RIP Gordon Lightfoot
Singer-songwriter – this article says “troubadour” – Gordon Lightfoot has died at 84. RIP.
Lightfoot was not an extreme favorite of mine; for example, I never bought an album of his. Nevertheless, he wrote many classic folk-type songs that I liked very much indeed, and still like. The first one – and the one I associate with Lightfoot most strongly – was this, in which a love ’em and leave ’em type sings to his most recent forsaken lover. It’s not a “nice” song, but I still think it’s a great one, not so much for the fairly simple but catchy melody, but even more for the words. The first line and refrain – “That’s what you get for lovin’ me” – has a certain ironic, teasing bite to it, as does what I think is its most brilliant passage of all: “Now there you go you’re cryin’ again…/But then some day when your poor heart is on the mend/I just might pass this way again.”
The casual way he speakks about re-breaking her heart – what a touch!
It was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on the guitar, and I could even finger-pick it way back when. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that now.
Here’s Lightfoot singing it:
And here’s another great one by him; one of so many more:
I associate him more with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” than with some of his other songs.
I always liked Lightfoot. In my retirement guitar playing the only song of his I do is Sundown. The Edmund Fitzgerald is another one I like.
This was a hit for a couple of others but Gord wrote it and his version is the best.
‘you can’t jump a jet plane like you can a freight train’
‘Early Morning Rain’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B34qwRrkSvQ
Neo:
I always had exactly the opposite take on “That’s what you get for loving me.” I took it as an ironic song in which the singer is telling his love what he is experiencing after the lover walked away, but projecting his feelings to the lover. Maybe too clever by half, but really, what kind of a cad would he have to be to write a song crowing about jilting someone and leaving them in pain? That’s just too harsh for my taste.
There was a fantastic documentary about Gordon Lightfoot made a couple of years back called ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ which featured new interviews with Gord where he was very open about his darkness that fueled a lot of his songs.
Really good stuff for anybody interested.
An appreciation of Gordon from Rick Beato.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iw7Jei8XOo
Why I love this blog.
When I was about 11 or so the cool neighbors moved in. They had a daughter my age so we were instant best friends. Some of the best times were riding in her mom’s Corvette (!) Her mom was young and so she let us control the stereo and was happy to listen to FM radio. Sundown was one of our favorite songs. When I heard of Gordon Lightfoot’s death I had a vivid flashback to riding in the Corvette and singing along with that song. The only time I ever approached being cool.
F:
The type of cad who likes to toy with women – and has a lot of charm – would express the sentiments in that song. Not so unusual a combination.
Another song that has a similar sentiment but isn’t as cruel:
Lyric:
Another song I didn’t realize Gordon wrote for a long time was ‘Ribbon Of Darkness’ which was a big hit for Marty Robbins in 1965.
The Marty Robbins version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXf3xd8zrX8
And the Lightfoot version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6F1JNJL0A
Jim Croce and Gordon Lightfoot had voices I loved to listen to. RIP, Gordon.
Re: “That’s what you get for loving me.”
Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I always heard the song at a meta-level, that the singer knows who he is and doesn’t admire himself for it.
Yes, RIP, Gord. I spent some good times with you.
_____________________
Get out old Dan’s records
Get out old Dan’s records
We will dance the whole night long
It’s fun to play the old time songs
If old Dan could see us now
I know he’d be so proud
Bring out old Dan’s records
Bring out old Dan’s records
–Gordon LIghtfoot, “Old Dan’s Records”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8weeAbz_4Y
Canadian Railroad Trilogy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzo6Otpgj-E
I’ve known this song for a long time, but just now learned that it was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Company for Canada’s Centennial. Lightfoot composed it in three days!
Gord was a very significant songwriter, he had a lot of credibility with his peers. Bob Dylan held him in high regard, as did other great songwriters. Deceptive simplicity that held multiple layers of meaning lyrically as well as chords and musical structure.
The great Tony Rice recorded a couple of albums of Gordon Lightfoot songs and included some in most of his performances. It’s funny, over the last week I had Youtube playing in the background with hours of Tony Rice live performances while I worked on some rather gloomy family business, and paid special attention to Gord’s songs in his set, and now he has joined Tony on the Other Side.
Especially pensive because today I got word of two dear childhood friends who passed all too soon, then I read of Gord’s passing. He’d had the talent to make a fine song about what I’m pondering right now.
Gordon Lightfoot was the only “pop” singer I ever bought a ticket to hear (not “see”,as the common phrasing goes), and that was in Tucson about 40 years ago. I own all of his CDs and admire all of his songs. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is brilliantly conveived and sung, as a memorial to the drowned Great Lake commercial sailors on their remarkable huge ships.
What is it with Canadian singer-songwriters?
Gordon Lightfoot
Leonard Cohen
Joni Mitchell
Neil Young
Robbie Robertson (The Band)
They were all intensely idiosyncratic and intensely professional. They each found their personal creative mission and took it as far as anyone could.
“Second Cup of Coffee” – a favorite of mine in the vein of “That’s What You Get (For Loving Me)” – perhaps from an older (wiser?) perspective
I just got back from grocery shopping. Had to pick up a pack of Great Lakes Edmund Fitz Porter in Gordon’s memory.
If You Could Read My Mind is my favorite.
“Joey, Joey, Joey” was one of the songs my mother sang at the kitchen sink when she was doing the dishes.
The great Art Lund. Former high school math teacher and (reportedly) a very nice guy.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I always heard the song at a meta-level, that the singer knows who he is and doesn’t admire himself for it. — huxley
That was exactly my thought.
‘Cause movin’ is my stock in trade
I’m movin’ on
I won’t think of you when I’m gone
He’s a drifter. Who is he addressing? God, the sky, a confessor, or confidant? He is being honest about who he is. Probably not proud of it, but maybe completely resigned to it. And the cad element, to me, is that he will not be that honest to the women he seduces.
Count me with TommyJay and huxley in their reading of “For Lovin’ Me”. I always saw it that way, too, maybe more so: as a bitter comment on his own jerk-ness.
I remember catching a video with this:
After decades of performing his classic hit “For Lovin’ Me.” Lightfoot said he “lost faith” in it because it’s an “insult to women. I didn’t know what chauvinism was [back then].”
“After singing it for about 23, 24 years on stage, I finally said, ‘I’m not going to sing this anymore’ because of what it says,” he said of the song which has been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan
Now he considers it tactless and unacceptable for his concert set lists. https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/gordon-lightfoot-on-chauvinism-drake-and-why-he-keeps-going-1.4435355
Perhaps he evolved, perhaps he was disingenuous in the interview, perhaps ghosts of the past haunted him. To discount and ban this song seemed rather narrow-minded, to me. Like a fairy tale, it lets the (young) listener know that there are people out there with shallow, callous, false, or evil intent. It is a great song. RIP to another great songwriter. I’m still not believing Burt Bacharach is gone.
“Gord” was a favorite of my younger days (and still is).
Saw him several times at an outdoor concert venue–he always delivered the goods!
Used to hang around the back gate with (I guess) groupies, just hoping to have a word with The Great Man.
My favorite memory is parking three blocks away, and hearing the haunting intro to “Beautiful” wafting on the summer air.
If You Could Read My Mind, Carefree Highway, Sundown, and even The Wreck of the Edmund FItzgerald (for its haunting sound) are great songs. I first heard If You Could Read My Mind back in 1972 when I was completing my first year in college.
I hope nobody thinks this clip from Seinfeld about Edmund Fizgerald/Gordon Lightfoot is disrespectful. “Yes and it was rammed by the Cat Stevens”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOaFHmMYikc
The song itself is remarkably evocative. I have little experience of that area, but you still feel for the men and their families, even now, almost 50y later.
It was an unlikely hit in that era:
????
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/gordon-lightfoots-wreck-of-the-fitzgerald-was-an-unlikely-radio-hit-in-1976/ar-AA1aDFK4
Not one of his more famous songs, but my favorite. ‘Home From the Forest’.
https://youtu.be/mATZznY7H_Q
Probably his best story-song — far better than the more popular Edmund Fitzgerald — is the Ballad of Yarmouth Castle, which came before Edmund and is based on a much larger tragedy in which 90 people died and, as Lightfoot’s lyrics accurately reflect, the ship’s captain fled in a life boat while leaving many people and crew in the burning ship to die. The incident was a catalyst for new maritime safety laws. The audience reaction at the end of the song affirms the power of this moving performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0EX3Xkmvw
1974. Sundown was Gord’s only #1 single – and played over & over on the radio, as I commuted about 25 minutes for my last year of High School, before going to USNA, Annapolis.
It was pretty good, but overplayed. I liked both “If you could read my mind”, and “The Wreck of E.F.” better.
So many of his songs sound so similar in pacing and his vocal range.
At Stanford and working after, I liked KFJC radio, with funny public service “announcements”/ ads.
Like: Get this 365 album set where Gordon Lightfoot sings every song ever written. Like Happy Birthday … snip
and Auld Lang Syne … snip
and Rock Around The Clock … snip
—
with the snips being a Gordon sounding person singing a few words of the song.
(Maybe you had to be there?)
It was really funny at the time, and I smile still.
RIP Gordon Lightfoot.
Well I have to accept with all that evidence that I have been misreading the meaning of That’s What You Get for Loving Me. That makes him a terrible cad, I guess. But such nice music! Ah well. . .