In Gordon Lightfoot’s high school yearbook, under the heading “probable destination,” the Canadian icon wrote: “diaper washer.” Author Dave Bidini thinks what the singer actually meant was: “I am Gordon Lightfoot. I will do whatever the fuck I want and no one is going to tell me otherwise.” Gordon Lightfoot was so uncool that he was cool. When rock’n’roll captivated the imagination of every teenager in North America, Lightfoot decided to sing in a barbershop quartet. When every folkie was going electric, Lightfoot added syrupy strings. When all his peers moved to L.A., Lightfoot stayed in Canada. Even weirder–he occasionally wrote songs about Canada, something that just wasn’t done in pop music at the time. That last point no doubt registered most strongly with Bidini, whose band the Rheostatics took a lot of flak for doing the same in the early ’90s, just as Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip were about to bury that stigma for good. Everyone in the Canadian music industry has a Gordon Lightfoot story. Some of them are first-hand encounters, some are urban legends, some are well-documented. Some celebrate the success of the small-town Ontario boy who became the first Canadian pop star of the ’60s singer/songwriter generation. Some portray the star in moments of spontaneous generosity. Some are candidly hilarious. And more than a few portray the legendary songwriter as an aloof control freak, a misogynist and an angry drunk. What would Gordon Lightfoot say himself? What a tale his thoughts could tell! We’ll never know; it’s highly unlikely that the notoriously private figure will ever write an autobiography. Dave Bidini took it upon himself to write Lightfoot’s “not-a-biography.” Writing Gordon Lightfoot is not titled Writing About Gordon Lightfoot for a reason. Bidini has penned a book-length, second-person letter to Gordon Lightfoot, a personal and somewhat rambling examination on Lightfoot’s life–and much, much more. In other words, Dave Bidini does whatever the fuck he wants to do with Lightfoot’s life story, and no one is going to tell him he can’t: not his publisher, not Lightfoot’s lawyers, not you. Bidini didn’t talk to Lightfoot directly while writing this book. In conversation, Bidini admits that neither he nor his publisher ever really thought he would. And yet in the text, Bidini harps on the matter, almost needling Lightfoot about his reluctance to spill the beans. Much of the book features Bidini–very much a character in the book’s meta-narrative–engaging in conjecture about crucial junctures in Lightfoot’s life. But had Bidini actually scored an interview, Writing Gordon Lightfoot would have been a comparatively dull read. “Judging from interviews I’ve seen or heard [with Lightfoot],” says Bidini, “you don’t get a lot back from him. He’s hard to get inside. He hasn’t done a lot of press. I think media, too, were exasperated because a) he was a bit of a dick to them, largely, and b) he’s uncomfortable and not really a great interview. And so because there was all this space, I was able to fill it with all these untruths.” The result is a slightly more fantastical take on what journalists call a “write-around”–writing a profile piece without access to its subject–and Bidini makes the most of the situation, pondering Lightfoot’s motives and mysteries and personal history, intertwining it with the author’s own experiences as a musician and music fan. Bidini situates much of the book in the week of July 10, 1972, the five days leading up to the 16th Mariposa Festival on Toronto Island, which was unexpectedly crashed by returning hometown heroes Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Lightfoot–all at arguably the height of their creative lives. Most notably, the god of them all descended from the heavens and showed up on Centre Island that weekend: Lightfoot’s friend and fan Bob Dylan. The local heroes were one thing, and not really that unexpected. But Dylan’s presence–at a time when he had largely dropped out of the public eye–inspired adults to drool like star-struck teenyboppers in his presence, altering the tone of a festival that had gone out of its way to avoid celebrity and focus on pure folk music–to not “stoke the star-making machinery behind the popular song,” as Joni might put it. Bidini doesn’t stop there. He postulates that this all had something to do with a rupture in the time/space continuum when a solar eclipse, the Cold War, international hockey, the twilight of Trudeaumania, nuclear weapons testing, the Rolling Stones and the biggest prison break in Canadian history all acted as a precursor to this historic moment in Canadian music. It’s a stretch, and a bold gamble that largely pays off–and is infinitely more entertaining than a straight-up bio would be. By using a single musical moment to link various disparate threads together, there’s a minor resemblance to Lipstick Traces, the egghead-y book by Greil Marcus about the Sex Pistols–that’s not really about the Sex Pistols at all, but uses their final gig as a springboard to discuss avant-garde 20th-century art. Bidini says he hasn’t read Lipstick Traces. “The Mariposa moment I knew I could peg Gord’s story around,” he explains. “Because of the biographical nature of the book, I wanted to focus on a period in his life–the ’70s, for a lot of reasons. So those other stories provided a backdrop behind him, him in relief against ’72. If there was any kind of interlocking, that was great. If there wasn’t, that’s okay. I wanted the other stories to be more evocative than to be proving anything.” One of Bidini’s more successful tangents it talking about Pierre Trudeau, and his effect on Canadian music: not only did CanCon regulations for radio come into effect in 1971, but Trudeau elevated Canadian musicians to the same cultural level as poets and playwrights. His young wife Maggie dragged the prime minister out to see bands like Crowbar (“Oh, What a Feeling”), which led to that band playing Maple Leaf Gardens as Trudeau’s opening act at a sold-out political rally. Sure, one can easily imagine Nickelback stumping for Stephen Harper–though it’s impossible to imagine Harper himself selling out an arena on his own. In July 1972, Trudeau called his first election since the sweep of Trudeaumania in 1968, and faced a more volatile electorate, one that would only grant him a minority government. “Trudeau represented all that ’60s optimism,” muses Bidini, “and in the early ’70s people were waiting for the payoff and it wasn’t really happening. I think that resulted in a certain amount of discontent in the country. The gilding was off the lily of ’67. It’s a great loss-of-innocence year. The country was becoming more mature. It was no longer this sweet, colonial place. We started to grow breasts and pubic hair.” Think of the Toronto we know today, and so much of it was born in 1972. City-TV went on the air with a mix of countercultural programming that celebrated our city’s eccentricities. A production of the musical Godspell spawned the Second City comedy troupe here, launching the careers of Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrew Martin, Gilda Radner, Paul Shaffer and others. Provocative art group General Idea had started staging cross-dressing, ironic beauty pageants at the Art Gallery of Ontario (currently hosting a must-see retrospective of the group). With the lowering of the drinking age to 18 from 21, music shifted out of the folkie Yorkville scene into a heavier bar rock sound. And yet all of these were still baby steps in the city’s cultural maturation. Bidini says Toronto was still a tiny town when the Rheostatics started playing in 1980. “We took our first demo to Ready Records, who had put out Blue Peter,” he recalls. “That was like going to the Brill Building, just going to this guy’s house on Rogers Road. Or going to CFNY when they were out in Brampton, it was a huge deal. The whole scale now is completely different. But it’s important to remember those times when we were so colonial, so small, so insecure. That helps us celebrate what we have now.” Writing Gordon Lightfoot is as much about Toronto as it is about Lightfoot. In that sense, it belongs on the shelf beside Nicholas Jennings’ Before the Gold Rush, Carole Pope’s autobiography or Liz Worth’s Treat Me Like Dirt as part of a secret and wild history about what Toronto the Good was actually like back then, stories unknown to even the current crop of municipal boosters, the Torontopians and Spacing Magazine enthusiasts. Bidini says, “I wanted it to be a Toronto book, for sure,” he says. “At least I wanted it to sound like a voice of Toronto. It’s a bit like when R.E.M. has their choruses: Mike Mills is always singing a second chorus underneath Michael Stipe’s lead vocal. I remember someone saying to me about R.E.M. is that you get to pick which chorus you want to listen to, and they’re both really good. I was thinking of this book along the same lines. You can really invest in the Lightfoot letters, or you can invest in everything else; if you invest in both, it’s a successful book.” __ Michael Barclay is the co-author of Have Not Been the Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995, reissued this year by ECW Press and writes the blog radio free canuckistan. This is his first article for the Toronto Standard.
