Lightfoot delights SPAC; performs at Lenox tonight
by Eric Freedman, The Knickerbocker News, September 1, 1978
If you didn’t make it to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Thursday night, the place to be tonight is at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., to hear Gordon Lightfoot in his finest form.
Canada’s best-known pop musician is on tour again, refreshed by a five-week canoe trek through the wilderness of northern Ontario, and he’s putting on the best show of the three we’ve seen so far.
Reinforced by an excellent four-piece back-up band, including Terry Clements, an outstanding guitarist, Lightfoot is weaving a flowing continuity of both old and recent songs. There are numbers from his latest album, Endless Wire, as well as the title cut from slightly earlier releases, “Sundown” and “Summertime Dream.” And, of course, he sings his best-known ballad of the past decade, the melancholy and haunting “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Although many fans are not fully satisfied with his latest works, they are not far apart in style and imagery from the early songs which paved the blond guitarist’s road to fame. Even so, those early works won the most enthusiastic responses from the SPAC audience and should do the same tonight at Tanglewood.
At one point, Lightfoot reaches more than a decade into the past and retrieves “Early Morning Rain,” which he wrote and which Peter, Paul and Mary made famous. Most of the program, however, is devoted to songs he wrote and recorded himself such as “Christian Island,” “Old Dan’s Records” and the evocative “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” which he used for his SPAC encore.
He opened heavily, concentrating on the music, making few comments and cutting into the applause after one song to quickly begin the next. As the performance progressed, however, Lightfoot began talking more, bantering with the audience and, at one point, delaying a song to clench a rose from an admirer between his teeth.
But the music was the thing, and perhaps it is no song more than “Don Quixote” which reflects the magnetism of Lightfoot’s sense of both music and lyrics. It is a piece which makes his listeners look at themselves and see themselves as descendants of Cervantes’ hero, facing their own daily inquisitions, seeking their own worthy missions and tilting at their personal windmills.
Touring with Lightfoot are the Good Brothers, a bluegrass and country group also hailing from north of the border. There are actually three Good brothers who are talented vocalists and who play the banjo, autoharp and guitar, with four back-up instrumentalists.
It seems that concert organizers too often schedule an inappropriate warm-up act before the feature attraction, putting the audience on edge and detracting from the star. Not so with the Good Brothers, who are both friends of Lightfoot and an appropriate introduction. Their 45-minute program ranges from original numbers to classics such as “Orange Blossom Special” and a semi-comic version of “Dueling Banjos.” They also ended their set with Lightfoot’s own “Alberta Bound.”
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