Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from My Heart Radio. We're nearing the end of
Speaker 1: our summer Staff Picks series. Over the last few weeks,
Speaker 1: you've heard from the staff as they showcase their favorite
Speaker 1: episodes from our archives. Now it's time to hear mine.
Speaker 1: I wanted to share with you an episode from one
Speaker 1: of the kindest people I've met in the making of
Speaker 1: this podcast, musician Gordon Lightfoot. My conversation with the Canadian
Speaker 1: singer songwriter of the nineteen seventies hits If You Could
Speaker 1: Read My Mind, Beautiful Sundown, and The Wreck of the
Speaker 1: Edmund Fitzgerald covers his beginnings in the industry, what changed
Speaker 1: in importance to him over time, and his battle with
Speaker 1: some serious health issues. Here's my two thousand sixteen conversation
Speaker 1: with Gordon Lightfoot. At times, I just don't know how
Speaker 1: you could feel anything but beautiful. Over the course of
Speaker 1: a career that has lasted more than fifty years, Canadian
Speaker 1: singer songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has achieved a global stardom and
Speaker 1: exceptional influence. Bob Dylan's a fan. About Lightfoot's songs, Dylan said,
Speaker 1: I can't think of any I don't like. These songs,
Speaker 1: which include Beautiful, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, If
Speaker 1: You Could Read My Mind, and many others, have been
Speaker 1: treasured by generations of popular musicians and listeners around the world.
Speaker 1: Many people know about the folk music revival that brought
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan to New York in the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: but north of the border there was an equivalent explosion
Speaker 1: of talent at that time, and Lightfoot, who got his
Speaker 1: start singing in boys choirs, found himself heading to Canada's
Speaker 1: cultural capital to try his luck. Beautiful Well, I was
Speaker 1: down in the in Toronto here looking for work, and
Speaker 1: I got a job as a coral performer and in
Speaker 1: a television series that was on every week. And at
Speaker 1: the same time I branched out and began working in
Speaker 1: the folk uh oriented places, because the the folk revival
Speaker 1: had occurred around about nineteen sixty and I would have
Speaker 1: been maybe twenty twenty years old there about one and
Speaker 1: uh so I'd be working on the TV show in
Speaker 1: the daytime and going and working at the coffee houses
Speaker 1: at night. You know, you had a period we wrote
Speaker 1: jingles for commercials. Correct I tried, they locked me in
Speaker 1: a room. One time, a manager in a place on
Speaker 1: Madison Avenue just left me there all afternoon. That go well,
Speaker 1: I wrote the commercial, but they didn't like it. They
Speaker 1: didn't play your version of the commercial. But you didn't,
Speaker 1: didn't You weren't in New York for a long time? Correct? Well,
Speaker 1: I would go back and forth in New York all
Speaker 1: the time. My management company was in New York. I
Speaker 1: was one of the fortunate ones who was able to
Speaker 1: acquire a management situation south of the border, so to speak,
Speaker 1: down in the States, and that was in New York,
Speaker 1: and it was a great manager. He recognized my songwriting
Speaker 1: ability immediately, and uh, I got a couple of tunes
Speaker 1: recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary and one of them
Speaker 1: went up to number five on the Which on Board
Speaker 1: chart for for loving me. That's what you get full
Speaker 1: loving me, that's what you get everything as you see,
Speaker 1: that's well you get me. And so I was introduced
Speaker 1: to the industry in the States really as a songwriter
Speaker 1: before they even knew that I sang, you know it was.
Speaker 1: It sort of happened on its own. Do you think
Speaker 1: it would have been Do you think you would have
Speaker 1: been happy to just stay in that place and just
Speaker 1: produce records and write music and was performing the goal
Speaker 1: all along? Did you want were you aching to do that? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to even as a child, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't mind singing in my grandmother's house and the Sunday
Speaker 1: get together, you know that they would single me out
Speaker 1: and I would solo. I enjoyed the feel of the
Speaker 1: communication that I and I can feel it then, and uh,
Speaker 1: that's what I feel now. I feel I feel a
Speaker 1: communication when I haven't wonder if a band and we
Speaker 1: have a great repertoire and we we just lay the
Speaker 1: stuff right out there for them, just pure joy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: joy doing that. But when when you were take care
Speaker 1: of if it pays the bills, that's a that's a
Speaker 1: desirable silver lining there benefit. Yeah, all that hard work, well,
Speaker 1: but when you were writing, when you turn that corner
Speaker 1: and singing takes over. You know, I was doing that
Speaker 1: like like small time stuff, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: I was asked to come to New York and open
Speaker 1: for Paul Butterfield concert sixty six thereabouts. I suppose you
Speaker 1: won the radio then recording. No, we didn't actually get
Speaker 1: on the radio until about seventy one and what was
Speaker 1: the first song that? I mean, I have a list here,
Speaker 1: but what was it? If you could read my mind?
Speaker 1: If you could read my mind, you know that Google
Speaker 1: was just beating I be as long as you can't see.
Speaker 1: The record was out. It was my first album on
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers. And uh it was out for eight months
Speaker 1: and there was no single, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: rather promotion, guys said to his girlfriend, we listen to
Speaker 1: this and come back and give me an opinion. On
Speaker 1: Monday morning, his girlfriend she likes, if you could read
Speaker 1: my mind, where are the heart? He's gone? The hero
Speaker 1: would be baby hero. Often you won't read that book
Speaker 1: because the just if you could read my mind hits
Speaker 1: the charts, so to speak, It becomes a big hit
Speaker 1: for you. What changes for you? Like did you just
Speaker 1: have to sit there and say, oh, I people are
Speaker 1: telling you to do things differently and now you're gonna
Speaker 1: be a success and they want you to we get
Speaker 1: so basically we got to hire an aircraft. Literally, that's
Speaker 1: what happened. We had to hire an aircraft. Everyone wants
Speaker 1: to book the same give in the same place, two
Speaker 1: different places in one day. So and when you reached
Speaker 1: that point of the and then that turning point is
Speaker 1: the is the next imperative. You've gotta start coming up
Speaker 1: with more songs and writing more songs. Oh yeah, record, Yeah.
Speaker 1: We made three more albums and nothing happened, but we
Speaker 1: but I kept doing one a year and and something
Speaker 1: had to give eventually, and then, Uh, one summer I
Speaker 1: wrote that song Sundown. I knew that it was it
Speaker 1: was going to happen, that it was, it was the
Speaker 1: right thing, and it did. When we're up to number one.
Speaker 1: That was our second one. Then it was almost seven
Speaker 1: two albums later that we had the wreck of the
Speaker 1: Evan and Fitzgerald. And that happened all by itself too
Speaker 1: that that became a responsibility. It did very large responsibility.
Speaker 1: The song became a responsible Fitzgerald. But but tell me
Speaker 1: in your own words. Many bowl go on about that,
Speaker 1: about the tragedy and the history, and it's a very
Speaker 1: important song to people, you know, Canadian history. People talk
Speaker 1: about it very reverentially. Why was it important to you?
Speaker 1: Because it was only one verse, uh, contained any conjecture
Speaker 1: of any kind, and the rest of it was taken
Speaker 1: from directly from newspaper articles and the aftermath, which only
Speaker 1: lasted for about three days. If I had not wrote
Speaker 1: that song, everybody would have forgotten about it a week
Speaker 1: after it happened. Uh, I said, people are all around
Speaker 1: the Great Lakes area are going to wonder if this
Speaker 1: song is appropriate. And some did wonder about it, whether
Speaker 1: it was appropriate for me to have written a song
Speaker 1: that kind. But I had gone, uh, pretty much with
Speaker 1: the newspaper articles that I scraped up. We had no
Speaker 1: CPS in those days, and you went back that, you
Speaker 1: went to the publisher and got the back copies of
Speaker 1: the newspapers. And uh, so it's it's accurate. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's accurate in the way the story unfolds. I remember
Speaker 1: the night I wrote it. I was working in a
Speaker 1: deserted house and there was there was a heck of
Speaker 1: a windstorm going on right in Toronto that night, and
Speaker 1: I remember myself wondering, G, I wonder what it's like
Speaker 1: up on the on the Great Lakes right now, because
Speaker 1: I sailed up there myself. I had a couple of
Speaker 1: two different sailboats up there, and wondered always, I wonder
Speaker 1: what the Great Lakes are like tonight? Because you're always
Speaker 1: hearing but what things happening up in the Great Lakes,
Speaker 1: And eleven o'clock in the evening, there was a report
Speaker 1: of a ship sinking three hours earlier in Lake Superior.
Speaker 1: And they're out looking for the people and they never
Speaker 1: found any of them, and uh, twenty nine people gone.
Speaker 1: And I had a melody and I had some cords
Speaker 1: that I was knocking around in this deserted house with
Speaker 1: the wind howling outside my Really, it was kind of
Speaker 1: kind of a classic sitting to to write a song
Speaker 1: like that. So I began writing the song and finished
Speaker 1: writing like two or three weeks later. We were right
Speaker 1: in the middle of a recording, a series of recording
Speaker 1: sessions at the times that we put it in and
Speaker 1: didn't work the first day, we put it in the
Speaker 1: second day, and uh, did you ever stomp? And Tom Connors? No,
Speaker 1: I will. Now I'm gonna run down and get all
Speaker 1: of stomping Tom Connor he was recording. He was one
Speaker 1: of very, very famous Canadian folk artists. Stomping Tom Connor's
Speaker 1: Poaches hit and so that sounds like a hit. He
Speaker 1: just heard the the melody going like, he didn't heard
Speaker 1: the lyrics or anything. So that the appeal of the
Speaker 1: song is definitely in the melody and the chord changes,
Speaker 1: and then the story of the actually vent itself. I
Speaker 1: got as accurately as I could by pursuing old news articles.
Speaker 1: The wind and the wires made the tattle tale sound,
Speaker 1: and the wave rope over the really and every man you,
Speaker 1: as the captain did to was the witch should love
Speaker 1: and stealing the don came late in the breakfast, had
Speaker 1: the week when the girls in November, came slashing in afternoon,
Speaker 1: came at the squeezing rain in the face of a
Speaker 1: hurricane west wind. We'll have more with Gordon Lightfoot after
Speaker 1: the break I'm a mic Baldwin and this is here's
Speaker 1: the thing. I spoke with musician Gordon Lightfoot in two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen. I was curious how his musicianship had changed
Speaker 1: over time and what it was like for him recording
Speaker 1: and performing in the early days. The first time I
Speaker 1: started doing it, I felt and like, not confident in
Speaker 1: what I was doing. What I was hearing, I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't like what I was hearing of your own stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like the sound of the sound of my voice
Speaker 1: bothered me. And and you know I I started working
Speaker 1: on that stuff and I and I've been working on
Speaker 1: it ever since on my vocal and I have worked
Speaker 1: on my my antonation on my instruments. Someone told me
Speaker 1: that that when you land, because you perform in so
Speaker 1: many different areas, you really dwell on tuning your instruments
Speaker 1: a lot. Correct. Yeah, sometimes I changed it around too,
Speaker 1: but but but I've learned through the years that there
Speaker 1: is a method that you can get me into into
Speaker 1: Scarborough fair Country, you know, like the like the sound
Speaker 1: that Simon and Garfunkel used to get on there acoustic
Speaker 1: orchestral ranges that they put together for their songs, and
Speaker 1: actually only came it came real for me maybe six
Speaker 1: or seven years ago after I was recovering from a
Speaker 1: mini stroke that I had and I had to practice
Speaker 1: a lot more all of a sudden. So it really
Speaker 1: got me zero in on it. And it it all
Speaker 1: comes down to the fifth and the octaves. You know,
Speaker 1: just leave it at that. I'm just a handmaid in
Speaker 1: here for all you guitar people out there. That's Gordon
Speaker 1: Lightfoot's gift to you and his present to you. That's
Speaker 1: the fifth and the octaves. And I don't have one, damn.
Speaker 1: The fifth and the I don't know what the hell
Speaker 1: he's talking about, but there it is. There's his message
Speaker 1: to you today. Open McCartney told me when I spoke
Speaker 1: to him once. Paul told me that he said, in
Speaker 1: the beginning they would go into a recording studio of
Speaker 1: the Beatles, and he said, you know, it was really
Speaker 1: these weren't his words, but the message was kind of
Speaker 1: like time is money. He said, these guys were luck.
Speaker 1: You know, we want two songs in the morning, and
Speaker 1: then you go have a lunch break and get down
Speaker 1: to the pub and you have a cigarette, you have
Speaker 1: a pufficient chips or wherever you come back. They want
Speaker 1: two songs. And later they really moved along at a
Speaker 1: clip when they were doing the first albums for Parlophone
Speaker 1: or whoever it was, or E. M. I. And then
Speaker 1: when they became, you know, the success they obviously became,
Speaker 1: then they would take a year, you know, all musicians,
Speaker 1: and then they would take a year to do their
Speaker 1: next album. You know, they would do Sergeant Pepper's or whatever.
Speaker 1: One really really luxuriate and getting every time. They gave
Speaker 1: them more time because it was worth it was worth
Speaker 1: that investment for them. Was the same true with you
Speaker 1: do you find that the more successful you became, the
Speaker 1: more time you wanted to make music. Perhaps later on,
Speaker 1: but I I pretty much stuck to the to the
Speaker 1: schedule as much as I could. We made like eight
Speaker 1: or nine albums and ten years there, so you didn't
Speaker 1: feel rushed by them. No, we were getting more time.
Speaker 1: But but I was also also improving because what I
Speaker 1: didn't like hearing I was I was changing all the time,
Speaker 1: and it was always an improvement venture. Like a guy
Speaker 1: building himself up and for play on an important sports team,
Speaker 1: you know they got it. This just not just the game,
Speaker 1: it's the preparation. Say you haven't played for for a
Speaker 1: month and all of a sudden you've got to get
Speaker 1: back up on stage. You should be able to crank
Speaker 1: it or just like it was just you did a
Speaker 1: show last night. But you liked rehearsing. Yeah, well you
Speaker 1: believe in rehearsing. Are you're learning new material or you're
Speaker 1: going back into the the old catalog, which we do
Speaker 1: because I have a rotational situation going on, the biggest
Speaker 1: problem my whole life been too many tunes, too many
Speaker 1: women for my listeners. Right now, Gordon Lightfoot is turning
Speaker 1: sheepishly towards his wife with a sheepish quin on his face,
Speaker 1: and she just patted his shoulder to say, it's okay, Gordon, Well,
Speaker 1: I can't step under your toes. Yeah, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: But but I remember reading I remember listening to an article.
Speaker 1: I remember reading an article that the Rolling Stones did
Speaker 1: years ago, and I was taken by how, you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of musicianship, Jagger and Keith, for two, were very,
Speaker 1: very married to rehearsal. And for you to say that
Speaker 1: as a great meaning to me. For you, someone who
Speaker 1: as great an artist as you are, that the preparation
Speaker 1: and the preparation beforehand so that when you when the
Speaker 1: audience is there, bloom, you strum that guitar and you're
Speaker 1: you're ready. You're ready. Yeah. And we we have the
Speaker 1: the orchestra itself. I have four really challenged guys and
Speaker 1: very loyal people. I read about that your band is
Speaker 1: very loyal to you. Well, I mean it's there's no
Speaker 1: reason why they should be. You know, we're all we're
Speaker 1: all the same path. I mean, we we just want
Speaker 1: to do a great job and you gotta like make
Speaker 1: almost make a science out of it. I don't know
Speaker 1: my guys are all professionals. I mean they're they're serious musicians.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and they do other things. I just got
Speaker 1: to let them know what's coming up. You know, what
Speaker 1: were you listening to back then in the sixties when
Speaker 1: you were coming up, Who did you listen to? Well,
Speaker 1: I was sing country music, you know, hack snow and
Speaker 1: then folks. It was Pete Seeger and it was Bob Gibson.
Speaker 1: It was Bob Dylan and and Simon and Garfuncle and
Speaker 1: you know, Peter Paula Mary and and Ian and Sylvia.
Speaker 1: They were a duet and they were it was a
Speaker 1: beautiful act that they had. Eventually met these people, well
Speaker 1: I met, but you became one of them my management
Speaker 1: company because they were the first ever to do one
Speaker 1: do any of my songs. It was Ian and Sylphia,
Speaker 1: which one for Loving Me and Early Morning Rain. I
Speaker 1: found an opening with the Folk Revival, you know, so
Speaker 1: I was lucky to be a part of that, to
Speaker 1: ride that one through and survive. Uh, there's there's nothing
Speaker 1: much out there these days, you know, they're they're they're busking.
Speaker 1: We We've got a whole bunch of people here in
Speaker 1: Toronto who are harvering around all the time that the
Speaker 1: folk oriented artists who are songwriters and you know, trying
Speaker 1: to get somewhere, and some of some of them are
Speaker 1: succeeding in summer or not. I get to hear a
Speaker 1: lot of this stuff because it comes across my desk
Speaker 1: and I get to hear it, and you wish, you
Speaker 1: know that something grand could happen for these people, but
Speaker 1: you don't know what to do. All you're gonna do
Speaker 1: is respond encourage. Yeah, where do you think people learn
Speaker 1: to hone their craft as a musician in in in
Speaker 1: clubs and performing live? Well, I was as well as
Speaker 1: I was working in bars to you know, like bars
Speaker 1: and lounges as well as the coffeehouses, and so I
Speaker 1: had a the kind of a repertoire that was acceptable
Speaker 1: to play bars. So I got him following in a
Speaker 1: couple of these bars. Then then I've sort of moved
Speaker 1: uptown into the the village area Yorkville which was just
Speaker 1: coming into bloom here in town, and get into places
Speaker 1: like like the Purple Onion and then the Riverboat, which
Speaker 1: was really the plumb of the whole lot was the
Speaker 1: Riverboat because Bernie Feeder brought every person into that place
Speaker 1: you could fastly imagine played there from James Taylor to
Speaker 1: Joni Mitchell to to Neil Young right on down the line.
Speaker 1: Is he is he a friend of yours? Yes? He is? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Your songs and you're singing of your song, you're performing
Speaker 1: of your songs is so vulnerable and so emotional. What
Speaker 1: was the most difficult song for you to write or
Speaker 1: among the most difficult songs for you to write? I'll
Speaker 1: tell you that a lot of times you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're doing it. If you you you're drawing the
Speaker 1: material from your subconscious you don't you don't actually know
Speaker 1: what you're doing. You're you know, you're drawing it from somewhere,
Speaker 1: and then later down the line, three or four weeks later,
Speaker 1: you're gonna sign it back to uh, the actual event
Speaker 1: that product on. I mean, that's like if you could
Speaker 1: read my mind. Just it's about actually that the crumbling
Speaker 1: of a relation was that painful for you to write. No,
Speaker 1: because I didn't know what I was doing when I
Speaker 1: wrote it. It just I didn't tell me that all
Speaker 1: these beautiful folks songs that people weep when they listen to,
Speaker 1: you're just like tossing it off, like I don't really
Speaker 1: know what this is. Let's take a song for example.
Speaker 1: Let me let me pick one song and one of
Speaker 1: my favorite songs of yours. I mean a song that
Speaker 1: I just kills me. It is beautiful. Describe to me
Speaker 1: recording the song beautiful? I mean, do you go out
Speaker 1: with your friends and you get ship faced drunk and
Speaker 1: you come in with a hangover and just lay this
Speaker 1: thing down and you play poke ro all night? Or
Speaker 1: do you enter a state? First? I get a card progression,
Speaker 1: then I get a melody. It's fifth syn octaves. People,
Speaker 1: it's fifth syn octaves that I get the lyric, You
Speaker 1: got the melody, You got the cards, but you don't know.
Speaker 1: So you you draw. You find an idea that that
Speaker 1: that fits the fits the melody. That's Gordon Lightfoot, this songwriter,
Speaker 1: Gordon Lightfoot, the singer, the performer. Do you enter a state?
Speaker 1: Do you take yourself to a place when you perform
Speaker 1: your recorded music? Or you don't? Well, I can, I
Speaker 1: can use my imagination. I actually saw it as as
Speaker 1: a seer love turned to a guy for his wife
Speaker 1: or his his girlfriend. It reminds me when when I
Speaker 1: was I learned how to sing with the emotion when
Speaker 1: I was about twelve, when I was doing handling material
Speaker 1: from Handles Messiah over the voice of Him who Criss
Speaker 1: and the wilderness and all that sort of thing. And
Speaker 1: I learned what emotion meant when when I were saying
Speaker 1: handle Handles Messiah at age twelve, I sent in a competition,
Speaker 1: uh so so I could apply. It was easier for
Speaker 1: me to apply to summon up that emotional uh something
Speaker 1: or whatever it is when it came time to put
Speaker 1: that song down. But I didn't have to the point
Speaker 1: at the beginning that I wanted to have it. And
Speaker 1: that's how I've been working on all my life is
Speaker 1: getting controlling that Inhal approached her man, make any it
Speaker 1: work for me. You don't want to overdo it, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't. You know that's what's beautiful about your music
Speaker 1: as you go right up to a point. But you
Speaker 1: don't do a lot of handholding. You let the audience
Speaker 1: do the crying for you. You know what I mean,
Speaker 1: you're your We we balance it off with a lot
Speaker 1: of toech happers got lots of For a prime example
Speaker 1: of the delivery, Gordon Lightfoot does so well. You don't
Speaker 1: have to look beyond this song sundown, I can see
Speaker 1: you learned back seven Christ where you do what you
Speaker 1: don't confess your better ticket coming up. Lightfoot talks about
Speaker 1: some of his musical inspirations that explains why he and
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan can't get along right away. Explore the Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing Archives. I talked with a very different kind
Speaker 1: of songwriter, Tom York from the British rock band Radiohead.
Speaker 1: He tells me how his producer gave him the confidence
Speaker 1: to explore wild new electronics sounds. I mean I was like, um,
Speaker 1: a kid being given a hammer. I was just hamming
Speaker 1: rely on stuff. I didn't really know what I was doing,
Speaker 1: but he was kind of fascinated about that, you know,
Speaker 1: and he'd come and literally tidy up the mess on
Speaker 1: the computer. Take a listen at Here's the Thing, dot Org.
Speaker 1: I you that you beautiful. This is Alec Baldwin and
Speaker 1: you were listening to Here's the Thing. Gordon Lightfoot has
Speaker 1: straddled the worlds of pop and folk music for decades,
Speaker 1: but his confessional songwriting appealed to country music performers like
Speaker 1: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr. And Glen Campbell as well.
Speaker 1: They all covered his songs, and there's a good reason.
Speaker 1: That's what Lightfoot was listening to when he started thinking
Speaker 1: about what kind of musician he wanted to be. It
Speaker 1: was probably a country music I made the crossover in
Speaker 1: adult contemporary music, you know, uh, fairly soon. And and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of good writing going on in
Speaker 1: the folk revival too, and I got I was influenced
Speaker 1: by that. So you didn't come into the music business
Speaker 1: and say I want to be Sinatra, I want to
Speaker 1: be Elvis, I want to be Dylan. I think you
Speaker 1: want to find your own voice. Yeah, I didn't. I
Speaker 1: certainly did not take ide of the fact that I
Speaker 1: was really influenced by Bob Dylan because of the not
Speaker 1: only the quality of the work, but the the output
Speaker 1: that they achieved. He was prolific. Yeah, that was the
Speaker 1: amazing part. But it said, well it can be that
Speaker 1: easy for him, I must surely be be easier for me.
Speaker 1: I mean, if he can do this much work, surely
Speaker 1: I can can do this much work. While appreciating the
Speaker 1: music that he was producing at the time. When did
Speaker 1: you first meet him, uh, nineteen in Woodstock, Well, it
Speaker 1: was a it was an interesting time. I we actually
Speaker 1: didn't didn't get along when we when we first now
Speaker 1: he criticized my my my rules at playing Manhattan on
Speaker 1: his pool table in Woodstock, and I got a little
Speaker 1: got a little sarcastic about it, and we were all
Speaker 1: he was very sarcastic, and I started seeing this coming
Speaker 1: on to me and I left. I left their their house,
Speaker 1: I went back down the hill to Albert's house. Albert's
Speaker 1: Albert Grossman, who he was the manager. I had sure
Speaker 1: part of that stable, that stable, yea. So it was
Speaker 1: to say, since I knew him for so many years
Speaker 1: after that, because we're all working in the same place,
Speaker 1: I became sort of party party central for them when
Speaker 1: they when they came to Toronto, which was often, and
Speaker 1: with the band and everybody, and we had a great time,
Speaker 1: and I, you know, it was good to have known
Speaker 1: have known Bob. Um. Is it safe to say, because
Speaker 1: I've read this in different articles and so forth, when
Speaker 1: I was reading up about you. Um, then when you
Speaker 1: say you got together and had a good time, was
Speaker 1: there a period of your life where you had too
Speaker 1: much of a good time? Well, I mean there was
Speaker 1: lots of drinking went on, you know, there was a
Speaker 1: little bit of everything. It just depended upon how severely
Speaker 1: were affected by it and what kind of a constitution
Speaker 1: that you possessed I did. I drank heavily right up
Speaker 1: until and then all of a sudden I stopped. And
Speaker 1: I asked how I stopped for twenty three years because
Speaker 1: it was gonna was gonna ruin my career, and I
Speaker 1: was making rrational, irrational decisions. And one night I tried
Speaker 1: to climb from from one balcony to the next in
Speaker 1: an apartment building on the tenth floor. Ye, sure, as
Speaker 1: a party going on? What you want from I love that?
Speaker 1: What was a better party in that other wing over there?
Speaker 1: Saying there was two folks, there was room for me
Speaker 1: to jump from the one balcony to the next. Did
Speaker 1: you make it? Yes? Well I've said it. I've just
Speaker 1: here talking. Do you want the phone and broken new
Speaker 1: leg or something? Who I was on the tenth floor,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here. Things like that,
Speaker 1: you know. The other things that I did, they were
Speaker 1: bad judgments, you know, and you know, with people, and
Speaker 1: I felt that I was offending people sometimes, and I
Speaker 1: did the last thing I wanted to offend anyone, you know,
Speaker 1: And uh, That's what I felt. When I wrote to Fitzgerald,
Speaker 1: I said, I hope I'm not going to offend any
Speaker 1: of the relatives of these men. You know, was it
Speaker 1: never communicated to you that you had Did anybody suggest that? No? No,
Speaker 1: it never appreciated what you did, honored we We just
Speaker 1: went to the fortieth anniversary ourselves, just this last novembery week.
Speaker 1: Where was it? Health Lake Superior. I've been fifteen miles
Speaker 1: thirty miles northwest of sou Sain Marie at the white
Speaker 1: Fish Point. Wow. Um, you know you have had some
Speaker 1: very impactful health issues. You had a stroke and then
Speaker 1: you had Bell's palsy and you couldn't have What's it
Speaker 1: like to lose feeling in your fingers and you were
Speaker 1: a guitar player? Well asked me what it was like
Speaker 1: when I had the ortal aneurysm okay, what was it
Speaker 1: like when you had the a ortal any ofism? Well,
Speaker 1: putting me out out of business for two years didn't really?
Speaker 1: Ye put me out of business for two What do
Speaker 1: you was that two thousand and two? What were the
Speaker 1: symptoms of that? You pass out and you don't wake up.
Speaker 1: The annuals and burst for six weeks. Yeah, what were
Speaker 1: you feeling in the weeks prior? I would have bouts
Speaker 1: of stomach ache and I'd have to lay out of
Speaker 1: my belly on the bed for a while. Yeah, then
Speaker 1: I would subside. And that went on over a period
Speaker 1: of several years, and it started about ten years before
Speaker 1: the actually event occurred. So there is a warning, there
Speaker 1: is there's third warning signals it's a paint pretty bad
Speaker 1: stomach ache. And yeah, that was years ago. That was young, Yeah,
Speaker 1: seventy two, I think they're about. Yeah. I had to
Speaker 1: stop performing for three months and then I got enough
Speaker 1: of a where stopped puffing enough that I was able
Speaker 1: to go back to work again. So I just I
Speaker 1: just bolted boulder through so so to speak. And then
Speaker 1: you had a stroke at so he came back that
Speaker 1: that was a mini strokes that affected my right hand,
Speaker 1: which was very disturbing. That wasn't two two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: That was when I really started practicing, and that's when
Speaker 1: I really improved learned how to really get my instruments
Speaker 1: in tune at the same time, So I derived a
Speaker 1: benefit from from that. How do American radio interview hosts
Speaker 1: differ from Canadian radio interview hosts. No difference that I
Speaker 1: can see people. Folks are folks. I the cousins all
Speaker 1: cousins here in North America political. That's why I never
Speaker 1: moved down there. I've I've got, I've I've follow I'm
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a political fan. I'm a fan of of
Speaker 1: watching the political process. Observer. Well, you you had the
Speaker 1: situation with the song in Detroit Black Day in July. Yeah,
Speaker 1: been from the Detroit Riots, and you wrote a song
Speaker 1: about that and and cause you a little bit of
Speaker 1: a grief in the record we released a single. Did
Speaker 1: you and did you feel that that was something that
Speaker 1: you resented or like, how did you feel when you
Speaker 1: got I kind of shouldn't have done that. It was
Speaker 1: almost like like the reck well like like it was, uh, well,
Speaker 1: I should have. I was working in the city a
Speaker 1: lot in the truck always circuit there. There was something
Speaker 1: about it. I kept saying, maybe I shouldn't have written
Speaker 1: a song like this. You know, it was written as
Speaker 1: a folk song for an album. The record the Fitzgerald
Speaker 1: was written as a folk song for an album and
Speaker 1: to political purposes, as signed by other people. You didn't
Speaker 1: have a political purpose when you wrote the song interesting,
Speaker 1: just a story and the soul of motor City. It's
Speaker 1: fared across the land, is taken in the heads of
Speaker 1: the son of the fathers who came into this did
Speaker 1: b and when when the record company took the song
Speaker 1: off the air? So it didn't piss you off. The
Speaker 1: record companies never pissed you off. No, never, when they
Speaker 1: told you what songs to put on the album, what
Speaker 1: songs not to put on the album, never bothered you. Well,
Speaker 1: we sat we always worked that out together. You did. Yeah, uh.
Speaker 1: With with the exceptions that's necessary. Early in the career too,
Speaker 1: before I had the level of authority that I that
Speaker 1: I needed to establish, I was in, I was produced
Speaker 1: and and I uh, I used to be able to
Speaker 1: discuss the custom discuss things with them there and very
Speaker 1: fortunately fortunately to be able to do that. What song
Speaker 1: that when you sing it, you could sit there and go, man,
Speaker 1: I really really nailed that. That's a good song. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of them, But what's one that just comes
Speaker 1: out of east of midnight, East of midnight, East of midnight.
Speaker 1: That's that's one of my very best ones. But somewhere
Speaker 1: is the midnight west of anywhere us around I don't
Speaker 1: do that. I usually do it. No, don't you know
Speaker 1: why I don't do it? Though you're such an East
Speaker 1: at midnight's my best song, man, I don't do that
Speaker 1: if I did it for years. This is my last
Speaker 1: four or five albums are probably the five best polbums
Speaker 1: I made. But unfortunately my my momentum had run out
Speaker 1: with the record company at that point. But I still
Speaker 1: kept producing because it isn't that interesting. You just said
Speaker 1: my last four or five albums with the best albums
Speaker 1: I've ever do really believe that? Sure you do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've been one of those albums between what period of
Speaker 1: time nineteen nine two and in two thousand and six?
Speaker 1: Do you recorded in an album in two thousand six?
Speaker 1: Right before you got sick? Nineteen years I made five
Speaker 1: of the best albums I've finished an album while I
Speaker 1: was when I was down with the aneurism, I finished
Speaker 1: an album there. I took my mind off my condition entirely.
Speaker 1: So it was very fortutors that I had a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff City and the UH in the can
Speaker 1: at the time, as they used to say. And the
Speaker 1: best one of the whole lot is is Easter Midnight?
Speaker 1: Do you write songs, now, I could. I always have
Speaker 1: four or five tunes on the on the back. Your
Speaker 1: wife is practically groaning behind your nodding head, like, yes,
Speaker 1: of course, there's always tunes in the back burner. What
Speaker 1: beautiful songs? What do you when you write songs? Now?
Speaker 1: What do you write about? I just ming from one
Speaker 1: to the other. I want to kill you. I just
Speaker 1: right about whimsy. I try. I try to sound sound intelligent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's on your mind? Though? Well? I was thinking about
Speaker 1: the but the one that has the turtle in it,
Speaker 1: I like that. I think she likes the fact that
Speaker 1: I introduced the turtle into this song. Is that the
Speaker 1: part you like about it? Darling? You know you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying here. It's amazing. It's it's amazing. Your
Speaker 1: wife is this gorgeous young woman. And I realized the
Speaker 1: glue of this marriage is you write songs about turtles
Speaker 1: for your wife's that I don't. That's just what one scene.
Speaker 1: I've got a bullshit my wife every day and convinced
Speaker 1: her into staying with me, and you just sit there
Speaker 1: and go, I wrote this song for your baby, a
Speaker 1: song about a turtle. I know, I know it's it's like,
Speaker 1: come if you will. Well, the earth is still fertile. Lady,
Speaker 1: I see so Edi through the eyes of a turtle.
Speaker 1: Turtles are soft and they they've got feelings too. Maybe
Speaker 1: they think too quicktly for me or for you, And
Speaker 1: it really doesn't matter. We gotta end there, maybe well
Speaker 1: maybe not, maybe not, just to show you the kind
Speaker 1: of a stuff and okay, into the microphonety well, back
Speaker 1: to the stable, Lady, I see Marilyn Monroe and their stands.
Speaker 1: Clark Gable held me off the cow. She'll stop the show.
Speaker 1: There's many a good hand felt a chilly wind blow,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't really matter. Don't ask you. You don't
Speaker 1: why I write that stuff, asking about oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we'll see I I sang it for twenty five years.
Speaker 1: But it's really vicious. It's very it's just a very vicious.
Speaker 1: The song of un quite a love song, and it
Speaker 1: was it was written during the time when I was
Speaker 1: I was, I was still married, and I wondered, my goodness,
Speaker 1: what what does my It was like almost like a
Speaker 1: world Chamberlain. I've had a hundred more like you. I'll
Speaker 1: have a thousand four him through. It was one of
Speaker 1: the lines in it, and I was married to someone
Speaker 1: and I've you know, I hated singing the song, and
Speaker 1: finally I stopped singing it the same way as I
Speaker 1: stopped drinking in But even that only lasted for twenty
Speaker 1: three years. Been saying it again. No, you don't sing
Speaker 1: the song. You won't think a lot of people do.
Speaker 1: But other people recorded singing Elvis Elvis press for me.
Speaker 1: That's what you get for loving me. I gotta say,
Speaker 1: I look at these album covers you are. You're one
Speaker 1: of the best using guys I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1: I mean, was that tough for you? Let tough part
Speaker 1: of your career? Well, I think it helped you. Probably,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. I'm sure it did, but I'm sure sure
Speaker 1: best have what's next? When are you going on the
Speaker 1: road again? Friday morning? I feel a little blue. I
Speaker 1: can't there's still a lot of things and I should
Speaker 1: know anyone could get I don't know how to brand
Speaker 1: my Saturday. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that's brought
Speaker 1: to you by my Heart Radio. I feel a little
Speaker 1: saying to watch them leave the cool because I don't
Speaker 1: feel the happy times. Agoe. I can still