I was in California a couple of weeks ago on business. I was looking to see if I could see any live music while I was there. I don’t remember which venue it was, but I saw an ad for a Gordon Lightfoot show [and a slew of others] in Anaheim. Underneath the ad, however, was the word ‘canceled.’ I knew he hadn’t been in the best of health. Seeing such a notice didn’t surprise me, but it did make me think that something was amiss. I heard yesterday morning that he had passed, and I thought back to something I had seen on Amazon Prime a few years ago. Shortly after he turned 80, I saw this documentary called Gordon Lightfoot: If You Read My Mind. As music documentaries go I thought it was pretty good. It wasn’t a hagiography, nor was it a ‘Behind the Music’ kind of thing [but it skirted the edge]. One thing I liked about this film was the stories behind some of the songs, and insights to his songwriting process. When it comes to music, I like learning about ‘how the sausage is made.’ As told by the man himself [and a few others], here are those stories.
For Lovin' Me [1966] – “I’ll never write another song like that as long as I live. I’m not talking about the quality of the song; I’m talking about the content. That song was a very offensive song, for a guy to write, who’s married, with a couple of kids. At the time I was so naïve that it just came out of my brain. You know, like…I didn’t know what chauvinism was. I was married when I wrote that song. So what do you think that Brita thought about it? In the meantime, Peter, Paul & Mary recorded it pretty soon. So did Johnny Cash and a couple of others. And the next thing I know, I hear it on the radio. All of a sudden, boom, it’s a hit. There’s a great deal of regret there. I guess I don’t like who I am. I vowed I would never write another song that bizarre again, where I said some of the things that were said. And so, I stopped doing it about twenty years ago, because I just don’t like it.” He was the unfaithful partner in his first marriage.
Early Morning Rain [1966] – “I was living in a basement apartment which was very nice, and I loved it there. I had a little room, and I had a desk, and I had a chair. I knew that I had to sit down and do the work. Then all of a sudden, one day I popped off with ‘Early Morning Rain.’ That turned out to be one of my biggest, most important tunes. We would go to the airport and watch the planes coming and going. One time, it was a misty day. I was standing watching the approach, and all of a sudden, out from the clouds, brand spanking new, Boeing 707 just getting ready to land. One night, Ian and Sylvia heard me do Early Morning Rain and the next day Ian called me and said ‘we’re just in the middle of doing a recording, and we really like Early Morning Rain.’ In the meantime, Ian played the material for Peter, Paul & Mary. They made a damn good recording of the song. I said ‘these guys are pretty good.’
Song for a Winter's Night [1967] – ‘I quite often write with some kind of locality in mind that keeps coming back to me. When I wrote that, I was thinking about being right out in the middle of the mountains somewhere. Right out in the middle of nowhere.’
On songwriting – “Truly, it comes from the unconscious mind. I swear, it’s an imaginary process. Everything that I’ve done has really, basically, been a figment of imagination. You just want to make sure it rhymes. All I did was write songs. I was always isolated. Somewhere in an apartment, somewhere in a space I would find. It wasn’t even getting away from people. You knew that you would have to be isolated to do it. Sit down at the table and actually do it. When you’re working on the tune, and you’re sort of describing the feel that you’re getting from that. And sort of looking inside yourself for something to say, and having a melody, and having a chord structure already prepared, it sometimes, the imagination just does the work for you.
I always say to kids who ask me how to go at it, first the chord progression, and then the melody, and then the words – if you can do it.”
He wrote his own lead sheets. When he was young he played drums for a local dance band in his hometown of Orillia, Ontario. This was when he started to write songs. He couldn’t write to his own satisfaction, so he went to music school in Los Angeles. He wanted to learn how to write music and how to write notation. He began to write his own lead sheets on onion-skin paper and get his songs copyrighted.
Canadian Railroad Trilogy [1966] – 1967 was Canada’s centennial. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned Lightfoot to write a song to help celebrate the Canadian Centennial. The song describes the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
The Circle Is Small [1978] – Lightfoot lived in an apartment building in Toronto that was round, like the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. He refers to this “apartment hopping” song as an “unrequited love song.” He was living with Cathy Smith at the time. If that name rings a bell, she was the person who injected John Belushi with the speedball that killed him. Lightfoot’s relationship with Smith was “mercurial.”
Sundown [1974] – “There’s always been lots of questions about Cathy Evelyn Smith. All my life, people have always asked me “What about this?” Cathy Evelyn Smith was a wonderful lady. I really loved her. I would like to have married her, but I was just newly divorced, and I was telling myself “I’m never getting married again.” I knew that it was not a good idea to carry out. It was one of those relationships you get a feeling of danger comes into the picture.” Brian Good [actor] – “Gord was pretty tough when it came to relationships. But she managed to hurt him. He wrote that song referring to more than one person that might have been involved with her, and some of them were Gordon’s friends. And I think that she was part of a breaking point.” Murry McLauchlan [musician] – “Some of the best things that he’s written are from when such a disturbing thing happened in his personal life. He was just writing it out. And as a songwriter, you try to amalgamate your experiences, however destructive or wonderful they may be. Putting them in some form that they become universally understood by other people.” Steve Earle [musician] – “Sundown has this whole, sort of, spaghetti western kind of feel to it, but the details are left out to the point where you can kind of make up your own movie.”
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald [1976] – The story of this doomed Great Lakes freighter is often told. It sank in Lake Superior the day I turned 13. Not only was the recording you hear a “first take,” it was also the first time Lightfoot and his band played the song together.
Sarah McLachlan [singer/songwriter] – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I remember that one the most out of any of his songs, and I think because, as a high schooler, I busked that song out in front of the library in Halifax. The melodies are so powerful, and he’s such a good storyteller, and such a beautiful lyricist. And the combination of those things just really makes for a great song.”
Rick Haynes [bass] – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Well, it was kind of the tail end of an album session, putting an album
together. And Gord came in one day and he said “I’m working on a song about
something that just happened. He said ‘I’ve been getting newspaper articles and
looking at this stuff. It’s not finished yet but it’s gonna go something like
this…’ and he started playing. I don’t know if it was the next day or a couple
of days later, we came back in the studio and Gordon started singing it again.”
Barry Keane [drums] – “Kenny, the engineer, said ‘Well,
you’ve got the studio booked. Why don’t we put it down on tape?’
Rick Haynes – “So, tape was rolling, so Barry said
to Gord ‘When do you want me to come in?’ He said ‘I’ll give you a nod.’
Barry Keane – “We get to whatever it is, the third
verse, and Gord gives me the big nod. I do a drum fill to come in.”
Rick Haynes – “We went right through the song, top
to bottom. It was very elemental and raw, but it had magic to it.”
Barry Keane – “It was not only a first take, it
was the first time we’d ever played the song. That’s the record.”
Rick Haynes – “After that, we tried a number of
times to record it and get it better. You always try to get it better in a
studio. And we never could. So it was basically a first take that came out and
became a hit record, which is very unusual. Nobody ever expected that to be a
single. It was too long for airplay.”
Steve Earle – “When I got to Nashville when I was
19 years old, Guy Clark and I were drunk for a week when the record, the Edmund
Fitzgerald, went to number one, because, you know, we were writing these long
story songs, and everybody was telling ‘no, you need three minutes and choruses.’
And then this big, long story song becomes a huge hit. So we got hammered for a
week ‘cause we thought maybe there was some hope for us after all.”
The rest of the film has the usual stuff – where he grew up, how he got into the business, clips of live performances, how alcohol nearly wrecked his career and what he did to kick the habit. If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, the cost for a rental is three dollars and ninety minutes of your time. I liked it.
RIP Gordon Lightfoot
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