Uncut Magazine
 

There's a music magazine published in England called Uncut. Each month the editor recalls an interview he gave in the past. Sorry I don't know how to do links(!), but if you go to www.uncut.co.uk and click on blogs, you will read a less than flattering account of an interview with Gord from 1975. Judging from the questions Gord was asked, i'm surprised he didn't walk off!
(moderator add: direct link - http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/uncut-ed...-than-lou-reed )

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

Type Gordon Lightfoot in the search engine, and it's about the 4th link down. The editor claims Gord was "even worse than Lou Reed"!!!!! lol. The editor sounds like a complete ass with the stupid questions he asked. Nice to read the comments from other readers on the same link, who evidently feel the same way.

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

it's easy peasy Dan
originally I am pretty certain that you simply pasted a URL in
and the forum program parsed it automatically it as a clickable hyperlink in orangy yellow but nowadays if you were to do that it only appears as quite unreadable bright blue text and you will most likely get your knuckles rapped my Madam Moderator!
Instead you look at the little control panel above the text box and select the sixth icon from the right a blue globe thingamejig if you hover your mouse cursor over it up pops a little "insert link" err umm popup
click it and a handy box opens helpfully entitled "hyperlink" with a highlit http:// that will disappear if you then press your delete key
whereupon you can directly paste in (Hint use Ctrl+V to paste in from the Windows clipboard a copied URL or webpage address
Similarly the third icon from the right (the yellow rectangle) opens a box with the cogent invitation to "please enter the URL of your image"
(which must be an Image somewhere (anywhere) on the internet and not on your local computer drive of course
To complete this exposition there is one type of pasted in URL that is automatically fully parsed these being any URLs copied from YouTube pages
pasting in which will create the correct HTLML code to embed that video into your message
OK here is the link to "even worse than Lou Reed"
http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/uncut-ed...-than-lou-reed
as written by Allen Jones on a bad hair day obviously!!
http://www.uncut.co.uk/sites/default.../picture-3.jpg
Who I'm sorry looks like a prize pillock of indeterminate gender!!

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

Thank you john! lol

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

Here's the text - read the comments below the article at the link - there's a few pages..This guy is a knob.
Lou Reed was back in the news last week and for reasons other than his recent life-saving liver transplant. It turned out that some boorish actor, a self-styled hell-raiser, Rhys Ifans, by name, had thrown a bit of a strop during a newspaper interview and so one of the Saturday broadsheets, presumably stuck for anything else to fill its pages, canvassed some notable journalists about their most difficult celebrity interview.

Two of the first three writers they spoke to nominated Lou, one of them describing him as ‘vile and bullying’, not to mention ‘fantastically hostile and contemptuous’. The same sensitive soul, previously a fan, was left bereft by Lou’s behaviour. “We were meant to see him play that night, but I just went back to my hotel room and wept,” he recalled, lip doubtless quavering at the memory, which probably would have made Lou laugh out loud if he’d known.

Lou could definitely be touchy and a conversation with him was a little like putting your hand in a fire. But by some great good fortune I was never exposed to his full withering wrath and where others may have felt chewed up by him I seem to have escaped serial encounters relatively unscathed. I was more than once reduced to tears by things he said, but usually of laughter.

Anyway, the article I’m talking about made me think about people I’ve interviewed over the years who turned out to be in one way or another ‘difficult’. I have spent perhaps more time than is reasonable with an assortment of cantankerous souls, but none worse than, you may be surprised to learn, the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot (pictured above), in whose inhospitable company I spent an uncomfortable hour or so in October 1975.

He was staying at London’s Westbury Hotel and barrels into his suite like someone looking for trouble who won’t be happy until he finds it, an unexpectedly burly man in a leather flying jacket, with a face that’s clearly seen hard times and worse weather.
“Man flies all the way from Frankfurt,” he’s shouting over his shoulder as he comes through the door, “the least he expects of his record company is that they get him a goddamn beer.”

Gordon throws a case across the room, follows it with a shoulder bag he flings with some force against a wall.

“Someone,” he booms, “get me a drink,” and you’d have to say straight off that the first impression Gordon makes is that he’s a bit of a bully, someone used to having his own way in pretty much every circumstance, and very much in love with the sound of his own voice.

As are, of course, at the time of which I’m writing, many hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, Gordon the author of mawkish MOR hits like the folkie “Early Morning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind”, songs that have or will be covered by Dylan, Cash and Presley, among others.
Anyway, here’s Gordon storming around the room, banging doors, ill-tempered. I presume he’s looking for the mini-bar, which I have myself only located with some difficulty during a search of the premises during a long wait for Gordon, whose flight from Frankfurt has been considerably delayed.

“It’s built into the cabinet over there,” I pipe up now, clearly startling the Canadian songsmith.

“Who the fuck,” Gordon wants to know, noticing me for the first time, “are you?”

I tell him I’m from what used to be Melody Maker, and he looks at me suspiciously, like he thinks I might suddenly leap on him and nail his head to the door frame.

“And what are you doing here?”

It’s a good question. Why I am here to talk to this grizzled old cur, I have even after all these years absolutely no fucking idea. I suspect, however, it has much to do with my nemesis at Melody Maker, quiche-nibbling, cravat-sporting, Chablis-sipping assistant editor Michael Watts, who with impish regularity sends me out to interview people he knows I won’t get on with, clearly in the hope that at least one of them will end up taking a swing at me.

Anyway, back at the Westbury, I’m engaged in what passes for conversation with grumpy Gordon, the morose Canadian telling me now with no great animation about his early career in Canada, where he played the same small club circuit as Joni Mitchell, or Joni Anderson as Gordon knew her back then, the mists of time just parting, the way he tells it.

“This is going way back,” he says, like he’s remembering the world’s first dawn. “We were just callow youths. You were probably kicking the slats out of your cradle.”
These days, he only tours maybe once every 18 months, the rest of his time spent sailing on the Great Lakes, he tells me, mistakenly thinking I’m interested.

“There comes a point, though,” he adds with a manly shrug, “when a man has to get out and be active. It’s my job. A man,” he says with suitably masculine sagacity, “needs his work.”

How we come to be talking about it, I can’t remember, but the next thing you know, Gordon’s lambasting the young American draft dodgers who made lives for themselves in exile in Canada rather than get shipped off to Vietnam. As far as he’s concerned, Canada should have booted them all out, sent them packing back to the States or banged them up in prison.

A man, he says, is nothing without a sense of duty. If he’d been an American, he would have volunteered to fight in Southeast Asia.

“Only Americans know the anguish of that war, but what kind of leniency can you extend to a guy who skips out of his country when 50,000 men get killed in a war?”
I may in some circumstances have let this pass. But during the long wait for Gordon, I appear to have grown somewhat cantankerous. So I launch into a patently ridiculous speech about America and Vietnam and the peace movement, generally coming on here like a veteran of the Weather Underground or the SLA, a history of random bombings on an FBI rap sheet, guns stashed in every cupboard of a South Compton safe-house, Patty Hearst trussed up in a closet close-by, peeing on the carpet and going out of her mind.

“Why didn’t I write about the war?” he says, in answer to that very question. “It was none of my goddamn business,” he says. “The United States at that time was a target for every loose tongue around. I didn’t think it was my place to say anything. I have,” he goes on, “a lot of sympathy for America. I also make a lot of money there. And if you don’t mind me saying so, some of the nicest people on earth are Americans and I wish you wouldn’t dwell on this particular subject. I suggest we talk about something else.”

We do. His songs. I have come across in one of them the following lyrics: “In the name of love she came, this foolish winsome girl/She was all decked out like a rainbow trout. . .” I fail to stop myself laughing out loud when I read this to Gordon from my notebook, where I have dutifully jotted it down, alongside adjectives like “sentimental” and words like “schmaltz”.

“Schmaltz?” Gordon seethes through grimly gritted teeth, almost coming at me out of his chair. “You’re calling my songs sentimental?”

In a word, yes.

Gordon, taking deep breaths, says then: “Well, I guess I’ve been accused of that before. Just not to my face. But I’d defend myself against an accusation like that. We all know the world isn’t exactly in a placid state right now, but I don’t think we have to dwell on it.”

Your songs, generally, though, are pretty wet, aren’t they?

“Wet?”

Like I say, they have a tendency towards sentimentality, weepiness, that sort of thing.

“One or two, maybe,” he grudgingly consents. “But people love ‘em. So I sing ‘em. I’m not going to apologise if you have a problem with that.”

It must be embarrassing, though, being lumped in with the kind of tepid troubadours whose serial confessional outpourings are often sentimental to the point of complete banality.

“Sentimental to the point of complete banality?” Gordon splutters. “Whose work are we talking about?”

I reel off a list of singer-songwriters, most of whom turn out to be friends of his and mention of whom in such a disparaging context is turning his face puce.

“Interview’s over, son,” he snaps.
I tell him I have one more question, and he leans over the table between us, close enough for me to feel his breath on my face.

“Listen,” he says, “beat it now. That’s my advice,” Gordon sounding like he means business in a big way.

I’m out the door before he unclenches his fist.

Read more at http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/uncut-ed...w4SSgzKKBmc.99

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

there is also someone apparently agreeing with him
Gordon Lightfoot sounds like a jerk
URL pasted in bald
http://www.b12partners.net/wp/2013/06/12/gordon-lightfoot-sounds-like-a-jerk/
and as a proper hyperlink
http://www.b12partners.net/wp/2013/06/12/gordon-lightfoot-sounds-like-a-jerk/

which repeats part of Ms Jones prattle and adds for good or bad measure the observation:-
"Yeah, screw you Gordon Lightfoot. I never liked your schmaltzy songs in the first place"

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

This interview reminds me of one I read years ago while visiting my in-laws, who at that time lived in Texas. A reporter from a magazine based in Texas had been sent to interview Troy Aikman, who was then the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.

The reporter made it clear up front that he didn't like sports, or the Cowboys, or football. He specifically did not like Troy Aikman. And yet he was surprised and put out when Aikman, who had to get up early on his day off to meet the reporter for breakfast, showed up in a surly mood.

Reporters don't need to be fawning sycophants, or refrain from asking tough questions. But when the interviewer so clearly dislikes the interviewee, it shouldn't be a surprise if the interview doesn't go well.

We all know that Gordon did not always behave perfectly in the drinking years. I think his graciousness now shows that he would go back and change things if he could. But Allen Jones was clearly trying to goad Gordon into getting angry so that he could then criticize him for doing so. There's no excuse for that. It's not good interviewing, or good reporting. It's just being a bad person while trying to make yourself look better at someone else's expense.

Allen Jones is a tool.

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

I think it is an interesting perspective and a glimpse inside the real guy as he was back then. He was no saint, and in fact quite an ass and a drunk. Not but a heartbeat off the Willie Nelson type chaos( remeber Willie got sewed into a sheet and beat by his wife while drunk). But a hell of a talent too. I felt a sense of enrichment when I stopped thinking of Gord as my high-school era hero, like kids did James Taylor, or Bruce Springsteen, or Later Dave Matthews...and started realizing that guys like that, people in general, we're flawed but still wonderful. I actually think it kind of funny that he was about to kick the guy's ass. It is easy to lament what career strides Gord could have made had he been a more agreeable guy while in his prime, but he is was he is, and he was what he was...and we are the richer for all of it.

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

Coming soon to your favorite local live music venue

"Gordon Lightfoot - An Evening Of Wet Music"

Re: Uncut Magazine
 

yes well I seem to remember Gord once saying that he would like to record an album of sea shanties and of course many of his songs do have a nautical, i.e.wet, theme including mentions of sundry islands.trout,mermaids,whales,rivers and their bends,canoes, boathice etc
In fact according to that talented Zoneranger fellow such an album has already been issued
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9473/q9qn.jpg