TORONTO SUN
Rush were the surprise performers at Gordon Lightfoot tribute at Massey Hall
The show was filmed for a future CBC Music Live At Massey Hall
Author of the article:
Jane Stevenson
Published May 24, 2024
Everyone from his own daughter to contemporaries like Burton Cummings paid tribute to Gordon Lightfoot in song on Thursday night at Toronto’s Massey Hall in the first musical gathering to honour the iconic singer-songwriter since his death just over a year ago at age 84.
But the biggest surprise was when previously unannounced performers Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush fame took the stage to join Blue Rodeo, one of two house bands for the evening, to perform The Way I Feel.
“Fancy meeting you here,” joked Lee.
The crowd went nuts during a night of many such memorable moments starting with Lightfoot’s youngest daughter Meredith Moon performing Oh, So Sweet, her own Slow Moving Train (a favourite of her dad’s) and was then joined by Serena Ryder to make beautiful harmonies for If You Could Read My Mind.
From there Tom Cochrane took on the mighty The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with The Lightfoot Band, the other house band of the night, reminding everyone just how much of a songwriting genius the Orillia native really was.
“I hope I remember the lyrics,” Cochrane joked.
The kind, generous and sometimes political spirit of Lightfoot, who performed the most at Massey Hall at a whopping 170-plus times, was most definitely in the house.
Particularly during William Prince’s poignant solo take on The House You Live In, Julian Taylor’s beautiful rendition of All I’m After, Kathleen Edward’s rousing version of Carefree Highway (backed by Blue Rodeo including ex-husband and guitarist Colin Cripps in a bedazzled nudie suit), and Allison Russell’s defiant Black Day In July, which Lightfoot wrote about the Detroit riots back in the ‘60s and found himself banned from many American radio stations as a result.
The biggest laughs came before Burton Cummings’ simple piano rendition of If You Got It as he re-enacted his famous impression of Lightfoot singing Rod Stewart’s Maggie May, and the biggest crowd singalong came during The Good Brothers’ Alberta Bound before all of the artists gathered for the grand finale of Summerside of Life.
The show, which was broken down into two hours on either side of a 30-minute intermission, was hosted by CBC Radio’s Damhnait Doyle, who often told the next performer’s Lightfoot story before they could while trying to kill time between band set-ups.
There were also cameras on stage and in the aisle with the concert being filmed for a future special edition of CBC Music Live at Massey Hall.
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