Asheville article - June 13-2013
 

http://www.citizen-times.com/article...nclick_check=1

Written by
Tony Kiss
FILED UNDER
Asheville Scene
IF YOU GO
Who: Gordon Lightfoot.
When: 8 p.m. June 16.
Where: Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.
Tickets: $34.50, $49.50 at the U.S. Cellular Center box office and Ticketmaster.com
You expect to hear the hits when Gordon Lightfoot plays. And the ’70s folk legend will gladly do them when he returns June 16 at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium. Think songs like “Early Morning Rain” and “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

But for his new tour, “50 Years on the Carefree Highway,” he’s also digging deep and playing what he calls the “dark horses” — tracks from his many albums that don’t get as much exposure.

“A lot of these, you haven’t heard before,” Lightfoot said in a phone interview last week. “They are songs that should have worked well on stage, but we never got a chance to work on them. We had too much other material and had to lose them. The standards are always there.”

Lightfoot is one of the biggest names in Canadian music, and he’s enjoyed big success in the U.S., too, in a career that started building in the 1950s. Lightfoot himself dates his career from 1965. “That’s when I gave up my day job,” he said.

At that time, he was working in a bank. Before that, he drove a truck, he said. And he was singing in coffeehouses and sometimes on TV as the foundation for his success began to take shape.

By the 1970s, Lightfoot was turning out the hits: “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” “Sundown” and more.

For the most part, Lightfoot said that his audience has been the same in Canada as it has in the States. “I feel a similar experience every time get on the stage north of the border or in the States,” he said.

His songs have stood the test of time for 40 years, thought he’s made a few minor lyric changes. He’s particularly tuned into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” inspired by the 1975 loss of the freight ship of the same name. Lightfoot’s song chronicled the tragedy, based on what was known when the ship went down in Lake Superior, taking with it her crew of 29.

“It was thought for a long time that a faulty hatch cover caused her to sink,” Lightfoot said. More recent research has shown the ship cracked in two, he said, and Lightfoot changed the lyrics to reflect that. It’s a sensitive matter, and Lightfoot remains in touch with family survivors of the Fitzgerald crew, including some of those whose husbands and sons handled the hatch covers, he said.

Lightfoot credits his success to having early songs recorded by such stars as Peter, Paul and Mary and Marty Robbins, among others. “I was fortunate that way,” he said. “I had two or three things clicking at once. I don’t know that too many young people (today) are doing it that way.”

While younger artists are turning to YouTube and Twitter to boost their careers, Lightfoot is not plugged into the online world. “I don’t have Twitter,” he said. “I don’t even have a cellphone. My kids do, and all my ex-wives, but I’m the only holdout.”