Old Gold: Gordon Lightfoot

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:52 pm by Ben Witherington

Old Gold: Gordon Lightfoot 2015-03-13T22:52:14-04:00 Ben Witherington

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June 26th was supposed to be the night Ann and I finally got to see Paul McCartney. But Sir Paul hasn’t been well, and postponed until Oct. 28th. Stay tuned. Instead, we went and saw (here in Lexington) an even older performer—- Gordon Lightfoot, who is an amazing 76 years old, and still singing away (he bragged he was doing eight shows in ten days on this mini-tour). I must confess I would never have guessed that the man I saw in about 1974-75 in Boston at Symphony Hall would still be doing this almost forty years later, because the man I saw was inebriated and also smoked….. a lot. There’s no accounting for good genes, and I don’t mean Levis.

Between the two times I have seen the man perform he has been: 1) married twice; 2) had an aortic aneurysm during a concert and was rushed to the hospital, was in a coma for six months, and somehow lived through it all; 3) had a mini stroke during a different concert, was rushed to the hospital, and lost the use of two fingers on his right hand. Good thing it was the right hand, as he uses a pick on the guitar, and he is right handed. He played just fine last night. The ravages of time have sort of caught up with Lightfoot (compare the two pictures above, reflecting the two period when I saw him), but his songs are timeless, and many of them both beautiful and winsome. BTW, he drank only bottled water on this night.

So how was the show? Well I should have mentioned first that the man has had a tracheotomy since the last time I saw him. His voice is now frailer, and thinner, but he can still sing the notes, and he sings on key and in tune. Well, there are a few high notes he doesn’t sing any more. This was noticeable on his signature song “If you Could Read my Mind” which he wrote for his wife as his first marriage was dissolving in the 70s. His back up band was excellent. It includes his original bass player, who must be about as old as he is. It’s a quintet of folks from Toronto. He introduced the drummer as someone who signed on when the ‘Sundown’ album was to be made, easily his best ever album. That is, he has been his drummer since about 1974. The guitar player was introduced as the gentleman who stepped in when Mr. Clements, his long time collaborator, died. These things happen when you’ve been playing and on the road for over fifty years.

The show lasted about two hours with a break in the middle, and it included all of our old favorites, Early Morning Rain, Beautiful, Sundown, Carefree Highway, and of course The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which gave him a new shot in the arm in 1976, after Sundown had peaked as an album in 1974. Gordon joked that “this show will be solely songs from the twentieth century”, but what great songs they are. Not full of expletives, often insightful into ordinary life (check out Rainy Day People), tuneful and singable, and they don’t last eight, ten, fifteen minutes with endlessly repeated choruses. Lightfoot comes from the era of the 3 minute song, and with the exception of the Edmund Fitzgerald song which requires a longer story telling, he stuck to it.

His band was an excellent ensemble team, even understated. There were no big egos, no extra long solos for no good reason, nothing out of balance or out of harmony. This is the first popular concert I’ve been to in a while where I could say, ‘that could have been louder’. No ringing in the ears after this one. It is a great pity that Singletary Hall has not been upgraded for spoke or sung word concerts. It is not good for those sorts of concerts– it is too big a barn. Frequently you could not catch Lightfoot’s comments between songs (though I did like his reference to the circus saying he loved ‘the roar of the grease and the smell of the crowd’ or was it the other way around).

Old gold, it was winsome, but it was also sad, like watching beautiful scarlet or yellow leaves fall to the ground in the Fall. We were watching the end of an era of folk music of a particular sort. And of course…. it reminded us both we too are in the autumnal season of life.

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