Music Food
Burning to the Sky
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By Gord Ellis
In Praise of Gordon Lightfoot I’ve never known a world without Gordon Lightfoot. It’s his songs that still remind me most of being a young man. When I hear “Carefree Highway,“ I’m 12 years old again, wearing a fringed leather jacket and biking up to the Cascades in search of brook trout. The first doom-filled guitar notes that signal the beginning to the epic “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” take me back to my childhood bedroom, channeling WLS from Chicago on an ancient radio. And that finger-picked opening of “Beautiful” is a time capsule to a place and time when young love was blooming. “Beautiful” is, in fact, just that. The melody is impossibly delicate and intricate—like the lines of a lover’s face. It’s Lightfoot’s melodies that set him above so many of his contemporaries. They stick like honey. He is really a songwriter first, and his ability to craft a tune is nearly unmatched. Bob Dylan, perhaps Lightfoot’s closest competition in this two-man race, once said when he heard a Gordon Lightfoot song he wished “it would last forever.” Dylan has covered Lightfoot several times, most successfully in 1998 when he nailed “I’m Not Supposed to Care” at a New York City concert.
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There is little waste and few flourishes in a Gordon Lightfoot tune. Instrumental leads are always hooks. Whether it be the little circular guitar riff in “Race Among the Ruins” or the rolling drums on “Black Day in July,” Lightfoot’s bands have never noodled or jammed. They serve the singer and the song. Gordon Lightfoot’s musical influence is sometimes difficult to see in the light of popular music circa 2011. However, in the Canadian roots rock world, it remains profound. There could be no Blue Rodeo, Cowboy Junkies, or even Sam Roberts without Gordon Lightfoot. Canadian guitar slinger Luke Doucet paid tribute to Lightfoot last year when he re-imagined “Sundown” as a Crazy Horse-style rocker. His vocals—shared with wife Melissa McClelland— put a pop twist on this classic ode to lust and infidelity. It was a golden moment and one of my favourite recordings of the year. I’ve only seen Lightfoot once, in 2006. It was during a comeback tour of sorts. A couple years earlier he had nearly died of an abdominal aneurysm and was in a coma for six weeks. Not many people thought he’d make it through, but he did. Once he felt healthy enough, he was back on the road with his bandmates of 30 years. The show I saw at the Community Auditorium was good, not great. The show volume was too low, apparently at the request of the man himself. Lightfoot himself still looked frail and his oncehusky baritone was a bit thinner than I remembered. But he was there, in the flesh, singing his songs—conjured by a band that knew exactly what needed to be played, led by a singer who still needed to tell his stories. One gorgeous creation after another.
Larry Hogard
Serving Thunder Bay & Northwestern Ontario since 2008
Ahnisnabae Art Gallery
Lightfoot is about to return to the Lakehead on December 4th for what is said to be his final tour. We’ll see. Old time minstrels have a hard time hanging it up. But it’s nice to know the world still has Gordon Lightfoot. And it will always have his songs.
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