Gordon Lightfoot
When: Tonight, 8 p.m.
Where: Royal Theatre-Victoria BC - Oct.22,23-2014
Tickets: $99.50, $75.00, $49.50 rmts.bc.ca or by phone 250-386-6121
Gordon Lightfoot’s tour of the U.S. began in West Wendover, Nevada, a city he had yet to visit during his 40 years as a professional performer.
The date, held in what Lightfoot called a “majestic” casino, was full of fans, some of who travelled a great distance to see the living legend in concert. While some musicians might consider a city at an old U.S. Air Force base near the Utah border easy to skip, Lightfoot was delighted to play there for good reason.
West Wendover, and other cities like it, serve as key dates on his concert schedule now.
“We like to work every night as we go along,” Lightfoot said from his home in Toronto. “These casinos come in handy.”
Lightfoot’s run through the U.S. finished Oct. 4 in Portland, Oregon. Facing a few weeks off before his Canadian dates were set to begin, he left his gear and tour bus stationed in Oregon while he and his band and crew flew home to Toronto. Lightfoot sent for it to be picked up over the weekend, in time for the 17-date Canadian run, which began Tuesday in Nanaimo and continues tonight in Victoria.
“It’s a bit of a scramble, I can tell you that,” Lightfoot, 75, said of life as a touring musician. “But you get used to it.”
None of this is new to Lightfoot, a Canadian icon and one of the most revered folk singers of his generation. He has been playing music, in one capacity or another, since the early 1950s.
In 1952, he received what would become his big break, a school recording session and performance. His school principal at the time had purchased a lathe recorder that recorded audio directly to acetate. Knowing that Lightfoot was already singing in places around his hometown of Orillia, Ont., he requested a meeting with the budding folk singer.
“He called me down to his office one day and I thought I was in trouble for something,” Lightfoot recalled. “I started getting scared because he used to strap kids. I thought I was going to get the strap, but instead he asked me to make a record.”
Lightfoot sang Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby) in the principal’s office, with a teacher accompanying him on piano. Lightfoot’s principal liked the performance so much he played it four days later, over the intercom, during parents’ day.
“I heard myself as I was walking down the hall with my parents,” Lightfoot said.
The young Lightfoot began playing shows around Orillia with his sister, Beverley, on piano, all because of his intercom appearance. “We gained quite a bit of ground with that one,” he said with a laugh. “People had me singing at weddings, and ladies’ clubs, and mens’ clubs, and the Lions Club — everything you could imagine.”
He has done everything imaginable in the decades since, from simultaneously topping the U.S. singles and album charts in 1971 to having his songs recorded by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and Johnny Cash.
Even though he has lived in both Los Angeles and London, his name is synonymous with Toronto. He made his mark in the early 1960s during the coffeehouse boom and expanded upon that with nine hit records during a seven-year period. For that, he was awarded 16 Juno Awards between 1965 and and 1976.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t write new material these days, and hasn’t issued a new recording in well over a decade. Lightfoot has said all he wants to say. His final studio album for Warner Bros., 1998’s A Painter Passing Through, brought to a close a contract with the label that began in 1970. He made one more album independently, 2004’s Harmony, after a ruptured artery nearly killed him. With that, he closed the book on his recording career.
His current tour has given him a chance to revisit his canon. For him, the highlights each night are the songs that weren’t chart-toppers. “We probably didn’t play them right when we put them down [to tape] in the first place, but the potential was there,” he said. “But when you get out front of a crowd, and do them a few times, they start to work and get you the momentum you were looking for.”
Included among the songs that “didn’t feel right” at the time of recording is perhaps his biggest hit. “There are some things I recorded — of the 220 originals I’ve written — that I wish to heck I would have had the chance to do over again. And you want to know what one of them is? If You Could Read My Mind. I wish they would have given me one more shot with that one. I had a hell of a hangover.” Mistakes were made in life as in his career, Lightfoot admitted. He stopped drinking in 1982 (“It was ruining my life,” Lightfoot said) but his legend as a songwriter has carried him through. He is now folk-music royalty, with some of the highest-ranking fans one could ever hope to have.
In recent years, Bob Dylan and Neil Young have pledged their respect by covering Lightfoot originals in the studio and on stage. The thought of his peers paying respect is a point of pride for Lightfoot.
“I certainly love the attention, but it’s a mutual thing. Both of them have been idols of mine for years. After getting to meet these people and sort of becoming acquainted with them, it was interesting, because it was the result of them being interested in doing my songs. I appreciated that a great deal.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
- See more at:
http://www.westender.com/folk-legend....pka11RaS.dpuf
VICTORIA BC-Oct.22-2014
