Toronto Star article-TD Towers-Mon.Feb.14,1966
Folksinger Goes Where the Action Is
Folksinger Gordon Lightfoot, who writes folk and pop songs for some of today's top singers, likes to go where the action is. He found some of it on the windy rainswept 38th floor of the Toronto Dominion skeleton on King Street.
His path to the 38th floor began a couple of weeks ago, when Lightfoot mentioned to Star nightclub columnist Frank Kennedy that he would like to get to the top of the building "to get the feel of some of the things that are happening."
Kennedy wrote it and within hours Toronto Dominion authorities invited Lightfoot to contact the muse on the site, weather and visibility permitting.
Weather lately has not permitted. Lightfoot left town to record in Nashville. Last week, shortly after the centre became the highest in the Commonwealth, Lightfoot, made it, though not to the present top (48) as the driving rain and wind had sent the highriggers home from the highest stories.
Still, it was high enough to have to sign waivers before going up (neither I nor my heirs, executors or administrators will make any claim...) High enough to see, despite the rain, the Star away down there at a mere 21 stories, the new City Hall and the Bank of Commerce building, once the Commonwealth's tallest building and now shorther than the Toronto Dominion even from the 38th floor.
"I guess" said Lightfoot, suitably awed, "it's the sheer immensity of the thing that turns you around."
Wading through the pools of water on the 38th storey, dodging the bolts and the piles of wiring conductors the 27 year old Toronto folksinger regretted that the highriggers had left.
He shouted, as the wind ripped through his open leather jacket, that he'd particularly wanted to get their outlook on things, but that he'd come back for it another day. (Thirty eight, for this onlooker, was quite high enough: There's something about 30-40 mile-an-hour wind gusts blasting through an open skeleton with nothing between you and the ground but a single strand of wire that makes you realize how much glass is taken for granted.)
Those Lightfoot did talk to - like hoisting engineers Jim Leslie and Max Ratke - told him that the steel hoist for the building is operated from the 36th floor, and that the whole project was the safest they had ever worked on.
"Hell," said Ratke, "there's a stretcher on each floor."
"Fantastic," Lightfoot marvelled, writing it down with a pencil.
Later, walking down 38 flights of stairs when the outside mancage (elevator) broke down, Lightfoot said he hoped "some of all this soaks into my brain."
Said Lightfoot, thawing out later: "A lot of the young lyric writers today write about death and destruction and hopelessness and U.S. foreign policy, which they're always against, never for. Me, I just write songs I feel and hope people listen.
They do, and in increasing numbers. In the last 18 months 35 Lightfoot songs have been recorded by people like the Kingston Trio, Ian and Sylvia, Bob Gibson, Marty Robbins, Peter,Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Conway Twitty, George Hamilton IV and most recently - Harry Belafonte.
Lightfoot leaves today for a two week tour of England with fellow Canadian folks singers Ian and Sylvia. He figures he won't really get working on the song until he comes back. Even then it'll take about three months of performing to "feel out."
The tentative first verse:
"There's a new tower in our town
"56 stories down to the groun"
"Men perched on the high beams
"Puttin rivets in I beams."
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