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The poetry and wisdom of Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot
Two new biographies explore the lives of the Canadian music icons
Judith Timson
October 5, 2017
Continued:
In such seventies hits as “The Circle Game,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Help Me,” and in her innovative albums Blue and Court and Spark, Mitchell provided the soundtrack of our lives, winning eight Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award, in the process. Her male peers thought she was way too personal—“Oh, Joni, save something for yourself,” Kris Kristofferson told her—but she couldn’t be any other way. The result was both transcendent and bracing, or as Rolling Stone once put it, “a whole lot of Woman Truth.”
Yaffe depicts Mitchell as “a young woman dodging male authority in a man’s world.” Her male peers—among them Graham Nash and Neil Young—admired the way she tuned her guitar, her intricate melodies and, most of all, the words she wrote. Even the late playwright Sam Shepard, for whom she wrote the song “Coyote” after a brief flirtation, couldn’t get over a lyric like “I’ve got a head full of quandary and a mighty, mighty thirst.”
Yaffe offers some memorable scenes, among them Joni and Jimi (Hendrix) in an Ottawa hotel room in March 1967, trading notes on music sitting on the floor with a third musician, “like a campfire,” says Mitchell, before a hotel detective broke it up. Oh, Ottawa.
Mitchell has bravely made intense forays into jazz and taken other sophisticated musical detours that her fans and radio stations didn’t always appreciate. Blue, meanwhile, remains her biggest-selling album. Yaffe explains the pull of its soulful songs: “In every decade, in every age, there would be those who are sinking, those who needed to be reminded . . . you can make it through these waves.”
On the stage of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in December 1975, amid stars like Joan Baez and Elton John, Lightfoot “looked every inch the handsome hometown hero,” Jennings writes. Not only would he have the crowd cheering as he sang “Sundown,” his “taut tale of sexual jealousy,” but there was a helluva party later that night at Lightfoot’s Beaumont Road mansion in Rosedale, site of many a rock-’n’-roll bacchanal, especially after Lightfoot’s sold-out yearly shows at Massey Hall.
Born in Orillia, Ont., in 1938, Gordon Lightfoot developed his love of singing before he was a teen, as a member of a United Church choir. He still sings in a Toronto church, once a year. “Throughout his life Lightfoot faced issues of sin, redemption and repentance and when reflecting upon himself, actually thought in those terms,” writes Jennings.
Time magazine once called him a “cosmopolitan hick.” While he played often in the U.S., he didn’t move there because “I was a bit of a homebody.” He made a lot of money here—buying up expensive Toronto real estate more commonly the habitat, says Jennings, of “stockbrokers, mining executives, the Bay St. boys.”
At the height of his fame, Lightfoot was drinking so hard it almost destroyed his career. At one point he was up to a bottle of Canadian Club a day. In the summers he would take long canoe trips, which also helped him dry out. He eventually stopped drinking.
He’s often been seen as socially brusque to the point of boorishness, and he’s agonized over it: “I’ve asked myself many times if the shyness is really arrogance . . . I’m sorry for every faux pas,” he told one interviewer.
Through broken marriages (three wives, six children) and the ups and downs of the music industry Lightfoot has had a “huge work ethic.” For Lightfoot, writes Jennings, “it was always about the song.” Work was his refuge, and it paid off in creating lovely, haunting songs (“If You Could Read My Mind” has been covered more than 300 times) that not only made him famous but were sung by some of the greatest singers of his time, including Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand.
Stubbornness has been a mainstay of his career. In 1972, he was nominated for a Grammy for “If You Could Read My Mind,” but he refused to perform the song because the producers wanted its time cut, thereby missing “his chance to shine on music’s biggest night on television.” Still, shine he did. In 2000, the New York Times critic Ann Powers wrote after a concert at New York City’s Town Hall that Lightfoot was “a rugged guy who knows how to melt. The slow thaw defines his music and his enduring charm.”
Through health crises, music industry shakeups and periods when they were deeply undervalued or undone by their own demons, Mitchell and Lightfoot each kept doing the thing that sustained them—and us.
Perhaps the greatest gift of both Reckless Daughter and Lightfoot is that both books lead you right back to their music. Feels like you never left, only better.