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After "Sundown" Gordon Lightfoot makes up for lost time, by
Nancy Naglin
Lightfoot deliberately keeps a low profile. He has his car parked in a local lot and he's glad he can wait in line with everybody else. He enjoys sneaking around the streets and not
being recognized. "I won't do television because what I'm doing now doesn't lend itself to the medium and because then you'll have everybody coming up to you in the street. I like my privacy."
On the way home he says he's looking "for a nice little house with parking for three cars. I'm kind of nomadic. I call up the movers about every two years." His place now is in a fairly affluent but subdued residential neighborhood. It's the kind of place a person could live for years without ever
being asked what he did for a living or where he went to work.
In the kitchen there's a lonely apple on the table, a couple of cases of Molson stock ale and a loaf of unopened Toastmaster bread turning positively blue. A Porsche in the backyard is
the only concession to a show of wealth. The rest of the house is simply, comfortably furnished. There is a chair with a doily pinned to its back, a few books (The Mirage of Marriage, I'm OK, You're OK, and a Canadian bestseller about the Depression), models of ships and trains, and lots of Eskimo art.
"My personal life has to be second priority because I'm really wrapped up in this. It is my
life." He says bringing a Molsons to an oak table in the living room. Occasionally, he glances at the row of gold records on the wall. "I try to get trough it like everybody else, and I think I've probably been more fortunate than most. There's been a lot of work, but a lot of people work themselves to death all their lives and never get anywhere."
The room has nice, mellow feel to it. Gordon stays at the table except for forays to the kitchen for more ale. Years of publicity have made him politely wary. He talks easily but no less
guardedly. He uses the second person when he talks about the music business. If he talks about his family at all, it's as if he's reading form letters - you get messages, but they don't touch you. He is paranoically cautious about personal matters, and considers any spontaneous remark as "coming clean."
Complications seem to be one of the things we have to deal with in the living business." He's
preoccupied with looking for cups among boxes of light bulbs which for some unexplained reason are cluttering up the kitchen counter. What he means is survival. Perhaps one of the most frightening moments of his career came two years ago in Toronto's Massey Hall when he lost feeling in one side of his face. In the intermission, a
doctor in the audience diagnosed the numbness as Bell's Palsy. The disease, caused by a viral infection of the middle ear, produces a
temporary paralysis which leaves the facial muscles unresponsive. It's hard to believe, but Lightfoot went back on stage to tell a hushed and shocked home audience exactly what was happening to him. He still wasn't completely recovered by
the time Old Dan's Records came out. The photo on that album purposely showed his face in the half-light. "I cried a lot," he says humbly. Today he has regained 90 to 95 percent use of his facial
muscles but he can still feel it. "I don't talk about it." But he still thinks about it.
Canadians have this crazy inferiority about being good, and Lightfoot is a perfectionist. "When I was sixteen years old I got hooked on jazz. For about four years I wouldn't listen to nothin' else but jazz and bebop. I used to try to play piano but I never got quite good enough."
As a performer he expects excellence every time. He plays with his three back-up men and saves the rest of his musicians for recording. "People enjoy hearing the basic group on stage. We don't resort to any of the effects. No electrical guitars. It's a nice, quiet, intelligent musical thing. The repertoire is big. We could go out there and play for five hours and never repeat a song. The band only knows what I'm going to play first. After that, I play it by ear. I don't spend a lot of time bantering about things that don't matter. I do about twenty-five songs each concert, and I play fast. We spend a lot of time making good and sure that our guitars are in
tune. I have one rule - we don't do any tuning on stage. There's nothing worse to listen to than a bunch of guitars that are out of tune, or somebody standing up there tuning his guitar. It's not cool at all.
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