It’s Cinco de
Mayo, so I by rights should have something appropriate for the occasion. But
Gordon Lightfoot died earlier this week at age 84. And Lightfoot was my North
Star.
Way, way back, my
BFF and I went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, Calif. I probably
shouldn’t have been let in, because I was under age, but not only did I have
some kind of too-cool-for-school coffee drink, I had enough chutzpah to go
backstage (not that it was much of a backstage at that place) and take a photo
with my Nikon S2 rangefinder:
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. He went through some rough patches, but eventually came through.
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 50 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.)
And so, let’s hear
the man himself singing “Early Mornin’ Rain”. Vaya con Dios, Gordon.
No comments:
Post a Comment