Free read today. Godspeed Gordon Lightfoot….
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I’m not sure if anybody has done any type of scientific study on it, but it’s impossible NOT to sing along to the song “Sundown”. I defy you to try. I’m sitting here listening to it right now, and it’s kicking my ass. It’s the Bohemian Rhapsody of folk songs. Wayne and Garth could have sang this in the car.
It might be the most perfect folk-pop (if that’s even a thing) song ever written. I don’t know a single songwriter who doesn’t wish that he or she wrote it. Gordon Lightfoot had that magic touch. I don’t think you can teach it. Some are simply born with the ability to pick up a battered old 12 string acoustic guitar and create something that’s going to last for 1000 years. The rest of us just peruse for scraps.
This intense, wiry little man (he seemed to shrink in size as he got older) drank too hard and loved too hard and worked too hard and was pronounced dead once before in 2010. He heard the news on the radio on his way to the dentist, and spent the rest of the evening trying to calm his crying daughter. He never stopped working. He never stopped playing. He had another tour in the works. Elvis Presley called him “Mister Lightfoot”.
I remember somebody mentioning they were shocked when they found out that “Early Morning Rain” wasn’t some traditional ballad plucked out of the ether and updated by Peter, Paul and Mary and Elvis. It was actually written by a 20 something kid from Ontario who used to work in a bank.
A friend of mine sent me a message this morning. He said he grew up so poor his Mom had to ration the family 8-tracks. One of the few they owned was “Gord’s Gold”. “Gordon will always make me think of my Mom”, he said. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? These songs…..they seem tied to something in our own lives. Only the great ones can conjure up our Moms. The rest are one and done.
The back of his guitar had a sticker of a smiley face on it, which might be the most Canadian thing ever. He became a Canadian icon without having to be certified cool in the United States first. Even Neil Young and Joni Mitchell couldn’t pull that off.
The news filtered through social media that Lightfoot died last night. I tried to think of something to say. Instead, I pulled up a playlist on Spotify and just listened. It took a while, but I eventually drifted off to sleep. The last song I remember playing in my ear buds was “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. I wish all my days ended this way.
One of my best friends is a singer-songwriter from Canada named Lorne Clarke, whose baritone is/was forever being compared to Lightfoot’s. Any time me and Lorne were playing together I’d ask him to sing “If You Could Read My Mind” or “Carefree Highway”, and I think this drove him crazy because I wasn’t the only one asking. But he was always a good sport about it. He too adored these songs and could sing the shit out of them. One night we were invited back to my sister’s summer rental cabin at Lake Carey after a gig. It was late the the house was asleep. We sat on the screened in porch and unprompted he broke into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and his voice echoed across the moonlit lake and my brother in law told me the next day that he was going to come downstairs for a better listen but was afraid if he did Lorne would cut the song short so instead he just hung his head out the bedroom window and cried.
I wish you memories like this.
But, yea. “If You Could Read My Mind”. One of the greatest self-lacerating love songs ever written. Lightfoot takes on the dissolution of his own marriage, and throws the blame back into his own face….
I never thought I could act this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back
This was heady stuff for 1970s top-40 radio. Again, it featured an absolutely astonishing melody, which was later swiped by the guy who wrote “The Greatest Love of All” for Whitney Houston. Lightfoot sued, but later dropped the lawsuit when he saw that it was affecting Houston more than it was the actual writer, who eventually issued Lightfoot a public apology.
The song has been covered quite a few times, but not always well. It’s deceptively difficult to sing. “Sinatra tried ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ and ended up throwing the music on the floor,” Lightfoot recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t do this.’”
That being said, if you’re gonna steal a melody, this is the one to steal.
And speaking of 1970s top 40 radio, there wasn’t much call for 6 minute dirges on little known (at the time) maritime disasters. But somehow “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” reached number 2 on the charts, behind Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night”. The 70s were weird, yo. I miss them.
We always had the radio on in our house. Casey Kasem’s top 40 and all that. I first heard it there. That slashing guitar riff that ties the story together. And what a story it was. Like everybody else, I devoured the lyrics…
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
"Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At seven PM, a main hatchway caved in, he said
"Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
As in the aforementioned “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, where Lightfoot condenses the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway into 6 minutes (Canadian writer Pierre Berton wrote a full length book on the same subject, and remarked to Lightfoot that “you did more damn good with your song than I did with my entire book”), he does the same thing here. In those same 6 minutes. In heart stopping detail, he creates a disaster movie.
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
That line just nails it all to the wall. “The legend lives on” he says. And it does. But only because this song exists. Without it, these 29 men are just another plaque on another wall, remembered by family but few else. Now they live forever.
And so does he. His songs will last as long as we feel the urge to sing along. What a legacy that is.
I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don't confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you been creeping 'round my back stairs
In a bit…
—tf
I once spent a NYE in an unknown crowded Ontario bar with some Canadian cousins, Sometime just before midnight on came "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald". At that moment you could hear a pin drop...and then everyone and I mean everyone sang along word for word. Some shed tears including me,
I've never once found myself singing a post. Check that one off my list.