Why Gordon Lightfoot continues to captivate us so...

the first 4 on UA are absolutely classic and generally considered so, but his subsequent albums are often overlooked, aside from the hits. don quioxte and summer side of life are two that i really enjoy.

Could be just me, but Gord and Stan Rogers seem to have similar voices, although Stan's vibrato is more obvious.

what are gordon's late 60s lps like? are they folk-rock, or even plain ol' rock, or was it more a "straight" singer-songwriter w/ acoustic guitar thing? i need to listen more to the dude, Sundown is such a great song, and i heard If You Could Read My Mind today, but I don't know his 60s stuff except thru covers (the Nico one and Fotheringay's "The Way I Feel" which kicks ass)

...Sundown and If You Could Read My Mind (over)duly ordered, as of ten minutes ago.
*gnaws fingernails*

canuckian humour
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSThKFtOC48

been jamming the track "watchman's gone" a lot lately. way killer. big ups to my girl who turned me onto that.

"Sundown" is such a great song

screw lightfoot, i didn't know the first thing about jim gordon, until now!

Discography:
The Beach Boys: Good Vibrations; Spirit of America; Pet Sounds
John Lennon: It's So Hard; Imagine; The Plastic Ono Band- Sometime in New York City
The Monkees: Monkees; More of the Monkees; Instant Replay
Harry Nilsson: Nilsson Schmilsson; Aerial Ballet
Minnie Riperton: Adventures in Paradise
Tom Waits: The Heart of Saturday Night
"His drum break on the LP's version of "Apache" has been repeatedly sampled by rap music artists"

+... Jim Henson The Muppet Movie - ie. jim gordon = animal!!!!!

AND he killed his own mother?!?!? how did i not know about this guy?

He delivered a truly outstanding performance on Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman too.

Great thread!!!! There is nothing wrong with Gordon Lightfoot!!!

I love Early Morning Rain. The Warlocks (nee the Grateful Dead) do a nice version.

This was a good tribute show from mid-2009, with Lightfoot himself playing a song at the end.

Ian and Sylvia do a wonderful version of "Early Morning Rain."

will search!

Does Kenny Buttrey play on any of these rekkeds aside from The Way I Feel?

I really like "Black Day In July".

it's sorta hokey, but "don quixote" is a pretty tune.

Watchman's out, kickin' yer dreams about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F08b_d_Sh0g

Not dead.

well that's a load off of my mind

ps: ????

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/gordon-lightfoot-very-much-alive/article1473102/

Ronnie Hawkins was obviously the architect of this cruel, cruel hoax.

actually I can't believe Ronnie Hawkins is alive. I thought he was already like middle aged when he toured w/ the Hawks

dead or canadian

Carefree Highway is my #1 goto song at karaoke.

Lake Simcoe, it's said, never gives up her dead

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5X8cn4zzA8

my favorite version of this song, maybe

Does Kenny Buttrey play on any of these rekkeds aside from The Way I Feel?

― ian, Sunday, January 3, 2010 4:26 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

i really liked some stuff i heard of his recently and his record are always under 5 bucks & are pretty ubiquitous around here, so i figured to start just buying them indiscriminately, but some of it is pretty awful. what's the good stretch? or what are the bad decades? not sure what it is technically but that particular style of production on acoustic music that strips it of all semblance to live music. and like, cheesy and totally unnecessary string arrangements. blegh

so far i know that this is bad

http://audiophilianervosa.com/ClassicLightfoot.jpg

and that this is pretty great. but still not as good as some of the other stuff

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/g/gordon-lightfoot/album-don-quixote.jpg

man, i don't know. as far as i can tell from listening to "best of" stuff he only has like half a dozen or so really great songs.

"Beautiful" is my favorite, and used to great effect in The Brown Bunny. Even if you hate Vincent Gallo a thousand times over, it's such a good sequence.

Also, seconding both the Warlocks and Bob Dylan's versions of Early Morning Rain.

all i can add to the discussion is that sundown is all time for me

that Jim Gordon stuff up-thread is WILD

I think Noel used Imagine as the template for Don't Look Back in Anger...

my fave track is probably "watchman's gone"
which i'm going to listen to right now, thanks ilm!

there are real low points on all his lps at least that ive heard but the stretch from sundown to endless wire is p classic. has most of his best songs + decent production + serious lowdown vibes. some of the early stuff he recorded w/the cbc is supposed to be really good but i dont think ive heard much of it & what i have heard is p conventional/uninteresting 60s folk

really though just jam this on repeat and peace:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgI8bta-7aw&feature=related

man, i don't know. as far as i can tell from listening to "best of" stuff he only has like half a dozen or so really great songs.

Whoa, crazy talk!

Pretty much all his 70's albums up through "Summertime Dream" are great.

he can creep 'round my back stairs anytime

wait is that guy above dismissing the early UA stuff? i mean it's not perfect but sheesh there are some great songs on there. i'm not sayin!

i have vol 2 of classic lightfoot

Had to bump this; been on a major Lightfoot kick lately. Glad to see "The Watchman's Gone" is getting some love in this thread. It's a seriously great song, easily one of my favorites. "I've done it before; I know I could do it in my sleep" - love that line!! Another favorite of mine is "Canadian Railroad Trilogy"...how many other folk songs from the 60's were over 6 minutes long?

hey!! can we talk about Gordon Lightfoot for a second here?

in particular the way he captures the pastoral side of small town living/the wonder of nature/being a poor, miserable drunk without being a bore

Go on.

I just read a kid's picture book for a thing here called Silver Birch, where students read a bunch of books and vote on their favorites:

http://www.cbc.ca/books/kids/assets_c/2011/06/canadian-railroad-trilogy202x289-thumb-202xauto-103019.jpg

The text is Lightfoot's lyrics.

here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCEcm2dFvoA

That's a nice song.

i'm a man and i'd never cry at a folk song, but if i did, it would be this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhmI_lL4Htk

you got just what i needed, thanks

Also, any funky blues like "Sundown"? Because I tried some of the folk numbers suggested and meh.

Maybe try "Baby Step Back"?

oh weird so Gordon Lightfoot has a late period album called "Endless Wire" that is pretty good, I was confused thinking you were talking about the pretty good late period Who album called "Endless Wire"

or maybe the Who's is better from the looks of it

The endless wire continued on its way past Lightfoot's house all the way to where the Who lived, and beyond...

I wonder if the massed overdubbed vocal tracks were an attempt to cover up inadequacies with his voice.

yeah I bet that's it. its the first album where you don't really hear him air out his voice at all. I think you could kinda figure it would be all downhill from there. but there is one post Edmund Fitzgerald album I do kinda like - Dream Street Rose. thanks to the album by album thread for turning me onto that one. if anything that's his coke album, the songs are like 25% faster than normal

Whatever we think about his late-period music, his late-period hair is unimpeachable. Endless Flow, amirite?

Sweet. Gordon Lightfoot, In Concert at the BBC, from 1972, on right now, over an hour of it.

that's cool, would love to hear some live 70's Gord, as somehow he never released a live album during that period! he only has two - one from 1969, and one from 2012. the '69 one is neat if you like his United Artists period since half the material was never recorded in the studio and some of it is very good. amusingly the other two performers are Red Shea, who played with Gordon until he died in 2008, and Rick Haynes, who I think stuck with him up until the very end! I guess he was a good dude to work for.

also the liner notes are kind of a trip, it's written in this beat poetry style with lines like "lightfoot is about to happen to you" intermixed with lyrics from "Yarmouth Castle" (which, by the way, is obviously the precursor to "Edmund Fitzgerald"). guessing this was a United Artists thing because I cannot imagine Gord himself writing anything like this.

His preceding studio album Back Here on Earth featured a rambling Gord-written prose poem:

https://www.lightfoot.ca/backnote.htm

Gord may well have washed his hands of UA by the time that live album came out though.

LIGHTFOOT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN TO YOU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja8oGwtaRXk

I keep calling 1-800-GORDMAS but they don't pick up

can you e-mail me a good site (bio) about Lightfoot?

hope everyone's whipping out their copies of Summertime Dream today

it was nice of the gales of November to come early in honor of the 50th