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Gordon Lightfoot Plays the Cool Granddad at the Ryman
POSTED BY THE SPIN ON FRI, MAR 18, 2016 AT 2:20 PM

Seventy-seven-year-old Canadian folk-rock icon Gordon Lightfoot wears velvet blazers, has long stringy hair and, of course, has one of the great catalogs of the past half-century in his particular genre. Despite the relatively low-key oeuvre of his tunes, he stands like a rocker. He does some typical singer-songwriter bobbing mostly, but when the mood strikes him, he assumes the stance of a relay runner ready to take the baton, holding his guitar like a button-man with a tommy gun.

That's the "cool" part.

The "granddad" part comes with Lightfoot's (relatively sparse) stage banter. There was a winding story about a recent trip to Whitefish Point, Mich., (he and his band, unlike the doomed Edmund Fitzgerald, made Whitefish Bay) and then there was a story about a shirt his aunt sent him that was three sizes too small. That was both punchline and setup.

But no one came to the Ryman Thursday night to hear Lightfoot talk anyway.

They came to hear those songs, and Lightfoot didn't shortchange anybody. Backed by a band that was predictably tight — the four-piece, which includes a guitar player who looks suspiciously like Jerry "The King" Lawler and a bassist who often seemed a second away from wandering off somewhere, has been accompanying him for the better part of five decades — Lightfoot cruised through more than two dozen songs in just over two hours.

Folk's appeal is in its earnestness, and stripped down to bare instrumentation — many album versions of Lightfoot songs got the Beautiful Music treatment, replete with soaring strings and studio-generated ethereality, unnecessary because Lightfoot's singing and playing are plenty ethereal as is — the stark, even darkly sinister lyrics of Lightfoot are even more haunting.

Take "Sundown," his biggest hit and a chilling inner monologue of a cuckold on the verge of revenge. It opens with a tortured lament ("I can see her lyin' back in her satin dress / In a room where you do what you don't confess") and it climaxes with, "I can see her lookin' fast in her faded jeans / She's a hard-lovin' woman, got me feelin' mean." Sundown, whoever he is, better take care, because Gord is close to crossing the line. Cameo — yes, they of "Word Up" — cites Lightfoot as an influence, which seems bizarre, except live, it's easy to appreciate the universality of his songs. It's easy to imagine "Sundown" covered smokily by, say, Conway Twitty, or in a dirgeish post-punk way by, say, Editors or Interpol.

The biggest crowd reactions were for the chart-toppers. Lightfoot closed the first set with "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," a song that so accurately retells the events of November 1975 that it might as well be journalism, and contains the haunting lyric, "Does anyone know where the love of God goes?" Which really feels like something a sailor faced with the lonely resignation of a shipwreck death would cry out.

When Lightfoot played the opening chords "If You Could Read My Mind," someone in the balcony yelled out, "Holy shit!" which is a jarring thing to say for the start of a song so cunningly mellow. And like "Sundown," there's some sinister sentiment mixed in with one of the toughest sad songs put to wax. "Heroes often fail" is a lesson everyone has to learn, and it can be the hardest lesson in life. But by the time Lightfoot lays it out, he's already admitted to being a ghost with chains upon his feet, and then seconds later, he aches at being burned in a three-way script.

Thank God "If You Could Read My Mind" was such a big hit for Lightfoot, because it's clear the events of the song took something out of him.

The set lists for this latest Lightfoot tour have been fairly consistent — no "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," unfortunately — so he's sung deeper cuts "Spanish Moss" and "Ribbon of Darkness" all over the country, but they felt particularly chosen for Nashville nonetheless. The former is a charming song about a Northerner falling for a Southern girl. The latter was made a hit by Marty Robbins, and Lightfoot gave a damn fine effort for an Ontarian to give tribute to Robbins' decidedly not-Ontarian voice in his performance.

It was appropriate to see Lightfoot on St. Patrick's Day — for one, it was a damn sight better than fighting the bros for a green beer on Demonbreun or standing in line at the honky-tonks; indeed, it was pretty much the opposite of that, because it feels as if Lightfoot is a successor to the bards of Eire. His songs are catchy enough to get stuck in your head, and while there's as much pain as joy, they aren't sullen (Lightfoot sang "Drink Yer Glasses Empty," which, yes, comes off as a boozing tune, but is actually a protest song about the first Gulf War; it, too, felt appropriately Irish).

The legendary cleverness of the Irish singer is embodied in the Canadian hero.

Maybe heroes do often fail, but at least one hero succeeded Thursday.