Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: At times, I just don't know how you could feel
Speaker 1: anything but beautiful. Over the course of a career that
Speaker 1: has lasted more than fifty years, Canadian singer songwriter Gordon
Speaker 1: Lightfoot has achieved a global stardom and exceptional influence. Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan's a fan. About Lightfoot's songs, Dylan said, I can't
Speaker 1: think of any I don't like. These songs, which include Beautiful,
Speaker 1: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, If you could read
Speaker 1: My Mind and many others, have been treasured by generation
Speaker 1: is of popular musicians and listeners around the world. Many
Speaker 1: people know about the folk music revival that brought Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan to New York in the early nineteen sixties, but
Speaker 1: north of the border there was an equivalent explosion of
Speaker 1: talent at that time, and Lightfoot, who got his start
Speaker 1: singing in boys choirs, found himself heading to Canada's cultural
Speaker 1: capital to try his luck. Beautiful, Well, I was down
Speaker 1: in the in Toronto here looking for work, and I
Speaker 1: got a job as a coral performer and in a
Speaker 1: television series that was on every week, and at the
Speaker 1: same time I branched out and began working in the folk,
Speaker 1: uh oriented place, just because the the folk revival had
Speaker 1: occurred around about nineteen sixty and I would have been
Speaker 1: maybe twenty twenty years old there about one and uh
Speaker 1: so I'd be working on the TV show in the
Speaker 1: daytime and going and working at the coffee houses at night.
Speaker 1: You had a period we wrote jingles for commercials, correct
Speaker 1: I tried. They locked me in a room one time,
Speaker 1: a manager in a place on Madison Avenue and just
Speaker 1: left me there all afternoon. That well, I I wrote
Speaker 1: the commercial, but they didn't like it. They didn't play
Speaker 1: your version of the commercial. But you didn't, didn't You
Speaker 1: 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. Before my management company was in New York.
Speaker 1: I was one of the fortunate ones who was able
Speaker 1: to acquire a management situation south of the border, so
Speaker 1: to speak, down in the States, and I was in
Speaker 1: New York and it was a great manager. He recognized
Speaker 1: my songwriting ability immediately, and uh I got a couple
Speaker 1: of tunes to recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, and
Speaker 1: one of them went up to number five on the
Speaker 1: Board chart for for loving Me. That's what you get.
Speaker 1: Full of me, that's what you get. Everything head as
Speaker 1: you can see, that's what you give me. And so
Speaker 1: I was introduced to the industry in the States really
Speaker 1: as a songwriter before they even knew that I sang.
Speaker 1: You know, it was it sort of happened 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 and write music and
Speaker 1: was performing the goal all along? Did you want were
Speaker 1: you aching to do that? Oh? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: wanted to even as a child. You know, I didn't
Speaker 1: mind singing in my grandmother's house and the Sunday get together,
Speaker 1: you know that they would single me out and I
Speaker 1: would solo. I enjoyed the feel of the communication that
Speaker 1: I and I could fail it then, and uh, that's
Speaker 1: what I feel now ifel I feel a communication. I
Speaker 1: have a wonderful band and we have a great repertoire,
Speaker 1: and we just lay the stuff right out there for them,
Speaker 1: just pure joy. Yeah, joy doing that when when you
Speaker 1: were take care of off it pays the bills. That's
Speaker 1: a that's a desirable silver lining. There benefit 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, I
Speaker 1: was doing that, like like small time stuff. And all
Speaker 1: of a sudden I was asked to come to New
Speaker 1: York and open for Paul Butterfield concert sixty six thereabouts.
Speaker 1: I suppose you won the radio then recording. No, we
Speaker 1: didn't actually get on the radio until about seventy one.
Speaker 1: And what was the first song that? I mean? I
Speaker 1: have a list here, but what was it? If you
Speaker 1: could read my mind? If you could read my mind,
Speaker 1: you oh that goost is bea and I won't never
Speaker 1: be said free as long as I'm I'm a ghost,
Speaker 1: you can't see. The record was out. It was my
Speaker 1: first album on Warner Brothers, and uh it was out
Speaker 1: for eight months and there was no single, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, rather promotion guys said to his girlfriend,
Speaker 1: well listen to this and come back and give me
Speaker 1: an opinion. On Monday morning, his girlfriend, she likes, if
Speaker 1: you could read my mind, where the heart he's gone,
Speaker 1: the hero would be me. Hero often feel you won't
Speaker 1: read that book because they just do. If you could
Speaker 1: read my mind, hits the charts, so to speak, it
Speaker 1: becomes a big hit for you. What changes for you?
Speaker 1: Like did you just have to sit there and say, oh,
Speaker 1: I people are telling you to do things differently and
Speaker 1: now you're gonna be a success and they want you
Speaker 1: to we get so basically we got to hire an aircraft. Literally,
Speaker 1: that's what happened. We had to hire an aircraft. Everyone
Speaker 1: wants to book same give in the same place, two
Speaker 1: different places in one day. So and when you reach
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 something had
Speaker 1: to give eventually, and then, uh, one summer I wrote
Speaker 1: that song Sundown, and 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 were up to
Speaker 1: number one. That was our second one. That it was
Speaker 1: almost seven two albums later that we had the wreck
Speaker 1: of the Avan Fitzgerald. And that happened all by itself too.
Speaker 1: That became a responsibility. It did very large responsibility, became
Speaker 1: a responsible Fitzgerald. But but tell me in your own words.
Speaker 1: Many people go on about that, about the tragedy and
Speaker 1: the history, and it's a very important song to people,
Speaker 1: you know, doing Canadian history. People talk about it very reverentially.
Speaker 1: Why was it important to you? Because it was only
Speaker 1: one verse, uh contained any conjecture of any kind, and
Speaker 1: the rest of it was taken from directly from newspaper
Speaker 1: articles and the aftermath, which only lasted for about three days.
Speaker 1: If I had not wrote that song, everybody would have
Speaker 1: forgotten about it a week after it happened. Uh, I said,
Speaker 1: people are all around the Great Lakes area are going
Speaker 1: to wonder if this song is appropriate, And some did
Speaker 1: wonder about it, whether it was appropriate for me to
Speaker 1: have written a song of that kind. But I had gone, uh,
Speaker 1: pretty much with the newspaper articles that I scraped up.
Speaker 1: We had no CPS in those days. And you went
Speaker 1: back that, you went to the publisher and got the
Speaker 1: back copies of the newspapers, and uh, so it's it's accurate.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's accurate in the way the story unfolds.
Speaker 1: I remember the night I wrote it. I was working
Speaker 1: in a deserted house, and there was there was a
Speaker 1: heck of a windstorm going on right in Toronto that night,
Speaker 1: and I remember myself wondering, g I wonder what it's
Speaker 1: like up on the on the Great Lakes right now,
Speaker 1: because I sailed up there myself. I had a couple
Speaker 1: of two different sailboats up there, and I wondered always,
Speaker 1: I wonder what the Great Lakes are like tonight, because
Speaker 1: you're always hearing, but what things happening up in the
Speaker 1: Great Lakes. And eleven o'clock in the evening, there was
Speaker 1: a report of a ship sinking three hours earlier in
Speaker 1: Lake Superior. And they're out looking for the people and
Speaker 1: they never found any of them, and uh, twenty nine
Speaker 1: people gone. And I had a melody and I had
Speaker 1: some chords that I was knocking around in this deserted
Speaker 1: house with the wind howling outside. My Really, it was
Speaker 1: kind of kind of a classic sitting to to write
Speaker 1: a song like that. So I began writing the song
Speaker 1: and finished writing like two or three weeks later. We
Speaker 1: were right in the middle of a recording a series
Speaker 1: of recording sessions at the times that we put it in,
Speaker 1: and it didn't work. The first day. We put it
Speaker 1: in the second day and uh, did you ever stomp
Speaker 1: and Tom Connors? No, I will. Now I'm gonna run
Speaker 1: down get all of stomping. Tom Connor. He was recording.
Speaker 1: He was one of our very famous Canadian folk artists.
Speaker 1: Stomping Tom Connor's poaches hit and so that sounds like
Speaker 1: a hit. He just heard the the elogy going like
Speaker 1: he didn't heard the lyrics or anything, so that the
Speaker 1: appeal of the song is definitely in the melody and
Speaker 1: the card changes, and then the story of the actual
Speaker 1: event itself. I got as accurately as I could by
Speaker 1: pursuing old news articles. The wind and the wires made
Speaker 1: the tattle tale sound in the wave roble. The really
Speaker 1: every man who asked the captain did was the witch
Speaker 1: should love? And stealing the dunk came late in the
Speaker 1: breakfast had to wait when the girls in November came
Speaker 1: slashing afternoon came at the squeeze and rain in the
Speaker 1: pace of herdricay in west wind? What was recording and
Speaker 1: performing music like back then? Did it seems im blur
Speaker 1: to you? Is it? Is it? What was it like
Speaker 1: for you to be you and do what you do
Speaker 1: in the early days as compared to later on into
Speaker 1: now for that matter. The first time I started doing it,
Speaker 1: I felt like not confident in what I was doing,
Speaker 1: what I was hearing, I didn't I didn't like what
Speaker 1: I was hearing of your own stuff. Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: the sound of the sound of my voice bothered me.
Speaker 1: And you know, I I started working on that stuff
Speaker 1: and I and I have been working on it ever since,
Speaker 1: on my vocal and I have worked on my my
Speaker 1: antonation on my instruments. Someone told me that that when
Speaker 1: you land, because you perform in so many different areas,
Speaker 1: you really dwell on tuning your instruments a lot. Correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes I changed it around too. But but but I've
Speaker 1: learned through the years that there is a method that
Speaker 1: you can get me into into Scarborough fair Country, you know,
Speaker 1: like the like the sound that Simon and Garth Uncle
Speaker 1: used to get on there acoustic orchestral ranges that they
Speaker 1: put together for their songs. And uh actually only came
Speaker 1: it came real for me maybe six or seven years
Speaker 1: ago after I was recovering from a mini stroke that
Speaker 1: I had and I had to practice a lot more
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, So it really got me zero
Speaker 1: in on it, and it it all comes down to
Speaker 1: the fifth and the octaves. You know, just leave it
Speaker 1: at that. I'm just a handmaiden here for all you
Speaker 1: guitar people out there. That's Gordon Lightfoot's gift to you
Speaker 1: and his present to you. That's the fifth and the octaves.
Speaker 1: And I don't have one day fifth and the I
Speaker 1: don't know what the hell he's talking about, but there
Speaker 1: it is. There's his message to you today. McCartney told
Speaker 1: me when I spoke to him once, Paul told me
Speaker 1: that he said in the beginning they would go into
Speaker 1: a recording studio of the Beatles, and he said, you know,
Speaker 1: it was really these weren't his words, but the message
Speaker 1: was kind of like time is money. So these guys
Speaker 1: were luck. You know, we want two songs in the morning,
Speaker 1: and then you go have a lunch break and go
Speaker 1: down to the pub and you have a cigarette, you
Speaker 1: have a pufficient chips or where you come back. They
Speaker 1: want two songs. And after they really moved along at
Speaker 1: a clip when they were doing the first albums for
Speaker 1: Parlophone or whoever it was, or E. M. I. And
Speaker 1: then 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
Speaker 1: whatever one really really luxuriate and getting every name, and
Speaker 1: they gave them more time because it was worth. It
Speaker 1: was worth that investment for them. Was the same true
Speaker 1: with you. Do you find that the more successful you became,
Speaker 1: the 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: It was always an improvement venture like a guy building
Speaker 1: himself up and for playing an important sports team. You
Speaker 1: 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 the
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 on your toes. You know you can't
Speaker 1: do that. But but I remember reading I remember listening
Speaker 1: to an article. I remember reading an article that the
Speaker 1: Rolling Stones did years ago, and I was taken by
Speaker 1: how you know, in terms of musicianship, Jagger and Keith
Speaker 1: for two, were very, very married to rehearsal. And for
Speaker 1: you to say that that as a great meaning to me.
Speaker 1: For you, someone who as great an artist as you are,
Speaker 1: that the preparation and the preparation aforehand so that when
Speaker 1: you when the audience is there, bloom, you strum that
Speaker 1: guitar and you're you're ready. You're ready, yeah, and we
Speaker 1: we have the the artistra itself. I have four really
Speaker 1: challenged guys and very loyal people. I read about that
Speaker 1: your band is very loyal to you. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: it's that there's no reason why they should not be.
Speaker 1: You know, we're all we're all the same path. I mean,
Speaker 1: we we just want to do a great job and
Speaker 1: you gotta make it almost make a science out of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. My guys are all professionals. I mean
Speaker 1: they're they're serious musicians. Yeah, yeah, and they do other things.
Speaker 1: 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? Well, I was as the country music, you know,
Speaker 1: hack Snow and then folks. It was Pete Seeger, and
Speaker 1: it was Bob Gibson. It was Bob Dylan, and and
Speaker 1: Simon and Garfuncle and you know Peter Paulamary and and
Speaker 1: Ian and Sylvia. They were a duet and they were
Speaker 1: it was a beautiful act that they had. Eventually you
Speaker 1: met these people, well, I met when you became one
Speaker 1: of them my management company, because they were the first
Speaker 1: ever to do one do any of my songs. It
Speaker 1: was Ian and Syphia which one for Loving Me and
Speaker 1: Early Morning Rain. I found an opening with the Folk Revival,
Speaker 1: you know, so I was lucky to be a part
Speaker 1: of that, to write that one through and survive. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's there's nothing much out there these days. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're busking. We We've got to a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of people here in Toronto who are horvering around
Speaker 1: all the time, that the folk oriented artists who are
Speaker 1: songwriters and you know, trying to get somewhere, and some
Speaker 1: of some of them are succeeding in summer or not.
Speaker 1: I get to hear a lot of the stuff because
Speaker 1: it comes across my desk and I get to hear it,
Speaker 1: and you wish, you know that something grant could happen
Speaker 1: for these people, but you don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: Alegandrews 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 too, you know, like bars
Speaker 1: and lounges as well as the coffee houses. And so
Speaker 1: I had a the kind of a repertoire that was
Speaker 1: acceptable to play a bar. So I got him following
Speaker 1: in a couple of these bars. Then then I've started
Speaker 1: moved uptown into the the village area of Yorkville, which
Speaker 1: was just coming into bloom here in town, and get
Speaker 1: into places like like the Purple Onion, and then the
Speaker 1: river Boat, which was really the plumb of the whole lot,
Speaker 1: was the Riverboat. Because Bernie Feeder brought every person into
Speaker 1: that place. You could fastly imagine played there James Taylor
Speaker 1: to Joni Mitchell, to to Neil Young, right on down
Speaker 1: the line, is he is he a friend of yours? Yes?
Speaker 1: He is? Yeah, your songs and you're singing of your song,
Speaker 1: you're 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? Right, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you that a lot of times you don't know
Speaker 1: what you're doing it. You've you you're drawing the material
Speaker 1: from your subconscious You don't you don't actually know what
Speaker 1: 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 brought it on. I mean, that's like if you
Speaker 1: could read my mind, just it's about actually the the
Speaker 1: crumbling of a relation with that painful for you to
Speaker 1: write No, because I didn't know what I was doing
Speaker 1: when I wrote it. It It just I didn't tell me
Speaker 1: that all these beautiful folks songs that people weep when
Speaker 1: they listen to, you're just like tossing it off, like
Speaker 1: I don't really know what this is. Let's take a
Speaker 1: song for example. Let me let me pick one song
Speaker 1: and one of my favorite songs of yours. I mean
Speaker 1: a song that I just kills me is beautiful described
Speaker 1: to me recording the song beautiful, I mean you go
Speaker 1: out with your friends and you get ship faced drunk,
Speaker 1: and you come in with a hangover and just lay
Speaker 1: this thing down and you play poker roll 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 se octaves. Then I get the lyric. You
Speaker 1: got the melody, you got the cards, but you don't know,
Speaker 1: so you draw. You find an idea that that that
Speaker 1: 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 a
Speaker 1: sincere love turned to a guy for his wife or
Speaker 1: his his girlfriend. It reminds me when when I was
Speaker 1: I learned how to sing with the emotion. When I
Speaker 1: was about twelve, when I was doing handling material from
Speaker 1: Handles Messiah over the voice of Him who Criss and
Speaker 1: the Wilderness and all that sort of thing, and I
Speaker 1: learned what emotion meant when when I were saying handle
Speaker 1: Handles Messiah. At age twelve, I sent a competition, uh
Speaker 1: so so I could apply. It was easier for me
Speaker 1: to apply to summon up that emotional uh something or
Speaker 1: whatever it is when it came time to put that
Speaker 1: song down. But I didn't have it 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 emotional approach to it and making it
Speaker 1: work for me. You don't want to overdo it, you know,
Speaker 1: you don't to get do you know? I think that's
Speaker 1: what's beautiful about your music is you go right up
Speaker 1: to a point, but you don't do a lot of handholding.
Speaker 1: You let the audience do the crying for you. You
Speaker 1: know what I mean, you're your We we balance it
Speaker 1: off with a lot of toe chappers. For a prime
Speaker 1: example of the delivery Gordon Lightfoot does so well. You
Speaker 1: don't have to look beyond this song sundown. I can
Speaker 1: see you back in setting this where you do what
Speaker 1: you don't confess you better ticket coming up. Lightfoot talks
Speaker 1: about some of his musical inspirations. It explains why he
Speaker 1: and Bob Dylan didn't get along right away. Explore the
Speaker 1: Here's the Thing archives. I talk with a very different
Speaker 1: kind of song writer, Tom York from the British rock
Speaker 1: band Radiohead. He tells me how his producer gave him
Speaker 1: the confidence to explore wild new electronics sounds. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was like, um, a kid being given a hammer.
Speaker 1: I was just hamming rely on stuff. I didn't really
Speaker 1: know what I was doing, but he was kind of
Speaker 1: fascinated about that, you know, and he'd come and literally
Speaker 1: tidy up the mess. Take a listen at Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing dot Org. I'm telling you that you beautiful. This
Speaker 1: is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Gordon Lightfoot has straddled the worlds of pop and folk
Speaker 1: music for decades, but his confessional songwriting appealed to country
Speaker 1: music performers like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Jr. And Glenn
Speaker 1: Campbell as well. They all covered his songs. And there's
Speaker 1: good reason that's what Lightfoot was listening to when he
Speaker 1: started thinking about what kind of musician he wanted to be.
Speaker 1: It was probably a country music I made the crossover
Speaker 1: into adult contemporary music, you know, fairly soon. And there
Speaker 1: was a lot of good writing going on in the
Speaker 1: 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. Think you want to find
Speaker 1: your own voice. Yeah I didn't. I certainly did not
Speaker 1: take light of the fact that I was really influenced
Speaker 1: by Bob Dylan because of the not only the quality
Speaker 1: of the work, but the the output that they achieved.
Speaker 1: He was prolific. Yeah, that was the amazing part. But
Speaker 1: and it said, oh, it can be that easy for him,
Speaker 1: I must surely be be easier for me. I mean,
Speaker 1: if he can do this much work, surely I can
Speaker 1: can do this much work. Will appreciating the music that
Speaker 1: he was producing at the time. When did you first
Speaker 1: meet him? Uh, nineteen? Was that like in Woodstock? Well,
Speaker 1: it was a it was an interesting time. I we
Speaker 1: actually didn't didn't get along when we when we first there,
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: he got a little sarcastic about it, and we were
Speaker 1: all he was very sarcastic, and I started seeing this
Speaker 1: coming on to me and I left. I left their
Speaker 1: their house. I went back down the hill to Albert's house.
Speaker 1: Albert's Albert Grossman, who he was the manager. I had
Speaker 1: to be sure part of that stable stable sons to say,
Speaker 1: said to him. For so many years after that, because
Speaker 1: we're all working in the same place. I became sort
Speaker 1: of party party central for them when they when they
Speaker 1: came to Toronto, which was often, and with the band
Speaker 1: and everybody, and we had a great time, and I
Speaker 1: you know, it was good to have known have known
Speaker 1: Bob um. Is it safe to say because I've read
Speaker 1: this in different articles and so forth when I was
Speaker 1: reading up about you. Um, then when you say you
Speaker 1: got together and had a good time, was there a
Speaker 1: period of your life where you had too much of
Speaker 1: a good time? Well, I mean there was lots of
Speaker 1: drinking went on there. There was a little bit of everything.
Speaker 1: It just depended upon how severely were affected by it
Speaker 1: and what kind of a constitution that you possessed. I did.
Speaker 1: I drank heavily right up until and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden I stopped. And I asked how I stopped
Speaker 1: for twenty three years because it was good. I was
Speaker 1: going to ruin my career and I was making unrrational,
Speaker 1: irrational decisions. And one night I tried to climb from
Speaker 1: from one balcony to the next in an apartment building
Speaker 1: on the tenth floor. Sure, as a party going on,
Speaker 1: and what you want to go from one? I love that?
Speaker 1: What was a better party in that other wing over there?
Speaker 1: Say 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 your
Speaker 1: leg or something? Who knows 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 the
Speaker 1: Fitzgerald I said, I hope I'm not going to offend
Speaker 1: any of the relatives of these men. You know. Was
Speaker 1: he never communicated to you that you had Did anybody
Speaker 1: suggest that? No? No, it never appreciated what you've been honored.
Speaker 1: We we just went to the fort anniversary ourselves just
Speaker 1: this last novembery week. Where was it? Health Lake Superior,
Speaker 1: up fifteen miles thirty miles northwest of South Say Marie
Speaker 1: at the white Fish Point. Wow. Um, you know you
Speaker 1: have had some very impactful health issues. You had a
Speaker 1: stroke and then you had Bell's palsy and you couldn't
Speaker 1: have what's it like to lose feeling in your fingers
Speaker 1: and you were a guitar player? Well, asked me what
Speaker 1: it was like when I had the ortal aneurism. Okay,
Speaker 1: what was it like when you had the a ortal anyism. Well,
Speaker 1: putting me out of business for two years didn't really? Yeah,
Speaker 1: business for two What do here? Was that two thousand
Speaker 1: and two? What were the symptoms of that? You pass
Speaker 1: out and you don't wake up, I mean the annualism
Speaker 1: bursts for six weeks. What were you feeling in the
Speaker 1: weeks prior? I would have bouts of stomach ache and
Speaker 1: I'd have to lay out on my belly on the
Speaker 1: bed for a while. Yeah, then I would subside. And
Speaker 1: that went on over a period of several years, and
Speaker 1: it started about ten years before the actually event occurred.
Speaker 1: So there is a warning, there is there's third warning
Speaker 1: signals it's a pain, pretty bad stomach ache and lights.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was years ago. That yeah, seventy two, I
Speaker 1: think they're about Yeah. I had to stop performing for
Speaker 1: three months and then I got enough of a where
Speaker 1: stopped puffing enough that I was able to go back
Speaker 1: to work again. So I just I just bolted boulder
Speaker 1: through so so to speak. And then you had a stroke.
Speaker 1: Gradually came back that that was a mini stroke that
Speaker 1: effected my right hand, which was very disturbing. That wasn't
Speaker 1: two thousand six, That was when I really started practicing,
Speaker 1: and that's when I really improved, learned how to really
Speaker 1: get my instruments in tune at the same time. So
Speaker 1: I derived a benefit from from that. How do American
Speaker 1: radio interview hosts differ from Canadian radio interview hosts. No
Speaker 1: difference that I can see, No difference. Folks are folks.
Speaker 1: I always appreciated the cousins cousins here in North America.
Speaker 1: You're not political, that's probably I never moved down there.
Speaker 1: I've I've got, I've I've follow I'm I'm I'm a
Speaker 1: political fan. I'm a fan of of watching the political process. Observer. Well,
Speaker 1: you you had the situation with the song in Detroit
Speaker 1: Black Day in July. Yeah, been from the Detroit Riots
Speaker 1: and you wrote a song about that and then cause
Speaker 1: you a little bit of a Grief and the record
Speaker 1: we released a single. Did you and you do feel
Speaker 1: that that was something that you resented or like, how
Speaker 1: did you feel when you got pulled? I kind of
Speaker 1: shouldn't have done that. It was almost like like the wreck,
Speaker 1: well like like it was, uh, well, I should have.
Speaker 1: I was working in the city a lot, in the
Speaker 1: always circuit. There there was something but I kept saying,
Speaker 1: maybe I shouldn't have written a song like this. You know,
Speaker 1: it was written as a folk song for an album.
Speaker 1: The record of the Fitzgerald was written as a folk
Speaker 1: song for an album. And the political purposes as signed
Speaker 1: by other people. You didn't have a political purpose when
Speaker 1: you wrote the song interesting, just a story. And the
Speaker 1: soul of Motive City is spared across the land, is
Speaker 1: taken in the heads of the son of the fathers
Speaker 1: who came into this lack And when when the record
Speaker 1: company took the song off the air, so it didn't
Speaker 1: piss you off. The record company's 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, I never
Speaker 1: bothered you. Well, we saw we always worked that out together.
Speaker 1: You did, yeah, uh, with with the exceptions that's necessary.
Speaker 1: Early in the career too, before I had and the
Speaker 1: level of authority that I that I needed to establish,
Speaker 1: I was in, I was produced and I and I uh,
Speaker 1: I used to be able to discuss the custom discuss
Speaker 1: things with them there and very fortunately fortunately to be
Speaker 1: able to do that. What song that when you sing it,
Speaker 1: you could sit there and go, Man, I really really
Speaker 1: nailed that. That's a good song. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of them, But what's one that just comes out of
Speaker 1: East of midnight, East of midnight, East of midnight. That's
Speaker 1: that's one of my my very best ones. But midnight,
Speaker 1: west of anywhere around. I don't do that. I usual
Speaker 1: to do it. No, don't you know why I don't
Speaker 1: do it, though you're such a funny East at midnight's
Speaker 1: my best song, man, I don't do that. If I
Speaker 1: did it for years. This is my last four or
Speaker 1: five albums are probably the five best albums I made,
Speaker 1: But unfortunately my my momentum had run out with the
Speaker 1: record company at that point. But I still kept producing
Speaker 1: because it isn't that interesting. You just said my last
Speaker 1: four or five albums with the best albums I've ever
Speaker 1: do really believe that? Sure you do? Yeah, you'd become
Speaker 1: one of those albums between what period of time nineteen
Speaker 1: Nino and in two thousand and six? Do you recorded
Speaker 1: in an album in two thousand six, right before you
Speaker 1: got sick? Five five nineteen years, I made five of
Speaker 1: the best albums I've finished an album while I was
Speaker 1: when I was down with the aneurism. I finished an
Speaker 1: 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 h and the can
Speaker 1: at the time, as they used to say, And the
Speaker 1: best one of the whole lot is East Midnight. Do
Speaker 1: you write songs now? I could? I always have four
Speaker 1: or five tunes on the on the back. Your wife
Speaker 1: is practically groaning behind your nodding head, like, yes, of course,
Speaker 1: there's always tunes in the back burner, beautiful songs. What
Speaker 1: do you when you write songs? Now? What do you
Speaker 1: write about? I just very read jumping from one to
Speaker 1: the other, want to kill you? I just write about
Speaker 1: whims there. I try to sound sound intelligent. Yeah, what's
Speaker 1: on your mind? Though? Well, I was thinking about the
Speaker 1: but the one that has the turtle in it. I
Speaker 1: like that. I think she likes to think that I
Speaker 1: introduced a turtle into this song. Is that the further
Speaker 1: you're liking about it? Darling? You know you know what
Speaker 1: I'm seeing. It's it's amazing. Your wife is this gorgeous
Speaker 1: young woman, and I realized the glue of this marriage
Speaker 1: is you write songs about turtles for your wife. It's
Speaker 1: that don't have that advantage, that 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 the song for your baby, song
Speaker 1: 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 society through the eyes of a turtle. Turtles
Speaker 1: are soft and they they've got feelings too. Maybe they
Speaker 1: think too correctly for me or for you, and it
Speaker 1: really doesn't matter. We gotta end there maybe well maybe not,
Speaker 1: maybe not, just to show you the kind of a
Speaker 1: stuff and okay, into the microphone. Many well, back to
Speaker 1: 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 know
Speaker 1: why I write that stuff? Asked him about for loving me?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, we'll see. I I sang for twenty
Speaker 1: five years. But it's really vicious. It's it's it's just
Speaker 1: a very vicious. The song of a un quite a
Speaker 1: love song, and it was. It was written during the
Speaker 1: time when I was I was, I was still married,
Speaker 1: and I wondered, my goodness, what what does my It
Speaker 1: was like almost like a wild Chamberlain. I've had a
Speaker 1: hundred more like you. I'll have a thousand four him
Speaker 1: through it was one of the lines in it. And
Speaker 1: I was married to someone, and I, you know, I
Speaker 1: hated singing the song, and finally I stopped singing it
Speaker 1: the same way as I stopped drinking in But even
Speaker 1: that only lasted for twenty three years. Been sang it again. No,
Speaker 1: you don't sing the song, you won't think a lot
Speaker 1: of people do. But other people recorded singing Elvis Elvis
Speaker 1: press for loving me. That's what you get for loving me.
Speaker 1: I gotta say, I look at these album covers. You're
Speaker 1: You're one of the best loping guys I've ever seen
Speaker 1: in my life. I mean, was that tough for you?
Speaker 1: To tough part of your career? Well? I think it
Speaker 1: helped you probably, I'm sure. I'm sure it did, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure sure what's next? When are you going on
Speaker 1: the road again? Friday Morning, A little Blue. There's still
Speaker 1: a lot of things and I should know anyone can
Speaker 1: get I don't know how to friend my Saturday Lo.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to here's
Speaker 1: the Thing I feel, saying to watch them leave go
Speaker 1: because I don't believe the happy times. Agoe, I can
Speaker 1: still boot mysel