When you promise something, you better come up with that promised thing, and sooner rather than later. So, here it is, folks. When I finished my three disc-retrospective on Gordon Lightfoot, I dangled the possibility of a Lightfoot rarities set in front of you, and like two users, said 'yeah, bring it on', which around these parts counts as somewhat of a mass movement. So, I said I'll bring this out and here it is. To go along with A Life In Song, here is now A Secret Life In Song, the collection of outtakes and rarities that completes that other box set. Unlike A Life In Song, you get the whole deal at once, two discs full of rare goodies from the Gord.
What really pushed me to go for A Secret Life In Song was the outtakes from the Songbook box set. When Songbook came out, I didn't buy it, because it retailed for between 60 and 80 bucks if I remember correctly, and, having bought most of his albums, I already had about three quarters of the music on it. The real draw for me were the outtakes that were sprinkled throughout the set, but yeah I couldn't bring myself to shovel over that much money. And then, well, the box set went out of orint relatively quickly, and with it these outtakes, because when Songbook was made available digitally, it came out without the outtakes, almost completely rendering that version of Songbook useless, because it's now more of an extra-long greatest hits package.
So for years (well, decades...) I was unhappy that I missed out on these tracks, though it took me the immersion earlier this year into all things Lightfoot that got me to search for these again. And, hurray, some enterprising person had finally put the original Songbook online, and I could finally hear those fabled outtakes. Now, let's be honest: These outtakes aren't the slices of greatness that I had built up in my mind, mainly due to their absence and unvailability. Some things never change. But they are pretty good, with the occasional better than good song on it. The highlight of these tracks you know already from my alt version of Old Dan's Records. "Nothing To Lose", the re-recorded track Lightfoot put up for Cool Hand Luke, is a song that can easily stand with his released work, and a track like "Stone Cold Sober" or "Borderstone" would have been fine additions to the albums of the period. But none of them stand out as egregious omissions.
The outtakes follow the general trajectory of Lightfoot's career, with his work from the early 80s on dipping heavily into a synth-heavy adult contemporary sound. Considering that a major part of these outtakes come from this period, this means that around the half point of disc two you get towards the 'last disc problem' of the material dipping noticeably. Let's just say, Lightfoot wrote one of these songs for Kenny Rogers, and it shows. The three highlights above all come from his golden period as a performer, from the mid-70s, but the pickings from these years are relatively lean. Then again, the United Artists period is even less represented with a mere three outtakes, all decidedly o.k.
But of course you get plenty more than just these outtakes. Superior live performances from a performance for the BBC in 1971 and a track from the Montreux festival in 1976 help fill out disc two, as does a really nice acoustic medley of "Spanish Moss/Shadows" from 1987. There are also two tracks whose rarity depends on point of view. The 1975 remake of "Affair On Eight Street" is of course not rare for the thousands of people who bought the double vinyl version of Gord's Gold, but members of the CD generation (like me) got the short end of the straw, because to fit onto CD, in the early days when Cds could only hold up to 73 minutes of music, this track was dropped from the line-up. So I only heard it decades later when the digital version of Gord's Gold put it back into its proper place. And the last track on the disc is the one new song that was collector's bait on Gord's Gold Vol. 2. As said in my write-up to disc three of A Life In Song, the only one of the remakes worth saving was "The Pony Man", which is on that disc, so here is the other song worth keeping.
You have probably realizd by now that I haven't said anything about Disc One, which has a lot to do with Lightfoot's, erm, difficult career beginnings which were, not a straight arrow towards success and adulation, rather a crooked, winding river. Lightfoot first went into the studio to cut ten tracks in 1962 of mediocre to outright awful MOR country pop, that, as Lightfoot himself noted, that had him "sounding like a cross between Jim Reeves and Pat Boone". I decided to keep one of the tracks, "Negotiations" to open disc one, as it's at least worth a chuckle seing Lightfoot of all people try out a rockabilly sound quite reminiscent of Gene Vincent. Then its off to the so-called Warner publishing demos. While Lightfoot was reluctant to perform his own material, he wrote dozens of songs as publishing demos for other artists to pick up. These recordings have never been officially issued, so sound quality will vary. I picked the highlights of these, including "Roll On", which still has a side-eye on rock'n'roll and rockabilly, the protest song-ish "Where Are The Martyred Children?" and songs that already hint at Lightfoot's later sound like "Betty Mae's A Good Time Gal".
The irony of Lightfoot's early career is that he was hired as a songwriter for Warner Brothers, then very riefly in 1965 as a recording artist, bringing out a single of "I'm Not Sayin'" that had sucess in Canada and nowhere else, and Lightfoot got dropped right away, only to find a home at United Artists for the next four years and five albums, before returning to Warner Brothers via Reprise Records in 1969, just in time for his commercial breakthrough, and stayed with Warner until the end of the century. United Artists hadn't been right away an open arms environment for Lightfoot, forcing him into recording a cover of Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" instead of one of his own compositions for his debut single. It's a very middling performance, so it isn't included here. What is included is "Movin'", the title song for an industrial film made by the Canadian National Railway, which became so popular as to even run in cinemas! United Artists have been notoriously shabby and haphazard in their treatment of Lightfoot's non-album material for them, never giving these a proper release.
Included as a means to look at Lightfoot as performer of contemporary folkies, there are some live performances from a concert in early 1966 (that sourced "The Ballad Of Yarmouth Castle" on Shanties) that see him perfom The Youngbloods' "Get Together" and "Turn!Turn!Turn!", just popularizd by The Byrds. A 1968 live performance of "I'm Not Sayin'" is included because it's a duet with Johnny Cash done on Cash's tv show and while Cash's live vocals are a little rough and off, it's a charming period moment. I also found the original demo of the aforementioned "Too Much To Lose", a charming first try that should have led to the song being published somewhere sometime.
Other than the sprinkled in Songbook outtakes, the disc then concludes with most of the live in studio acoustic recordings Lightfoot made for Skip Weshner's radio show from 1968 to 1970, including the unreleased "Seabird Song", several classics off If You Could Read My Mind, an early version of "Looking At The Rain", and a cover of Elton John's "Your Song". All in all, Disc One has 26 songs dating from 1962 to 1970, while Disc Two covers 1970 to 1988 in 19 songs.
So, there it is, Gordon Lightfoot's Secret Life In Song. For budding music historians and confirmed Lightheads alike, or really anyone who is more interested in retracing the steps of this outstanding singer-songwriter. Let these songs flee out of their secret existence and into your music collection.
Since compiling this collection, I have found a number of other rare Lightfoot songs that are possibly of interest, so if I find some time and some of you are interested, it's not impossible that a super secret bonus disc to Secret Life In Song will be compiled. Let me know what you think...
Gord's secret life in song
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