Out of the spotlight Gordon Lightfoot and other music legends hide in plain sight
As webs of snow are driftin’ and the gales of November blitzin,’ Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot — undeterred by weather, health or the simple passage of time — will take the Centre in the Square stage Thursday to do what he’s always done: sing his songs, tell his stories and revel in the warmth of a doting sold-out crowd.
His aging fans, as always, will be entranced by his bittersweet songs about life, love and loneliness culled from a six-decade career that has seen the low-key legend perform at both 1967’s centennial celebrations and its sesquicentennial 50 years later.
That’s Gord, as perennial and dependable as a Great Lakes freighter.
But even Great Lakes freighters, as we learned in his most famous song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” don’t last forever.
And Lightfoot, who turns 80 on Saturday, is no longer a young man.
He almost died, you know. Back in 2002, from a near fatal stomach aneurysm that landed him in a six-week coma and knocked out his career for two years. Bang. Pow. We almost lost him right then and there.
When he was pronounced dead in 2010 — wrongly, it turned out — you could feel the country holding its collective breath until he called a radio station to confirm that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
A gasp of relief followed by, what, benign indifference? It seems he was embraced by fans and taken for granted by everyone else.
And then there’s Burton Cummings, former lead singer of The Guess Who, one of the most influential rock bands this country ever produced.
Driving on an L.A. freeway in May, Cummings’ car was totalled when a fellow motorist ran a red light, leaving the Canadian rock pioneer battered and bruised
with a severe concussion.
I didn’t hear a peep until I stumbled across it during a Google search two days ago, which made me wonder: if Cummings had died, would anyone have noticed?
After all, it’s been 48 years since “American Woman” topped the U.S. Billboard charts — the first song by a Canadian band to achieve that feat — and 15 since the original lineup’s swan song at the 2003 SARStock benefit in Toronto.
The 70-year-old belter — whose voice has oft been proclaimed one of rock’s most powerful — has been flying under the radar ever since.
Just like Jack Scott, the Windsor-born early rival to Elvis Presley, who soared to the heights of rock stardom in 1958 and, 60 years later, is still out there, plugging away, with very little fanfare.
This was a guy, after all, who ranked with The Beatles, Presley, Fats Domino and Connie Francis in charting more U.S. singles (19) in a shorter period of time (41 months) than any other recording artist.
But outside a small cabal of diehards who grew up with his music, who even recognizes his name?
“When you look at the top 500 songs of all time,” points out Roger Ashby, the longtime CHUM radio DJ who grew up in Kitchener and has an encompassing sense of history, “what they really mean is the Top 500 songs people can remember.”
And collective memory, in this accelerated age of on-demand playlists and corresponding musical niches, ain’t what it used to be.
Did you know Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive and kicking, along with Little Richard, Bob Seger, Harry Belafonte, Frankie Valli, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Robbie Robertson, Ronnie Hawkins, Tina Turner and Doris Day?
You never hear about any of them either. To some extent, it’s always been this way.
Artists build an audience during their prime commercial years and carry this perpetually shrinking demographic with them to the grave.
At some point — usually when the next generation comes aknockin’ — they fall out of the spotlight, hiding in plain sight until one of four things occurs:
(1) a younger, au courant act remakes one of their songs.
(2) one of their classic tunes pops up in a Disney blockbuster.
(3) they become the subject of a fact-fudging movie — like Queen in “Bohemian “Rhapsody” — that goes heavy on hits. (4) they die.
Certainly this last scenario was the case with late singer, songwriter and activist, Gord Downie — Lightfoot’s spiritual successor — who enjoyed a commercial heyday in the ‘90s with The Tragically Hip before being tragically overlooked for more than a decade until he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer back in 2015.
The national mourning that followed was genuine, because people have an emotional attachment to music from their youth, and because — with Downie’s patriotism and poetic yearning — The Hip positioned itself as “Canada’s band.”
But it speaks to human nature that this groundswell of support came after his diagnosis from people who hadn’t bought a Hip album — judging by sales figures — since “Fully Completely” in 1992.
It’s not just Canadians. How many music fans mourning the deaths of David Bowie, Prince and Aretha Franklin bought an album or attended a concert by these legendary artists in the years before their deaths?
The parade of grief was dramatic but short-lived, conditional, the clinging narcissism of an aging generation coming to terms with its own mortality.
And let’s be clear: despite the hype, a sizable chunkof the population had no idea who these artists were.
This is much different than the predigital era, when one-size-fitsall was the order of the day.
When I was a teenager in the classic rock ‘70s, I knew who the heck Elvis Presley was, even though his music was before my time.
I also knew who Bill Haley, Frank Sinatra and The Everly Brothers were, even if their cultural context escaped me.
And I can guarantee my clued out, over-the-hill parents were aware of The Partridge Family, The Captain & Tennille and the greatest forgotten rock band of all time, Three Dog Night — not because they were fans, but because with Top 40 radio dominating every public airspace, they were impossible to avoid.
“Frank Sinatra dominated,” notes CHUM’s Ashby, outlining the trend line.
“So did Elvis and The Beatles. But once you get past Elton John you’re gonna be hard pressed to find anyone else. Nobody is ever going to dominate like those guys today because music is so diversified.”
Ask a teenager who Bob Seger or Joni Mitchell is and you might get a twinkle of recognition — more likely you’ll be greeted with an uncomprehending shrug.
To be fair, it’s a phenomenon that, in the internet age, works two ways.
“It’s hard to feel a part of today’s industry,” 1970s rock legend Cummings told media two months after his accident.
“I feel very out of touch at times. I watch the Grammys and I don’t know half the artists.
“I met Shawn Mendes on the night I got my big SOCAN (songwriting) award. He had no idea who I was — no time for an old guy like me.”
Which brings us back to Lightfoot, musical emissary from another age who — given his groundbreaking achievements — should be celebrated every time he picks up a guitar.
Instead, he’s a phantom of our musical past, hovering on the fringes of our consciousness, out of sight, out of mind.
That will change when he dies, of course, and newspapers like this one eulogize him on their front page as, for one brief instant, his cultural significance is gloriously reaffirmed.
But then — poof — he’ll be gone, like that other Gord, a dusty footnote in the Canadian psyche.
Bittersweet?
As another Canadian songwriter you never hear about anymore crooned so eloquently, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
It’s as true now as it was then. Only moreso.