadian artists admire him so much, he credits his work ethic and longevity the same example Bob Dylan once set for him.
When it is pointed out that he was the first to prove that a Canadian could build an international career while remaining in Canada, he shrugs it off. "Maybe [they'll say] he wasn't talented enough to make the move, and he's making an excuse about it. But I really sincerely wanted to live in Canada."
It would seem incredible to young singer-songwriters, such as Finnan, that Lightfoot would doubt his standing. On the night Finnan heard about the musician's collapse, he pulled out every Lightfoot album he owned and started playing song after song alone in the dark. The 30-year-old thought of the way Lightfoot's songs "had shaped my sense of the country, my sense of romance, my masculinity."
He recalled listening to Affair on Eighth Avenue ("The perfume that she wore/ Came from some little store/ On the down side of town") with the headphones on when he was just seven, and how "in that moment, I knew I was learning something I wasn't old enough to know." And he thought of the first Lightfoot concert he ever attended, when he was 21, at Place des Arts in Montreal, and how he went backstage and waited outside and got to shake Lightfoot's hand.
When Finnan, at the time a theatre student, told Lightfoot that he liked to "chop out some of your songs, Gord," Lightfoot told him, "Y'know, you should write your own songs." Which is what Finnan proceeded to do.
In fact, when morning brought an end to Finnan's recent all-night salute, he pulled out his guitar and began to compose "a get-well song" to the ailing musician which became the only original composition included on the new tribute album. "Ever will your name be strong," he wrote. "Ever will the true north ring/ With the glory of your song."
This would be Lightfoot's take on the subject of his own legacy: "My classification is contemporary. My handle is I'm a singer-songwriter. Let's put it that way, and whatever comes out, that's the result."
It is his songs, after all, that always said it best.
