Songwriting legend Gordon Lightfoot still traveling that 'Carefree Highway'
By Wallace Baine
POSTED: 09/23/2014 11:06:03 PM PDT
The golden age of Gordon Lightfoot has long since passed, and there are younger generations of music fans that can't be faulted for thinking of him as ancient, if they even recognize his name at all.
Lightfoot is, in fact, younger than Willie Nelson and the late Johnny Cash, two old-school music icons who are as famous in the millennial generation as they are with their contemporaries.
At 75, Lightfoot — who performs live Friday, Sept. 25 at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz — is in the peculiar position of being both a living music-industry legend and underrated.
Why is this Canadian singer/songwriter so thoroughly out of fashion these days? Why do music fans generally regard him as closer to Glen Campbell than Bob Dylan? Perhaps, it's because many of his most famous songs are wistful and earnest and, melodically speaking, may have more in common with medieval madrigals than Delta blues or Hank Williams country.
Or, maybe it's because of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Lightfoot's 1976 hit single that single-handedly made the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior in 1975 the most famous maritime disaster since the Titanic. I mean, who sings songs about shipwrecks?
Lightfoot's songs, however, were everywhere in his heyday from the mid 1960s to the mid '70s. The hits were legion — "If You Could Read My Mind," "Early Morning Rain," "Carefree Highway," "Rainy Day People," "Sundown," that shipwreck song. His songs have been recorded by Cash, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, even the Replacements. He's a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Many of Lightfoot's best songs were able to evoke a kind of pioneer loneliness that often sweetened into longing, as if he were singing them in some remote logging camp in the Yukon territory, mulling over loved ones far away or fatal mistakes he had made. Many of those songs are decidedly old-fashioned not only in their sentiments but in their references, such as trains.
"Yeah, I always did like trains," said Lightfoot by phone from his home near Toronto. "I'm old enough to remember when they still had steam engines. I was very young at the time, maybe 5 or 6 years old, when I saw one of those big locomotives coming into the station, the way it spun those big drive wheels so you could see the sparks flying off them when they took off."
Trains became a guiding obsession for him as a young aspiring singer/songwriter and when he first discovered Johnny Cash's 1960 album "Ride This Train."
Outside of a short stint in his youth when he studied music at Westlake College in Los Angeles, Lightfoot has lived most of his life in Canada and is considered a national treasure there. In 2002, he was struck by an abdominal aneurysm which almost killed him. He said it took him six months to regain his hearing. But 28 months after the incident, he was back on stage.
Lightfoot and his band play 88 dates a year now, many of those in the U.S. "Right now, I'm working at full blast," he said. "We've learned to vary our show from night to night, digging into the catalog a bit for some goodies, without leaving out the standards."
He said that he has trouble hitting the high notes in songs such as the epic "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," a kind of unofficial national anthem in Canada. But he has learned to improvise better. And, most importantly, the stage still gives him energy.
"It does refresh me, very much so," he said. "It has a rejuvenating effect on me. I really come to life up there."
Gordon Lightfoot
When: Friday, Sept. 25, 8 p.m.
Where: The Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz
Tickets: $65
Details:
www.riotheatre.com
SANTA CRUZ article
