Lightfoot chose for his appearance a snug pair of bell-bottoms with a giant embroidered rose, suspenders, and wide-collared polka-dot shirt. I loved Chevy Chase and John Belushi in particular, and modeled myself on their sarcasm and cockiness. SNL in its first iteration was pure catnip for an attitudinal teen and a chrysalid comedy junkie, and reader, I was that cat. Meantime, my own allegiances were shifting, from hand-me-down music to up-yours revolt. Later that year, “Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald,” the thousand-verse maritime disaster singalong, would mesmerize Western society. In April 1976, Lightfoot appeared as musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Nary a preteen moment was Lightfoot-free. Many was the summer afternoon I spent chopping wood in the yard, as portable speakers in tall rust-colored cabinets, jammed into open windowframes and run from our living room by lamp cord, blasted “Don Quixote” and “Song For A Winter’s Night” into the North Carolina heat. We sang them as a family, harmonizing and strumming. By the time I started playing guitar, I knew many if not most of his songs by heart. My parents, connoisseurs of then-contemporary folk, revered his music and played his records without surcease or pity. I was 3 when his first American record came out.
The voice is one of the first things I recall. An inoffensive radio staple, the Jim Croce of Canada, hirsute soft-seller of anodyne MOR balladry with a vaguely macho edge, the hitmaker who once upon an ice storm gave us “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald,” and “Rainy Day People.” For you, a comparatively normal person, Gordon Lightfoot is probably something more graspable.
For me, his name conjures a queasy kaleidoscope of personae: etcher of piquant phrases, tonal source of earliest memory, curiosity, anachronism, hack, nullity.
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