A FAN’S NOTES

Gordon Lightfoot 1938 - 2023

There was a time when a hit song wasn’t manufactured pap. I bought my first Gordon Lightfoot album in 1974 because the title track of Sundown was beyond addictive. I had a lot of growing up to do before I realized just how nasty the lyrics were as sung by the mean drunk of a narrator. Lightfoot had always been in our house, in my big sister’s record collection, Lightfoot release dates going back to 1966. Sometime in the late 90s when I was living in Calgary, my brother, in from Edmonton, and I were killing time together downtown although I can’t remember the circumstances. I nodded toward the HMV store and said, “Do you mind if we pop in?” My brother’s musical tastes weren’t strictly Memphis and Motown, but earnest white folkies with precise Presbyterian pronunciation were definitely not his bag, papa. He walked out with Lightfoot’s Complete Greatest Hits on the Rhino boutique label. Well, I never…

Lightfoot has always been there. There like the Thousand Islands or the Rockies, part of the landscape, a page in an atlas of Canada. I swear to God he’s cited in The Penguin History of Canada and I’m sure he’s standing sideways, concealed behind the jack pine, in Tom Thomson’s painting. He seems an eternal constant because he never strayed very far from his groove. He never went “electric” and if he ever got entirely sober, there was never a “born again” phase. Folk music is the people’s music which is why it’s always been around and isn’t going anywhere. Lightfoot sang our stories; he was our “rainy day” troubadour. And I prefer that epithet because words like “icon” and “legend” whose meanings have been diluted through overly liberal application don’t seem to cut it now. I suppose the annoying “Canadian” modifier still applies because Lightfoot was quite content to stay home.

And there’s Lightfoot’s catalogue of songs. They almost strike me as some ethereal national birthright and yet not a single one has sunk to shorthand Canuck cliché unlike say Stompin’ Tom’s “The Hockey Song.” When my family and friends celebrate my death I hope they start the party with “Old Dan’s Records,” a bluegrass jig, and then pull out all of mine and dance all night or at least until two or three on gritty cinders of me. It’s fun to hear the old time songs.

Well the liquor tasted good and the women all were fast. The missed flight in “Early Morning Rain” is westward bound. In my mind it’s west to east perhaps because I’ve always imagined “Alberta Bound” didn’t quite work out for the young stranger. Like the deceptively titled “Carefree Highway,” “Early Morning Rain” is about self-inflicted wounds, loss and longing. Good times in the big town not only cost the price of a plane ticket but ultimately the haven of home and the embrace of loved ones. Not an uncommon theme. What slays me is a rueful aside, a grudging acknowledgment of changing times: You can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train. Down and out is getting harder than ever before (I consider the Rheostatics’ “Bad Time to Be Poor” obtusely obvious but these inflationary times have prompted reconsideration). Nowadays panhandling raises “a pocketful of sand” because nobody carries cash.

From “Ribbon of Darkness” to “Black Day in July” or “If You Could Read My Mind” to “Circle of Steel,” the Lightfoot universe is filled with dark matter. There are no Inco/stinko “Sudbury Saturday Night” gag rhymes. Lightfoot plumbs the depths of Lake Superior and shivers in the chilly shadows of the Canadian Shield, boreal forest. Canadian culture, still coming of age, and increasingly and refreshingly diverse, hasn’t many touchstones that soar above the lowest common denominator exercise in nostalgia that is Hockey Night in Canada and Canadian Tire catalogues or defy facile “our version of” comparisons. Gordon Lightfoot is not Canada’s Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan; Lightfoot, flawed and complex, is Lightfoot, both a chronicler and character in our ever-evolving national dream.       

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source Canadiana since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.