Step On Board Of This Vessel with Your Captain, Gordon Lightfoot

When Gordon Lightfoot died almost exactly two years ago, I didn't have much to say. This blog didn't exist yet, but even on the music blogs I visited there was no mention of him, and when I wanted to post a short eulogy in a comment section I didn't know what to say either. Lightfoot is the kind of artist who doesn't elicit much passionate discussion either way. If you even do remember Lightfoot, it's probably for one of his three hits ("If You Could Read My Mind", "Sundown" and "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald") which probably still turn on classic radio. But general opinion and appreciation of Lightfoot probably tops out at 'pretty nice, but not essential', which I can't really argue with. 

So I'll quickly tell you why Gordon Lightfoot means more to me than that general opinion (on which I would be happy to stand corrected). Gordon Lightfoot was the first singer-songwriter I discovered. Not a guy my father played a lot (although I didn't find his first album in his collection), but I found a Warner Brothers Singer Songwriter label comp that had "Sundown" and "If You Could Read My Mind" on it. (Since Dion's "Josie" was sequenced right after the latter, I always figured it was a latter-day hit, not the album track it turned out to be. It's great by the way, but that's another story for another post). I don't know what dre me more to Lightfoot than, say, Stephen Stills or Tom Paxton or any number of royalty also on that album (Van Morrison! Tim Buckley!), maybe the warmth and gentleness of his voice, but Gordon Lightfoot was it for me, so I slowly but surely bought almost his entire 60s and 70s output, which happily for a teenager was available as mid-price selections (hey, remember those?). 

Gordon Lightfoot was never particularly hip, but he certainly wasn't hip to teenagers in the early 90s. So I had that man and his music all to myself, and I only shared him with my first girlfriend. Sure, I'd discover all the great ones - Dylan, Newman, Zevon - in time, but first there was always Lightfoot and his tales of nature and romance and history and a bunch of other things, all very romantic bard type things, which no doubt appealed to me, the constantly forlorn in unrequited love teenager (but then, isn't that most of them? It didn't feel like that at the time, though...). But Lightfoot also opened up my mind to the idea that lyrics could be more than vehicles to move a song along, or to be catchy as a chorus. Ligtfoot was the first artist I listened to that seemed to love words as words. I can 100% say that I would have nver become a lover and reader of poetry without a little assist of Mr. Lightfoot.  

I generally liked tons of ongs from Mr. Lightfoot, but other than the lovelorn, romantic and sad ones I really liked his tales of the sea. Lightfoot, an avid hobby sailor on the Great Lakes, was fascinated by the sea and , more importantly, could translate that fascination to the listener. Most recognizably, and arguably as his finest piece of storytelling, on the aforementionesd "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald". But what he also often could impress on the viewers was the sense of adventure and wanderlust of seafaring, in song ssuch as "High and Dry" and "Christian Island", the two upbeat side openers of the accompanying Shanties album, our One Buck Record of the day. "The Ghosts Of Cape Horn", with its little whistling section of the chorus is another favorite.  

The Golden Goose, one of Lightfoot's sailboats...

The line-up concists essentially of odes to seafaring from across Lightfoot's discography - and tales of two tragedies involving ships, both the side closers of the album.  It's interesting to contrast these two songs about the sinking of ships, "The Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle" and "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald". 

"The Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle", about the burning and sinking of the cruise ship of the same name, is sort of an odd duck in Lightfoot's discography, a protest/story song that Lightfoot wrote right after the catastrophe occured - the version I kept is from a concert in Toronto end of January 1966, so  it's been barely two months since the sinking of the Yarmouth Castle. But that song, after premiering thus in early 1966 never made it onto any of the Lightfoot albums that followed, finally surfacing on Sunday Concert, the record-fulfilling live album at the end of his tenure with United Artists. One suspects that it was taken out of mothballs three years (and three albums later) to assure a number of original songs on that album. But I'm not a big fan of the Sunday Concert version, with its echoey and slightly distant sound. I much prefer the version I used, which surely must be one of the first public airings  - if not the first ever - of the song, which has a warmer, friendlier sound that jibes better with the other songs around. The sentiments, however, weren't warm or friendly. 

"Yarmouth Castle, shes a-dying and don't know it..."

The fact that "The Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle" was not issued for three years also highlights Lightfoot's odd positioning in the folk singer community. Unlike most of his brethren, he wasn't having particularly leftwing views, he in fact supported the Vietnam war and at least privately complained about American draft dodgers invading his home country. As a sign of the time maybe, he did have the occasional protest song - "Black Day In July" about the Detroit riots from Did She Mention My Name comes to mind - but he is sort of weirdly uncommitted on these songs in a sort of 'just reportin' the facts, M'am' way. 

"Yarmouth Castle" thus isn't really direct as a protest song and avoids fingerwagging, just pointing out how the captain (and his crew) abandoned the ship and consequently left dozens of passangers to die ("The captain on his lifeboat is a-leaving") or how the paint used on the ship accelerated the spread of the fire and how the safety features were outdated and inadequate ("For the ragged hoses in the rack / no pressure do they hold"). He also makes really interesting use of personification, telling the story partly from the point of view of the ship."The Ballad Of The Yarmouth Castle" is one of his best offerings of Lightfoot's early years and certainly beats out some of the fluff on the albums that didn't issue it, again pointing out how the song got the short end of the stick, for whatever reasons. 

By contrast, "Edmund Fitzgerald" is decidedly mythologising from the get-go, establishing an ominous atmosphere, both musically and lyrically, that depicts the boat's sinking as an almost unvaidable fate "when the witch of November come stealin'". Atmosphere is the key word here, as the brooding rhythm of the song, that Lightfoot based on old Irish folk song "Back Home In Derry", depicts the beginning of the Edmund Fitzgerald's fateful last journey, before thes slashing guitar lines by Red Shea and terry Clements and the equally slashing steel by Pee Wee Charles really bring the sentiment of gales whipping across the ship's deck alive.

It's a testament to that sustained atmosphere and Lightfoot's evocative lyrics that an almost six and a half minutes long song without a chorus could make it all the way to no. 2 in the charts, only held off by - urgh - Rod Stewart's disaster song of another kind, "Tonight's The Night". Lightfoot wasn't one to let a good riff go, so perhaps unconsciously, when he wrote "Sea of Tranquility" for 198's Dream Street Rose he seemed to reuse some of the licks from "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald". As a sort of 'prelude' I sequenced "Sea Of Tranquility" right in front of "Fitzgerald".

Shanties is a relatively short album - only eight songs, but as three are quite long, it has vinyl album length. I had some other vaguely nautical themed songs on the short list, but decided to just use these - all killer no filler, something Lightfoot didn't always manage on his original albums. Put this on, and set sail with captain Gordon Lightfoot... 

"I'm sailin' down the summer wind, I got whiskers on my chin, and I like the mood I'm in..."