http://www.toronto.com/article/68571...gold-at-massey
By Greg Quill
Entertainment Reporter .
Lightfoot polishing the gold at Massey
May 18, 2011
Nothing makes Gordon Lightfoot more uncomfortable than talking about himself.
He won't admit it. He'll talk up a storm about other things — hockey, the Royal wedding, the weather, his physical fitness program, his special affection for Massey Hall, where he has performed a string of sold-out concerts every spring for nigh on 40 years, and to whose vaunted stage he will return Wednesday through Saturday — rather than give too much of himself away in idle chatter. He's a true master of the deke.
The personal stuff is what the 72-year-old musician, arguably Canada's best known and most loved bard, used to save for his songs. Trouble is, he doesn't write songs any more — at least nothing he wants us to hear — and, he said during a recent phone interview from his home in Toronto, he has no intention of making another record.
“I was under contract (to make recordings) for 33 years, and all my obligations are honoured. I could still write if I really wanted to, but I'm not going to be making any more records.”
Even so, he admitted, when he sees his friends and peers releasing new records, he's a little unsettled.
“Paul Simon's got a new one out, and Neil Young has never stopped or even slowed down. Ian Tyson is still out playing, making records and writing books. He taught me (the Merle Travis coal-mining song) ‘Dark as a Dungeon' way back in Yorkville, and Ian & Sylvia were the first act to record one of my songs, ‘Early Morning Rain,' in 1965.
“I love them all, but they make me really jealous.”
Instead, Lightfoot is content to work his existing repertoire — covering 20 albums, from Lightfoot! in 1966 to Harmony in 2004 — live on concert stages across North America. It's a kind of moveable minstrel revue, comprising 26 or 27 songs per show, each set slightly different from its predecessor, with all the major touchstones, the jewels of an immense legacy, in place.
“I never get tired of the old songs,” he said. “It's what the folks come to hear. I still heed the advice of my old manager, Albert Grossman (who also managed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band and Peter, Paul & Mary): ‘Never give them less than they expect.'
“And I rise fully to the occasion. If I feel the love, I'm bound to give it back.”
With more than seven million albums sold — and counting — and constant revenue from hundreds of covers of his songs by other artists, Lightfoot doesn't need to test his currency, or to risk his reputation by competing in a recording market that must seem as alien to him now as the lunar surface. The last time he scored a major hit — “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” in 1976 — radio was still a slave to the Top 40 format. It's a safer bet repolishing the gold he has already accumulated.
“Besides, there's too much other stuff going on,” he explained. “I have a very large family (four children from two marriages, both dissolved) spread out over various domiciles. I like to spend as much time as I can with them, making up for lost opportunities.
“When I was in the songwriting zone, I had to shut myself away for long periods of time. It wasn't good for relationships . . . like living in another world.”
He doesn't talk much about recent brushes with mortality — a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, several major surgeries and a nine-month coma that kept him hospital bound for 28 months, from 2002 till 2004 — and a minor stroke in 2006 that temporarily immobilized the fingers of his right hand and forced him to stop playing guitar.
Lightfoot's longtime manager and closest confidante, Barry Harvey, died suddenly from a heart attack in 2007, and in February last year the singer found himself rather absurdly on a phone-in radio show countering Twitter-fueled rumours of his own demise that had been broadcast as fact.
He recently admitted in the Montreal Gazette that lately he has been suffering from a middle-ear problem that annoyingly blocks out the sound of his own instrument when others are being played at the same time.
Lightfoot skillfully sidesteps questions about these potentially life-changing events with happy chatter about the rigour of his new health regimen — “I do a lot of walking, a lot of lifting and stretching at a gym” — and vocal exercises that keep his voice in good shape. Having started out as a trained singer in a boys' choir in his youth in Orillia, Ont., the singer is famously fastidious about pitch, timbre and enunciation.
“My voice is good. The tuning and pitch are true. I like to be strong when I perform, so I do lots of breathing exercises and spend a lot of time on the arrangements of the songs, to avoid strain.”
The Massey Hall shows next week are part of a 14-city tour — all promoted by Bernie Fiedler, the Toronto entrepreneur and co-owner of the fabled Yorkville coffee-house, The Riverboat, where Lightfoot started out — that takes Canada's favourite troubadour and his four-piece band across Canada and down the U.S. east coast to Florida. After this leg, he's booked solid through to the end of January.
Last year, he said with considerable pride, he performed 82 concert dates. In 2011, it may be more.
Of all the venues he has played in his long career, his favourite is London's Royal Albert Hall, where he has performed twice.
“I love the size, the magnificence of the place, the history, the Queen Victoria vibes. Maybe it's because my mother was so into the Royal Family. She'd have watched the royal wedding for sure. I felt inclined to watch it, too.
“But Massey Hall is always special. It's my home base. All my oldest friends and fans come to see me play there. They bring their families — two or three generations, sometimes.”
And while that regular homecoming love-in brings some comfort, it's also stressful, Lightfoot admitted.
“I try to make each Massey Hall experience better than the time before. I've worked up two different shows, with the songs in different rotation. It takes a lot of meticulous planning. I worry a lot about what goes on at Massey.”
Toronto Star article-May 2011
