Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing from iHeart Radio. Last week we lost one of
Speaker 1: the greats singer songwriter, folk rock legend, and hands down
Speaker 1: one of the kindest people I've ever met. In the
Speaker 1: making of this podcast, musician Gordon Lightfoot, I wanted to
Speaker 1: take a moment to remember Lightfoot and his influence on
Speaker 1: all who were lucky enough to hear his music. Lightfoot
Speaker 1: was on a short list of music legends I was
Speaker 1: anxious to interview. The opportunity finally presented itself while I
Speaker 1: was attending the Toronto Film Festival. He was one of
Speaker 1: my favorite artists and he will be deeply missed. Here's
Speaker 1: my twenty sixteen conversation with the late Gordon Lightfoot.
Speaker 2: At times, I just don't know.
Speaker 3: How you could be anything but beautiful.
Speaker 1: Over the course of a career that has lasted more
Speaker 1: than fifty years, Canadian singer songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has achieved
Speaker 1: global stardom and exceptional influence. Bob Dylan's a fan. About
Speaker 1: Lightfoot's songs, Dylan said, I can't think of any I
Speaker 1: don't like these songs, which include Beautiful, The Wreck of
Speaker 1: the Edmund Fitzgerald If you could Read My Mind, and
Speaker 1: many others have been treasured by generations of popular musicians
Speaker 1: and listeners around the world. Many people know about the
Speaker 1: folk music revival that brought Bob Dylan to New York
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen sixties, but north of the border
Speaker 1: there was an equivalent explosion of talent at that time,
Speaker 1: and Lightfoot, who got his start singing in boys choirs,
Speaker 1: found himself heading to Canada's cultural capital to try his luck.
Speaker 3: Beautiful Well, I was down in Toronto here looking for work,
Speaker 3: and I got a job as a cooral performer in
Speaker 3: a television series that was on every week. And at
Speaker 3: the same time I branched out and began working in
Speaker 3: the folk oriented places. Because the folk revival had occurred
Speaker 3: around about nineteen sixty and I would have been maybe
Speaker 3: twenty years old there about twenty one, and so I'd
Speaker 3: be working on the TV show in the daytime and
Speaker 3: going out and working at the coffeehouses at night.
Speaker 1: No, you had a period where you wrote jingles for commercials. Correct.
Speaker 1: I tried to make a living.
Speaker 3: They locked me in a room one time, a manager
Speaker 3: in a place on Madison Avenue and just left me
Speaker 3: there all afternoon.
Speaker 1: How'd that go?
Speaker 3: Well? I wrote the commercial, but they they didn't like it.
Speaker 1: They didn't play your version of the commercial. But you didn't.
Speaker 1: You didn't. You went in New York for a long time?
Speaker 3: Correct, Well, I would go back and forth in New
Speaker 3: York all the time because my management company was in
Speaker 3: New York. I was one of the fortunate ones who
Speaker 3: was able to acquire a management situation south of the border,
Speaker 3: so to speak, down in the States, and that was
Speaker 3: in New York. And he was a great manager. He
Speaker 3: recognized my songwriting ability immediately, and I got a couple
Speaker 3: of tunes recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, and one
Speaker 3: of them went up to number five on the Board
Speaker 3: chart for loving me.
Speaker 1: That's what you get, full loving me. That's what you get,
Speaker 1: full loving me.
Speaker 2: Everything it was gone, as.
Speaker 4: You can see, that's what you get for love.
Speaker 3: And so I was introduced to the industry in the
Speaker 3: States really as a songwriter before they even knew that
Speaker 3: I sang, you know it was. It sort of happened
Speaker 3: on its own.
Speaker 1: Do you think you would have been Do you think
Speaker 1: you would have been happy to just stay in that
Speaker 1: place and just produce records and write music and was
Speaker 1: performing the goal all along? Did you want? Were you
Speaker 1: itching to do that? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I wanted to even as a child, you know,
Speaker 3: I didn't mind singing in my grandmother's house on the
Speaker 3: Sunday get togethers. You know, they would single me out
Speaker 3: and I would solo. I enjoyed the feel of the
Speaker 3: communication that and I could feel it then. That's what
Speaker 3: I feel now. I feel a communication when I have
Speaker 3: a wonderful band and we have a great repertoire and
Speaker 3: we just lay the stuff right out there.
Speaker 1: For them, just pure joy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I enjoy doing that. But when you were take
Speaker 3: care if it pays the bills, that's.
Speaker 1: A that's a desirable silver lining there. Yeah, all that
Speaker 1: hard work, well, but when you were writing, when you
Speaker 1: turn that corner and singing takes over. You know.
Speaker 3: I was doing like like small time stuff, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden I was asked to come to New
Speaker 3: York and open for Paul Butterfield concert nineteen sixty six thereabouts.
Speaker 1: I suppose sixty So you won the radio then recording.
Speaker 3: No, we didn't actually get on the radio until about
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: What was the first song that I mean? I have
Speaker 1: a list here. But what was the if you could
Speaker 1: read my mind.
Speaker 3: If you could read my mind, if you knew that ghost.
Speaker 4: Is me and I won't be sad as long as
Speaker 4: time I'm a ghost. You can't see.
Speaker 3: The record was that it was my first album on
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers, and it was out for eight months and
Speaker 3: there was no single, and all of a sudden other promotion.
Speaker 3: Guys said to his girlfriend, we listen to this and
Speaker 3: come back and give me an opinion. On Monday morning,
Speaker 3: his girlfriend she likes, if you could read my.
Speaker 4: Mind, where the hard he is gone, the hero would
Speaker 4: be me.
Speaker 3: Hero of.
Speaker 2: You won't read that book because the endangers.
Speaker 1: If you could read my mind hits the charts, so
Speaker 1: to speak, it becomes a big hit for you. What
Speaker 1: changes for you, Like did you have to sit there
Speaker 1: and say, oh, people are telling you to do things
Speaker 1: differently and now you're going to be a success and
Speaker 1: they want you to We.
Speaker 3: Get so busy we got to hire an aircraft. Literally,
Speaker 3: that's what happened. We had to hire an aircraft. Everyone
Speaker 3: wants to book, say, get the same place two different
Speaker 3: places in one day.
Speaker 1: So when you reached that point, that and then that
Speaker 1: turning point is the is the next imperative. You've got
Speaker 1: to start coming up with more songs and writing more songs.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, you record. Yeah.
Speaker 3: We made three more albums and nothing happened. But I
Speaker 3: kept doing one a year and something had to give eventually,
Speaker 3: And then one summer I wrote that song Sundown, and
Speaker 3: I knew that it was it was going to happen,
Speaker 3: that it was it was the right thing, and it did.
Speaker 3: When we're up to number one. That was our second one.
Speaker 3: Then it was almost seven two albums later that we
Speaker 3: had the record the Abne Fitzgerald, and that happened all
Speaker 3: by itself too. That became a responsibility. It did a
Speaker 3: very large responsibil.
Speaker 1: The song became a responsible But tell me in your
Speaker 1: own words. Many people go on about that, about the
Speaker 1: tragedy and the history, and it's a very, you know,
Speaker 1: important song to people, you know history. People talk about
Speaker 1: it very reverentially. Why was it important to you?
Speaker 3: Because it was only one verse contained any conjecture of
Speaker 3: any kind of the rest of it was taken from
Speaker 3: directly from newspaper articles and the aftermath, which only lasted
Speaker 3: for about three days. If I had not wrote that song,
Speaker 3: everybody would have forgotten about it. A week after it happened,
Speaker 3: I said, people are all around the Great Lakes area
Speaker 3: are going to wonder if the song is appropriate. And
Speaker 3: some did wonder about it, whether it was appropriate for
Speaker 3: me to have written a song of that kind. But
Speaker 3: I had gone pretty much with the newspaper articles that
Speaker 3: I scraped up. We had no CPS in those days,
Speaker 3: and you went back that you went to the publisher
Speaker 3: and got the back copies of the newspapers. And it's accurate.
Speaker 3: It's accurate in the way the story on folds. I
Speaker 3: remember the night I wrote it. I was working in
Speaker 3: a deserted house and there was a heck of a
Speaker 3: windstorm going on right in Toronto that night, and I
Speaker 3: remember myself wondering, Gee, I wonder what it's like up
Speaker 3: on the Great Lakes right now, because I sailed up
Speaker 3: there myself. I had a couple of two different sailboats
Speaker 3: up there, and wondered always, I wonder what the Great
Speaker 3: Lakes are like tonight, because you're always hearing about what
Speaker 3: things happening up in the Great Lakes. And eleven o'clock
Speaker 3: in the evening there was a report of a ship
Speaker 3: sinking three hours earlier in the Lake Superior, and they're
Speaker 3: out looking for the people, and they never found any
Speaker 3: of them, and twenty nine people gone. And I had
Speaker 3: a melody, and I had some cords that I was
Speaker 3: knocking around in this deserted house with the wind howling outside.
Speaker 3: Really it was kind of kind of a classic setting
Speaker 3: to write a song like that. So I began writing
Speaker 3: the song and finished writing it like two or three
Speaker 3: weeks later. We were right in the middle of a
Speaker 3: recording a series of recording sessions at the time, so
Speaker 3: we put it in and didn't work the first day.
Speaker 3: We put it in the second day and did you
Speaker 3: ever stomp and Tom Connors?
Speaker 1: No, I will. Now I'm gonna run down and get
Speaker 1: all of stomp and Tom Connery he was recording.
Speaker 3: He was one of our very famous Canadian folk artists.
Speaker 3: Stomping Tom Connors poke his hit and said that sounds
Speaker 3: like a hit. He just heard the melody going like
Speaker 3: he didn't heard the lyrics or anything. So the appeal
Speaker 3: of the song is definitely in the melody and the
Speaker 3: chord changes, and then the story of the actually made itself.
Speaker 3: I got as accurately as I could by pursuing old
Speaker 3: news articles.
Speaker 2: The wind and the wires made the tattle tale sound,
Speaker 2: and the wave rope over the railing, and every man
Speaker 2: you as the captain did to twis the Witch and
Speaker 2: love and stealing.
Speaker 3: The dawn came leading, and.
Speaker 5: The breakfast had the week when the girls in Lovember
Speaker 5: and slashing what afternoon came into screeeze and rad in
Speaker 5: the base of a hurricane west wind.
Speaker 1: We'll have more with Gordon Lightfoot after the break I'm ALC.
Speaker 1: Baldwin and this is here's the thing. I spoke with
Speaker 1: musician Gordon Lightfoot twenty sixteen. I was curious how his
Speaker 1: musicianship had changed over time and what it was like
Speaker 1: for him recording and performing in the early days.
Speaker 3: The first time I started doing it, I felt under like,
Speaker 3: I'm not confident in what I was doing, what I
Speaker 3: was hearing, I didn't I didn't like what I.
Speaker 1: Was hearing of your own stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't like the sound. The sound of my
Speaker 3: voice bothered me. And you know, I started working on
Speaker 3: that stuff and I've been working on it ever since.
Speaker 3: On my vocal and I've worked on my intonation, on
Speaker 3: my instruments.
Speaker 1: Someone told me that when you land because you perform
Speaker 1: in so many different areas. You really dwell on tuning
Speaker 1: your instruments alot. Correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes I chase it around too, but I've learned
Speaker 3: through the years that there is a method that you
Speaker 3: can get me into into Scarborough fair Country, you know,
Speaker 3: like the like the sound that Simon and Garfuncle used
Speaker 3: to get on their acoustic orchestral arrangements that they put
Speaker 3: together for their songs. And it actually came it became
Speaker 3: real for me maybe six or seven years ago after
Speaker 3: I was recovering from a mini stroke that I had
Speaker 3: and I had to practice a lot more all of
Speaker 3: a sudden, so it really got me zeroing in on it.
Speaker 3: And it all comes down to the fifths and the octaves,
Speaker 3: and I'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 1: I'm just a handmaiden here for all you guitar people
Speaker 1: out there. That's Gordon Lightfoot's gift to you and his
Speaker 1: present to you. That's the fifths and the octaves. And
Speaker 1: I don't have one damn idea the fifths and the eye.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the hell he's talking about, but
Speaker 1: there it is. There's his message to you today. McCartney
Speaker 1: told me when I spoke to him, once Paul told
Speaker 1: me that he said, in the beginning they would go
Speaker 1: into a recording studio of the Beatles, and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, it was really these weren't his words, but
Speaker 1: the message was kind of like time is money. He said.
Speaker 1: These guys were like, you know, we want two songs
Speaker 1: in the morning, and then you go have a lunch
Speaker 1: break and you go down to the pub and you
Speaker 1: have a cigarette, you have a fission chips where you
Speaker 1: come back. They want two songs after they really moved
Speaker 1: along at a clip when they were doing the first
Speaker 1: albums for Parlophone or whoever it was, or em I,
Speaker 1: and then when they became, you know, the success they
Speaker 1: obviously became, then they would take a year. You know,
Speaker 1: all musicians are the same. Then they would take a
Speaker 1: year to do their next album. You know, they would
Speaker 1: do Sergeant Pepper's or what everyone really really luxuriate and
Speaker 1: getting every They gave them more time because it was
Speaker 1: worth it was worth that investment for them. Was the
Speaker 1: same true with you. Do you find that the more
Speaker 1: successful you became, the more time you wanted to make music.
Speaker 3: Perhaps later on, but I pretty much stuck to the
Speaker 3: to the schedule as much as I could. We made
Speaker 3: like eight or nine albums in ten years there, so.
Speaker 1: You didn't feel rushed by them.
Speaker 3: No, we were getting more time. But I was also
Speaker 3: improving because what I didn't like hearing I was I
Speaker 3: was changing all the time. I was always an improvement venture,
Speaker 3: like a guy building himself up and for to play
Speaker 3: on an important sports team. You know they got it.
Speaker 3: It's just not just the game, it's the preparation. Say
Speaker 3: you haven't played for for a month and all of
Speaker 3: a sudden you got to get back up on stage.
Speaker 3: You should be able to crank it out just like
Speaker 3: it was just you did the show last night, right.
Speaker 1: But you like rehearsing, Yeah, well you believe rehearsing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're learning new material or you're going back into
Speaker 3: the old catalog with which we do. Because I have
Speaker 3: a rotational situation going on, the biggest problem in my
Speaker 3: whole life's been too many tunes, too many women.
Speaker 1: For my listeners. Right now, Gordon Lightfoot is turning sheepishly
Speaker 1: toward his wife with a sheepish grin on his face,
Speaker 1: and she just patted his shoulder to say it's okay.
Speaker 3: Gordon, Well I can't step on your toes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't do that. But I remember reading I
Speaker 1: remember listening to an article. I remember reading an article
Speaker 1: that the Rolling Stones did years ago, and I was
Speaker 1: taken by how you know, in terms of musicianship, Jagger
Speaker 1: and Keith Ridgard were very, very married to rehearsal. And
Speaker 1: for you to say that that is a great meaning
Speaker 1: to me. For you, someone as great an artist as
Speaker 1: you are, that the preparation and the preparation beforehand so
Speaker 1: that when you when the audience is there, bloom, you
Speaker 1: strum that guitar and you're you're ready. You're ready.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And we we have the the artistra itself. I
Speaker 3: have four really talented guys.
Speaker 1: And very loyal people. I read about that your band
Speaker 1: is very loyal to.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's there's no reason why they should
Speaker 3: not be. You know, we're all the same path. I mean,
Speaker 3: we just want to do a great job and you
Speaker 3: got to like make almost make a science out of it.
Speaker 3: I don't know. My guys are all professionals. I mean
Speaker 3: there's they're serious musicians. Yeah yeah, and they do other things.
Speaker 3: I just got to let them know what's coming up.
Speaker 1: You know, what were you listening to back then? In
Speaker 1: the sixties when you were coming up, Who did you
Speaker 1: listen to?
Speaker 3: Well, I was listening to the country music, you know,
Speaker 3: Hank Snow and then folks. It was Pete Seeger, and
Speaker 3: it was Bob Gibson. It was Bob Dylan and Simon
Speaker 3: and Garfunkel, and you know Peter Paul and Mary and
Speaker 3: Ian and Sylvia. They were a duet and it was
Speaker 3: a beautiful act that they had.
Speaker 1: Eventually you met these people, well I met, but you
Speaker 1: became one of them.
Speaker 3: My management company because they were the first ever to
Speaker 3: do one of do any of my songs was Ian
Speaker 3: and Sophia, which one for Loving Me and Early Morning Rain.
Speaker 3: I found an opening with the Folk Revival, you know.
Speaker 3: So I was lucky to be a part of that,
Speaker 3: to write that one through and survive. Uh, there's there's
Speaker 3: nothing much out there these days. Uh, you know, they're
Speaker 3: they're they're busking. We've got a look a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of people here in Toronto who who are hovering around
Speaker 3: all the time that the folk oriented artists who are
Speaker 3: songwriters and you know, trying to get somewhere, and some
Speaker 3: of some of them are succeeding in some or not.
Speaker 3: I get to hear a lot of the stuff because
Speaker 3: it comes across my desk and I get to hear it,
Speaker 3: and you wish, you know that something grand could happen
Speaker 3: for these people, but you don't know what to do.
Speaker 3: All you can do is respond.
Speaker 1: Right, encourage.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Where do you think people learn to hone their craft
Speaker 1: as a musician in in in clubs and performing live?
Speaker 3: Well, I was as well as I was working in
Speaker 3: bars too, you know, like bars and lounges as well
Speaker 3: as the coffeehouses. And so I had the kind of
Speaker 3: a repertoire that was acceptable to plant bars. So I
Speaker 3: got him following in a couple of these bars. Then
Speaker 3: I've sort of moved uptown into the village area, you
Speaker 3: or Yorkville, which was just coming into bloom here in town,
Speaker 3: and get into places like the Purple Onion, and then
Speaker 3: the Riverboat, which was really the plumb of the whole lot,
Speaker 3: was the Riverboat because Bernie Feeder brought every person into
Speaker 3: that place. You could fosply image and play there, from
Speaker 3: James Taylor to Joni Mitchell to to Kneel Young right
Speaker 3: on down the line.
Speaker 1: Is he is he a friend of yours? Yes?
Speaker 3: He is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, your songs and you're singing of your song, you're
Speaker 1: performing of your songs is so vulnerable and so emotional.
Speaker 1: What was the most difficult song for you to write
Speaker 1: or among the most difficult songs for you to write?
Speaker 3: I'll tell you that a lot of times you don't
Speaker 3: know you're doing it. You're drawing the material from your
Speaker 3: subconscious you know, you don't actually know what you're doing.
Speaker 3: You're you know, you're drawing it from somewhere, and then
Speaker 3: later down the line, three or four weeks later, you
Speaker 3: can sign it back to the actual event that brought
Speaker 3: it on. I mean, that's like, if you could read
Speaker 3: my mind is about actually the crumbling.
Speaker 1: Of a Really was that painful for you to write? No?
Speaker 3: Because I didn't know what I was doing right I
Speaker 3: wrote it. It's just I didn't really.
Speaker 1: Tell me that all these beautiful folks songs that people
Speaker 1: weep when they listen to, you're just like tossing it off,
Speaker 1: like I don't really know what this is. Let's take
Speaker 1: a song for example. Let me let me pick one
Speaker 1: song now, one of my favorite songs of yours. I mean,
Speaker 1: a song that I just kills me is beautiful, describe
Speaker 1: to me recording the song beautiful. I mean, do you
Speaker 1: go out with your friends and your get ship faced
Speaker 1: drunk and you come in with a hangover and just
Speaker 1: lay this thing down and you play poker ro all night?
Speaker 1: Or do you enter a state?
Speaker 3: First I get a card progression, Then I get a melody.
Speaker 1: It's fifth syn octaves, people, it's fifth syn octaves.
Speaker 3: Then I get the lyric. You got the melody, you
Speaker 3: got the chords, but you don't know, so you draw.
Speaker 3: You find an idea that that fits the fits the melody.
Speaker 1: That's Gordon Light for the songwriter, Gordon Light for the singer,
Speaker 1: the performer. Do you enter a state? Do you take
Speaker 1: yourself to a place when you perform your recorded music
Speaker 1: or you don't?
Speaker 3: Well, I can, I can use my imagination. I actually
Speaker 3: saw it as a sincere love turn to a guy
Speaker 3: for his wife or his girlfriend. It it reminds me
Speaker 3: of when I was I learned how to sing with
Speaker 3: emotion when I was about twelve, when I was doing
Speaker 3: handling material from Handles Messiah, the Voice of Him who
Speaker 3: Cries in the Wilderness and all that sort of thing,
Speaker 3: And I learned what emotion meant when when I were
Speaker 3: saying handles Messiah. At age twelve, I sang in a
Speaker 3: competition so I could apply. It was easy for me
Speaker 3: to apply to summon up that emotional uh something or
Speaker 3: whatever it is when it came time to put that
Speaker 3: song down. But I didn't have to the point at
Speaker 3: the beginning that I wanted to have it. And that's
Speaker 3: why I've been working on all my life is getting
Speaker 3: controlling that emotional approach to it, making it work for me.
Speaker 3: You don't overdo it, and.
Speaker 1: You don't know what I'm saying. That's what's beautiful about
Speaker 1: your music is you go right up to a point,
Speaker 1: but you don't do a lot of handholding. You let
Speaker 1: the audience do the crying for you. You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: You're your We balance it off with a lot of
Speaker 3: toe chappers. You got lots of to.
Speaker 1: For a prime example of the delivery Gordon Lightfoot does
Speaker 1: so well. You don't have to look beyond this song sundown.
Speaker 2: I can see you land back seven.
Speaker 3: Room where you do what you don't confess.
Speaker 4: Some better dickas.
Speaker 1: Around coming up. Lightfoot talks about some of his musical
Speaker 1: inspirations that explains why he and Bob Dylan didn't get
Speaker 1: along right away explore the Here's the Thing archives. I
Speaker 1: talk with a very different kind of songwriter, Tom York
Speaker 1: from the British rock band Radiohead. He tells me how
Speaker 1: his producer gave him the confidence to explore wild new
Speaker 1: electronic sounds.
Speaker 6: I mean, I was like a kid being given a hammer.
Speaker 6: I was just hamm and reliance stuff. I didn't really
Speaker 6: know what I was doing, but he was kind of
Speaker 6: fascinated by that, you know, and he'd come and literally
Speaker 6: tidy up the mess on the computer.
Speaker 1: Take a listen at Here's Thething, dot Org. I'm telling you.
Speaker 3: That you beautiful.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing. Gordon Lightfoot has straddled the worlds of pop
Speaker 1: and folk music for decades, but his confessional songwriting appealed
Speaker 1: to country music performers like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Junior,
Speaker 1: and Glenn Campbell as well. They all covered his songs.
Speaker 1: And there's good reason that's what Lightfoot was listening to
Speaker 1: when he started thinking about what kind of musician he
Speaker 1: wanted to be.
Speaker 3: It was probably a country music I made the crossover
Speaker 3: into adult contemporary music, you know, fairly soon and there
Speaker 3: was a lot of good writing going on in the
Speaker 3: folk revival too, and I got I was influenced by that.
Speaker 1: So you didn't come into the music business and say
Speaker 1: I want to be Sinatra, I want to be Elvis,
Speaker 1: I want to be Dylan. Well, I think you wanted
Speaker 1: to find your own voice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't. I certainly did not take lightly the
Speaker 3: fact that I was really influenced by Bob Dylan because
Speaker 3: of the not only the quality of the work, but
Speaker 3: the output that they achieved. He was prolific. Yeah, that
Speaker 3: was the amazing Particut and said, well, it can be
Speaker 3: that easy for him, it must surely be be easier
Speaker 3: for me. I mean, if he can do this much work,
Speaker 3: surely I can do this much work. While appreciating the
Speaker 3: music that he was producing at the time. When did
Speaker 3: you first meet him nineteen sixty five, What was that
Speaker 3: like for you in Woodstock? Well, it was a it
Speaker 3: was an interesting time. We actually didn't didn't get along
Speaker 3: when we first met. He criticized my my rules at
Speaker 3: playing Manhattan on his pool table in Woodstock, and I
Speaker 3: got a little he got a little sarcastic about it,
Speaker 3: and we were all He was very sarcastic, and I
Speaker 3: started seeing this coming on to me and I left.
Speaker 3: I left their house wow, and went back down the
Speaker 3: hill to Albert's house. Alberts, Albert Grossman. He was the
Speaker 3: manager I had before, part of that stable, that fam
Speaker 3: that's stable yet, so natives say, since I knew him
Speaker 3: for so many years after that, because we're all working
Speaker 3: in the same place, I became sort of party party
Speaker 3: central for them when they when they came to Toronto,
Speaker 3: which was often, and with the band and everybody, and
Speaker 3: we had a great time. And I, you know, it
Speaker 3: was good to have known Bob.
Speaker 1: Is it safe to say, because I've read this in
Speaker 1: different articles and so forth when I was reading up
Speaker 1: about you. Then when you say you got together and
Speaker 1: had a good time, was there a period of your
Speaker 1: life where you had too much of a good time?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean there was lots of drinking went on there.
Speaker 3: There was a little bit of everything. It just depended
Speaker 3: upon how severely you were affected by it and what
Speaker 3: kind of a constitution that you possessed. Did. I drank
Speaker 3: heavily right up until nineteen eighty two, and then all
Speaker 3: of a sudden I stopped last I stopped it for
Speaker 3: twenty three years because it was good. I was going
Speaker 3: to ruin my career and I was making unrational, irrational decisions.
Speaker 3: And one night I tried to climb from from one
Speaker 3: balcony to the next in an apartment building on the
Speaker 3: tenth floor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 3: Sure there was a party going on.
Speaker 1: And you wanted to one party. I love that. What
Speaker 1: was a better party in that other wing over there?
Speaker 1: There was too to meet folks.
Speaker 3: There was room for me to jump from the one
Speaker 3: balcony to the next.
Speaker 1: Did you make it?
Speaker 3: Yes, Well I've said it. I here talking.
Speaker 1: You might have fallen and broken your leg or something.
Speaker 3: Who knows, I was on the tenth floor. I wouldn't
Speaker 3: be here.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't be here.
Speaker 3: Things like that, you know. But other things that I
Speaker 3: did there were bad judgments, you know, and you know,
Speaker 3: with people, and I felt that I was offending people
Speaker 3: sometimes and I did the last thing I wanted to
Speaker 3: offend anyone, you know, And that's what I felt when
Speaker 3: I wrote to Fitzgerald, I said, I hope I'm not
Speaker 3: going to offend any of the relatives of these men.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Was it never communicated to you that you had Did
Speaker 1: anybody suggest that.
Speaker 3: No, No, it never appreciated what you've been honored. We just
Speaker 3: went to the fortieth anniversary ourselves, just this last novembery week.
Speaker 3: Where was it helped Lake Superior? I've been fifteen miles
Speaker 3: thirty miles of northwest of Sussaint Marie at the Whitefish Point.
Speaker 1: Wow. You know you have had some very impactful health issues.
Speaker 1: You had a stroke and then you had Bell's palsy
Speaker 1: and you couldn't have what's it like to lose feeling
Speaker 1: in your fingers and you're a guitar player.
Speaker 3: Well, ask me what it was like when I had
Speaker 3: the aordal aneurysm.
Speaker 1: Okay, what was it like when you had the a
Speaker 1: ordal aneurysm.
Speaker 3: Well it put me out of business for two years?
Speaker 1: Did it really? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Put me out of business for two What a year
Speaker 3: was that? Two thousand and two?
Speaker 1: What were the symptoms of that?
Speaker 3: If you pass out and you don't wake up.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean the aneurysm bursts for six weeks? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what were you feeling in the weeks prior?
Speaker 3: I would have bouts of stomach ache and I'd have
Speaker 3: to lay out of my belly on the bed for
Speaker 3: a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Then I would subside. And that went on over a
Speaker 3: period of several years, and it started about ten years
Speaker 3: before the actually vent occurred. So there is a warning.
Speaker 3: There is this third warning signals it's a paint. You
Speaker 3: get a pretty bad stomach ache. And yeah, that was
Speaker 3: years ago. That was nineteen you were young, Yeah, seventy two,
Speaker 3: I think thereabouts.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I had to stop performing for three months and then
Speaker 3: I got enough of wou'd stop puffing enough? Then I
Speaker 3: was able to go back to work again. Really, so
Speaker 3: I just I just boulder through, so to speak, and
Speaker 3: then you had a stroke actually came back. That was
Speaker 3: a mini stroke. That the fact of my right hand,
Speaker 3: which was very disturbing. That in two thousand and six,
Speaker 3: that was when I really started practicing, and that's when
Speaker 3: I really improved learned how to really get my instruments
Speaker 3: in tune at the same time. So I derived a
Speaker 3: benefit from from that.
Speaker 1: How do American radio interview hosts differ from Canadian radio
Speaker 1: interview hosts.
Speaker 3: No difference that I can see, no difference. People folks
Speaker 3: are folks. So the boys appreciated the cousins. We're all
Speaker 3: cousins here in North America. That's why you're not political now,
Speaker 3: that's probably I never moved down there. I've follow I'm
Speaker 3: I'm a I'm a political fan. I'm a fan of
Speaker 3: watching the political process observer.
Speaker 1: Well, you you had the situation with the song in
Speaker 1: Detroit Black Day in July. Yeah, from the Detroit riots,
Speaker 1: that's right, and you wrote a song about that and
Speaker 1: then cause you a little bit of a.
Speaker 3: Grief in the record we released a single.
Speaker 1: Did you and did you feel that that was something
Speaker 1: that you resented or like, how did you feel when
Speaker 1: you got pulled.
Speaker 3: That I kind of shouldn't have done that. It was
Speaker 3: almost like like the wreck well, well like like it
Speaker 3: was a well I should have I was working in
Speaker 3: the city a lot, in the trucky I circt there.
Speaker 3: There was something about it. I kept saying, maybe I
Speaker 3: shouldn't have written a song like this. You know, it
Speaker 3: was written as a folk song for an album. The
Speaker 3: record of the Fitzgerald was written as a folk song
Speaker 3: for an album.
Speaker 1: And the political purposes assigned by other people. You didn't
Speaker 1: have a political purpose when you wrote the song. Interesting,
Speaker 1: just a story Black.
Speaker 4: Dan and the soul of Motor City is there across
Speaker 4: the line.
Speaker 3: That's the book of the.
Speaker 2: Law and order is taken in the hands of the time,
Speaker 2: So the fathers who came into this lane.
Speaker 1: Bug Dan, July Black Dan. And when the record company
Speaker 1: took the song off the air, so it didn't piss
Speaker 1: you off. The record companies never pissed you off. No, never,
Speaker 1: when they told you what songs to put on the album,
Speaker 1: what songs not to put on the album, never bothered you.
Speaker 3: Well we started, We always worked that out together.
Speaker 1: You did. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Interesting with the exceptions necess very early in the career too,
Speaker 3: before I had at the level of authority that I
Speaker 3: that I needed to establish. I was in how was
Speaker 3: produced and I I used to be able to discuss
Speaker 3: and cust and discuss things with them there and very
Speaker 3: fortunately fortunately to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: What song that when you sing it, you could sit
Speaker 1: there and go, man, I really really nailed that. That's
Speaker 1: a good song. Oh, there's a lot of them, But
Speaker 1: what's the one that just comes out of you?
Speaker 3: East of midnight, East of midnight, East of Midnight. That's
Speaker 3: that's one of my my very best ones. But some
Speaker 3: wills the midnight West anywhere as I I don't do that.
Speaker 3: I used to do it. No do you know why
Speaker 3: I don't do it?
Speaker 1: Though? These were such a funny cat East Midnight's my
Speaker 1: best song man. You got to hear that I don't
Speaker 1: do that anymore.
Speaker 3: If I did it for years. This is my last
Speaker 3: four or five albums are probably the five best albums
Speaker 3: I made, But unfortunately my momentum had run out with
Speaker 3: the record company at that point. But I still kept producing.
Speaker 1: Because but isn't that interesting You just said my last
Speaker 1: four or five albums were of the best albums I've
Speaker 1: ever Do believe that?
Speaker 3: Sure you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you begin one of those albums between what period of.
Speaker 3: Time, nineteen nineteen eighty two and in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: So you recorded in an album in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: right before you got sixty.
Speaker 3: Five nineteen eighty five, nineteen years, I made five of
Speaker 3: the best albums. I finished an album while I was well,
Speaker 3: while I was down with the aneurysm. I finished an
Speaker 3: album there. I took my mind off my condition entirely.
Speaker 3: So it was very fortuitous that I had a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of stuff city in the in the can at
Speaker 3: the time, as they used to say. And the best
Speaker 3: one of the whole lot is Easter Midnight.
Speaker 1: Do you write songs now?
Speaker 3: I could? I always have four or five tunes on
Speaker 3: the back burner.
Speaker 1: Your wife is practically groaning behind your nodding herd like.
Speaker 3: Yes, of course, there's always tunes in the back burner.
Speaker 2: What a beautiful songs?
Speaker 1: What do you when you write songs?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: What do you write about? I just write right about
Speaker 1: jumping from one balcony to the other way to kill you.
Speaker 3: I just write write about women. I try to sound
Speaker 3: sound intelligent.
Speaker 1: You know what's on your mind? Now?
Speaker 3: Well, I was thinking about the but the one that
Speaker 3: has the turtle in it, I like that. I think
Speaker 3: she likes the fact that I introduced a turtle into
Speaker 3: this song. Is that the part that you like about it? Tartly,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, It's amazing. Your wife is this gorgeous young woman.
Speaker 1: And I realized the glue of this marriage is you
Speaker 1: write songs about turtles for your wife. That's amazing. I
Speaker 1: don't have that advantage.
Speaker 3: 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 turtle.
Speaker 3: I know, I know. It's it's like, come if you will. Well,
Speaker 3: the earth is still fertile, Lady, I see society through
Speaker 3: the eyes of a turtle. Turtles are soft and they've
Speaker 3: got feelings too. Maybe they think too quickly for me
Speaker 3: or for you, and it really doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: We got to end there, well maybe not, maybe.
Speaker 3: Not, just to show you the kind of stuff and okay,
Speaker 3: into the microphone.
Speaker 1: We well.
Speaker 3: Back to the table, lady, I see Marilyn Monroe and
Speaker 3: there Stans Clark Gable. He'll melt the cow, she'll stop
Speaker 3: the show. There's many a good hand felt, a chili
Speaker 3: wind blow, and it doesn't really matter. Don't ask her.
Speaker 3: You don't why I write that.
Speaker 2: Stuff, ask about for loving me?
Speaker 3: Nothing? Oh yeah, well, we'll see. I sang for twenty
Speaker 3: five years. But it's really a vicious it's it's just
Speaker 3: a very vicious song of unrecinded. Quite a love song,
Speaker 3: and it was it was read during the time when
Speaker 3: I was I was, I was still married, and I wondered,
Speaker 3: my goodness, what does my It was like almost like
Speaker 3: a Will Chamberlain. I've had a hundred more like you.
Speaker 3: I'll have a thousand and forum Through was one of
Speaker 3: the lines in it, and I was married to someone
Speaker 3: and I've you know, I hated singing the song, and
Speaker 3: finally I stopped singing it, the same way as I
Speaker 3: stopped drinking in nineteen eighty two. But even that only
Speaker 3: lasted for twenty three years.
Speaker 1: Didn't you sing it again? No, you don't sing the song.
Speaker 1: You won't sing going to a lot of people do,
Speaker 1: but other people record it.
Speaker 3: You won't sing it. Elvis, Elvis Presley for loving me.
Speaker 3: That's what you get for loving me.
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I look at these album covers.
Speaker 3: You are.
Speaker 1: You're one of the best of guys I've ever seen
Speaker 1: in my life. I mean, was that tough for you?
Speaker 1: That's a tough part of your career.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it helped you probably, I'm sure. I'm
Speaker 3: sure it did, But I'm sure sure.
Speaker 1: Best have what's next when you're going on the road again.
Speaker 3: Friday morning, I'll be a little blue. I can soon.
Speaker 4: There's still a lot of things, and I should.
Speaker 3: Know anyone can gain. I don't know how to friend
Speaker 3: my Saturday.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you
Speaker 1: by iHeart Radio.
Speaker 4: I feel at saying to watch them leave, I'll be cool,
Speaker 4: become because I don't know, really the happy times.
Speaker 1: Ago I can still put on
Speaker 4: My Saturday