A FAN’S NOTES

Lightfoot in a Vacuum

Nearly 30 years ago I sauntered into a downtown Edmonton pub called the Rose and Crown. I was carrying a hardcover book which I’d just plucked from the remainder shelf of a nearby Coles bookshop. I was on time to meet another ex-pat Montrealer for a social pint. The book was the translated memoirs of Rene Levesque, Quebec’s first separatist premier. My friend said, “Why would you read that?” I said, “Well, we’re both here, aren’t we?” A thousand miles from many places, especially a since departed home city and province in which neither one of us felt particularly welcome anymore.

I was seeking some insight, curious about the mind of a man who was a factor in prompting me to make an unwelcome and life-altering decision. And I needed to get some sense of Alberta, where I landed, and so I delved and dove into other books about the western Canada, history and fiction. I had to understand where I left and why, and where and why I went where I did. I craved context in order to get a handle on my displacement and my new, blossoming sense of another place.

I’m currently reading a book about another prominent Canadian who has also had an impact on my perception of this country and my place in it because “there was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run.” Lightfoot by Toronto-based music writer Nicholas Jennings is the first in-depth work I’ve read about Gordon Lightfoot, our blonde troubadour. Good memoirs and biographies reveal their subjects to the reader in part by inserting the reader into the subject’s environment. A portrait of a person cannot exist on a plain white canvas; there must be a backdrop, context. Lightfoot is a curiously dry and colourless rendering of a towering figure on the Canadian songscape.

To be fair to Jennings, these past months I’ve immersed myself in Canadian music literature. Robbie Robertson’s Testimony guided me through northern Ontario, Toronto, upper New York State, the Big Apple and Los Angeles during tumultuous and ever-evolving times. With Sylvie Simmons’s I’m Your Man I walked the streets of Montreal with Leonard Cohen and shared a room with him in New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel. Tom Wilson (Junkhouse, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Lee Harvey Osmond), the adopted son of a blind, alcoholic Royal Canadian Air Force rear gunner, held my hand in the back alleys of Hamilton’s toughest neighbourhood, and again as we endured the shakes and sweats of rehab in Beautiful Scars. Still, these titles are the competition; these are the books on the shelf alongside Lightfoot.

Prior to Lightfoot’s birth in 1938 his hometown of Orillia was best known in the guise of Mariposa, the provincial Ontario town portrayed and gently lampooned in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). Jennings describes Leacock as Canada’s Mark Twain, a lazy analogy which does not constitute context about anything. Ronnie Hawkins, one of Canadian music’s most charming and certifiably lunatic characters, is just a “friend.” Lightfoot played the Gaslight where his idol Bob Dylan had once performed; perhaps that joint’s in Yonkers.

The simplistic Dick and Jane premise of Lightfoot is that Gordon Lightfoot is Canada’s Bob Dylan. He is not. Nobody is anybody’s Dylan. Dylan has zigged, zagged and worn so many masks that a chameleon like David Bowie died trying to keep up. Even rival Canadian contemporaries Joni Mitchell and Neil Young (both absented from Jennings’s narrative for the most part) have always taken the fork in the road, exploring genres far beyond the realm of their musical roots and rote comfort zones. Mingus? Trans?

An element of creative genius is an innate understanding of what not to do. Once Lightfoot established a sound that perfectly complimented the timbre of his voice, his precise enunciation and the emotional depth of his lyrics, that rich acoustic six- and 12-string blend of folk and soft rock virtuoso stylings, he stuck with it. The crash course in Lightfoot is the Warner Bros. release Gord’s Gold, produced by Lenny Waronker. Crucially, the set features rerecorded versions of Lightfoot’s earlier hits waxed for United Artists label. That album is the definitive sonic definition of Lightfoot’s unique oeuvre. This is how we hear him.

Gordon Lightfoot is his own artist. No Dylan, and no one else either. My hunch is that Gordon Lightfoot is not as bland and boring as the character portrayed in Lightfoot. The author of ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Minstrel of the Dawn’ deserves a more thorough and colourful study. With more context. Lightfoot reads something like a lengthy obituary: dry as dust, slight bon motes.

Until the ultimate book about Gordon Lightfoot is written, there is silly succor. Visit YouTube and search ‘Burton Cummings (Guess Who) sings Gordon Lightfoot.’ The footage is barely three minutes, it’s a brilliant parody performed with affection. It speaks more to Lightfoot than Lightfoot does, more telling. It puts Gordon Lightfoot in his rightful place, revered by a fellow legend, with context.