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Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Upstate New York
Posts: 3,101
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Tonight at Massey Hall, 'Gord is back'
"If there was a Mount Rushmore in Canada, we wouldn't have any politicians on it, that's for sure. There'd be Peter Gzowski, Gordon Lightfoot, he'd be on it, people like that."
-- Murray McLauchlan
Canadians have been waiting to exhale ever since an abdominal hemorrhage put Gordon Lightfoot into a coma in the fall of 2002. Sure, there have been plenty of signs, particularly in the last 10 months, that Canada's bard seems to have bounced back from his three visits to the surgeon. These include a round of one-off benefit concerts, a brief appearance at Mariposa 2004 and a recent evening hanging with Brian and Bruce Good at an Ian Tyson performance in a Toronto club.
But for most, the real confirmation that "Gord is back" occurs tonight, when Lightfoot, 66, and the four-piece band that's supported him, off and on, for the last 18 years, take the stage of Massey Hall in Toronto. Only then, when Lightfoot's baritone eases into Minstrel of the Dawn or Never Too Close or Don Quixote, then continues for another 21 or 22 self-penned songs, will Canucks permit themselves a genuine sigh of relief. Until now, the sporadic reports of Lightfoot sightings at this award show or that, or playing three consecutive dates in Vegas, have been a kind of tease, an anticipation of tonight's pleasures.
In one sense, Lightfoot's appearance -- the first of four consecutive Massey Hall shows -- is rather beside the point. The 2,600 or so fans at tonight's gig likely have committed to memory at least 90 per cent of the lyrics, melodies and arrangements Lightfoot will unveil. Never the most arresting or at least the most comfortable of on-stage performers, it's Lightfoot's songs that are his monument. As Tyson remarked yesterday from his ranch in Alberta, "He's in a class by himself, in terms of presentation and the level of his stuff and the tremendous consistency he's shown, especially the things he did in the 1970s. . . . I hope it goes terrific tonight. I'm sure it will."
Another friend who has Lightfoot in her thoughts this week is classical guitarist Liona Boyd. Contacted at her home in Florida, she said, "Gordon will always have a special place in my heart for his generosity and for helping me launch my career." Indeed, it was in the mid-seventies that Lightfoot, then at the height of his fame and creative powers, invited the twentysomething Boyd to go on tour with him to open an estimated 100 concerts. "He introduced me to a life of limos, Lear jets, sold-out arenas and hockey stadiums, encounters with people like John Denver and Kris Kristofferson, New York agents . . . and helped me build a significant fan base of my own.
"What I admire about his music," she added, "is that he always kept his course and didn't listen to managers or record companies who were trying to make him more 'commercial.' His style was unique -- and so representative of Canada."
Boyd said she spoke twice with Lightfoot during his recovery in hospital in Hamilton. "I'm delighted he's recovered and is back again, singing. I only regret that we never recorded some music together as we were both such fans of each other's styles. Maybe there's still time. I'm ready and willing!"
Speaking this week from London, Bonnie Dobson, composer of the classic post-apocalypse ballad Morning Dew, recalled her first meeting with Lightfoot, in the late summer of 1965 at an all-Canadian folk festival in Sault Ste. Marie. A Toronto native, Dobson had moved to New York in 1960, "because that's what you did if you were a folk artist then."
The Soo festival "was a most remarkable weekend," she said, and Lightfoot, who'd already had his songs covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, and Marty Robbins, "was a model of generosity and completely without affectation. I can't say enough nice things about him. I went back to New York after that, but then I thought, 'Why am I living in New York when I could be back in Canada with all those great performers and songwriters?' " Dobson did eventually return to Canada to live in Toronto for four years before moving to England in the late 1960s. "Whenever I'd be homesick over there, I'd listen to two artists on my record player: Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell."
David Wiffen -- the Ottawa-based composer of such famous songs as Drivin' Wheel, More Often Than Not and Coast to Coast Fever and a member, with Bruce Cockburn, of Three's a Crowd -- first met Lightfoot in the early 1960s when Lightfoot was one-half of the Two Tones duo and a regular at the now-defunct Village Corner coffee house in Toronto.
"I always admired Gord as a performer from the first time I saw him," he recalled this week. Later, Wiffen wrote a song, The Ballad of Jacob Marlowe, "with Gord in mind to sing because I always felt that Gord was an excellent storyteller."
Murray McLauchlan, one of that generation of Canadian singer-songwriters who followed in Lightfoot's footsteps in the early 1970s, noted in late 2003 that while Lightfoot is "a visceral writer" who seems to require the ups and downs of his life to fuel his creativity, he's also a trained composer, having studied orchestration in Los Angeles in the late 1950s.
"Gord writes like Mozart. He writes down actual notes on staff paper. Everybody else just gets a bottle of Scotch and hammers away until he gets something. Or not."
McLauchlan noted how Lightfoot managed to become "this huge, successful pop artist," most significantly in the 1970s, "while maintaining this long-lasting core of fans as a folk artist.
"I mean, you can't go into a Tim Hortons or a Canadian Tire in this country and not find someone in the checkout line who knows something by Lightfoot.
"They may not have the records at home, but they'll be able to sing you something from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald or If You Could Read My Mind."
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