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Old 02-09-2020, 10:37 PM   #5
charlene
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Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Zoomer magazine cover boy again!!!

Lightfoot’s a movie buff (his favourite film is 1984’s Amadeus, about the rivalry between composers Mozart and Salieri), so I ask if he’s seen Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, which is set in 1969 at the time of the Manson murders. I thought Lightfoot would be interested. “I’ve watched half of it,” he says. “I don’t even like to think about how I was in the Hollywood Hills that night.” Lightfoot was staying at his friend Jack Nicholson’s guesthouse on Mulholland Drive, in bed with Helena Kallianiotes, the striking belly dancer and actress who’d appeared in the Monkees’ experimental movie Head, which Nicholson wrote and produced. They awoke the next morning to learn the grisly murders had taken place just a couple of blocks away.

Despite his extraordinary journey and success, Lightfoot remains refreshingly unaffected. While ambitious and competitive about his career, he’s down to earth and humble and laser-focused on touring with his band members, some of whom he’s been with longer than any of his wives. He’s a creature of habit and doesn’t like change or surprises. Loyalty and hard work are just two of the small-town values he inherited from his dad, who ran Orillia’s laundry service. Lightfoot has had the same booking agent (Bernie Fiedler), barber (Sandy Bozzo) and bass player (Rick Haynes) since the 1960s. He’s a details-oriented guy, constantly making lists of tasks and tour plans. After performing an astonishing 78 shows in 2018 and 43 last year, he and his band (Haynes, drummer Barry Keane, keyboardist Michael Heffernan and guitarist Carter Lancaster) have some 50 dates booked to the end of 2020.

Having dodged death and overcome medical crises, not to mention outlasting most of his musical contemporaries by sticking to his tried-and-true folk sound, Lightfoot may be pop’s ultimate survivor. How long will he keep going? “To quote my friend Bob Dylan,” he replies, “‘Work while the day lasts because the night will come when you can no longer work.’ I’ve simply never wanted to retire.”

It’s getting late, and I know that Lightfoot, a fitness freak, turns in early to be at the gym every day before 10, so I finish by asking whether he’s learning to like himself more. “I guess I’m doing okay,” he says, “but I always think I could do better. I don’t think I try hard enough with my kids. I’m still trying to make up for the way I treated their mothers.
“Have I learned anything?” Lightfoot continues. “Yeah, I’ve learned to control my emotional self better when arguments occur. Anger can kill you – kill you right where you’re standing – with a stroke. I try to listen when I talk with people, try to get them talking about themselves. But with wives and mates … I sometimes find it hard to get my point across.”

Finally, I ask about personal demons and whether he’s been able to make peace with his life. Lightfoot takes a deep breath and sighs. “God, I don’t know.” Then he adds, in a voice that’s barely above a whisper: “I don’t actually know if I’ve made peace with anything.”
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