And the show is 100% Lightfoot. “There is no opening act – we come right out there and start with the good stuff! Some of my songs are shortened as I can lose a verse or two here and there. You can’t do it on songs where the entire message is contained in the lyric. You can’t shorten The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald or Sundown or If You Could Read My Mind, but if I shorten some of them, we get to do everything that we want to do.”
On the other hand, For Lovin’ Me has been shortened completely. “I don’t do that one anymore. I sang it for 25 years and it was a very chauvinistic song and I never wrote another one like it. It is a tough and brutal song.”
Will there be some surprises? “We have some stuff that we have found, plums from the old catalogue that are surprisingly effective.”
A mainstay of Gordon Lightfoot’s recordings had been his lead guitarist Terry Clements but Terry died in 2011 at the age of 63. “Both Terry and I knew that he wasn’t going to last. He was one of my best friends and his story is very sad. He was married a couple of times and nothing worked out and he was such a nice guy. I brought him up from California when he was very young, and he might have done better had he stayed. He was working for Johnny Tillotson and he was getting involved with Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, and other people who were calling him for sessions. He was a great musician but he got so ill that he couldn’t play anymore.”
What was his finest contribution? “Well, first and foremost it would be The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald. He came up with his part along with the steel player, Pee Wee Charles, and I couldn’t have wished for anything better. It was written as a folk song for an album and the fact that it became a popular song surprised me.”
Will there be a new album? “I have tunes on the back burner of course, everybody does, but I also have a very extensive family and the responsibility is even, fifty-fifty, between showbiz and family. The twain shall not meet. (Laughs) I love doing the shows so much that the shows win out over a new album. I have always written material to support my shows. I always think, ‘Are they going to like this one when I do it?’ I remember the first time I did Canadian Railroad Trilogy at a university show. They loved it and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve got something here.’”