[charlene]

“It was eerie. Man, he got it right.

“The biggest thing for me is the opening guitar riff. Everyone knows that now. No matter what I’m doing when the song starts, I hear that, and I stop. Gets to me. Every time.”

The unlikely single topped the Canadian chart, the U.S. country chart, and finished 1976 on the Billboard 100 chart second only to Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night,” a song that checked all the usual boxes for a hit: short — at three minutes and thirty-four seconds, almost three minutes shorter than “The Wreck” — peppy, with a memorable chorus and hook, plus the bonus of Stewart’s girlfriend, Britt Ekland, cooing in the background, the “Me Generation” personified. It embodied everything “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” did not.

“I just listened to ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ for the first time in a while,” Rolling Stone editor Christian Hoard says, “and I have to say it’s remarkable that it was such a big pop hit: no chorus, no bridge, no hook, just the same melody repeated over seven eight-line stanzas for nearly seven minutes. I mean, ‘Hotel California,’ another dark and lengthy story song from the same era, still had a chorus and an amazing guitar coda.

“I’d venture ‘Wreck’ is one of the wordiest top five hits until rap came along. Compelling melody for sure, but I have to assume that what people loved so much was hearing the story in such detail. That’s some old-school troubadour stuff, a ballad in the classic sense.”

Perhaps Hoard’s insights explain why Lightfoot was so reluctant to share it in its embryonic stage. Lightfoot’s song broke all the rules, and he knew it. But Hoard is right: The story was too compelling to ignore. Like Lightfoot’s sources, the AP’s Harry Atkins and Newsweek’s Jim Gaines, Lightfoot cared about the Edmund Fitzgerald more than he had to, and people could feel it.

A few months after the meeting with Warner Bros.’ president in Los Angeles Lightfoot’s band played a tour stop at Kalamazoo, Michigan’s K-Wings Stadium. It holds about five thousand people, but packed six thousand that night. “I can still see their faces pressed up against wire screens around the stage,” Keane says. “It was like that for the whole concert — but you can imagine how it got amped up when we played ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’ ”

In addition to the song’s unusual structure and forbidding length, the tune was limited by Lightfoot himself, who refused to market the piece in the usual manner.

“Gord wasn’t big on playing hits,” Keane says with a chuckle. “He would always say, ‘To thine own self be true.’ At our concerts he liked to play his favorites. We’d say, ‘Hey Gord, why don’t we play “Carefree Highway”? Big hit, everyone likes it.’ And he’d say, ‘Ah they all know that one.’ Right! Isn’t that the point?

“He drove Warner Bros. absolutely nuts! We’d produce a new album, and not tour, because Gord was afraid people would think we’re just trying to sell records. Well, wasn’t that the idea? A very Canadian response. A very Lightfoot response.”

And yet, Lightfoot’s stubborn purity is surely why listeners recognize his sincerity in memorializing such a tragic event. The next year he accepted an invitation from the Reverend Ingalls, the pastor who rang the bell twenty-nine times, to play at the Mariners’ Church in Detroit. Lightfoot brought only Terry Clements and Rick Haynes, a barebones band.

“Just us, and a small amplifier playing at the front,” Haynes says. “As simple and pure as it gets.”

After they finished the song Reverend Ingalls approached Lightfoot, appreciatively and respectfully, to point out that Mariners’ wasn’t a “musty old hall,” as Lightfoot’s lyrics said, but clean and bright.

Lightfoot agreed. Whenever they played the song after that, he changed the lyric from “musty old hall” to “rustic old hall.”

One of the theories investigators had posited to explain the Fitzgerald’s sinking was improperly clamped hatches, which prompted Lightfoot to write one of his most famous stanzas:

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck
sayin’, “Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya.”
At seven p.m., a main hatchway caved in
he said “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya”

After investigators were able to send a submarine to examine the ship 530 feet below the surface, they discovered that Fitzgerald deckhands Mark Thomas, Paul Riippa, and muscle car aficionado Bruce Hudson had, in fact, done their jobs correctly, to the great relief of Hudson’s mother, Ruth. Lightfoot changed that lyric, too: “At seven p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said ‘Fellas, it’s been good to know ya’”

“That’s how much Gord really cared about ‘the wives and the sons and the daughters,’ ” Keane says.

Bassist Rick Haynes agrees. “Gord wanted the families to have peace.”

Lightfoot even double-checked lines in the song that were verifiably accurate.

“One time Gord and I had a heated argument,” Haynes says. “He said, ‘It can’t be twenty-six thousand tons. That’s impossible! It has to be twenty-six hundred tons!’

“Gord, you got it right the first time,” Haynes said. “That’s what those ships carry!”

Lightfoot and his bandmates have been careful about how and where they play it, too. When Jimmy Fallon wanted to do a comedy bit based on the song, Lightfoot rejected the idea out of hand, before it could go anywhere.

The fear Lightfoot had of being perceived as an opportunist, especially by the families, was dispelled.

“I had quit following the Fitzgerald story,” former Fitzgerald deckhand Patrick Devine says. “I just couldn’t deal with it emotionally. But when the song first came out the next year, I was furious! I felt like a lot of people were taking advantage of other people’s suffering. I was really irritated.

“But the following year I was at one of the memorials when Helen Bindon, widow of Eddie Bindon, who had been so good to me, came up to me and said, ‘Have you heard that new song?’ She appreciated it — even if I didn’t. It stunned me. Well, she lost her husband, and she loves the song, so what’s my problem?”

Like Devine, when Marilynn Church Peterson, one of the five children of Fitzgerald porter Nolan Church, heard the song for the first time, “I hated it. My first thought was he just wants to make money off it.”

Marilynn’s view changed twenty-six years later, on May 5, 2002, when she and five family members went to see Lightfoot and his band play in Duluth. After a moving concert, Lightfoot invited them all backstage.

“When I heard him play it live I knew he really cared about the song,” Marilynn says. “And backstage he asked what I thought of it. I assured him it was a great tribute. He truly cared about all the families involved — and I felt that he truly cared about my feelings.”

Like many of the survivors, since the sinking Marilynn Church Peterson has never gone back out on Lake Superior, the lake she grew up on. As a rule, the younger the survivor, the more likely they were to succumb to self-medication through drinking and drugs. Most ultimately came out of it, but not all.

“It was very hard on Mike,” Bonnie Church Kellerman says, referring to their youngest sibling, who was just seventeen when their father died. “He had a really hard life after that, and chose the wrong direction,”

Marilynn says. “At that age, I don’t think he ever got over it.”

The families have little choice but to savor the silver linings, including the song itself.

“Our dad has so many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now even great-great-grandchildren,” Marilynn says. “They never got to meet him, but they love the song, and at family functions we always play it.”

Cindy Reynolds, Bruce Hudson’s girlfriend, remembers the immediate effect the song had on her and Ruth Hudson.

“We listened to it and listened to it,” Reynolds says. “And Ruth thought it was unbelievable that he could put together those words that fast. She wondered how he could know how it felt, because it felt like he did.

“Even now, when I hear the song, it gets me reminiscing about Bruce. And sometimes I have to pull over, and listen in peace.”

That might be Lightfoot’s best review.

Lightfoot, after the unexpected success of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” pulled out of his tailspin, got clean and sober, and embarked on thousands of concerts over the next four decades.

If Lightfoot was initially uncertain about his new song, by 2002 he knew exactly where it stood in his body of work. He told Roger LeLievre, then at The Ann Arbor News, that “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” “is my greatest achievement. It’s a song you can’t turn your back on. You can’t walk away from the people either. The song has a sound and total feel all its own. We’ve sung it at every show since the day we wrote it. It’s a true song and a great song. It’s stood the test of time.”

Former Great Lakes Maritime Academy superintendent John Tanner met Lightfoot a few times backstage with the GLMA scholarship recipients. “If I had to pick one word to describe him and his music,” Tanner says, “it’s ‘pure.’ Gordon Lightfoot is pure.”

That explains why fans, from overseas to the Fitzgerald families themselves, are so attracted to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: It’s a true song.

For the fortieth anniversary of the sinking in 2015, bassist Rick Haynes and Lightfoot flew from a concert in Utica, New York, on their only day off from their tour, to the Upper Peninsula, then drove to Whitefish Point for an event — and not to play, just to be there with the families.

“I remember walking out to the water off Whitefish Point,” Haynes says, “and sitting in the sand, and just looking out there. This is a song that I’ve sung thousands of times, and the men we sing about are just fifteen miles out there.

“So close to safety. It gets you.”