Gordon Lightfoot, 1938–2023
ON MONDAY, THE singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot died at age 84, in Toronto. The staff of Indignity, being old enough to have absorbed the Canadian's music at the peak of his minor but indelible fame, convened in a chat to discuss his legacy. ALSO: This post is too long for email. You will need to do some extra clicking.
TOM SCOCCA: When's good to discuss the Troubador?
JOE MACLEOD: Gordo Lightfoot! He has joined Neal Peart and Stompin’ Tom Connor in Canadian Music Heaven. My mental image of Gordon Lightfoot is based on AM radio airplay and a construct of apocrypha and false perception.
TS: What's the false perception you brought to him? He was also, for me, 100 percent synonymous with AM radio.
JM: Well, of course he was that gentle baritone who I heard over the airwaves of WGY-AM in Schenectady, delivering the threatening, sexual intrigue-loaded “Sundown,” and the timeless ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a top 40 hit song with NO CHORUS, crazy! My perception of Gordon Lightfoot took a turn for falsehood years and years and years ago when a co-worker told me that as a greenskeeper at a golf course in Canada, he met Gordon Lightfoot, and that he was a legendary drunk who drove his car onto the course. So in my brain, forever, is a half-remembered comment, probably mixed with Caddyshack, where I see Gordo driving his Cadillac onto the links with a tumbler of scotch in his hand and a guitar slung over his shoulder and he tumbles out of the driver’s seat to grab a driver and blast one down the fairway.
TS: An epic tale that belongs in a ballad of its own! I got my heavy dosage of Gordon Lightfoot from WBAL-AM, back when the space between local news and talk segments could be filled with not-too-rockin' rock music, instead of Rush Limbaugh or local off-brand Rush Limbaugh. In the case of the profoundly weird "Edmund Fitzgerald," the not-too-rockin' music could in turn be taken directly from the news headlines. I was a child, and it seemed at the time that this must all be the normal way of the world, so that only with the distance of many years did I begin to properly grasp how bizarre the 1970s were.
[LUNCH BREAK]
JM: Cool, I’m looking for the video snip of me and my pal singing WRECK at a variety show I organized.
TS: [URP]
JM: Lemme go heat up my coffee
I guess this was fueled by discussions of my false anecdotal memory; for reasons that are otherwise unclear to me, in February 2020 there was a variety show at a coffeehouse in Baltimore, where my pal Jim Meyer and I performed, for reasons still mostly unknown, the entire “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” in fishing slickers with a cardboard EDMUND floating behind us, created and crewed by our crafty friend Bria S Rex. The verses were punctuated by Jim and I slapping each other with artificial fish, and the performance culminated in a shower of frozen shrimp.
TS: That seems like a pretty normal response to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which is a cultural object so large and odd and appalling that it automatically becomes a punchline. We've been reading Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror at bedtime, and more or less right off the bat in the story, our young teenaged night-owl protagonists venture into a hipster coffeehouse for the first time, and this happens:
The jazz record finished, and this guy got up to sing. He had a guitar. Someone had switched on a spotlight. The singer sat on a stool, in the light of the spot. Nobody introduced him. He sang the longest and most boring song I'd ever heard. It was about a maritime disaster on the Great Lakes. The song told about the wreck of a freighter called the Hortense Matilda McAllister in 1957. All five crew members got wet—nobody drowned—because the boat sank at the dock in Toledo, Ohio. The singer had a lot of trouble with rhymes because of the name of the boat. There were about sixty stanza, all more or less the same. The guitar playing was diabolical.
JM: Ha!
TS: It's spoofing a kind of thing, but the kind of thing is really one specific thing that achieved kind-of-thing status just by virtue of existing.
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