Gordon Lightfoot and me, yesterday and today

May 21, 2012 2 Comments

Gordon Lightfoot…then

Gordon Lightfoot…now

I’ve got this vague memory from my college days in western New York. It has to something  to do with this guy I knew who was looking for someone to hitchhike with him to Ontario where Gordon Lightfoot had supposedly been busted for pot possession and was supposedly waiting for someone to come bail him out of jail . That was so long ago that now I can’t remember if I actually went with the guy, or whether it wasn’t even me involved in this escapade but one of my friends, or whether Lightfoot was actually even in jail. I don’t even remember the name of the guy I think I somehow knew, although I do remember that, if he really existed, he was sort of sketchy and was not a student but just hung around campus and looked mysterious and had longish very dark hair and a dark complexion and wore dark sunglasses all the time.

This was in the days when I hung out at bars in Niagara Falls with names like Dew Drop Inn (a country-western place patronized by western New York good ol’ boys and Native Americans from the Tuscarora reservation)  and The Frog Pond, where factory workers from Hooker Chemical and Carborundum Steel spent their paychecks and where the design motif, for some lost-in-the-toxic-smog reason, was FROGS — paintings of frogs, frogs on the napkins, drink stirrers with little frogs sitting atop the tip and little plastic frogs glued to the inside bottom of beer mugs. Come to think of it, the frogs weren’t the only mystery about The Frog Pond. It’s also a mystery why those big burly dirty grown-up shot-and-a-beer-drinking factory workers allowed a long-haired Southern Comfort-drinking college kid to hang out on their turf and didn’t push him out the door and drop-kick him into the bubbling and gurgling and beautifully named Love Canal.

The point of these musings and memories, I guess, is that it was all a long, long time ago, and many memories have faded, but somewhere in there I remember liking — really liking — an album called “Summertime Dream” by Gordon Lightfoot. I still love that album, which is one reason why I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend a performance by Lightfoot last night in New Brunswick, N.J.

But  I had to deal with some issues.

One of them was the feeling I get every time I see one of those PBS television specials featuring pop and rock performers from the 1950s and 1960s — specifically, that these people in the audience are really friggin’ OLD. I can deal with this when I see the doo-wop fans — I mean, if that music was the soundtrack of their adolescence, these folks had to be born right around the beginning of World War II, right? So they’re all well into their 60s and even their 70s. No wonder they look old. Even the 1960s revival on PBS sort of bothers me, but not really….I mean I wasn’t even close to being a teenager when the British invaded, so why should it bother me that Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits and Eric Burdon of the Animals and every single member of the Moody Blues looked like they were all allowed to leave the nursing home for this concert but had to promise not to play the music too loud and to be back home by 11.

I dealt with this hang-up last night by telling myself as I studied the audience that I looked way younger than that white-haired guy with the cane and that “dark-haired” guy with the obvious and very bad hairpiece. Etc.

I then watched with some alarm as Gordon Lightfoot walked out on stage and I realized he was moving like AN OLD MAN. A quick Google search revealed that Gordon’s nearly 74 years old. In recent years he has dealt with a nearly fatal abdominal aneurysm and a mini-stroke (suffered while he was on stage performing, for God’s sake) and an episode (I think related to the aneurysm) in which he was actually in a coma for six weeks.

But then…as I marveled at all of the old folks around me and pondered the notion of Gordon Lightfoot being just six years away from being EIGHTY YEARS OLD…I focused on something different. Sure, Lightfoot’s voice had lost of some of its richness and depth. Sure, he looked a little shaky up there and seemed to get out of breath quite easily.

But he’s still talented and still a good performer. I loved the show. And I ever make it to 74 years old and I’m half as cool as Gordon Lightfoot, who’s still playing his guitar and singing his songs on stage in front of thousands of grateful fans,  I’d be quite happy with my lot in life.

So I sat back and just enjoyed some beautiful music: “Sundown,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Early Morning Rain” “For Loving Me,” Rainy Day People,” Carefree Highway,” “Christian Island,” and other lovely tunes.

My favorite of those songs he performed? “Edmund Fitzgerald,” which tells the sad and true tale of a freighter which sank in 1975 on Lake Superior, leaving all 29 crew members dead; the iconic “Early Morning Rain,” the stunningly beautiful “Christian Island,” and “If You Could Read My Mind,” if only for these verses:

“If you could read my mind love/What a tale my thoughts could tell…But stories always end/And if you read between the lines/You’ll know that I’m just tryin’ to understand/The feelings that you lack/I never thought I could feel this way/And I’ve got to say that I just don’t get it/I don’t know where we went wrong/But the feeling’s gone/And I just can’t get it back…”

I do wish Gordon Lightfoot had played these two songs:

Here’s his cover of Dylan’s beautiful “Ring Them Bells”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gFxxDOnsK0

And here’s what I think is the most beautiful song from the “Summertime Dream” album, “I’m Not Supposed to Care”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUkEpZ4mdQc

Filed under Music, Three chords and the truth Tagged with ,

Fallen angels

July 26, 2011 Leave a comment

Fallen Angel by Jean-Michel Baquiat

Pete Townsend wrote it and Roger Daltrey sang it and I’m sure both of them are glad they didn’t get their wish: “Hope I die before I get old.”

Creepy and callous talk about the “27 Club” followed last week’s tragic death of the substance-addicted 27-year-old British singer Amy Winehouse at age 27. She joined the pantheon of other 27-year-old pop icons — including Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain — who also died tragically at age 27, burned out from drugs and alcohol and fame’s bright flame.

Not mentioned as frequently were other pop and rock stars who died too young — from gunshots, from drugs, from drink, in plane crashes and car crashes, in freak accidents, by their own hand or at the hand of others: John Lennon, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Pigpen (of the Grateful Dead), Dennis Wilson, Johnny Ace, Duane Allman, Mike Blookfield, Marvin Gaye, Nick Drake, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Sam Cooke, Sandy Denny, Mama Cass, Tupac Shakur, Keith Moon, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gram Parsons. And Elvis, who died when he was just 42.

I really have nothing to say about Amy Winehouse or the others, except the usual empty and vague generalities: such a loss, such a tragedy, I wonder what kind of music they would have created had they lived, can you imagine that John Lennon would now be seventy years old, and so on…

But I do have something a little different to add — two names of artists who were not pop stars or rock stars, both of whom died at age 27.

The artwork at the top of this entry is by the painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988. Appropriately, it’s called “Fallen Angel.”

And then there’s the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who died in 1938 at age 27, apparently poisoned by a cuckolded husband or lover:

Filed under death, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Music, Rick Danko Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Watching the river flow

May 24, 2011 Leave a comment

I warmed up for the celebration of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday by attending a great show — Blondes on “Blonde on Blonde” — presented last Saturday as part of the Concerts at the Crossing series held in Titusville, N.J., near Washington Crossing, where, yes indeed, Washington crossed the Delaware and invaded Trenton.

I know…we should have let the British keep Trenton. But I lived there with my parents right after I was born. My young father was serving in the Air Force, stationed at Fort Dix. So if Washington hadn’t crossed the Delaware and routed the Hessians, I’d be speaking with a British accent and…

I know.,.I’m drifting too far from the shore…Here’s a video of one of the “Blondes on Blonde on Blonde performers,” Sloan Wainwright, singing “Meet Me in the Morning” from “Blood on the Tracks” –

On the actual Bobday — Tuesday, May 24 — I sat by the banks of the Raritan River in New Jersey, reading a poem by Allen Ginsberg of Paterson, N.J., .listening to “Things Have Changed” by His Bobness…and watching and listening as an Orthodox Jew with a cantor’s voice stood alone at the riverside, first with his hands on his hips and then with his arms opened wide to the sky. The man chanted and sang a tune I did not recognize and words I did not understand, and he looked out over the holy river, and it was a confluence of Jewish poems and prayers, a meeting of the orthodox and the avant-garde, as the cantor and I sat and watched the river flow on Robert Zimmerman/Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday,

Here’s the song I was listening to, sung by the birthday boy himself:

And here’s Joe Cocker and Eric Clapton watching the river flow…

Filed under Bob Dylan, Music, New Jersey Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Rocking in “The Cradle of Recorded Jazz”

May 9, 2011 Leave a comment

Who ever would have imagined? Somehow you find yourself in, of all places, Indiana, in a town called Richmond, just over the Ohio line, about midway between Indianapolis and Louisville.

You’re heading to breakfast at a downtown cafe and notice a large mural, about two stories high, of a 1920s-vintage blues musician carrying his guitar and his cardboard suitcase. As you wonder about the mural, you wander around the corner and there’s another mural — this one depicts (their names are under the pictures, although you easily recognize a few of the faces) Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and others.

Turns out Richmond, Indiana, calls itself “The Cradle of Recorded Jazz” — and has a legitimate claim to that title. Early in the last century, the town was the home of Gennett Records and Studios, which put out early recordings by Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson and Fats Waller. Really early recordings. The last commercial record released with the Gennett label came out in 1934.

I didn’t get a chance to stop by the town’s Starr-Gennett Galley, which displays artifacts and memorabilia and offers CDs of music by the label’s musicians. I didn’t have the opportunity to visit the Gennett Records Walk of Fame.

But I did visit the brick ruins of the former site of Gennett Records and the Starr Piano Company — Gennett was a division of Starr, which was famous in its own right and was founded way back in 1872 in Richmond. And as I tried to imagine the days when the place bustled with activity and reverberated with music, I also tried to get my head around the impressive roster of Gennett musicians — including Bix Beiderbecke and The Wolverines, Gene Autry, Big Bill Broonzy, blues diva Alberta Hunter, King Oliver, Lawrence Welk (yikes!) Hoagy Carmichael, country/bluegrass legend Uncle Dave Macon, and — holy moley and hosannah! — Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton!

Richmond, Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan once thrived, where a hotel houses a collection of framed and mounted gaudy neckties donated by visiting Agway distributors and Kiwanis Club conventioneers, where the local history museum proudly displays one of only two honest-to-goodness Egyptian mummies in residence in the entire Hoosier State, which back in the 1920s and 1930s proudly proclaimed itself “The Lawnmower Capital of the World” — and where great bluesmen and great jazz musicians gave birth to great music at Gennett Records, “The Cradle of Recorded Jazz.”

Here’s Big Bill Broonzy:

Here’s Hoagy Carmichael singing “Stardust”:

Here’s Uncle Dave Mason:

Here’s Charley Patton singing “High Water Blues”:

And here’s Blind Lemon Jeffersonm, speaking for us all, singing “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”:

Filed under Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, death, Indiana, Music, Three chords and the truth, Travels Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Laurel and Hardy and Iggy

March 18, 2011 Leave a comment

Yes. Of course. Laurel and Hardy meet Iggy Pop. Iggy sings “The Passenger.” And Stan and Ollie dance!

Filed under Humor, Iggy Pop, Music, Video, Web Tagged with , ,

Claire de lune

March 18, 2011 Leave a comment

We’re talking about apogees and perigees. We’re talking about a taunting headline. We’re talking about Nat King Cole. We’re talking about Kurt Vonnegut (just for the heck of it….because his “Sirens of Titan” is underated and overlooked…and because Titan is one of the moons of Saturn). And, yes, we’re talking about the moon, which means it’s likely that we’re also talking about love.

Tomorrow night the moon will be closer to us than it’s been since 1992. The full moon will be brighter than usual — and will appear to be nearly 15 percent larger and about 30 percent brighter than your plain old full moon. That’s because Earth’s cosmic tag-along will be at perigree — its closest approach to the Earth, and more than 30,000 miles nearer to Earth than it is at apogee, the most distant part of its orbit. The moon’s orbit — and its apogee and perigree — varies from year to year, and this year it happens (personally, it feels like fate) that it will be nearer than it’s been in nearly two decades.

The taunting headline? From a news website: BIGGEST FULL MOON IN 19 YEARS WILL MAKE YOUR NIGHT BRIGHTER, MORE ROMANTIC THAN USUAL.

Nat King Cole and Kurt Vonnegut and love songs sung ‘neath the perigee moon? Listen. A red-winged blackbird asks the moon: “Po-to-weet? And so it goes:

Filed under books, Friday night arrives without a suitcase, love, Nat King Cole, Nature Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

They still haven’t found a cure….

February 22, 2011 1 Comment

Leonard Cohen confirms that the scientists and the doctors still haven’t found a cure for love…not that it’s an ailment that necessarily demands a remedy…Trivia fans take note: the church he refers to is way down at the south end of Main Street in a small town in the western Massachusetts Berkshires..

Filed under Leonard Cohen, love Tagged with , ,

The early bird gets the girl

January 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Just got an email from a flower shop where I’ve purchased blooms before — for a birthday, for Valentine’s Day, for Christmas, for no special reason. The email is an ad for Valentine’s Day bouquets. It advises (or warns) that “The Early Bird Gets the Girl” and suggests I order red roses right away. The featured bouquets: “Forever Beloved,” “P.S. I Love You” and “Be My Love.” No, I won’t be ordering those — and not “Hugs and Kisses,” “Heart and Soul” and “Love’s Divine” either. Maybe the “Always on My Mind” arrangement? No, best to send a song…the great Steve Earle’s not sending flowers…he’s singing that he’s never been “Lonelier Than This”….

Filed under love, Music Tagged with ,

Embers

January 7, 2011 1 Comment

Whiteout. Blizzards of regret. Drifting thoughts. Snowed in by sorrow. Thin ice.

No need for any more wintry words…they won’t stoke the warming fire…they won’t quell the howling wind….

See that she has a coat so warm….Dylan and Cash…eloquently…sounds that come from deep within a heart where persistent embers flicker with the remnant spark of love…

Filed under Bob Dylan, love, Music Tagged with ,

They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn

January 6, 2011 Leave a comment

You’re wide awake at 3 a.m. and still you’re all alone. Still the same old heavy heart, still heavy as a stone. Then that song begins to play, soundtrack of your night, your sad and hopeless serenade, your not-a-lullaby:

Filed under love, Music Tagged with ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 175 other followers