In 1952, popular music was safe and unexciting, still reflecting the cautious postwar times. You could turn on the radio and hear lightweight pop from the likes of Doris Day and Perry Como or country songs by Hank Williams and Kitty Wells. Elvis Presley hadn’t yet walked into the offices of Sun Records in Memphis to record his first hit and bring the rough-and-tumble sound of rock ’n’ roll to the masses. The biggest musical thrill for kids at the time came from the smooth harmonies of vocal groups like the Four Aces and the Mills Brothers. Canada’s the Four Lads, a quartet formed at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Choir School, had hit the charts that year with the harmony-filled ballad “The Mocking Bird.”
When Lightfoot entered his Grade 9 science classroom that fall at Orillia District Collegiate Institute (everyone called the high school simply “OD”), his teacher wasted no time in recruiting him to join a singing group—not a pop vocal outfit, but a barbershop quartet. “I was shanghaied right into it by Mr. Wallace,” Lightfoot says today. “I simply said, ‘When do we start?’ ” The Collegiate Four was formed right away, with Lightfoot singing tenor and schoolmates Bob Croxall on lead, Wayne Rankin on baritone and Paul Lazier on bass. The four neatly dressed guys made their first public appearance that December during commencement ceremonies at OD. As members of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA), the Collegiate Four got access to arrangements for tunes like “After Dark” and “The Old Songs.” Wearing matching V-neck sweaters and bow ties, the group was soon singing all around Orillia, at school assemblies, church meetings and service clubs. Not shy of ambition, the quartet got itself bookings in Midland, Toronto and as far away as Sarnia.
Throughout Grade 10, Lightfoot kept his sights firmly set on music. His shyness meant he wasn’t yet boldly pursuing girls. In fact, Lightfoot’s first date came just two weeks before his fourteenth birthday, when Lois Doble asked him to go with her to the school’s Sadie Hawkins dance. More dates with girls would follow for the good-looking Lightfoot, but the Collegiate Four remained his first priority.
All the rehearsing and polishing of harmonies started paying off. First, Lightfoot made his national radio debut with the quartet on The Dominion Barn Dance, a locally recorded show broadcast on the CBC network. His national TV debut followed soon after, when the Collegiate Four traveled to Toronto to appear on CBC’s Pick the Stars,*1 a talent contest with a judging panel that included Toronto Telegram critic Clyde Gilmour. Lightfoot and his schoolmates arrived at the studio, warmed up their vocal cords and waited as tap dancers, comedians and country bands worked hard to impress the judges. When their call came, they stepped into the spotlight, gathered around a microphone and delivered their polished four-part harmonies. The Collegiate Four impressed Gilmour and his panelists and took first prize. Lightfoot was thrilled. His group’s performance was seen on TV sets across Canada, with most of Orillia tuning in—Jessie made sure of that. But Pick the Stars proved to be the Collegiate Four’s crowning achievement. Nature soon took its course and Gordie’s voice descended a couple of octaves, making him a baritone—a position in the group that was already filled. Lightfoot was out, and the quartet disbanded shortly afterward.
If Lightfoot was despondent, he didn’t show it. He knew another musical opportunity would come up. He threw himself into more school activities, joining the curling team and taking part in glee club productions of Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. He almost joined the student council, but Jessie, who encouraged him in most things, frowned on the idea. “You don’t want to get into politics,” she told him.
Not content to see his barbershopping days come to an end, Lightfoot formed a new quartet, the Teen-Timers, in the fall of 1954, enlisting three fellow OD students: Bill Hughes on bass, Bob Branch on tenor and Terry Whelan on lead. Whelan proved to be an asset. He wasn’t shy and could speak confidently in public in a way that Lightfoot simply couldn’t. The Teen-Timers stayed busy through the summer months, rehearsing regularly and performing wherever they landed gigs, just as the Collegiate Four had done. “We did the same thing,” Lightfoot told the barbershop magazine The Harmonizer in 2006. “We went through the contests, practiced, were coached, went to meetings, sang with the chorus; did everything we were supposed to do. It became a whole project that lasted all through high school up until the end of Grade 12.” This time, Lightfoot was in charge. With his unstoppable work ethic, he was determined that the Teen-Timers would be going places.
Lightfoot’s new group became competitive right away. It took part in barbershop competitions at Toronto’s Massey Hall and as far away as St. Catharines, where the group placed second in the annual contest of the SPEBSQSA. His father did all the driving, shepherding the boys to competitions and as many as two gigs a week. When Gord Sr. complained about the time it was taking, it prompted an unexpected outburst from his headstrong son.
I had to confront my dad about it. We had an argument in our backyard. We raised our voices. I told him, “You don’t have to drive, but somebody has gotta do it. It ain’t gonna be Terry’s dad, or Bill’s dad, because he’s a dentist, and it ain’t gonna be Bob’s, because he doesn’t have a dad.” I was running the quartet, so it was my responsibility to get us to the shows. It was the first time I stood up to my dad. He listened, saw I was serious, and we got it settled right there.
Locking horns with his father took some nerve. Gord Sr., then forty-four, had a stubborn streak as long as Main Street. But so too did his son. Gordie was beginning to use that Lightfoot bullheadedness to further his music career. It wasn’t long before he had his driver’s license and was able to transport the Teen-Timers himself. When school finished, the quartet spent part of the summer at a lodge in Haliburton, performing twice a week in the resort’s floor show as well as at other hotels in the area. With plenty of beer and girls around, it was a sweet deal.
Throughout Grade 12, Lightfoot remained wholly committed to music, less so to academics. He did play guard for OD’s junior football team, alongside classmate Charlie Baillie, and earned the following yearbook comment: “Gord [no longer Gordie] has often found the weakness in the offensive team and has made some fine stops.” Lightfoot was one of the school’s most popular kids, although his shyness remained a handicap. Guys admired his competitive drive and girls liked his gentle manner and blond good looks. He was a local star. His singing—both solo and with the Teen-Timers—was often heard around campus. This led to some teasing from his classmates. “WANTED: Gord Lightfoot,” read the yearbook’s class notes, “for singing to the endangerment of the public’s eardrums.” Truth was, Gord was the Orillia boy made good, and everyone enjoyed his voice. Tayler “Hap” Parnaby, who was a teenage DJ at CFOR, heard him sing “Moonlight in Vermont” at the Pavalon, or the “Pav,” as the locals called the Couchiching Park dance hall. “He did a masterful version of it,” says Parnaby, “a little bit like Crosby, in that velvet voice Gord has when he sings softly. Everyone really sat up and took notice.”
Despite his best efforts, Lightfoot could not keep the Teen-Timers together. With bass singer Hughes already graduated and studying at the University of Toronto, and tenor Branch quitting school to work in town, the quartet disbanded in Lightfoot’s final high school year. Barbershopping had run its course, and Lightfoot’s music tastes were shifting anyway. He and one of his school friends, Buddy Hill, were getting into jazz and traveling to Toronto with other classmates to see concerts.
There’d be a carload of us, and we’d go to catch whatever big name was in the clubs. I remember one time when we went on the bus to hear Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan at Massey Hall. We saw them all—Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington—when they played the dance halls. I really enjoyed listening to jazz. It really got me interested in studying notation.
Orillia’s own swing band, the ten-piece Charlie Andrews Orchestra, was a regular fixture at the Rainbow Room, owned by the Andrews family, and at places like Dunn’s Pavilion, in Bala. While Lightfoot was still in Grade 13, he received an invitation—and a challenge—from Andrews.
I got a call from Charlie, the orchestra leader. I’d known about him all through high school and knew what his band was doing. He said to me, “You can sing, but can you play an instrument?” No, I told him. “Can you play the drums?” “Well, I can certainly try,” I said, “but I don’t have any drums.” He had me over to his house, where he had a drum kit. They were quite a musical family and were all in the orchestra. Charlie played bass, his wife, Anne, played piano and their son Ross was a horn player. The band was doing a mix of ballads and jazz tunes. Charlie said to me, “Take the drums home and learn to play them.” How do I do that? “You put records on and play along with them.” That’s how I learned to play drums. I set them up in the basement and started drumming to Louis Armstrong. The next thing I knew, I was up on the bandstand performing with the orchestra.
Supplying the backbeat for the band at places like Orillia’s Rainbow Room and Gravenhurst’s Muskoka Sands, Gord was also the vocalist when they did Nat King Cole’s “Stardust” and the Platters’ “My Prayer.” Marg McEachern, an attractive teenager from nearby Pefferlaw, caught Lightfoot singing with the Andrews orchestra at Beaverton’s Commodore. Like other girls in the dance hall that night, she was instantly smitten. “He sang ‘Cry Me a River,’ and we all slid under our chairs,” she says. “Gordie was like an Elvis Presley in those days. Extremely good-looking and very shy—but he really lit up when he was onstage.”
At intermission, Lightfoot came and asked McEachern to dance. The two hit it off. They started a relationship that was somewhere between romance and a musical partnership. Marg played piano, and they jammed at her house and at the Lightfoot home, half an hour away in Orillia. “I can’t remember if we actually dated or if we were just best friends,” says McEachern, who does remember at least one kiss. “We were kind of platonic. It became a standing joke.”
At eighteen, Lightfoot was having the time of his life, trying his hand at everything that came his way. Jessie, always willing to further her son’s interests, had bought him a four-string tenor guitar, and he’d begun dabbling in rock and roll, doing Presley imitations with Brendan McKinnon, another friend and budding guitarist.
Gary Thiess was a schoolmate in awe of Lightfoot’s relentless activities. “Gord was such a hardworking guy,” Thiess says. “My mom always used to say, ‘If only you could apply yourself like Gordon did.’ But I couldn’t keep up with him.” Thiess remembers the determination Lightfoot showed with track and field: “When he developed a passion for pole vaulting, he’d practice over and over in his parents’ back garden. He didn’t have a proper landing area other than some dirt he’d dug up to make it a little softer. He finally managed to get up to a certain height but came down the wrong way, causing him to tear a ligament when he landed. But that was Gord—a real competitor.” Lightfoot got his work ethic from his father. But he developed his competitive drive entirely by himself. Both would become characteristic qualities in Lightfoot throughout his music career.
In early 1957, the Everly Brothers were topping the charts everywhere with sweet melodic hits like “Bye Bye Love” and “Wake Up Little Susie.” The siblings’ close, expressive harmonies inspired Lightfoot and Terry Whelan, his partner in the Teen-Timers, to form their own Everly-style duo. They called themselves the Two Timers, a roguish play on their quartet’s name, and began doing gigs around town. On a Friday night at the Pav, nineteen-year-old Lightfoot and Whelan—wearing sports jackets and ties, their hair swept up à la Elvis or Johnny Cash—sang earnest renditions of the Everlys’ songs and Harry Belafonte’s “Don’t Ever Love Me.” They took turns alternating between four- and six-string guitars, but harmonizing was their forte. Whelan handled the between-song patter. Lightfoot was happy to let the songs do the talking, a pattern he followed throughout his career.
Lightfoot finished high school in June 1957. He flunked algebra, having spent more time on harmonies than homework, and had to make up the credit to get his diploma. But he had chosen his career path and there was no deviating from it. By now, he’d already written his first composition, “The Hula Hoop Song,” about the popular toy that kids everywhere were twirling around their waists, limbs and necks. “I read about it in Life magazine,” Lightfoot says. “It was a craze that came before the twist. The magazine showed a picture with 150 people in a vacant lot all hula-hooping at once. It inspired me to write a song about it.” Convinced that he had something, and determined to prove it, the teenager borrowed his father’s Buick and drove down Highway 400 to pitch the unlikely song directly to the performing rights association in Toronto. Armed with just a ukulele and an unwavering conviction, he bravely played the tune for BMI executives Harold Moon, Whitey Haines and Bailey Bird. They listened patiently but weren’t buying. Still, Lightfoot says, they offered words of encouragement. “Harold Moon said it was quite good for a topical song and told me to keep writing.” That was all he needed to hear.
That summer, Lightfoot was working for Wagg’s, delivering linens to area resorts. On his lunch break, he’d read Downbeat magazine, the American jazz bible he subscribed to. One day, in between articles on pianist Dave Brubeck and drummer Max Roach, something jumped out at him: an advertisement for the Westlake College of Modern Music in Hollywood. Westlake was the first academic institution after Boston’s Berklee to offer a college diploma in jazz. Lightfoot called his friend Buddy Hill, an aspiring pianist. This was exactly what they needed. Right then and there, they hatched a plan to go to the music school together.*2 They were both accepted. Why two kids from Orillia were granted admission in the same year is anyone’s guess, but Lightfoot didn’t question it.
Lightfoot made a deal with his parents: with his wages from Wagg’s, he would pay as much as he could toward airfare and tuition if they would make up the difference. His mother and father agreed, and Gord began counting the days before the Westlake semester began in September. When word spread around Orillia that Gord Lightfoot Jr. was going to Hollywood, the news sparked a predictable reaction. Maybe it was jealousy or maybe people thought the kid’s success had gone to his head, but Orillians did not take his plans seriously. “They were laughing about it,” says Lightfoot, giving the example of how his father’s friends responded on the golf course one day that summer. A local boy studying in Hollywood? “People thought that was the most outlandish thing they had ever heard of.” Just as Leacock had observed in Sunshine Sketches, Orillia’s townsfolk loved to cut ambitious locals down to size. It was the same narrow-minded disapproval and small-town Ontario repression that Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro depicts so forcefully in her short stories. Who Do You Think You Are?, the title of one Munro collection, was a double-edged question facing Lightfoot or anyone else growing up in a community with Scottish Presbyterian roots.
But Gord Jr. was not deterred. Come September, he said goodbye to his parents, sister and his girlfriend at the time, Shauna Smith, and he and Buddy took a bus to Chicago. From there, they boarded a TWA Constellation to Los Angeles. It was the first time Lightfoot had flown on a commercial airline and the first time he’d been away from Orillia.
Westlake had the perfect location. Surrounded by palm trees and pink stucco buildings, the school was situated at 7190 Sunset Boulevard, not far from Hollywood Senior High School. Every day was a chance to see things he’d only ever read about in magazines. The luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel, where the Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe all stayed, was to the west, while to the east was the celebrated Sunset Strip, home of the city’s best nightclubs.
Pat LaCroix, another Canadian student at Westlake that year (as many as twelve out of a total enrollment of fifty), recalls walking a short distance from the small campus and its dormitories to a pack of jazz clubs. “I remember seeing Blossom Dearie just down the street, and we could stroll over to Sherry’s and see a great band for the price of a beer. There was so much great music,” says LaCroix. “Plus, we’d all go jam down at Ben Pollock’s Pick-a-Rib nightclub on Sunday nights.”
Like Lightfoot, LaCroix was a singer. He’d later form the Halifax Three folk group with Denny Doherty, future vocalist with the Mamas & the Papas. “Gord and I were both vying to be singers, but it was a friendly rivalry,” says LaCroix. “We took turns singing with the school’s A band. He was a good vocalist, but trying real hard to sing like Frank Sinatra in those days. Later, when I finally heard Gord doing his original stuff, I thought, ‘Man, he’s really come into his own.’ I had no idea he could write songs.” Fact was, Lightfoot spent his time at Westlake studying how to improve his compositional skills, taking courses in orchestration and music theory. He also learned musical notation and how to write in all keys on the piano—essential tools for any versatile songwriter, and he would make full use of them all.
With LaCroix and two fellow students, Lightfoot formed a singing group called the Four Winds. “It wasn’t like barbershop,” he points out. “We were getting into more of the jazz type of modern, fancy chords.” The Four Winds landed a couple of cool gigs through Westlake connections. They were hired to sing backup vocals for a rockabilly-style artist named Johnny Stark, who had a deal with Mercury Records. “We recorded four songs with him,” says Lightfoot, “including a good one called ‘Cold Coffee.’ But we never heard another thing about it. Never heard about Johnny Stark again either!” Then the Four Winds were asked to appear on a local TV show hosted by Bobby Troup, a musician and actor who later starred in Emergency! with his wife Julie London. LaCroix recalls they sang on several tunes performed on the show, including Troup’s own “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.”
There were plenty of kicks to be had for Canadian teenagers living in Hollywood. One of the students had a big old convertible, and a carload of them would drive through neighborhoods like Bel Air stealing oranges right off the trees. LaCroix recalls one night when they’d partied late and drunk a crazy amount of beer. “No sooner were we all tucked into our beds, around three in the morning, than the birds start singing, making a real din,” he says. “All of a sudden, we hear thump, thump, thump, someone going down the stairs, and then, smash, the screen door slams. ‘Hey, you fuckin’ birds, shut up!’ It was Gord, yelling at the birds in the middle of the night. You could hear everyone in the dorm laughing at that.”
Although Westlake was a two-year course, Lightfoot stayed for only two semesters. But the school had taught him a lot about composition, arranging and sight-reading. He’d also learned how to write musical notation in his neat penmanship, a skill that would soon come in handy. Despite the allure of Los Angeles, Lightfoot was deeply homesick, and he returned home to Canada in the spring of 1958. He had a summer job waiting for him at Wagg’s and the chance to get back to singing with his pal Terry Whelan. But when the summer job ran out, so too did his tolerance for Orillia. His small hometown had been idyllic in his youth, but now, after the experience of Hollywood, he found it claustrophobic. Plus, his girlfriend, Shauna Smith, with whom he’d corresponded while at Westlake, had started going out with one of his old classmates. It was time to get out of Orillia. “I just knew I had to go to Toronto,” says Lightfoot, “and get my engine started.”