Back in fighting form
With medical setbacks far behind him, Gordon Lightfoot hits the stage tonight
Posted By JOHN SWARTZ, SPECIAL TO THE PACKET AND TIMES
Posted 9 months ago
When Gordon Lightfoot performs at the Opera House tonight and tomorrow night, he'll already have the order of the songs he'll do worked out, including the requests.
So it is when your songbook is full of hits and it's a rarity that someone doesn't ask for one of them.
"If I have to field any requests, I can fit them in without taking my sequence too badly out of line," Lightfoot said in an exclusive interview with The Packet & Times.
"This time I already have two or three requests for the Orillia show -- like my little second cousin, Jessie Vick. She needs to hear Pony Man. She's 11 years old and Pony Man is one of her favourite tunes."
These two concerts, just days before his 71st birthday on Tuesday, are benefits for the Soldiers' Memorial Hospital Foundation and the Opera House.
"I always have done that ever since I started doing those concerts in Orillia -- split the money between the hospital and the hall itself."
As luck would have it, they fall just days before Lightfoot's annual Massey Hall series of concerts, which take place next week.
"I think a lot of my relatives are going to be there. This year, they've decided to come to the Orillia show. Normally, they would have come down to Massey."
One of those is likely to be Steve Eyers. Eyers is one half of a popular nightclub duo called Even Steven. The other half is Steve McEown and McEown wrote a song called I Used to be a Country Singer, which Lightfoot recorded.
"We'll be doing their tune. We'll be doing that one for sure. They won't have to ask."
Surely, there are few Canadians who don't know Lightfoot suffered an abdominal aneurysm in his dressing room at the Opera House in 2002. Once the shock subsided for fans, the concern was -- would Lightfoot ever perform again? -- which, of course, he has.
But few know that Lightfoot had another brush with illness.
In September 2006, Lightfoot suffered a stroke while doing a sound check prior to a show in Escanaba, Mich.
"I was blasting out In My Fashion. I remember it quite well."
"That's a very little-known episode. I never talk about it much. It was a bit of an inconvenience."
"I lost the use of my right hand and arm for about three-and-a-half months."
But, as serious as it sounds, Lightfoot didn't cancel one show on that mid-western United States tour.
"The band carried the back up and I just fingered chords with the left hand. After about the fifth day, I started to get the strum back and we got some rosin at a music store, the kind of rosin you put on a bow for a fiddle, got that and put that on the picks and it helped me hold onto the flat pick and I just used the thumb on my right hand for the next two months. The thumb was working but the fingers weren't working."
It could have been much more serious. Two days after the stroke, Lightfoot saw a specialist in Minneapolis, Minn.
"We went and had an MRI. He showed it to me. He said, if it had been half a centimetre to the left, he said, you'd have had a speech problem."
When that tour ended, Lightfoot returned to his regimen of daily workouts in the gym and the effects of the stroke are barely noticeable now.
"It's back to about 98%. It's good enough to hold onto the flat pick."
Lightfoot credits his workouts for being able to stay on the road each year, and to speedy recoveries from life's maladies.
"I'm one of those guys: I go to the gym. I like to store energy. It's not so I can lose weight. It's not so I can build muscle. It's so I can store energy because I know it will help my show and help my singing. To me, it's part of the job. To do great shows I must be in good physical condition."
Oddly, he says being on the road doesn't suck too much of that energy away.
"I usually feel rejuvenated when we come off one of those trips."
This little side trip will bring a bonus to somebody. While Lightfoot is here, he will autograph a Martin D18 guitar similar to the one he's used since 1948.
According to Nicole McCahon, executive director of the Soldiers' Memorial Hospital foundation, the hospital's director of community relations, Terry Dyni, came up with the idea and did the leg work to have Martin Guitars, through our own Gilbert Guitars, donate the D18 to the foundation.
It will be auctioned on eBay beginning at 7 p. m. Monday. McCahon said doing the auction online should draw a larger pool of bidders and hopefully attract bids well in excess of the $2,500 retail price tag of the guitar.
"It's a great guitar," Lightfoot said. "You get the intonation right on it and it sounds really good."
And Lightfoot, along with his band, can't wait to hear themselves once again in the room that bears his name.
"I'm excited about it. We're all looking forward to it."
Both concerts have been sold out for some time. Good luck finding a friend who all of a sudden can't use their tickets.
