[Rhodes22-list] Hey Slim! Music History

[Slim]

Thanks, Brad.  Being up here in the Great Lakes region, I get a fair number
of requests for Edmund Fitz. Not so much the others.  It's not a song I'd
pull out at 11:00 on a Sat night, but maybe late on a lazy Wed.

But speaking of Paul Butterfield, I was just in The Lake of the Ozarks where
I was hired by their entertainment director, Donny Larson.  Donny played in
the Butterfield band when they played at Woodstock.  I don't think I've ever
met anyone who even attended Woodstock, let alone played there!  He met all
those players including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, et. al.  He also opened
for the Beatles at Candlestick park and met those four guys!

He toured with Elvin Bishop for 20 years and wrote the song "Fooled Around
and Fell In Love" for Bishop.  He also wrote the song "Peaceful Easy Feelin"
for the Eagles, and here's my favorite--he wrote the song "If I Had a Boat"
for Lyle Lovett. He shopped it first to Jimmy Buffett, whom he also tour
with for 5 years but Buffett turned it down but then later recorded it.

Donny still does gigs too and invited us up to sit in with him.  A truly fun
person to meet and hang with and I admit to being a little star-struck.  He
even took us out for a boat ride.

Slim

On 5/8/07 7:09 AM, "Brad Haslett" <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:

> Slim, a little musical performer history for you this morning.  I'd tell you
> the source but I'd have to kill you (that copyright thing).  Brad
> 
> -----------------------
> 
> In the last week and a half, John Corcoran, an otherwise completely
> normal-seeming middle-aged guy turned up at nine out of 10 Gordon Lightfoot
> concerts. The owner of an oil and gas business in Traverse City, Mich., Mr.
> Corcoran, 52, beamed as the Toronto troubadour performed classic fare like
> "Beautiful," "Rainy Day People," "Carefree Highway" and his signature "If
> You Could Read My Mind" in Torrington, Conn.; Easton, Harrisburg, Glenside
> and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; Sparta and Red Bank, N.J; Peekskill, N.Y., and here
> in a sold-out gig at the 1,495-seat Town Hall.
> 
> Mr. Corcoran's wife, Peggy, is tolerant. ("She knows Gordon is 68, and he's
> not going to be touring much longer. So she says, 'It's not heroin, booze or
> another woman.'")
> 
> His three children are bemused, his friends derisive. "I get unrelenting
> [abuse] from them. They call me a 'Lighthead,'" confided Mr. Corcoran, who
> as an 18-year-old became acquainted with the baritone voice and sugared folk
> melodies of Mr. Lightfoot and has seen him in concert some 300 times.
> "I'm a little nuts. I'm a lot nuts," he amended as he stood outside Town
> Hall in a fever of anticipation. "All I know is that in the midst of the
> madness of this world it's my therapy. The music touches my heartstrings."
> 
> The gray-mustachioed object of Mr. Corcoran's curious devotion is reed-thin
> with a singing voice to match, the result perhaps of a near fatal abdominal
> aneurysm in 2002. "It took two years to recover and for a while it was touch
> and go," said Mr. Lightfoot, a few hours before the Town Hall performance.
> "Then for a year I wondered if I'd be able to sing because everything was
> thoroughly messed up. But I have a pretty strong constitution and everything
> is all right now."
> 
> Mr. Lightfoot has reached a point in his career where, like it or not, he's
> frequently dealt with in numerical terms: the five Grammy nominations, the
> nearly two dozen albums that went gold, platinum or double platinum in
> Canada and the U.S., the 10 million-plus albums sold, the 17 Juno awards
> (the Canadian version of the Grammys), including seven for best folksinger,
> five for best male singer and two for composer of the year.
> 
> Despite those impressive stats, copping to a deep fondness for Mr. Lightfoot
> has never been the best way to establish one's hipster bona fides. Indeed,
> one embarrassed ticket holder standing outside Town Hall refused to give his
> name and expressed concern that he'd already divulged too much by
> identifying himself as a 43-year-old lawyer from Long Island. "People don't
> look at a Gordon Lightfoot fan as being cool and manly," he said puffing a
> compensatory Marlboro.
> 
> Cool or not so, he and hundreds of others were in their seats waiting
> eagerly for the first strum of Mr. Lightfoot's acoustic guitar precisely as
> audiences have been doing for some 40 years. It was a sentimental journey of
> sorts for the singer-songwriter. He was the opening act here -- his first
> concert hall engagement -- for Paul Butterfield and his band in the late
> '60s.
> Mr. Lightfoot and his band have "always been a presence," he said. "We've
> always toured and worked. We've just kept on, and it's come up to this point
> in time that I'm quite surprised I'm still around. We're not setting the
> world on fire on the music charts, but we've got a desire and passion."
> 
> Mr. Lightfoot is savoring the freedom of a man who has nothing left to prove
> -- and no recording obligations to fulfill. "I signed with Warner Bros.
> twice and I probably could have signed again, but I really wanted that
> pressure to be off of me at this point.
> 
> "I was under contract for 33 years, and when you're like that you're always
> under the gun to produce. You tend to ignore certain things and to become
> isolated, and you don't spend enough time thinking about other things like
> the business end and the family and even the live performances. Now I can
> concentrate on my shows, which is great because that's what I like best
> anyway."
> 
> What the fans like best during those shows is the old stuff -- tunes like
> "Sundown," "Rainy Day People" and "If You Could Read My Mind" -- that made
> Mr. Lightfoot rich, famous, a plot point on episodes of "3rd Rock From the
> Sun" and "Seinfeld," and the focus of a 2003 tribute album by artists like
> the Cowboy Junkies and Maria Muldaur. "I know what I really love and I know
> what they love. I wind up settling on material that bears repetition. I can
> always pull the emotions out. That's not a problem. I believe in the songs."
> 
> The younger of two children, Mr. Lightfoot grew up in Orillia, Ontario,
> where, as a boy soprano he worked the wedding circuit ("O, Promise Me" and
> "The Lord's Prayer" were specialties), performed in a church choir, a
> barbershop quartet and a dance band. "My parents were very supportive," he
> recalled. "My mother talked to me about Bing Crosby. She told me one day,
> very casually, 'Bing makes a living as a singer.' I was 8 years old and a
> little light went on in my head."
> 
> After a few semesters at music school in Los Angeles, Mr. Lightfoot came
> back to Canada where he played the guitar and sang in coffee houses and
> plugged away at his own compositions. "That's what I tell young performers
> who come to me asking for advice: write a bag of songs . . . because that's
> what you have to do. You don't just grab it right off the bat like that,"
> said Mr. Lightfoot. His own particular bag of songs attracted the interest
> of Peter, Paul and Mary, who made a hit out of "For Lovin' Me." "That song
> was written early on in my first marriage. It was troubled right off," Mr.
> Lightfoot said. Anne Murray, Judy Collins, Richie Havens and Mr. Lightfoot's
> idol Bob Dylan also did well with his material, success the songwriter would
> share when he began recording his own tunes.
> 
> Along the way, there was a fair amount of triumph ("The Wreck of the Edmund
> Fitzgerald," Mr. Lightfoot's sonorous account of the 1975 disaster on Lake
> Superior, "Sundown" and "If You Could Read My Mind" had pleasant stays at
> the top of the charts), a fair amount of drinking (though Mr. Lightfoot says
> he's been sober since the early '80s) and a fair amount of attitude. "I
> might have been difficult...during the '70s when we were flying a little bit
> higher in the pecking order," Mr. Lightfoot conceded. "But I never trashed
> any hotel rooms or set any fires or anything like *that*."
> 
> There was also a fair amount of messing around. Mr. Lightfoot, who's been
> married twice -- he's separated from wife number two -- has six children by
> four women. "I've always had women interested in me," he conceded. "I'd be
> honored if they were interested now, but I can't go for it because I don't
> want to change my estate. People who read The Wall Street Journal will know
> exactly what I'm talking about."
> 
> And he certainly doesn't want to change his schedule -- there are 60
> concerts on this year's itinerary. "I'm coasting into my end game," said Mr.
> Lightfoot. "But I'll do it as long as audiences come. I'm sure I'll be able
> to tell when it's time to stop. It'll probably be when I'm lying on the
> floor."
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