Things I’m Supposed To Hate, But Don’t: Gordon Lightfoot
By Mitch Berg
To the musical hipster, Gordon Lightfoot has for almost thirty years been synonymous with getting a kiss from your great-aunt.
Let’s do try to set the record straight, here.
Lightfoot is one of the last, longest-living (commercially, anyway) survivors of the folk music boom of the early sixties. But I always took to Lightfoot because, while most of the “folk” music I heard was either screechingly, mawkishly self-righteous (Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez) or self-consciously archaic (all of Pete Seger and Woody Guthrie’s many, many imitators) or groaningly over-literate (Bob Dylan’s many, many, many imitators), Lightfoot was just a guy who wanted to entertain a crowd. He was just a hard-drinking Canadian guy who looked and drank like the guy who refinished your driveway and sang songs about being hungover and unreliable.
Which isn’t to say that he didn’t follow some of the trends of the times – but even those shots were more interesting than their contemporaries. Amid the suffocating masses of “protest” folk songs, songs like “Don Quixote” and “Circle of Steel” were deft, oblique yet engaging.
Unlike most of his folk contemporaries, his shots at pop stardom, “Sundown” and “Carefree Highway” and “Summer Side of Life” and many others, were refreshingly un-suffocated by the conventions of folk that weighed down so much of the rest of the genre.
Lightfoot comes in for particular abuse for his biggest, best-known hit, “Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”. Some call it “boring”. Well, people are entitled to their own opinion; “Fitz” is an example of one of the most-abused folk forms, the “Really really long historical ballad” (which Lightfoot has done before, albeit without quite the same sales). But I always loved the song, partly because being from North Dakota, maritime lore is in my bones, and partly because the notion that, in 1976, when disco and dreary singer-songwriter treacle and Bachman Turner Overdrive ruled the airwaves, the notion that a five minute song about a shipwreck would sell a zillion songs should have been a plot for one of those “a couple of underdog guys hatch an improbable plot to make a zillion bucks in a scheme that everyone says has got to be a flop” movies.
So yeah. I’m supposed to hate Gordon Lightfoot. But I don’t.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Mitch puzzled readers: “partly because being from North Dakota, maritime lore is in my bones”
The connection between a land-locked mid-western state and “maritime lore” are not immediately obvious. Perhaps you whiled away the hours down at the grain silo by singing sea chanteys?
May 4th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Good post. Lightfoot is a guilty pleasure and his stuff has aged a lot better than his contemporaries. And you hit on the reason — he just wants to entertain. That big ol’ creamy baritone voice of his is distinctive and just a lot of fun.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
AC – Mitch was being ironic, like the big hipster doofus he is. Being from Milwaukee, I have seen enough poseur hipster dofus use of irony to be able to spot it almost instantly.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I’ll admit that “Edmund Fitzgerald” is a guilty pleasure of mine too… it’s such a throwback to the era when songs actually meant something.
May 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
and sang songs about being hungover and unreliable.
Wait. There was a folk music genre about my college years?
May 4th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
My brother and a friend were camping on the Yukon river out in the middle of Alaska. They had flown in and landed on a river bank just to spend a couple of days. In the evening a solitary long haired dude in a canoe pulled up to the bank to say hello. It was Gordon Lightfoot. He was spending the summer by himself along the Yukon. He wrote a song about his canoe, and a lot of his music is inspired by the north
“Whispers of the north, soon I will go forth
To that wild and barren land
Where nature takes it’s course
Whispers of the wind, soon I will be there again
Bound with a wild and restless drive
That pulls me from within”
May 4th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Wait. There was a folk music genre about my college years?
Look up “Early Morning Rain”. It’d seem to fit for a lot of us.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Wow, Master, that reminds Angryclown of the time he was riding a horse without a name in the desert, when the band America stopped by.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Foot + AC:
Not so much “irony” as “incongruity”. I love saying “we from NoDak are a maritime folk” because of the internal double-take I get from people.
Although be advised I’m half Norwegian, descended from seafarers who terrorized your anscestors, whomever they were (unless you’re Vietnamese or Korean or something).
May 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
that reminds Angryclown of the time
Oddly enough, last time I was in NYC I ran into Lou Reed. He’d lost his head as he was…
…oh, look at the time…
May 4th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
is this when you developed your hatred for America?
May 4th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Oddly enough, last time I was in NYC I ran into Lou Reed. He’d lost his head as he was…
…oh, look at the time…
Clownie came from out on the island
May 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
That was a different time, Mr. D. Angryclown was just back from Oyster Bay, holding a six-pack, when he ran into Billy Joel.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Lemme guess – your sister was gone (she was on a date), and you were just staying home and…
…oops – 2PM meeting. Gotta dash.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
That was a different time, Mr. D. Angryclown was just back from Oyster Bay, holding a six-pack, when he ran into Billy Joel.
I heard about that. That was a few years after the tin cans were explodin’ out in the 90 degree heat, when Clown somehow lost his baby down on Bleecker Street.
It’s sad, but it sure is true.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
“when he ran into Billy Joel. ”
Usually, Billy Joel runs into you.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Oooh. Good one.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I mean, Mr. D.
Although MoN’s was good, too…
May 4th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Angryclown threw the pitch over the plate, Master hit it out of the park. Fine comedy, Master.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Normally the straight man doesn’t wear the grease paint.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
It would seem that the Watchman’s out, kicking the bums about.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Things I….. didn’t know…. I’m supposed to hate, but don’t.
Musical and poetic content aside (which is just fine), the engineered sound in a bunch of his songs stands by itself as great. Legend has it he was very anal in the recording studio. I don’t know if he always had the same guys in his band, but the music mostly sounds TIGHT and CLEAN–Neil Young’s music on the other had seems just the opposite and his voice is only slightly better than Bob Dylans…and his guitar is always out of tune!
May 4th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Pencil,
Y’know, I totally forgot about that angle. While most folkies were fine setting up a mic and just banging out songs, Lightfoot had an appreciation for, and command of, the art of recording that set him apart from most folkies.
So there’s a Lightfoot mystery; while driving across southern MN in about 1988 or ’89, I heard a song in the distance on an AM station out of Long Prairie; it was late at night, and the music was slightly garbled and distorted by atmospherics, but I heard a Lightfoot song from the era that sounded, in the distance, almost like a Big Country song, with what sounded like big, skirling guitars keening in the background almost like bagpipes. It was one of those moments you only got on AM radio; a little four minute ephemeral snippet of beauty that disappeared (seemingly) never to return again. Or so it seems, having looked for close to 20 years for the song…
May 5th, 2009 at 8:16 am
You sure love the straw men!
May 5th, 2009 at 9:32 am
And you sure love the non-sequiturs…
May 6th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Mitch Berg,
I read your article via http://www.corfid.com . The Gordon Lightfoot song with “big guitars skirling like bagpipes” sounds like the title track of the 1983 album “Salute”. The album has since been released on CD.
Dave, Melbourne, Australia.
May 9th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Dave,
Thanks. I’ll have to try to find that.
And when I do, it’ll be worth a post…
May 3rd, 2023 at 11:00 am
[…] I tried to figure out where to start writing something that I haven’t written dozens of times before, with a long-overdue watching of If You Could Read My Mind, the 2020 documentary about his sixty-plus year career, life and legacy. And I read this brief article I wrote on him (checks notes) 14 years ago. […]