[Auburn Annie]

FOUND it! I was checking web pages instead of group discussions. On Google, enter "Gordon Lightfoot" +Brita and the last entry is the [long] article (see below). Part 2, referred to at the end, is NOT on the internet, that I've found.
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This cover story from MacLean's magazine of September, 1968, gives us a
fascinating glimpse into the Ontario portion of one of Lightfoot's annual
cross-Canada tours he used to conduct by station wagon in the late 60's.
As well, in part 2, we get an inside peek at Lightfoot's 1968 appearance at
the Cellar Door in Washington, DC.
The article was written by Marjorie Harris.

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The trip north from Tornto with Gordon Lightfoot was an Arcadian dream:
there was Lightfoot, a beautiful man, driving the car through the special
luminous twilight that comes to Ontario in May, over roads that undulated
the land, just as the steam rose off the black earth like smoke. The funny
Victorian-Gothic farmhouses and villages perched inact on the horizon,
temporarily immune from the urban sprawl. This was, in fact, Gordon
Lightfoot country. He came from Orillia, 40 miles northeast of the little
town of Alliston where we were heading that night for a concert in the
high school gymnasium.

Alliston's houses belong to the 19th century, but the Frederick Banting
Memorial high school is aggressively 20th century - a sterile saltbox. It
was imbued with a different spirit that night, however. Gordon Lightfoot
was the first genuine star to play the town in years and every one of the
2000 folding chairs in the cavernous gym had been sold. The crowd that
started lining up at eight o'clock was mostly under 25, uniformly clean-cut,
scrubbed and innocent-looking. No hippies here - no sideburns or
turtlenecks, no weird clothes or wild makeup. There were knots of newly wed
tennagers, pregnant young girls, talking about finishing grade 13, about
babies, about drinking Southern Comfort and Coke and getting very sick, and
about Lightfoot: "He's pretty big, you know."

Gordon Lightfoot is pretty big indeed. He's 29 and he's had more songs
recorded by other artists in the past five years than any songwriter in
North America except Bob Dylan. For Loving Me, one of his earliest songs,
has been recorded by more than 100 artists. His albums sell phenomenally
well in Canada. His second album, The Way I Feel, has sold more than 125,000
copies and won him a gold record. He went from singing in a bar to filling
Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre in a matter of months, strictly on the
hits other people had made by recording his songs. He composed honest tunes
with an astonishing variety of textures. His lyrics are straightforward and
touching, without obscurantisn or flatulent philosophy.

At precisely nine o'clock, John Stockfish, electric bass, sporting a
pre-Elvis pompadour, and Red Shea, acoustic guitar, looking like a shambling
Paul Newman, took their places on the vast naked stage. Then, in a blizzard
of buckskins, Lightfoot was front and centre singing For Loving Me.

The buckskin jacket, with its rows of fringes, was a surprise, a holdover
from his early Country-and-Lightfoot days. The rest was hip: bell-bottom
jeans, brightly colored shirt with a California style scarf loosely knotted
at the throat. The soft curling blonde hair gave him the appearance of a
monir Greek god. He's paler and heavier than your average Greek god, but
sexy in a vulnerable kind of way. The crowd loved him. They whistled and
stamped their feet at every song, building up an empathetic rhythm as he
sang.

The star quality was all there: the presence, the pacing, the confident
patter, even corny jokes. The kids dug whatever he said. "A few weeks ago I
was in the Princess Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I met a girl named Marie
Christine Dupuis. She couldn't speak English, and being a Canadian I
couldn't speak word of French. We spent five lovely hours together. This
song is about a woman compared to a ship. It is definately ahead of its
time." Then he gave his Dick Martin-type laugh.

Lightfoot moved into Black Day In July. He wrote it just after the Detroit
riots last year. It's solid musical journalism, documenting America without
putting it down. His sense of that violent is graphic. The audience shouted
their approval. "I wish I had some answers," he replied.

Between sets, he relaxed by reminiscing about his early career. He sat with
his leg slung over the arm of a chair, his long elegant fingers fiddling
with his ring. "Alliston's a lot like Orillia physically - a small, pretty
town. I'm not sure what I feel about Orillia - that was 11 years ago and I
got out. When I first went to Toronto I was real hick. I was a clerk in a
bank for $40 a week - some financier. I lived with another guy from Orillia
in a boarding house in the east end."

Unlike many folk singers and young composers who can think up tunes and
lyrics but have to get someone else to transpose them, Lightfoot is the
complete composer. He's come the whole disciplined route: singing and
drumming in the high school band, operettas, studying piano, forming his own
singing groups and bands; a barbershop quartet that almost won a national
championship until the bass quit and the group collapsed. When he graduated
from high school in 1957, he studied at the Westlake School of Modern Music
in Los Angeles to polish all his techniques. Now he can identify any note
played and can sight-sing.

He jogged back onto the stage and started laying his very newest song on the
Young Ones, as he calls his fans. "Now this is really deep," he said. "It
took me six years to put it into words. It's about a first trip to New York
- it's called Cold Hands From New York."

After the show was over, the crowd dispersed reluctantly. About 30 girls
waited for autographs. Through the middle of them strode a tall, heavily
built girl in an orange dress. It was the ultimate groupie, or group
follower. Lynn Ackerman. She is the most devoted and obsessive of all
Lightfoot's fans. "It doesn't matter where we play," Lightfoot explained,
"if it's in Sudbury or New York, she'll show up." It's hard to understand
why. She has almost no contact with him, although he occasionally shouts
from the stage, "Is Lynn out there?" Nothing is quite as sad as Lynn
watching Lightfoot zap off out of the parking lot. I wondered how she'd get
back. "By bus, or hooking a ride with someone," Lightfoot said. "I don't
know, I can't get myself involved in her bag."

We roared along the highway drawn by the pospect of greasy chips - the first
food anybody had had since noon. "Man, I worked bars for two years after I
learned how to play guitar. I mean, when the Village Corner Folk Club thing
was happening for Ian and Sylvia, all I could pick was four-string axe - the
simplest there is. I was writing all the time and had started singing some
of my own songs. The first time I really broke out with something was at the
Toronto Teachers College in 1964. Steele's Tavern, where I was playing, let
me off for an hour. The thing at the Teachers College was all me. I went
over well and I knew it. It did something to me." It did enough to give him
confidence in his own songs, and he incorporated them into his repetoire.
One night a few months later, Ian Tyson came into Steele's with John Court,
Albert Grossman's partner and record producer. Tyson liked Lightfoot's
songs and later recorded several; Grossman, "the" New York agent for folk
and pop singers, signed Lightfoot. That did it. Calls for concerts started
coming in. "Peter, Paul and Mary did For Loving Me and they were on my
bandwagon for months. They'd shout my name out at concerts."

The next day, Lightfoot was faced with two shows in Cobourg, Ontario. In
spite of fatigue and indifestion from last-night's hamburgers, he headed out
to visit some old friends between shows. Three girls were waiting 50 yards
from his 1967 Ford sation wagon as he was leaving the school. "Don't be shy,
girls. It's okay, I'll sign. They were all carrying his latest album, Did
She Mention My Name. They giggled. One girl held out her hand to be signed.
"No way," he said, and signed the album: "Best wishes from Gordon
Lightfoot."

In drizzling rain we pulled up in front of a ranch-style bungalow huddled
uncomfortably between some elegant old, brick Victorian houses. The vast
living room of the house was covered in about a quarter of an acre of beige
carpet. Lightfoot politely removed his pointy cowboy boots. Everyone
followed his example, to the host's astonishment. We sat down to tiny
sandwiches and a drink. "We've followed Gord's career closely for 10 years,"
the host said. "When we realized Gord was in the chorus singing and dancing
on Country Hoedown, 18 of us got together and sent a petition to the CBC
demanding that they give Lightfoot a chance to sing by himself. All they did
was send back a picture of King Gannam, the star of the show."

"When I started out on Country Hoedown," Lightfoot recounted, "the producer
said, 'You're a clumsy son of a bitch, but you've got potential.' I did
every one of those 250 shows terrified that I'd forget my lines or the dance
steps."

We left the house at 6:30. Lightfoot, Shea and Stockfish needed time to tune
up for the evening performance - a holy, private ritual for musicians. The
dressing area for the band was in the school's music room. The principal of
the school came in to meet Lightfoot. He was a tall, quiet man whose eyes
popped when he saw the band's equipment strewn all over his tidy music room.
Introductions were started but Red Shea, who acts as Lightfoot's buffer
against the outside world, broke in and pushed Gordon into a small anteroom
where they were tuning up. Twenty minutes later he emaerged apologetically,
did his polite thing and signed autographs.

The hall was filled to capacity: 1,024 tickets at $2.50 and $3.50 each had
been sold. One man in the back row couldn't believe what had happened to
him: seven dollars for two people to sit 1,000 seats from the stage!

Lightfoot got thunderous applause when he ran on stage and swung into For
Loving Me. The pacing of this show was faster than the afternoon and the
night before. An electric quality was building up all during the show. The
crowd swayed in time with his music, they responded to every movement of his
body and every song he sang. Lightfoot was digging it - he kept nodding
affirmatively and smiling at Shea and Stockfish. At one point he said,
"We're really together tonight. Lord, let it stay like this."

Peter Bryson, the student organizer of the concert, had seen the Gordon
Lightfoot TV special last September. Undeterred by skeptical friends, he
approached Albert Grossman and got a signed contract back by the end of
February. When Lightfoot's third album was released in April, more than 100
copies were sold in each Cobourg record store the first day.

"I don't know if he realizes this, but he has a different rhythm," Bryson
said. "I play guitar and try to copy him, but I can't. I listen to the song
first, then the words. He puts something up against me, and I'd like to get
around it and see what the real thing is for myself." To Peter Bryson and
most very young people, Lightfoot's songs about love are just a story. But
the songs about Canada, and the documents, are different. "Take something
like the Canadian Railroad Trilogy," Bryson explained. "It makes you want to
go across Canada and have this song in your mind as you travel. I'm proud
he's a Canadian. I'm proud a famous folk singer sings about Canada."

The evolution of Lightfoot's lyrics has been from very simple, charming
songs like The Way I Feel; to more complex historical songs like the
Canadian Railroad Trilogy. This remarkable song has the quality of Francis
Parkman's histories of Canada. You can feel how empty and lonely it was - no
wisp of smoke rose over those incredible forests. His recent songs are
trickier, psychologically and symbolically. The Gypsy, written earlier this
year, is closer to the drug-oriented metaphors of Bob Dylan.

Barnstorming is an exhausting way to pay the bills. "You have to travel with
your own PA system and expect the worse about lights. Small town promoters
don't realize you can get up there with the wrong lights, bad sound and
make an ass of yourself in front of 1,000 people."

In Hamilton the following day, the seating arrangement was bad, the lights
were terrible and the promoter wanted Lightfoot to cut the aftyernoon show
short. "I can't do that, man," Lightfoot shot back. "They've paid good money
for a Lightfoot show and that's what they'll get - a complete show, and a
good one." He was right. It was a good one.

When the pressures of perfectionism and performing dry him up aesthetically,
Lightfoot takes off for England. It started in 1963, when he took his
Swedish bride Brita and spent the summer in London. He'd suffered a fearful,
arid period in his writing for almost two years. Before that songs had been
pouring out of him. Some were good, and some, like Two Kids From Cabbagetown
were awful. Through a fast-talking agent he got on British television with a
show called Rancho Vegas, fearturing live horses and Rodgers-and-Hart early
Americana. Even though the show was a seedy affair and he felt numbed by it,
Lightfoot wrote 30 songs. During a more recent fallow period, he went to
England and rode around in train compartments by himself. Sicteen new songs
came to him swiftly and he started writing poetry as well. Perhaps England
frees him from his small town background and the dominating Canadian
landscape. Now he's articulating urban fear and violence and the enormous
burden of Canadian history.



[This message has been edited by Auburn Annie (edited April 10, 2003).]