[charlene]

Friesen countered, “Look, you’ve got the guys here and you’ve got the studio booked for five days. You’re paying for it either way. Might as well try it.”

“There was a long pause,” Keane recalls. “Then Gord said, ‘All right.’ ”

Lightfoot turned to his guitarists and said, “Terry and Pee Wee, do your thing.”

Keane, lost, had to speak up.

“When do you want me to come in?” Lightfoot’s drummer had never played a single note on the mystery song to that point, and had no idea what Lightfoot wanted.

“I’ll give you a nod,” Lightfoot said. Since Lightfoot would be sitting across from Keane, right outside the drum booth, that seemed simple enough.

Lightfoot asked Friesen to turn the lights down, which set the mood, then paused, closed his eyes, and started strumming the song’s first notes. When he was already ninety seconds in — approaching the entire length of most popular songs — he still hadn’t given Keane the nod to start, so Keane figured he had forgotten him, and the song was about to end.

“But no,” Keane says, “right before the third verse Gord gave me a nod, just like he said he would, and I jump in.”

At exactly 1:34, right after Lightfoot sang, “And later that night when the ship’s bell rang/could it be the north wind they’d been feelin’?”

He nodded to Keane, who came in with a strong tom fill, to mimic a storm crashing down. It was a bold move, especially for someone who hadn’t yet secured a full-time spot in Lightfoot’s band — and exactly the right one.

“None of us had heard the whole song,” Keane explains. “So we all just played what we felt.”

Right after Keane’s thunder, Lightfoot sang, “The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound/and a wave broke over the railing.”

Keane had provided the perfect transition to the storm itself. It’s impossible to imagine the song without it.

After twenty-eight two-line stanzas, lasting five minutes and fifty-eight seconds, they reached the end of the song, improvising the entire way — then looked at each other, pleasantly surprised.

What was that?

Whatever it was, Keane says, “it was actually pretty darn good. But Gord’s a perfectionist, so he says, ‘Well, we should try it again.’ So we tried it again. Then maybe a third time. Then Gord says, ‘We’ve got another day of studio time, so let’s try it for real tomorrow, and do this thing right.’ ”

On Friday they played it again three or four times, Keane says, “but we never got it as good. The first time we played it the day before, there was that creative tension. Gord was putting his heart and soul into it. You can hear it. The other guys felt the same tension, because we’d never heard the song, and nobody wanted to screw it up. And that tension led to some good stuff. We weren’t thinking. We all just played what we felt.

“You’re always trying to make it better — but each time you play it, it takes some of the soul out of it, because it becomes more clinical, more technical. You want to perfect it, but that song didn’t need to be perfected. It needed to be raw, organic.”

When they played back the various takes, they reached a surprising consensus: The first take on Thursday was their best. “That’s it,” they said. “That’s the one.”

But Lightfoot’s band was not a democracy. He had the only vote that mattered, yet to their surprise he agreed with them: The first take was their best. The version people have been hearing on the radio for decades is actually the first time the band ever played the song.

“Look, if you’re not in the music business, you probably don’t know that first takes get on albums sometimes,” Keane explains. “But the first time you ever played the song? Never. Never, never, never. That never happens. And it almost didn’t happen that time. It was that close. The album was done!”

When they left the studio, they all felt that they had created something special.

“But did I know it was going to be a hit?” Keane asks. “Not a chance in hell. It was long. Six minutes. It didn’t have a chorus. It didn’t have a hook, no ‘Yummy yummy yummy, I got love in my tummy.’ It didn’t check any of the boxes you need for a hit. I didn’t think it had a chance to be a hit — and I was in the record business.

“No. No chance.”

An Unexpected Hit

SHORTLY AFTER THE album came out the band appeared on The Midnight Special, a popular show featuring live music, to promote Lightfoot’s new album, Summertime Dream. The album had eleven songs, and they played six that night — but not “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which they felt was too long, with little commercial appeal.

A few months later Lightfoot and his band traveled to Los Angeles for a series of shows at the Universal Amphitheatre. While in town Warner Bros. asked Lightfoot to meet with Mo Ostin, their president, to discuss which song to push as a single from the Summertime Dream album. Lightfoot asked Keane to come along.

“We sit down,” Keane says, “and Mo says, ‘You know what, Gordon, we’re getting some reaction to the shipwreck song on FM.’ ”

When Ostin asked Lightfoot what he thought of turning it into a single, Lightfoot and Keane looked at each other “in complete disbelief,” Keane says. “We know Mo’s a smart man, but really? We couldn’t believe what we were hearing.”

Almost everyone personally attached to the Fitzgerald remembers the first time they heard, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

John Hayes was working on the ST Crapo. He and Helen planned to get married on August 21, 1976, though the death of his best man, Fitzgerald oiler Tom Bentsen, naturally hung over them.

“It was a windy, nasty night on Lake Michigan,” Hayes says. “I’d just helped load the coal for the boilers with a flashlight. When we finished, I hopped on my bunk with my AM radio and I just happened to hear Lightfoot’s song that night. First time.