Gordon Lightfoot! Troubadour of the Carefree Highway! Golden God! Epitome of Canadian Cool! What with the head-to-toe denim and the manly-man mustache and the head of curly golden ringlets right down to, I was going to say the man-sandals he’s sporting on the cover of 1974’s Sundown, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. You can’t hop a freight train in man-sandals. It’s unseemly. Anyway, Gordon Lightfoot is not just another “singer-songwriter” he’s (I repeat) an honest-to-god troubadour, living and loving and losing and turning it all to account in his songs, which hurt like the phantom memory of your true home, the home you’ve never had, the home you’ll never have.
None of this is a joke. I love Gordon Lightfoot. He’s a philosopher bard of the lonely road, Alberta bound and cold on the shoulder of the highway, thumb up in the early morning rain. Life is tough, an unending tutorial in the art of lowered expectations. “Sometimes,” he sings, “I think it’s a shame when I get feeling better when I’m feeling no pain.” He’s seen the summer side of life and known rainy day people and thanked his lucky stars the watchman was gone when the train pulled into the station, come to carry his bones away, two engines, twenty-one coaches long.
What can I say? Bob Dylan said it better than I ever could when he remarked that upon hearing a Gordon Lightfoot song, he hoped “it would last forever.” Lightfoot, who was born in 1938, has been hailed as Canada’s greatest songwriter, and as a “national treasure” by none other than Robbie Robertson, and everyone from Elvis to The Replacements to Nico has covered his songs. He spent his early years playing with the obscure likes of The Swinging Eight and the Gino Silvi singers before making a name for himself as a folkie in Toronto’s coffee houses.
He released his first LP (Lightfoot!) in 1966 and its great songs (“Early Mornin’ Rain,” “Ribbon of Darkness”), his smoky baritone, and mastery of the 12-string acoustic guitar made him a star in Canada; his first big American hit was 1970’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” But he reached his commercial peak with his mid-seventies LPs: 1974’s Sundown, 1975’s Cold on the Shoulder, and 1976’s Summertime Dream. And it was these LPs that Rhino Records primarily looked to for the songs on Rhino Hi-Five: Gordon Lightfoot, although it also includes “If You Could Read My Mind” and 1972’s “Beautiful.” Goddamn Rhino never gets it right, and I’m dumbfounded that they’d pick “Beautiful”—which is overly sentimental bordering on maudlin, and suffers both from a set of hackneyed lyrics and a melody that’s a bit too pretty for its own good—over the likes of “Early Mornin’ Rain,” “Summer Side of Life,” “Race Among the Ruins,” “Rainy Day People,” or “It’s a Long Way Back Home.”
I’ve already said my piece on “Beautiful,” which I suppose I wouldn’t turn off on a romantic evening by an open fire in a snug cabin in wintery Manitoba, even if it is an exorbitant price to pay just to get laid. Much, much, much more wonderful is “Carefree Highway,” a simultaneously spritely and sadly nostalgic song featuring Lightfoot’s 12-string acoustic, piano, and strings that opens with Gord singing, “Picking up the pieces of my sweet, shattered dream/I wonder how the old folks are tonight/Her name was Anne and I’ll damned/If I recall her face/She left me not knowing what to do.” The melody is lovely, as are Lightfoot’s solos, and he delivers up one of his lessons on lowered expectations when he sings, “Now the thing that I call living/Is just being satisfied/With knowing I’ve got no one left to blame.” And he knows he’s seen better days, but he still longs to slip away on that carefree highway to go a woman whose face he can’t even remember. And of all the songs I know with the word “highway” in them “Carefree Highway” is my favorite, better than “Highway 61” or “Roll on Down the Highway” or “Highway to Hell” or even, so help me God, Bruce Springsteen’s great “Highway Patrolman.”
“If You Could Read My Mind” is a lovely song but it has never been one of my Lightfoot faves, for the perverse reason that it comes perilously close, at least to my ears, to Jim Croce territory. The melody is beautiful, the guitars and strings ditto, and it’s sad, sad, sad, despite its anachronistic lyrics—which I don’t much like—about castles dark and fortresses strong. That said, even a hard-hearted cynic such as yours truly is helpless against such lines as, “I never thought I could feel 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.”
The jealousy-themed “Sundown” was written for the infamous Cathy Smith, the groupie, back-up singer, and drug dealer—who ultimately wound up in prison after administering the fatal dose of heroin and coke to John Belushi—with whom Lightfoot had a tempestuous affair. From its cool opening guitars to its great opening lines, “I can see her lying back in a satin dress/In a room where you do what you don’t confess/Sundown, you better take care/If I find you’ve been creeping round my backstairs,” this is one smoky, slinky, bluesy affair about a romantic dark night of the soul, and thanks to the drums and electric guitar it rocks harder than your typical Lightfoot song. Why, it even comes complete with two, count ‘em, funky guitar solos. To say nothing of its nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/When I feel like I’m winnin’ when I’m losin’ again.” The guy’s a philosopher, I tell you, but he’s flesh and blood too, and Sundown, who’s “been lookin’ like a queen in a sailor’s dream,” has him “feelin’ mean.”
I love “Carefree Highway” and “Sundown” to pieces, but “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is my true love, and one of rock’s very best narrative songs. Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Hurricane” don’t even come close, although the aforementioned “Highway Patrolman” gives Lightfoot a run for his money. (Don’t even bring up “Stairway to Heaven”; I’m talking about songs that tell a coherent story, not hirsute hiccups of hippie hobbit gibberish.) “The Wreck” tells the true story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in Lake Superior during a fierce storm on November 10, 1975 while bearing a load of ore pellets from Duluth to a steelworks near Detroit, drowning all 29 men on board.
Lightfoot sets the scene well, singing about the Native American legends about Superior and repeating those foreboding lines about the lake never giving up its dead when the gales of November come early. He gets a few minor details wrong—he says, for instance, the doomed ship was bound for Cleveland—but his poet’s eye for the telling dramatic detail is impeccable, as when he sings, “The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound/And the wave broke over the railing.” And of all the incidents aboard the ship that night that he might have chosen to humanize the disaster, he opts to highlight the words of the lowly cook: “When suppertime came/The old cook came on deck/Saying ‘Fellas its too rough to feed ya’/At 7 p.m. a main hatchway gave in/He said, ‘Fellas, its been good to know ya.’” It’s a moving moment, as is his recounting of the memorial service at “a musty old hall in Detroit” in the “Maritime Sailors Cathedral” where the “church bell chimed till it rang 29 times/For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” has no chorus, no bridge, but just comes at you verse after verse after verse, pummeling you like the swells that capsized the benighted freighter. It’s as remorseless as a November storm on Lake Superior, while the chiming electric guitar riff that recurs throughout the song bears a load of sorrow every bit as heavy as the ore the Edmund Fitzgerald took with it to the bottom. Meanwhile some really nice pedal steel guitar and a muted Moog synthesizer accompany Lightfoot on the verses, giving the song a full, rich sound. But it’s the song’s relentless drive and Lightfoot’s evocative lyrics that lend “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” its real power, and make it the greatest disaster tune—a genre I’m quite fond of—ever, better even than “Angels and Fuselage,” the Drive-By Truckers’ haunting recounting of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash.
Canada has given us so much great music, from The Band to Leonard Cohen to Neil Young to The Tragically Hip. But it has only given us one troubadour, and his name is Gordon Lightfoot. Gordon, your songs are what I dream at night when my dreams are good. Now lose the man-sandals, before I lose all my respect for you. As Amy Rigby once sang, “Jesus did it so I guess it’s all right/But no matter how hard I try I can’t get used to it/And who am I to deny their right?/But if you ask me there’s really no excuse for it/Men in sandals.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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