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-   -   text from magazine: READING,PA-May 29-2015 (http://www.corfid.com/vbb//showthread.php?t=27884)

johnfowles 06-01-2015 09:27 AM

text from magazine: READING,PA-May 29-2015
 
y
Quote:

Originally Posted by DarylK (Post 187613)
Here is the positive article from Thursday's Reading paper.

As I am preparing a tutorial on using Optical Character Recognition to extract the text from images like that one I decided to feature it as one of several examples and therefore I uploaded it to the free online OCR website whose URL is (you guessed it):-
http://www.onlineocr.net/

and here follows the result
(the recognition was in fact perfect (the only editing I did was to remove about a dozen no longer required dashes in the middle of words that were of necessity folded into the next line as typeset in the newspaper.
Yer Tiz:-

Gordon Lightfoot and his folk classics still move huge fan base
BY TRACY RASMUSSEN READING EAGLE CORRESPONDENT
THE CAREFREE highway hasn't always been kind to Gordon Light-foot, but 50 years later, he's still on it. The singer-songwriter brings his "50 Years on the Carefree Highway" tour to the Santander Performing Arts Center on Friday for an 8 p.m. performance. He said he's just as excited about this tour as he has been about the dozens of others he has been on in his long and successful career. "We're always excited about getting out there to perform," he said. "I really do enjoy it. Everybody enjoys it."
Lightfoot admitted that he has created a science for streamlining his shows, relying on the interaction of the audience to make each show unique. "I have three different shows that I keep rotating," he said. "They are all in different orders and the material is different, so you won't always hear the same songs." There are some songs, though, that you will always hear at a Gordon Lightfoot show. Lightfoot knows why his audience keeps filling theaters for him, and he said he's happy to oblige. Songs such as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "If You Could Read My Mind" and "Carefree Highway" are always in every show, as are about a dozen others. "Those are the standards," Light-foot said. "There are about 14 or 15 songs that we'd never miss doing in the time allotted. The rest is support material." He said he makes sure to dip way back into his catalog for a few gems each night, too. "There are three or four of those," he said. "Maybe it was something you heard way back when, and they turn out to be real good onstage. I like to work them into the show." His problem remains that he has got a huge catalog of songs well loved by his 50-plus year following of fans. "I hate to take (songs) out," he said. "I hate to lose stuff. But there are some songs that we will never lose." At 76 with a near-death experience in his recent past (an abdominal aortic aneurysm that left him comatose for several weeks and off the stage for nearly two years), Lightfoot doesn't think about retiring. Even a stroke that left his right hand fairly useless for a while wouldn't stop him, as he just worked harder to get the hand working again. It's performing that pulls him through the tough times and, frankly, he said, it's what he was born to do. He got his start in Canada, where he still lives, and started writing songs in high school. "When I got started you could perform in coffeehouses anywhere," he said of the 1960s. "People were hiring folksingers everywhere." As a senior in high school, he wrote a song about the hula-hooping craze and brought it to the local music publishing company. "I was with the barbershoppers through high school," he said. "And I was trying to write an arrangement, and I was dismally lacking in notation. So I saw a picture on the cover of Life magazine with a vacant lot with about 150 people all spaced out and hula hooping at once, and I wrote a song about it." He said he borrowed his dad's car, drove to Toronto and took it to BMI Canada. "I had only just learned to drive," Lightfoot said. "But I drove there and showed the song. I remember that Harold Moon (then head of BMI Canada) talked to me and said that it was a very topical song. They weren't going to publish it, but he said if I had anything else refreshing like that, to send it along." Lightfoot still has the lead sheet for that song, but it wasn't until a few years later that the songs he wrote for Peter, Paul and Mary and Canadian singers put him on the path to his own stardom, the path that brings him back to Reading again. "I really like performing those songs," he said. "It's still thrilling to hear them." Songs like "If You Could Read My Mind" (which cracked the Top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1970) don't have the same meaning they had when he wrote them (that particular song was about the breakup of his marriage), but now they resonate in different ways. "When the tuning is perfect on the instruments and the tempo is a little different, it's just thrilling," he said. "I remember I had a terrible hangover the day I recorded that one." Email Tracy Rasmussen: weekend@reading eagle.com.
If you go
Event Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot When: 8 p.m. Friday Where: Santander Performing Arts Center,136 N. Sixth St. Admission: Tickets range from $39.50 to $63.50 plus fees Web: www.santander-arena.com By the way: Dinner is available prior to the show; reservations required at 610-898-7201.


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