http://www.calgaryherald.com/travel/...514/story.html
Dave Bidini says he hopes he didn’t disappoint anyone with his new book.
They are not the first words you would expect to hear from an author on the publicity rounds for his newest book.
“I hope I didn’t disappoint anybody terribly,” says Dave Bidini, settling in for a chat from his home in Toronto. “I’m sure I did.”
It seems the prolific author and musician realizes there are perils to messing with the accepted hallmarks of the unauthorized biography, particularly when dealing with a beloved and enigmatic Canadian icon. More to the point, he was aware that naming a book, Writing Gordon Lightfoot: The Man, the Music and the World in 1972, might lead a few readers to expect something a little more generic than what they will actually be getting.
Later in the interview, Bidini even points out some less-than-flattering reader reviews found on Amazon.ca, and hostile comments that appeared after his latest column for the National Post.
“ ‘Pure garbage’ I think is the headline of one of my entries,” he says with a laugh. “And the National Post site, after my column this week, there’s a bunch of people saying ‘Well, of course this is a terrible article, I read the Lightfoot book and why am I reading about prison breaks?’
So, yeah, unfortunately there are people who have come to it and have been sort of tricked, I guess.”
“But all you have to do is read the inside flap to really know what the book is about.”
Bidini appears to take some solace when reminded that unimaginative readers, like unimaginative listeners of music or unimaginative watchers of films, tend to base their appraisal of something on how closely it resembles everything else they have read, listened to or watched.
And Writing Gordon Lightfoot is anything but typical as a biography or anything else. Loosely, it fits into the growing field of “literary journalism.” But it fits even more snugly into what has become a pet topic of Bidini’s through a good number of his 10 books. (Incidentally, Bidini’s book On A Cold Road, a 1998 road memoir, made the shortlist for CBC’s 2012 Canada Reads contest Wednesday and will be championed by supermodel Stacy McKenzie.)
Yes, Writing Gordon Lightfoot is about “the world in 1972” but it’s also about Canada in 1972. It’s about how Canada viewed the world, and vice versa. So while ostensibly focused on Lightfoot and the week leading up to the iconic 1972 Mariposa Folk Festival on Toronto Island, Bidini also veers into other stranger-than-fiction, seemingly unrelated happenings that were shaping Canada and beyond for those seven days. That includes everything from a prison break at Millhaven penitentiary, to the beginning of the Canada-Russia hockey series, to the fading of Trudeaumania, and a decidedly debauched Exile on Main Street tour by the Rolling Stones, which happened to roll into Toronto at roughly the same time that Lightfoot, Bob Dylan and others took to the Mariposa stage.
“I think it was a very pivotal week in terms of Canada maturing as a country and us maturing as a people,” says Bidini. “The nature of the country was changing for sure, you know, with the flower of ’67 getting trampled to the ground. Rock ’n’ roll and hard rock was dirtying up the Canadian sound. And I think, the Canada-Russia series, that whole ride, I think we were very different at the end of that summer.”
Writing Gordon Lightfoot shares another common thread with other Bidini books, which is his habit of inserting himself into the action.
There are “fan letters” from Bidini to Lightfoot throughout the book. The first is also perhaps the most revealing, a mea culpa of sorts about an incident more than 20 years earlier that Bidini fears may have scuttled any possible relationship with Lightfoot.
After Bidini’s former band, the Rheostatics, covered The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1989, the young musician was offended when his hero refused to acknowledge the interpretation. So he told a British journalist, perhaps after one too many pints, that the melody of the song was in fact stolen from an old Irish tune. This accusation, which isn’t true, eventually got out to the world and greatly annoyed Lightfoot. Getting it off his chest was cathartic, Bidini says. Still, unlike his younger self, he seems torn as to whether he wants the 73-year-old legend to actually acknowledge his work now. Or, for that matter, whether he wants Lightfoot to even read the book at all.
“While I was writing it, yeah, but not so much now,” Bidini says. “If he did read it, that would be swell, I suppose. But I think it’s a bit of a ‘careful-what-you-wish-for’ scenario. If he doesn’t read it, that’s OK too. Ultimately you have to write for yourself really. He’s a guy I think would be really great to sit down and have a beer with him and get to know him.”
But how many people, particularly journalists and writers, really get to know Lightfoot? Last month, Herald music critic Mike Bell asked the singer about Bidini’s book directly. Lightfoot said he didn’t know anything about it and that Bidini was just one of many people who had asked, and been denied, access to his life.
He also said he was the only one who could really write a proper memoir. But even if he did, he would likely keep a lot of the personal details to himself.
That enigma, of course, is part of the appeal and part of what makes Lightfoot such an intriguing case study for any writer.
“Basically, a biography of Bono would probably be really dull,” says Bidini. “He’d be like ‘I’m Bono!’ It’s the ones whose lives are in the shadows. . . . They’re always the most interesting characters.”
evolmers@calgaryherald.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald