The minstrel of the dawn

It was quite the blast from the past on Saturday when NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed Gordon Lightfoot. The Canadian singer-songwriter, 76, is embarking on a tour and has embarked on a 26-city tour.

I didn’t recognize Lightfoot’s voice, but then I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speaking much; just the singing. I don’t recall now how I came to love his stuff, but I first went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, where I probably shouldn’t have been allowed in because I was underage. But I’d persuaded my BFF to go with me, and then somehow had the chutzpah to go backstage—or maybe it was beside-stage; the club really was small—to take his picture:

A lot of years later, I went with another friend to the Universal Amphitheatre to hear him again. This time he was backed up by a band, singers and the whole megillah, and he had a bit of the air of someone who'd already been rode pretty hard and put away wet.

Even if you’ve never heard Lightfoot, you’ve heard his songs. Seriously—if you don’t know “Early Morning Rain”, you haven’t been alive at any time in the past 40 years.

(I know this will sound antediluvian to Millennials, but when I rode my bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, I had no iPod, no smartphone, not even a Walkman. I sang to myself, and I well recall blaring out “Now the liquor tasted gooood and the women all were faaaast” as I pedaled through a Spanish village, much to the visible surprise of the residents.)

Lightfoot actually wrote a range of songs, including some truly forgettable fluff. “Go-Go Round” comes to mind, with its refrain “Only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn’t care.” Well, yes—haven’t we all been that go-go girl?

But, as Simon brings up in the interview, there are many (including myself) who only know about the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy of 1975 because of Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

My favorite Lightfoot song, however, is the one Simon refers to as the “unofficial Canadian national anthem”, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. Actually—I think much of my understanding of Canadian history comes from that one song. Um. But I always loved the three distinct parts, wrapped in the underlying “green dark forest…too silent to be real.”

So I’m glad to hear Lightfoot is still out there playing the halls. And the clubs.