http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/s...s_intense.html
Gordon Lightfoot finds intense pocket of fans at The Dow Event Center in Saginaw
By Sue White | For MLive.com
on May 06, 2013 at 12:00 PM, updated May 06, 2013 at 12:06 PM
Yfat Yossifor |
yyossifor@mlive.com Gordon Lightfoot on stage Sunday, May 5, at the Heritage Theater in The Dow Event Center in Saginaw.Gordon Lightfoot performs at Saginaw's Dow Event Center gallery (17 photos)
SAGINAW, MI – Shannon Henige was nearly in tears Sunday night at The Dow Event Center, waiting for singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot to come out and meet fans after his show at Heritage Theatre.
The Freeland woman, born in 1971, clutched two eight-tracks that her mother bought through a subscription music service in the ‘70s, “Summertime Dream,” released in 1976, and “Gord’s Gold,” out in 1975. And when someone gave her a spare backstage pass, she finally would get Lightfoot to sign them.
“We saw him when he was in Saginaw about four years ago,” she said, watching for the door to the dressing rooms to open. “I just love him.”
She wasn’t alone May 5 as Lightfoot’s 50 years on the Carefree Highway hit the stage. It’s a title the Canadian music man shuns and when the show began, it was easy to see why.
On a stage set that was deceptively simple yet capable of interesting textures in the right light, Lightfoot did the same, adopting a quick, friendly rapport with the crowd of some 1,000 fans. Surrounded by his bandmates, he took up the acoustic guitar and opened with the beautiful “Sweet Guinevere.”
A few songs later, “Cotton Jenny” and then “Waiting for You,” you began to hear a new wistfulness in the storyteller’s tales, the lyrics rubbed to a warm glow with the patina of time. “I remember when best friends were jealous lovers” took a new direction, and even more so, “Yesterday is gone.”
The voice grows a little thin in the upper registers these days, though “the whole object is to play the tune right,” he said. Then Lightfoot launches into one of the “dark horses,” as he calls the songs that seldom saw the light of day, and the emotion brings it straight from the heart.
It was evident, too, that Lightfoot was surrounded by friends in Saginaw, the audience breaking into applause at the first notes of songs he thought no one remembered. And the spontaneous chorus that brought still another sleeper to a close caught him totally by surprise.
“Hire them now, all of them,” he called out.
Of course, the night had hit hits, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a true story, he pointed out, as if anyone in Michigan doesn’t know it, and the haunting “If You Could Read My Mind” and the popular “Sundown.”
Then he’d bring out “Restless,” and a new favorite was born, complete with its “echoes from the past.”
In song after song, he told his tales, leading a fan to ask him backstage how he remembers all those words.
“It just flows,” he told her, and his show tomorrow at DeVos Performance Hall on May 6 in Grand Rapids will be different that Saginaw received.
But Henige’s prized eight-tracks found him at a loss for words. They posed for pictures and she was left to savor the moment.
“I can’t believe I finally got to meet him,” she gushed. “This is so great.”