http://www.winnipegsun.com/entertain...7/9140031.html
Gordon Lightfoot
Where: MTS Centre
When: Thu., April 16
Sun Rating 3.5 out of 5
Business up front, party in the back.
If there's a way to sum up Gordon Lightfoot's concert at MTS Centre Thursday night, that's it. And no, we're not talking about his hair — though his swept-back, shoulder-length locks were slightly mulletish, come to think of it.
Mostly, though, we're talking about the way the 70-year-old folk icon divided up his 110-minute show into two distinctly different halves: One perfunctory, fast-paced and no-nonsense; the other loose, relaxed and far more enjoyable. Instead of An Evening With Gordon Lightfoot, they should have called it The Two Sides of Gordon Lightfoot.
Let's start with Side 1: The K-Tel Concert. Taking the stage at a few minutes after 8 p.m., Lightfoot — clad in a purplish velvety jacket, skinny-legged black jeans and pointy-toed footwear — proceeded to hustle his four-piece band through a jukebox-like 14 songs in 50 minutes. And we do mean hustle; from Cotton Jenny and Carefree Highway to Rainy Day People and Beautiful to Sundown and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the hits fell like dominos. (At times, it almost reminded us of that old SCTV commercial parody for an album titled Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written — we were half-expecting him to launch into Supercalifragalisticexpialidotious and Happy Birthday.)
Hit-packed it may have been; riveting it was not. Most of the tunes were pared down to the essentials; some were truncated; sometimes Lightfoot barely seemed to pause for breath between numbers. His tastefully understated but ultimately generic combo — consisting of a guitarist, keyboard player and a rhythm section — handled everything capably, whether it was country-pop, folk-rock or more "ethereal" fare. But hamstrung as they were, they seemed more like a Holiday Inn cover band than a touring arena act. The well-behaved, attentive and decidedly middle-aged crowd of 3,000 didn't seem to mind much — but they didn't seem especially bowled over by it either. Aside from a few nostalgic whoops during the druggy Sundown and a massive outpouring for Edmund Fitzgerald, applause was enthusiastic but polite and most folks were restrained (except for the lug behind me, who apparently believed he was at some sort of sit-down clog-dancing event).
At first, we thought maybe LIghtfoot just wasn't enjoying himself. But once he proclaimed "Awright!" after the first big round of applause, that went out the window. Which brought us to another possible explanation: That he just doesn't have the stamina to make it through a long concert anymore. After all, these days, Lightfoot — who never seems to have fully recovered from an abdominal aneurysm that put him in a coma for six weeks back in 2002 — is as gaunt as a Rolling Stone, with cheekbones you could use to slice cheese. And likely as a result of a tracheotomy performed during that health scare, his voice has withered away to a thin, dusty shadow of its former robust, boomy self. So if he was trying to bolt through as many songs as he could before running out of steam, well, fair enough.
But no. As Lightfoot joked near the end of the first set, he isn't nearly as frail as he appears. "I'm holding up pretty well," he quipped, eliciting cheers. "I go to the gym a lot in my spare time."
So what was with the Speedy Gonzalez bit? Well, he claimed he was intentionally front-loading the set list with hits so that he could take it a little easier and let his hair down in the second half. We're not sure why he felt he had to do that, but hey, it was his show. And after a brief 15-minute break, he made good on his promise.
Shedding his jacket for a vest, Lightfoot did indeed stretch out a little in the 50-minute-long second half. He led the band through rockier numbers like Hangdog Hotel Room, Make Way for the Lady, Baby Step Back and Blackberry Wine. He chatted with the audience about a cold he's trying to shake. He joked about his ex-wives ("I was never unfaithful in my second marriage"). He took requests. He showed the audience how to drink water upside-down to cure the hiccups. He even moved away from the microphone every now and then (making the spotlight operator work for the first time that evening). Basically, he relaxed and had more fun — and so did everybody else, judging by the increasingly vigourous applause. And even though he played almost as many numbers in this half as in the first, nothing seemed rushed or abbreviated. In fact, by the time he was singing "I'd best be on my way" in Early Morning Rain, he seemed like he was just hitting his stride.
Next time, Lightfoot should skip the business and go straight to the party.
darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca
First Set:
Cotton Jenny
Carefree Highway
Sea of Tranquility
14 Karat Gold
Never Too Close
Let it Ride
Painter Passing Through
Rainy Day People
Shadows
Beautiful
Watchman's Gone
Ribbon of Darkness
Sundown
The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald
Second Set:
Triangle
Hangdog Hotel Room
Restless
Clouds of Loneliness
Waiting for You
If Children Had Wings
Make Way for the Lady
If You Could Read My Mind
Don Quixote
Baby Step Back
Early Morning Rain
Song For a Winter's Night
Blackberry Wine
Encore:
Old Dan's Records
Winnipeg review
