As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
Now that Gordon Lightfoot has been dead awhile and Canadians as much as Lightfoot got it wrong on what it was about him that made some of his songs eternal, the Lame Cherry will explain a few things.
in the 1970s after signing with Warner Records in the U.S., making a splash at the start of that decade with the release of the single If You Could Read My Mind, now a folk standard.
Lightfoot followed that up, over the next six years, with what became many of his best-known songs, such as Beautiful, Sundown, Don Quixote, Carefree Highway, Rainy Day People and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
I really liked several of Gordon Lightfoot's songs, If you could read my Mind, Sundown, Carefree Highway and Edmund Fitzgerald, but it was due what Lightfoot was Inspired to do, in like Arnold Schwartzenegger movies, Lightfoot could write a memorable line to define a song.
In Edmund Fitzgerald, the thing that spoke to the human soul was the line, "Does any man know where the love of God goes when the wave turn the minutes to hours". No one who has been trapped and facing death from cancer to a tornado ever forgets what it is like in questioning where the love of God goes in that kind of terror. Lightfoot followed that line with, "Superior they said never gives up her dead when the gales of November come calling."
Those lines are not that great of prose. They are though lines of absolutism. Every human knows what it is like to lose something or someone in the depths of life and never get that chance, object or life back.. That is what Superior is, that big broody lake which refuses to give back what it takes, just like life. It is bigger than mankind.
The music on Lightfoot's hits was good in arrangement, Thank the label for that. His best was his first hit in If You Could Read My Mind Love, it was poetic, but it was once again not the poetry. It was the human soul of combined suffering he was speaking to. Each one of us knows the helplessness we feel of being lost in love. How sometimes we can never get it back, no matter how hard we try. We are left with wishing wells, fantasies, and books which the ending is just too hard to take, in we will never read that book again.
In Carefee Highway, the line is short in "slip away, slip away on you". The music is flowing and taking the heart somewhere where there is not worries of real life. Again the line is in a music which is pretty enough, but it is a remarkable defining insight into human reality.
I was listening the other day to an artist in a very pretty song, and I knew the voice, but had one of those mental lapses until the next day in how the singer was. Eddie Money is a great deal like Gordon Lightfoot in his singing of verses had definitive lines. The song was on of Eddie's not as well known hits, but it was still the same in like David Michael Murphy of the Doobie Brothers in What a Fool Believes, a man knows a woman is out of his league, and convicts himself, but that man would do anything for that woman that a million men would not, whom she would choose.
Sundown, Sometimes I think it's a sin, when I feel like I'm winning, but I'm losing again.
Sundown was clanking like most of Lightfoot's odd key songs in being definitive, but what I like best about the music in that song is when the acoustic guitar is allowed to pause, sound alone and perform the shift, to take you back into the song. I think Sundown could have been made better instead of that odd synthetic guitar it featured, in it just went back to the Lame Cherry basics. Rock music needs electric guitars, drums, bass and organs. You can include saxophones, but horns do not belong in rock and roll, and in most cases no PIANO. I can violate that with America in Daisy Jane as he makes the piano growl, as much as 10,000 Maniacs with Natalie Merchant in their hit, Who Loves the Night, works because it is the piano ringing alone in the visceral of love.
Gordon Lightfoot was ok. Better arrangements than Bob Dylan but others arranged his Minnesota twang to perfection. Lightfoot was never in league with the American Guthrie's in Arlo's, City of New Orleans was a fabulous folk song, it surpassed American Pie in capturing a stage which was best left to the wonderful talents are still emerging from the Tennessee, West Virginia and Carolinas sound of what can be lumped into Blue Grass or the Spirituals of the Carter Family and the work of Bill Monroe, all now gone to the wind.
I came across a guy from South Dakota........I forget his name he died in a motorcycle accident, but he surpassed Lightfoot in talent in breathing life into songs like Mule Skinner Blues, but he never had the original hits like Lightfoot which transformed into Pop music. Kyle Evans was his name. Fantastic artist.
So to eulogize Lightfoot as the laureate of Canada is just weak, but the Canada does not have a great deal of soul as the English employed the Scots to screw people over, as the French were suppressed and the Aboriginals just go along for the ride, as the work of Canada was the German religious sects, now replaced by Asian and Muslim hordes. Lightfoot, like Shatner, like Trebec never amounted to shit in Canada, until they tripped the light fantastic in America, which manufactured the product into something marketable.
So let us not forget, as it seems every one of these artists forgets that it is the guy in the booth. who takes the shit you turn out and turns it into something wonderful that you never dreamed of. There are very few Mike Lynn's who can create, arrange and produce what comes to be called songs. Gordon Lightfoot came out of government sponsored Canada and in free enterprise Americans, was transformed into something he never was.
The song was produced by Lenny Waronker and Joe Wissert at Sunwest Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, with strings arranged by Nick DeCaro
So as these tards in left universe Canada talk about Gordon Lightfoot, the person who took that shit no one would listen to, in Joe Wissert, is the sound of Canada, along with Nick DeCaro. Take them away and Gordon Lightfoot was just a local singing train songs on government funds.
There are allot of great lines in this world. I am Inspired to write them all the time, but if the complete package is not there, they are just lines laying there which never speak to the human soul.
Nuff Said
agtG
