Page 12 - the NOISE March 2016

A LIGHTFOOT
SUNDOWN LOVIN’ FLAGSTAFF WELCOMES THE SONGWRITING LEGEND
INTERVIEW BY
PHOTO BY
pretty much note for note for 5-10 seconds of the song. It’s a real classic melody, real innovative — I haven’t heard anything quite like it.
I met Springsteen three or four years after I wrote that song. And I noticed it in “Born to Run.” That particular sequence has appeared in another Whitney Houston one too. Where it’s the sort of sequence where once you start doing it, you have to stay with it, you know? Even if it takes 8 or 16 bars to do it. Once you start you got to finish it, and you got to go all the way with it.
Yeah it’s like going to the top of a hill. You’re not to the top yet, because the notes are going up in the progression.
So it’s not original; I don’t think that it’s an original.
So where do you think that it came from? Some of us never know where it comes from.
I fished it out of my own brain. The year was about 1970. 1969 or 1970.
What do you spend more time on? Words or melodies?
I used to be able to write these things in an afternoon, but now it could take weeks. Or it can still take an afternoon, you know? It just depends. Sometimes you can take two or three days. I would say the melody would be the first thing to lock in, then the chords. And then you start arranging a marriage between the lyrics and the melody. I started thinking like that years ago, and I was taught by an old publisher here in Toronto at BMI. It was a marriage between the lyrics and melody, and by god, you know, that works if you really think about it.
My bassist Kyle wanted me to ask you if you ever get any blowback for sexism in songs like “For Loving Me,” also called “That’s What You Get For Loving Me.” I told him my favorite solo Nico song is “I’m Not Saying,” a song that you wrote where the main character seems pretty sexist, but it’s a female singing the song. So, is it still sexist? Is it you just writing a scenario, like David Bowie is writing a scenario when he’s talking about space travel, and like Johnny Cash, writing a scenario about killing
a man in Reno just to watch him die?
Well “For Loving Me,” I wasn’t gonna argue with it, because it went up to #5 in the Billboard charts, which was done by Peter, Paul and Mary. And really, it got me accepted by the industry in the USA as a result of that. But the funny thing is I always hated the song, because it was such a chauvinistic statement for a man to make to a woman, so I couldn’t actually stand to sing the thing after a few years anymore. So I stopped singing it, because it’s just no way to speak to a woman. I came to that conclusion.
But you know, at the same time rappers in NWA talk about killing people and all this stuff. Johnny Cash talked about killing people. Are they merely storytellers telling a story of how relationships go in some cases? Or maybe it’s a warning ...
It was brutal. It was a brutal song. It was emotionally bruising. So, I never wrote anything that was that extreme again.
So you did get some blowback from that?
Mostly personal, mostly conscious, mostly just made me feel guilty every time I sang it.
Is there anything you want the readers in Northern Arizona to know?
Well, we are always looking forward to coming back to Flagstaff, and looking forward to meeting with some close friends there. One is the button lady, who makes all kinds of cool things out of buttons. Helena and Bob — they are a couple and they’ve been friends and fans of us for about 45 years!
| Ray Reeves . music@thenoise.us INTERVIEW
RAY REEVES
DAVID COOPER
Igrew up not only listening to Gordon Lightfoot, but also performing his songs on the drums in my parent’s band. One of them I liked the best was “Sundown,” a radio classic about a cool- tempered threat to someone who’s been creeping around his girlfriend’s back stairs. His songs have been recorded by Nico, Elvis, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary and so many others. It was my great honor to talk with the Canadian Legend who will be performing March 5 at Northern Arizona University’s Ardrey Memorial Auditorium in Flagstaff.
It’s a pleasure to be talking with you Mr. Lightfoot ... You’ve said that you grew up outside of Toronto?
I grew up about 80 miles away from Toronto. I moved to the city to make something of myself when I was 20, or about 21. First of all I went to music school, because I wanted to take notation when I left high school. Actually, the first place I went to was Los Angeles when I was
19. I took this notation course because I was writing songs, and I couldn’t write music. I wanted to learn how to write music, and commit music to paper, because in those days when we did our lead sheets we had to have them written out. We’d have to have the lyrics, the melody and the chords to make a lead sheet. I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff. I had a rough idea because I had played piano as a child growing up. But I never picked up enough of it to exercise the theory that is involved in it, which is why I went to school. People thought it was rather unusual, for somebody to leave the small town, like the one I lived in, and go some place far away to go to school. I came from a normal family and my dad was the plant manager. We had a normal life growing up. People thought it was rather strange, or thought I wanted to be a movie star or something like that. They got a few laughs over that one. But I took the course and I stayed there for over a year, and it worked out well. I learned how to write. I got employment when I came into the city, transcribing songs from tape onto manuscripts, and doing jobs like that.
Do you think that learning those skills, of transposing those words, melodies and theories onto sheets, and the work of transcribing those all out on paper, helped your songwriting?
A lot of transposition was involved. So everything we did was based on the keyboard. It’s the best way to go at it. I had mental pictures of a couple of musical options framed in the forward part of my brain. It was implanted there, and if I wanted to write something down I didn’t have to go to a piano, I could just picture the keyboard.
Wow! I’m sure all of the training at the L.A. music school, especially your training with melody, helped you. I’ve read the first time you performed you were five years old at a talent show.
You know what that was? It was a pre-Sunday school concert for the really young kids. I was five and I forget what I sang. Some say I sang, “I’m a little tea pot.” I think I went a little deeper than that and sang some church-type song a child would sing at Sunday school. I did quite well there too, and at the end the teacher complimented all of us children and said to remember one thing: “To do the best with what you got.” I never forgot that — meaning, whatever talent you have, use it well and try to make it work for you — I guess. That’s what I did. I always wanted to be in the music business, and here I am at 77 years of age, and still touring and sort of taking it one year at a time, because you never know. I had one health issue that took me out for two and a half years, several years ago.
I think you’ve been massively influential. I think people rip you off, and don’t even know they’re ripping you off.
Ha. Oh well. I never even think about that.
But that’s Americana music. For example, there is this Whitney Houston song: “I Believe The Children Are Our Future,” and the pre-chorus of that song is just like the chorus to “If You Could Read My Mind.” Also, I was in a grocery store yesterday, and I heard the Soul Asylum song “Runaway Train,” and their pre-chorus section of that song is just like the chorus of “If you could read my mind.” It’s
12 • MARCH 2016 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us