Canadians are waking up today to the sad news that we have lost one of our most iconic children. GORDON LIGHTFOOT, the indefatigable folksinger loved the world over has passed away.
Born in Orillia, Ontario, Lightfoot became an internationally renown folksinger. He virtually shaped the folk genre throughout the 60s and 70s, alongside such legends as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Lightfoot’s first public appearance–I love this story–was in the 1940s, over the PA system at his elementary school during a Parents’ Day event. Lightfoot sang the Irish lullaby Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral. It was just a glimmer of what was to come. He never stopped singing…
Back when I worked in a record store (Target Tape & Records) in the 70s, Lightfoot’s music could always be heard throughout the day as we priced vinyl and helped customers find their next great obsessions. Quite often, it was Lightfoot’s records they were taking home. This was the case whether they were hard rockers, disco enthusiasts, country, reggae, or pop fans. Kiss fans would pick up the newest Kiss album along with a Lightfoot. Engelbert Humperdinck fanatics would also have a Lightfoot in tow at the checkout. There are just some artists who refuse to be pigeonholed into a single lane in the music world. Lightfoot was one of them. Even throughout my punk and new wave phases in the early to mid-80s, Lightfoot was there. His records sat comfortably alongside Leonard Cohen, Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Cure. There’s no explaining how some artists get to stay in the rotation throughout one’s life, other than the fact that their iconic sound never sours. It is eternal.
Lightfoot was one of those artists. His eternal sound never lost its edge. One of his most iconic songs, If You Could Read My Mind, was recorded by well over 100 artists, including Liza Minnelli, Olivia Newton-John, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Don McLean, and Barbra Streisand. Viola Wills made it a disco hit, while Stars on 54 kept the trend going.
Lightfoot walked in every lane. Whether you loved him or not, he probably had influence on your favourite artists. His songwriting skills earned him a forever place in Canada’s (and the world’s) music universe.
Lightfoot considered The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (1976) and Early Morning Rain (1966) his crowning achievements. The former, of course, was a song commemorating the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. The entire crew of that ship (29 souls) was lost in the accident. Lightfoot wrote about things that happened around him. He captured Canada and the world in his lyrics.
My own personal experience with Gordon Lightfoot took place in 2007. This was the year of my very first MUSKOKA NOVEL MARATHON experience. I wrote the 48 hour novel writing marathon that year. I left before the 72 hours was up. This was an option…you could either do two days or three. I wrote a really tumultuous story about a boy (Sebastian Nelson) growing up in the Beaches district of Toronto, in the 1970s, with his younger brother and his broken father. I had a folksinger character who came into the boys’ lives to pick up the slack where the father was failing. This folksinger was fashioned after another iconic Canadian…Montreal’s Leonard Cohen. It was a barely concealed homage to Cohen.
I wanted an epic closing chapter to my first MNM novel attempt, so I decided the Cohen character would go to Gordon Lightfoot’s 1980 benefit concert for Canadian Olympic athletes at CNE Grandstand here in Toronto. Lightfoot was actually a character in this final chapter. Lightfoot invited my character, Teal Landen, to join him on the stage. The two then sang a duet of If You Could Read My Mind. It was EPIC (to me)!
I really dove in to that story. I was possessed. I raced that story through the 1970s and I did not look back until I finally made it to the stage of that concert in 1980! I couldn’t wait to get Teal onto that stage at the CNE Grandstand and to that event hosted by none other than the great Gordon Lightfoot.
As I wrote that last chapter with tears in my eyes and excitement in my heart, I felt this great crescendo escalating with every word that raised to meet the ending. It was the denouement to a story that was often hectic and scary. It was the moment when my child character, from the wings of the CNE Grandstand stage, was finally able to exhale after a treacherous ride through a difficult childhood. It was the culmination of a full 48 hours of writing the same story start to finish and it was simultaneously electrifying and exhausting.
After writing that story the way I wanted it written, I didn’t want to risk anything. I didn’t know about copyright laws or what you were or were not allowed to do in fiction. Once the marathon was over, I immediately sought out both Leonard Cohen’s management and Gordon Lightfoot’s management. I wanted to secure permission from Lightfoot to use him as a character in my novel. And I wanted to secure permission to use Leonard Cohen lyrics. I had no idea if this was necessary or not. I just didn’t want to shop this novel around only to find out I’d have to scrap the last chapter (WHICH I ABSOLUTELY LOVED!)
Leonard Cohen’s management gave me permission on the lyrics almost immediately. The information I had for Gordon Lightfoot was a fax number. I meticulously created a cover letter explaining my request, and I added my final chapter to the fax. I imagined them being HOPPING MAD receiving all these pages at once. I envisioned them throwing the ‘junk mail’ fax into the bin with a curse.
That’s not what happened. About an hour after I sent the fax, I received a phone call from Barry Harvey…Lightfoot’s manager. Harvey was thrilled about my request. I could here his legitimate excitement as he spoke to me. He was happy that Lightfoot would be memorialized this way. He didn’t care if Sebastian’s Poet would become a bestseller, or even get published at all in the end. He was happy that I did it, period. And in the background, I actually heard Lightfoot talking. Harvey passed on a few comments that I had already heard in the background. They were happy to give me permission and they wished me luck with my endeavor.
Soon after I got off the phone, I received the signed permission. I still don’t know if this was something I actually needed or not. I just didn’t want to change a word of that last chapter. I was protective of my baby and doing everything I could to ensure it stayed intact. Lightfoot delivered tenfold! Barry Harvey passed away a couple of days later.
I’m sure there are as many Lightfoot stories as there are fans. He was a giving and generous person who interacted with his fans. He will be sadly missed. His music sneaks into the soundtracks of our lives when we least expect it. It always will. We are, after all, Canada… and so is he.
Gordon Lightfoot – November 17, 1938 – May 1, 2023
REST IN PEACE
THE REASONS was my second year at the Muskoka Novel Marathon! I gave myself a break and wrote for the entire 72hrs for this one. The first year was a dizzying thrill-ride, but this second year really cemented my love for this form of novel writing. All in one sitting. It’s a spectacular to connect to a story in this magical way. No distractions…just done in one!
SUMMER ON FIRE – Zach appears in my first novel, Summer on Fire. He is the friend who outwardly appears to be the most together. But he is also, in a way, the weakest link. Picture Wil Wheaton’s Gordie Lachance. He’s the hero of the story, but he is nothing like the hero of the story. Everybody knows the guy you want to be when you watch the movie Stand By Me is Chris Chambers…the coolest of the cool (played by River Phoenix). Even though Chris later dies, he’s the ultimate hero of that story. My Chris Chambers in this story is Jeff Barsell. I’m referencing Stand By Me here because it is mentioned in quite a few of the reviews for this book. Zach was broken in the most subtle way of all of my main characters. He wants to please everyone and he struggles with his moral compass. He wants to do the right thing but he also wants to remain loyal to his friends. Jeff Barsell is the real broken hero of this story. Jeff has a brother who bullies him and a father who beats him. He adores his mother. He knows that the trouble he’s gotten himself into could finish the job of breaking her…a job his father has been chiseling away at for years. When the boys accidentally set a barn on fire, the stage is set for a much darker revelation. The house beside the barn goes up in flames…and with it, the body of the old man who lived there. From there, we get to see the mettle of these three boys as they attempt to wiggle out of their predicament.
SEBASTIAN’S POET – Sebastian Nelson is perhaps my favourite of all the characters I’ve ever created. He’s a boy who is forced to grow up at an all too young age. When folksinger Teal Landen appears on the couch one morning after a bohemian party at Sebby’s place, he quickly forms a bond with the boy. Sebastian comes from a broken family. He’s left with his mentally ill father after his mother takes off to her homeland of Montreal. With a father who can’t even look after himself–a father who is silently dealing with deep dark issues that threaten to kill him–Sebastian becomes the number one caregiver to his younger brother Renee. Teal becomes his saviour, but the distance between them is vast as Teal attempts to hide a truth from the young boy who worships him. This one takes place in The Beaches in Toronto…in the 1970s. It’s all Leonard Cohen meets James at 15. Sebastian is abused, neglected, and without a childhood to speak of. He is someone who should not be able to get up…but getting up is all he ever wants to do.
THE REASONS – Reason is the family name of the narrators in this one. The narration flips from chapter to chapter, from Tobias Reason to Maggie Reason. This is an entirely broken family. Maggie is insane. Her secret is so completely buried, she herself doesn’t even know what it is. But when she tosses her newly inherited house at Tobias, just to get rid of it, Tobias discovers the deepest darkest thing about a family so broken they might never be saved. Tobias’s older sister dies in chapter one…and on the surface this may appear to be the thing that breaks Maggie. But all along, there are hints that she was broken long before Deja died on her road-trip to the mountains she would never see. Maggie has no time for her youngest daughter, Annabel…so it falls to Tobias to raise her. But Annabel may in fact hold the key to everything that is broken. Tobias is abused, neglected, and without a childhood to speak of. But he is a character on a mission…he wants to save his mother, and in the process he wants to save his family. He will do anything to make this happen.
BURN BABY BURN BABY – Francis Fripp’s last name is a nod to mention—He has the last name Fripp as an homage of sorts to Grady Tripp from Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. This novel marks the onward march of my own courage. I wanted to go deeper with this one, explore the darkness that teens experience on a deeper level. Francis is bullied relentlessly at school. His tormentor, Brandon Hayley, won’t be happy until he sees Francis completely destroyed. But Francis was broken before Brandon ever got to him. Francis was mutilated by his abusive father, who burned half of Francis’s body in a murderous rage. As broken as Francis is–both inwardly and outwardly–he has a deep love of life. You can just glimpse it if you look past the angst and turmoil he lives with every day. He loves his little brothers Paul and Simon like mad. Sure, he calls them, collectively, Paul Simon…but he does this in love. He sees only his burns when he tries to assemble a picture of who he is as a person. But the new girl at school might see more than that. It’s up to Francis to allow her to do so. His walls are so high, he doesn’t know how to take them down. Francis is abused, neglected, and without a childhood to speak of. But Francis wants to soar. And his unflinching champion, Trig, will do anything to see that he does so.
HALF DEAD & FULLY BROKEN – Carter is a twin. He’s the loser mentally unstable half of the Colby twins. His brother, inexplicably, is the popular All-American boy. But in chapter one, Marcus Colby dies in a motorcycle accident on the way to school.Carter was a passenger on the bike and becomes even more screwed up when he has to survive such a traumatic experience. Losing his twin is the beginning of the horror, but he quickly learns that sharing a face with the most popular dead boy in school is not an easy task. People who never saw him when Marcus was alive now don’t want to see him. Marcus becomes dead Marcus in this story…as he begins to visit Carter on a regular basis. He has unfinished work and he needs Carter’s help to see it through. The ghost of Marcus is just as fabulous and put together as the living Marcus was. While Carter attempts to pick himself up from the wreck of his life, he works with Marcus to help make things right. He also unexpectedly falls in love with Marcus’s girlfriend, Melanie, and forms an unexpected friendship with the school jock, Justin Dewar, who also happens to be the victim from the truck involved in the accident that killed Marcus. Carter is broken, but in different ways than usual. He has no self-esteem. He lives in the shadow of greatness and can’t manage to get out from under it. He hates himself. But he finds hope in Melanie…and in the possibility of being made more whole.
KEVIN CRAIG 