Saturday, June 26, 1999
Gordon Lightfoot: The way he felt
He may seem out of date now, but a new collection
recalls how the singer captured a romantic national
vision even in the moment it was being lost.
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Music Critic
taken from globeandmail.ca
Toronto -- Somewhere in the American Southwest, Gordon Lightfoot is
singing the old songs. In concerts at Las Vegas, Los Angeles and
Sacramento, the trains are heading across the northern prairie and the
Edmund Fitzgeraldis going down in a winter storm.
For Lightfoot's loyal fans, any place is a good place to start down that
carefree highway, and to dream about what it's like to be Alberta-bound.
They'll be ready for the trip when he sweeps across Canada next fall,
and they're probably out right now buying his new, four-CD anthology of
songs that, as the album notes hopefully suggest, "never go out of
fashion."
"It's so damn basic, what I do," Lightfoot once said.
"All I do is play and sing and write songs." That order of
things is about right these days -- the few new songs are overshadowed
by the old favourites, nine of which he performs without fail at every
concert.
Lightfoot is 60, and in a sense this vintage country-folk singer is in
the same business as the 50-year-old rockers who tour as the Eagles or
the Stones. But while Jumpin' Jack Flash and Hotel California have
become as international as Mickey Mouse, Lightfoot's songs belong to us.
They're as Canadian as the Group of Seven. They're as familiar as
family, and like family they tend to get strong reactions.
When I mentioned to friends that I was going to write about Lightfoot
and his music, each one of them offered horrified condolences. They
obviously thought that listening to the selected works of this Canadian
icon would be about as exciting as reading an old social-studies
textbook, the kind that used to have titles like Canada and Her
Neighbours.
Like many Canadians, my friends and I figure we have become too
sophisticated for Lightfoot. His countrified persona grates on us, and
his habit of singing about hopping freights rings false, especially
since we know that he lives in a mansion in Toronto's posh Rosedale
area.
Yet there is power still in some of the music, and reason to wonder why
the particular national consciousness it articulates has gone out of our
popular culture. Like time capsules, Lightfoot's songs preserve a
mythic, rural vision of Canada that was strong in the sixties and
seventies but has been waning ever since.
"Lightfoot's is the voice of the romantic," the Village Voice
wrote in 1974, when the singer was at his peak. "For him (as for
Don Quixote, one of his chosen heroes) perfection is always in view and
always slipping from his grasp."
Gordon Lightfoot Songbook, the boxed set just out on Warner's Rhino
label, covers the whole of his career -- with three discs for the period
up to 1981, and just one for everything since. It charts his
transformation from a mellow country crooner (think of Pat Boone) into a
god of the folk revival who, by the late sixties, was being compared
regularly and favourably with Bob Dylan.
Lightfoot was a Cancon success before there were regulations supporting
such things. He toured the country tirelessly during the sixties, and
hit the charts with tunes like Spin, Spin and Black Day in July. He
seemed unstoppable in the early seventies -- the hits included If You
Could Read My Mind, Sundown, Carefree Highway, Don Quixote, The Wreck of
the Edmund Fitzgerald -- but went into a long decline through the
eighties. He stopped writing altogether for awhile, and has produced
only two albums this decade, including last year's A Painter Passing
Through. But he has never stopped performing, and his past hits are
still staples of golden-oldie radio.
Many people have covered his tunes -- folkies Peter, Paul and Mary (For
Lovin' Me), country icon Marty Robbins (Ribbon of Darkness), and more
recently the dance-music trio Stars on 54 (If You Could Read My Mind) --
but in a sense the songs are inseparable from his way of performing
them. When he got into the country-folk groove, Lightfoot (who was a
prize-winning boy soprano in his native Orillia) quickly realized that a
bland crooner voice would not do. He developed a punchier delivery.
In this new style he would often hit at the notes and then immediately
back off into a more confidential sound, made urgent by a quick vibrato
that was almost like the dramatic tremor of an actor of the Gielgud
generation. This is the voice we all know, the voice of rugged
taciturnity that has been provoked into song by strong feeling. You can
hear its characteristics most clearly on tunes such as You'll Still Be
Needing Me (1967) and Shadows (1982).
That voice connects strongly with his imagery of trees and birds and
endless rain. It's easy to imagine that the singer of Early Morning Rain
(1966) had done time as a field hand or railway worker -- you can
practically hear the train whistle in his long repeated high notes. And
yet just as Lightfoot is making that stuff palpable in his voice, he's
telling you that it's all lost and doomed: "You can't jump a jet
plane/ Like you can a freight train."
This very Canadian sense of loss seems to have come to Lightfoot
instinctively, which is part of his strength. If he had been more
deliberate about choosing his theme, he wouldn't have sounded so
genuine.
Of course, Lightfoot has had his own real losses to contend with. The
fresh-faced lad who used to dance and sing on Country Hoedown, a hugely
popular CBC show of the fifties and early sixties, developed a serious
alcohol problem as his career took off, and wrecked several long-term
relationships with his womanizing. One extramarital tussle led to a
broken cheekbone for one-time girlfriend Cathy Smith, a serial groupie
who later administered a lethal heroin hit to comedian John Belushi. And
Lightfoot's creative blockage in the late eighties must have been a
trial for a man with his kind of old-time Protestant work ethic.
The boxed set unintentionally hammers home what Lightfoot's critics have
been saying for the past quarter century -- that his talent is genuine
but narrow, and that he repeats himself. And yet no one prominent in
Canadian popular music (with the possible exception of James Keelaghan)
is connected to this country the way Lightfoot was. The strong stream of
folk-roots music out of Nova Scotia has more to do with a broad Celtic
revival than with anything specifically Canadian. Shania and Celine and
Alanis just aren't interested -- and may have no reason to be.
Lightfoot's obsessions are (or were) the concerns of their parents and
grandparents, who can remember trans-Canada passenger-rail service and
the nationalist optimism of Pierre Berton's "last good year,"
1967.
Round about 1983, Lightfoot's voice began to change again. It got more
nasal and less warm, as its lower resonances seemed to drain away. In
his recording of A Lesson in Love (1986), his upper register sounds
almost Dylan-like. On A Painter Passing Through, it's recognizably an
old man's voice, worn and frail and squeezed out.
Characteristically, A Painter Passing Through is about the glories of
yesterday, "when I was in my prime." But for once Lightfoot
isn't mourning his losses, even though they're real and personal and
permanent. He'll leave the lamenting to the rest of us. After all,
haven't we lost something too?
