Having just successfully posted my 2-part scan of my UK early Lightfoot album sleeve as my contribution to Borderstone's recent topic on lending/borrowing stuff I remembered that I had intended to scan the liner notes from both this and the original "Lightfoot" album sleeve, for a project I am working on. The original notes by Gord's one-time co-manager John Court have always intrigued me and knowing that many readers here have hardly even heard of the United Artists albums let alone read the liner notes I have scanned both versions and was most gratified to find that my scanner's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software produced almost faultless text from the scans
So here are the notes
1 UK issue
UK United Artists Stereo UAS 29012
Liner notes
"It was on June 2nd 1969 that Gordon Lightfoot's first British concert was held. British, that is to say, in the sense that the location was London's Royal Festival Hall, but if you were lucky enough to be a member of the audience, you'll have been aware of the Canadian feel throughout the evening. For Gordon is a native of Toronto
a city that stages his regular concert appearances.
This style of contemporary folk singing is captured in all his many songs
filled with tremendously rhythmic patterns that single him out as an equally fine writer
as he is a singer.
This album was cut back in 1966
and spotlights the earlier days of Gordon including his original versions of "Early Morning Rain"
(which he still features regularly), "Ribbon of Darkness" (a Marty Robbins country hit of a couple of years back),
"For Lovin' Him" (sic)(which became a best-seller for Peter, Paul & Mary)
and the George Hamilton IV speciality "Steel Rail Blues".
We are pleased to present this record for
your collection as a representation of the earlier days of an artist whose talent emerged in Canada
and has now been recognised internationally."
Alan.Warner
2.Liner notes from original Canadian album
United Artists Stereo uas 6487
"So you come home from work or whatever to your favorite chair, open a cold beer and energize the telly. There is the ostensible World News and all the unrest it provokes, followed by a suggestion that Ice Blue Something is what we must look to for security in this nuclear Age of Anxiety. And as if that's not enough of the Big Lie from the Big Eye for one gulp (we must of needs deduce that Katy Winters moves in a fairly odoriferous circle), there is next this purportedly candid footage of some fellow protesting that he gets forty shaves from this extraordinary razor blade. Now we know, you and I,in our placid personal truths, that we won't get anything like forty shaves ourselves, but that this fellow has cornsilk growing out of his face and therefore possibly is not personally lying; the big grain of salt we must wash down with our beer,though, goes with the protestation that we must also get about forty shaves, or the honers of this extraordinary blade will be unhappy to buy us a pack of Coo-coo brand, the bona fide inferior blade. It can wear you down, this kind of opportunity to have a bad experience with a razor blade and then send away for your free supply of The Inferior. It can wear you down.
Which brings to mind the first recording session for this album, at the risk of mentioning the real-world fact of a
phonograph record's birth pangs. It was a kind of melancholy Fall night that nobody could do anything about, and we
were in the small Studio D of a large and impersonal New York recording company. Since there were only to be another guitar and a bass accompanying Gordon, we thought that a
small studio might conjure a musical intimacy worth going for. But the moon was pulling too hard on everybody that
night, and the color of the walls in this particular studio successfully captured the mood of gloom we thought we'd left outside. Our assistant engineer, an older fella, seemed none too emotionally involved in this kind of music, maybe none too involved even in this business of recording. From all that was apparent, he might have been happier in his work had it been cobbling shoes or trimming trees; he meant no harm, neither did he mean especially well. And any-
one not born and bred in New York City can be extremely sensitive to this kind of split hair.
Anyway, the first tune Gordon put down that night was his
Rich Man's Spiritual and in filling out the "take" sheet this assistant engineer guy wrote "Richman's Spiritual", by which he probably didn't mean to suggest anything about the implicit Brotherhood of Man, but only that, if indeed he
tuned in on anything at all anymore, he certainly wasn't going to be able to tune in on that night's activities. So alien were they to anything that had ever moved him. Now, apart from all else, that's a reasonably sad circumstance for a man and probably much too common a one in these
times of magnified opportunity; that the man with, say, the soul of a baker should get caught up in the role of an assistant
sound engineer. And because it's a sad proposition, there was an essential sadness felt for the man when he went on to
transcribe our artist's name as Gordon Whitefoot rather than ask what was it again. That kind of sympatico can serve to distract even the most insensitive among us, and the night in Studio D had definitely taken on such a cast. But what's remarkably more, and the single important fact at the bottom of all this meandering, is the privilege to report that, later on, blossoms of a sort were made to grow in such a cold and angular atmosphere. Gordon's eventual delivery of, among other tunes, his own
Early Morning Rain seemed to make just the right use of those grey walls. And the great wealth of feeling he's written right into that song is about the same shade of grey as was that entire session. Oh, there were many more happy sessions after the first, but it has been mentioned here in morbid detail to demonstrate the shadowy ways in which a real artist can find virtue lurking out the other side of predicament.
Gordon Lightfoot is his name, ladies and gentlemen. Gordon Lightfoot. Remember it well, as certainly you will because
it's that kind of name. He sings them all like he wrote them and in most cases he did. what's even more important,and not
always the case, he usually sings his own songs better than anyone else does. Which fact says a lot about the directness
with which they come from the heart, or wherever that place is where artists are most comfortable with their thoughts and themselves. But whether he wrote it or not, when Light-foot the singer takes up a song there is an authority that the ear is quick to accept and relax behind. Gordon's vocal talent is doubtless a sensational example of that elusive quality that puts a chasm between the amateur and the sheerly profes-
sional. Like must also be true for really great bakers and assistant sound engineers, to cloak the whole thing in terms of the necessary doing for the necessary living, and how a good feeling about one lends itself to a good feeling about the other.
Yes, Gordon Lightfoot, with ample gifts and gratitude, has good reason to be a happy guy. A Canadian happy guy with Swedish wife and a season as star of an English-made Country and Western tv show under his wide-buckle belt (as well as his own monthly special currently on Canadian tv). He wears
cowboy boots most of the time, like Tyson of lan and Sylvia, his friend and hand-up-the-ladder. And he says "oot" for out,
like Tyson and Goulet and Bobbie Burns. But, along with Tyson, he understands about the cowboy and the psychology of open spaces that makes up the mood of life in the biggest part of Canada, as it did and does in the American West.
It's these guys who have become the poets of that way of life, filtered as it now necessarily is through the Ice Blue dem-
ocratic news of the world that affects us all, regardless of race, creed or color. And it's gratifying to see the songs of a Gordon Lightfoot begin to receive the attention they deserve.
For, hung as they so often are on a wide-open-spaces metaphor, they nonetheless deal most poetically with the way life is for
all of us, in one way or another. We won't get hung up here reciting how Peter, Paul and Mary, a fairly well established branch of folk musical royalty, have had two substantial U.S., Canadian, Australian and European hits with Lightfoot tunes (in France, they sing "Tu N' Aurais
Jamais Du M'Aimer" when they mean That's What You Get For Lovin' Me). Or that Marty Robbins' version of Gordon's
Ribbon of Darkness was number one on the Country and
Westem charts for several weeks recently. Suffice it to say that, at the very moment of this writing, other artists of
awesome stature and diverse interests are recording his originals. And meanwhile, back at the Lightfoot, Gordon's
treatment of the work of his songwriter contemporaries gets and keeps the respect of audiences wherever he is heard.
So, then. Of the fourteen songs on this, the first time out for an important artist, eleven are his own. All fourteen
might just as easily have been his own, but in three instances Gordon felt strongly enough about other people's work to
want it included in his first collection. Nor, interesting to note, were the three exceptions chosen simply for reasons of
musical variety. The album is not that kind of album, really. And frankly not the sort that is paced fast song-slow song-fast
song for maximum and most symmetrical contrast. It is, rather, more like a statement; a collection of thoughts most
importantly on Gordon Lightfoot's mind these days. Ones he was anxious to organize in a single place and record for posterity before getting on to more adventurous projects, longer works in the ballad and talking blues vein, along with occasional and deft forays into the jungle of Top Forty competitions. Elsewhere, the expression "Country and Lightfoot" is already in use among the cognoscenti, and those who predict that a subtle amalgam of 'Rock and Country is next in sight on the Pop horizon are well aware of the work of Gordon Lightfoot. For that matter, several of the aforementioned tunes on this album are already on their way to becoming standards. It's just that the guy who wrote tnem would like to take the next little while and sing them for you, like they're supposed to be sung, before he gets on to the next thing. And that, one supposes, is the logical content of a creative life in the real world. Coo-coo him no blades."
John Court
I always loved "Country and Lightfoot" and "Coo-Coo him no blades" from the above notes
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My Gordon Lightfoot webring
starts at
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/lightfoot
[This message has been edited by johnfowles (edited September 09, 2003).]
"Lightfoot" Album Liner Notes
- Borderstone
and
