There Were No Illusions On The Summer Side Of Life

I get the impression that Gordon Lightfoot knew time was short when he recorded his last album, three years ago. At 81, it wasn’t a big stretch.

It’s the best album he’s done in quite a while – done solo, just Lightfoot on an acoustic guitar, solo, his voice nowhere near it’s strength and power of his glory days, but still very much him. And it was a surprise – in 2016, he famously retired from songwriting, saying it’d caused a lot of problemls with, and for, the people closest to him in his life.

Lightfoot’s best work wrestles with one of those most troublesome human emotions – regret. Popular culture’s current affectation is to “have no regrets” – which is only possibly if you live a life with no failures, mistakes or risks. Like Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind, it sounds like a guy wrapping up accounts for a life spent swinging for the fence – and leaving a few broken bits and pieces in his wake.

It’s a wonderful end to a wonderful career.


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.

The documentary opens, rather pointedly, with Lightfoot and his third wife watching him peforming “For Loving Me”, a semi-comic cad’s anthem that, it turned out, wasn’t nearly fictional enough to have not affected many of Lightfoot’s relationships over the years.

He’s visibly uncomfortable.

“Turn it off. I hate that f*cking song”, he says, face wrinkled in disgust that, we learn in the next 90 minutes, has a whole lot of hindsight behind it.

And the hindsight is fascinating indeed.


The first acoustic guitar part with a moving bass line that I ever learned to play, back in eighth grade, was “Sundown”.

And it occurred to me – while LIghtfoot’s music wasn’t a huge, life-altering influence at the front of my mind, like Springsteen or (in my annoying adolescent days) The Who, Lightfoot’s music was always not just there, but found a way to burrow into my mind. Lightfoot’s music was always filling – there was as substance to it. It didn’t just flit through the mind and keep going.

He was an infamously fastidious songwriter and producer (not to mention, as the documentary notes, a rhythm guitarist who was in his prime such a solid, powerful musical presence that his band didn’t need a drummer until well into the seventies). His craftsmanship was very deliberate, very personal (in sixty years, he never worked with a co-writer), and pretty much completely him.

He came to fame in the folk music revival scene of the early 60s, on the basis of a lot of live performances and several songs covered by other artists; “Early Molrning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind” were covered by everyone from a Johnny Cash-style version by, well, Johnny Cash, to a disco version by VIola Wells that topped the R&B charts for a month in 1980.

And that leads us to one of the things that always drew me to Lightfoot; his music, like Dylan’s, kicked the fey, mewling limitations of “revival” folk music out of the way. The covers wandered all over the waterfront – from Wills’s disco read of “If You Could Read My Mind”…

To the Replacements sloppy punk…

To Sarah McLachlan’s alt-pop:


Favorites, looking back at a sixty year carer? Leaving out some of the obvious ones, like “Sundown” and “Wrech of the Edmund Fitzgerald”?

Some days, it’s the maddeningly oblique “Summer Side of Life”, with not-subtle Gospel overtones, distinctly un-folky Hammond organ part, and one of the most glorious vocal hooks ever?

The subtle “Don Quixote”, a protest song about…well, everything, and one that runs through my mind every time I on the air, today?

The tartly autobiographical “Race Among The Ruins”?

The freezing-cold social commentary of “Circle of Steel”?

On any given day, any or all of ’em qualify.

But for today? Looking back at Lightfoot’s 84 years (and my own, uh, several decades), this one seems most appropriate; a wistful look back, wrestling with regret, and finding away to live with them and still live.

RIP, Gordon LIghtfoot.


16 thoughts on “There Were No Illusions On The Summer Side Of Life

  1. Sadly, the music world lost three Canadian power talents this year. Robbie and Randy Bachman, of Bachman Turner Overdrive, passed within three months of each other. Randy passed on Saturday of cancer at 71.

  2. BH
    Ian Tyson died last December, Ian & Sylvia were the first people to cover Lightfoot’s In the Early Morning Rain bringing him to prominence first in canada then the US

  3. personal favorite Did She Mention My Name

    if you can get your hand on it Gordon Lightfoot Songbook a 4 cd set is worth having.

  4. “Popular culture’s current affectation is to “have no regrets” – which is only possibly if you live a life with no failures, mistakes or risks.”

    or if you are a sociopath

  5. John: Another great choice.

    PB: I may just go and do that.

    MacWheel: Stipulated.

  6. I’ve had Songbook on frequently in the last few months. One of my favorite soundtracks when I get in a certain mood. Highly recommended. And it does contain the Railroad Trilogy, which are among my favorites of his.

    Lightfoot had a troubled personal life, and it showed. Many artists have the same, but he showed it in his songs more personally than most.

    He was a huge talent and will be missed.

  7. Lightfoot had a troubled personal life, and it showed

    I knew that, but never quite to the extent that the documentary showed.

    I had no idea that “Sundown” was about Cathy Smitih – the woman who went on to give John Belushi his fatal speedball.

  8. You know you are at rock bottom when you are hanging out with a groupie/hooker/pusher called “Hard Kathy.”

  9. Smith denies injecting Belushi with the speedball. She says she got it ready for Belushi, then gave it to him, and he injected himself. Hard Kathy knew how to avoid a murder charge.
    Fun fact, one of the last people to see Belushi alive was Robin Williams. Williams was also acquainted with John Hinckley, the would be assassin of Ronald Reagan. They attended the same prep school.

  10. A Tree Too Weak to Stand: but songs of love will never leave loves feeling undefiled

  11. A older friend of mine paddled the Boundary Waters in Ontario in summer, 1974 or so. A remote area with countless lakes. Few camping spots, the countryside is steep. Arriving at one lake’s little campsite at sunset, they were disappointed to find two guys already there. Who didn’t mind the extra company. They cooked fish and after sunset the two strangers pulled out guitars and one of them began to sing. My friend was impressed! He asked their names and the singer was Gordon Lightfoot. My friend said, “Wow, can we camp here for a couple more nights?” And they did. Gordon said he liked camping and fishing the Boundary Waters, to recover from touring.

  12. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 05.04.23 (Morning Edition) : The Other McCain

  13. Emery,

    I heard a similar story from a friend of mine and a lake in Ontario.

  14. Lightfoot had a troubled personal life, and it showed. Many artists have the same, but he showed it in his songs more personally than most.

    In the documentary, he notes the song “The Circle Is Small” was written about an apartment building he lived in in the 70s (in either LA or Toronto) that had a circular layout. It was populated by a lot of show-biz people, all of whom were having affairs with each others significant others in the building.

    Gord had to have been happy he cleaned up his act before AIDS happened…

  15. As you say, Gordon had most of his issues in the 70s when he was in this late 30s/early 40s. He was pre-boomer, trying to live the hedonism of the 60s and 70s as someone who had grown up with far more traditional values that he wasn’t able to excise. His folk status pushed him deeper into the depravity than most of that era. It seems to me that many of his problems were that the mores of the crowd he immersed in were in deep conflict with the morals of his youth that he still valued. As a folk artist, he turned that anguish into some very moving songs to his both his credit and shame.

    I don’t miss the 70s “youth culture” in the least. Gordon seemed to feel the need to live that culture rather than resist it, despite seeing how shallow, callous, and personally destructive it was.

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