Little by little, Lightfoot’s profile in America was growing—just not fast enough for his liking. His albums were getting noticed, but they weren’t big sellers. His songs were familiar to listeners, but as hits by other artists. Lightfoot could be called critically acclaimed, but not yet a household name. Albert Grossman had more work to do. In the fall of 1967, Grossman’s office arranged for Lightfoot to play New York’s prestigious Bitter End, in Greenwich Village. Kris Kristofferson called the club a songwriters’ “shrine,” a place “full of artists, poets, dreamers and drunks where the audiences listened.” Since it opened in 1961, the Bitter End had gained renown for its Tuesday night sessions where new singer-songwriters performed against an unadorned red brick backdrop. Paul Colby, who began managing the club in 1968, worked hard to book Lightfoot. “When Gordon played the club, it was something of a coup. My neighbor and nearest competitor, Howie Solomon of the Cafe au Go Go, wanted Gordon very badly. I worked the phones very tenaciously and finally signed Gordon for a gig. Howie was so mad, he ran across the street and yelled at me, ‘You’re taking the food out of my children’s mouths.’ ”
When Lightfoot pulled open the heavy wooden doors to the Bitter End to do his sound check, inside he met Hank DeVito, a young soundman later famous as Emmylou Harris’s pedal steel guitar player. As Lightfoot ran through his songs and DeVito adjusted the audio levels, Jerry Jeff Walker popped into the club. A local singer-songwriter and regular in the Greenwich Village scene, Walker had just recorded a single and wanted to hear it on the Bitter End’s sound system. He introduced himself to Lightfoot and asked if he minded. “Go right ahead,” Lightfoot told Walker. The two sat listening to the song and Walker asked about the orchestral strings that had replaced the original organ part. “Gord said he thought the change helped a lot and was really encouraging, which was great,” says Walker, “because I was feeling pretty down about it.” The song was “Mr. Bojangles,” Walker’s soon-to-be-classic tale of a tap-dancing drifter. As good as the song was, Walker was more impressed by Lightfoot’s material, which he heard that night in the club. “I’d already heard Marty Robbins’s version of ‘Ribbon of Darkness’ and loved it. Gord was an earthy songwriter who was really setting the pace for acoustic artists.”
Before the year was out, Grossman arranged for Lightfoot to meet John Simon, a bright young staff producer at Columbia Records who had just produced the debut albums of Leonard Cohen and Blood, Sweat & Tears for the label. Simon checked out Lightfoot at Philadelphia’s Main Point club and decided then and there to produce his next album. The two later met over dinner in a New York restaurant and talked about ideas for the recording, but they spent much of the night trying not to be distracted by famed Beat poet and On the Road author Jack Kerouac, who was sitting at the table next to them. Plans were made to reconvene in Toronto, where Lightfoot had recently bought a larger house a short distance from the triplex on Farnham, which he and Brita kept as a rental property. Located at 222 Poplar Plains Road, the new house was in a well-to-do area with neighbors that one writer described as “stockbrokers, mining executives, the Bay Street boys”—strange company for a denim-clad musician. At his spacious new home, Lightfoot played his new producer some of his latest songs. Among the romantic ballads, some tinged with pronounced melancholy, one number sprang right out of the day’s headlines.
Lightfoot had never written an explicitly political number. Although he’d admired the ability of his friends Dylan and Ochs to tackle social issues, he felt that as a Canadian he shouldn’t be adding his voice to the chorus of protest over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Detroit was different. The city was a second home to him. He had friends there, knew the streets and played its clubs many times. On July 23, 1967, a riot broke out when African-American protesters clashed with troops following a police raid on an inner-city bar. The “black day” left many dead, injured and arrested and hundreds of stores looted or burned; losses were estimated at between $40 million and $80 million. The riot hit a raw personal nerve for Lightfoot, who wrote “Black Day in July” in response. When he performed his composition at Detroit’s Living End a month after the riot, he introduced it by saying, “This is about your city. I’m sorry it has to be that way.”*1 The song’s outrage was palpable.
Black day in July
Motor City madness has touched the countryside
And the people rise in anger
And the streets begin to fill
And there’s gunfire from the rooftops
And the blood begins to spill
Simon loved “Black Day in July” and said its power and immediacy were “cool.” He believed it could be a hit. So, too, did Grossman and executives at United Artists, who released it as a single. The song soared up the Canadian charts in early 1968. But many US radio stations deemed it too controversial for public consumption and banned it from airplay. In the song, Lightfoot asked, “Why can’t we all be brothers, why can’t we live in peace / But the hands of the have-nots keep falling out of reach.” Too radical? Radio programmers justified the ban by expressing the fear that playing the song might cause further unrest. For his elusive American breakthrough, it seemed Lightfoot was going to have to win over audiences from the stage.
Lightfoot was in Los Angeles when he found out about the ban. He was appearing on Skip Weshner’s radio show on KRHM-FM, where he performed his songs in a refreshingly informal setting. For many in the LA area, this was their introduction to Lightfoot. Weshner dutifully plugged the fact that his guest was about to make his debut at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood. Owner Doug Weston had run the Troubadour as a folk and country music venue since 1961, helping launch the careers of Hoyt Axton, John Denver, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Arlo Guthrie. He also occasionally presented blues artists such as Muddy Waters and stand-up comedians like the Smothers Brothers. The Troubadour had grown to become the premier showcase for new talent on the West Coast. Maybe the radio ban rattled him, or maybe he was overwhelmed by the prestigious venue, but when Lightfoot entered the club the next night, he had a serious case of the jitters. Would anyone show up? And if they did, would they like him?
Chuck Mitchell was living in Los Angeles at the time, now divorced from Joni. He was there backstage at Lightfoot’s show and witnessed his nerves up close. “Like all of us, Gordon had genuine self-doubt and wasn’t totally secure,” says Mitchell. “And the Troubadour could be an imposing room. But when Gordon walked out on that stage, he saw that the place was packed. He sang his set and the people knew his songs. In the end, he got several encores, and when he came offstage, he virtually broke down. It was very emotional.” Lightfoot had arrived.
Lightfoot had several brushes with Hollywood while in California. The first was meeting Gale Garnett, a vivacious Canadian actress and singer who’d moved to LA after winning a Grammy for her album We’ll Sing in the Sunshine, beating out Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. At the time, Garnett was fronting a psychedelic folk group called the Gentle Reign and shared a stage with Lightfoot at a folk festival at San Francisco State College, where Lightfoot performed with Shea and Stockfish. Garnett told Dave Bidini, author of Writing Gordon Lightfoot—an imagined correspondence—that she and Lightfoot slept together: “Gord was a very straight Scottish Presbyterian guy. It was very sweet, very innocent.”
Garnett was right. Lightfoot did have a strong Presbyterian, almost Calvinist, streak in him. He professed not to be religious, but having grown up in a small Ontario town where churches and Protestant thinking dominated, he always held himself to a strict moral code. Throughout his life, Lightfoot faced issues of sin, redemption and repentance—and when reflecting on himself actually thought in those Biblical terms. Guilt, a somewhat strange concept in the decadent world of rock and roll, would weigh heavily on Lightfoot throughout his life as he judged whether he was a good husband, father or son.
The California visit led to Lightfoot’s second experience writing for Hollywood movies. He had previously composed several songs for Paul Newman’s film Cool Hand Luke, although the producers bypassed his contributions in favor of numbers performed in the movie by Harry Dean Stanton.*2 This time around, Lightfoot was asked to come up with songs for a Burt Reynolds movie called Fade In. The producers put him up in the historic Hollywood Roosevelt, the hotel where a young Marilyn Monroe was once a resident, and Lightfoot worked hard to come up with songs and recorded demos. Again, nothing of his wound up in the film.
But Hollywood’s interest in Lightfoot’s songs persisted. A short time later, Lightfoot wrote the title track for Hail, Hero!, starring a young Michael Douglas as a hippie who enlists in the army to use love to combat the Viet Cong. The movie’s soundtrack also featured an alternative version of “Wherefore and Why.” And then, in early 1975, a Chicago Tribune columnist, the daughter of the prominent Daley family, reported that Robert Redford wanted Lightfoot to write the theme song for his film All the President’s Men. The columnist, Maggie Daley, wrote that Lightfoot would be flying to New York to meet with Redford when the first leg of Lightfoot’s current tour ended in Milwaukee. A soundtrack deal never materialized, and today Lightfoot denies such a meeting ever took place. “Totally false” is all he will say. Yet there were reports of the two being seen together. Andy Warhol wrote in his published diaries that Lightfoot and Redford were among the celebrity VIPs attending Brazilian star Pelé’s last soccer match at Giants Stadium. Lightfoot has no recollection of that Redford encounter either.
The Simon-produced album Did She Mention My Name arrived in stores in April 1968, featuring “Black Day in July” as well as the reflective “Pussywillows, Cat-Tails,” the lustfulness of “The Mountains and Maryann,” songs of longing like “The Last Time I Saw Her” and such string-laden gems as the philosophical “Wherefore and Why.” “Pussywillows” drew from his idyllic childhood growing up in bucolic Orillia. But “Maryann” expressed the attraction of “hot blooded mountain love,” a reference to a Calgary schoolteacher, whom he’d met while touring Alberta in 1967 on his cross-Canada tour. The album received high praise from the jazz magazine Downbeat, the publication that Lightfoot had devoured in his teens and that had led him to Westlake. The review called Lightfoot “one of the most arresting and poetic of the new breed of songwriters, a romantic to be sure, but a clear-eyed realist at the same time.” It concluded that his songs were “lyrical, full of tenderness and compassion, but above all real, honest and totally without artifice.” Lightfoot didn’t know how to be anything else. While some criticized his lack of bravado, others—especially women—found his honesty attractive and his vulnerability appealing.
A new album meant a new American tour to promote it. Typically, six nights in a US club would fetch Lightfoot as much as $600. Lightfoot and his sidemen Red Shea and John Stockfish piled into Lightfoot’s 1967 Ford station wagon and set off. It was an efficient operation, with the vehicle just large enough for the trio’s instruments, amplifiers and sound equipment (Jack Long, of Toronto’s musical instrument rental store Long & McQuade, had designed the PA system specifically to fit the station wagon). The touring pattern was quickly established: Lightfoot did the driving; Shea handled directions. A stickler for tuning, Lightfoot insisted that they arrive early at each venue to tune up at sound check, then make more adjustments immediately before taking the stage. After shows, it was time to greet fans, and Lightfoot would send the gregarious Shea out as the icebreaker. At the backstage gatherings, there’d always be plenty of girls.
It was an intense time to be in the States, with frequent race riots and Vietnam protests. When Lightfoot, Shea and Stockfish arrived in Washington, DC, to perform for a week at the Cellar Door, a transit strike coincided with the Poor People’s March, organized by Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the resultant gridlock, the club was filled every night. At one of the parties afterward, where drinks were flowing, Lightfoot met a beautiful German woman. He found out she was a waitress at the Playboy Club in New York and made a mental note of her name with every intention of seeing her again. Alcohol and women were becoming another part of Lightfoot’s touring pattern, although that was hardly unusual for musicians in the late ’60s. The more Lightfoot was away from Brita, the more heavily he drank, and the more affairs and one-night stands he had.
After the US tour, Lightfoot needed a new batch of songs for his next album. In June, he flew to England with the sole purpose of overcoming writer’s block. The first song came to him in a taxicab on the way from Heathrow to the Stratford Court Hotel. With its lyrics about a woman “waiting for her master to kiss away her tears, waiting through the years,” “Bitter Green” was written with Brita in mind. For all of Lightfoot’s fooling around, Brita remained his safe harbor—a muse about whom he could romanticize. The question was how long Brita would “wait through the years.”
Holed up in his hotel, Lightfoot came up with four other songs: “The Gypsy,” “Unsettled Ways,” “Don’t Beat Me Down” and “Cold Hands from New York,” about the alienation he felt on his first trip to that city. For a change of scenery, he took the train up to Edinburgh. There, at a hotel on Princes Street, he met a young French woman named Marie Christine Dupuis. She couldn’t speak English, or he French, but they spent what Lightfoot later called “five lovely hours together.” His next composition was about a ship that he called “Marie Christine.”
Writing songs is about finding the time, because it’s an isolated thing. You need to lock yourself in a room to do it, in one shape or another, whether it’s an empty house or hotel room. In those days, I was mostly writing songs about nature and love and the refined natural beauty of living.
The songwriting trip was a success. As well as composing new songs, Lightfoot penned forty poems, written in red ink in a lined notebook. He briefly considered compiling the poems and later showed some of them to Toronto Life’s Marq de Villiers, who, in the magazine’s June 1968 cover story on Lightfoot, declared him to be “as good a poet as a songwriter.” There was even a publisher willing to release a book of his poetry. But Lightfoot, unsure of the merits of his work, never followed through on the idea. Today, he claims he doesn’t even have the poems anymore.
Lightfoot didn’t return directly home. He flew to New York in the hope of hooking up with the German waitress from the Playboy Club. A taxi took him to Grand Central Station, where he phoned and arranged to meet her after she finished work. What transpired between them in her apartment was captured vividly in Lightfoot’s next song, “Affair on 8th Avenue.” His lyrics about perfume and long flowing hair coming “softly undone” provided sensuous details of the tryst. And the imagery of “treasures of paper and tin” and a “game only she could win” was distinctly Dylanesque and closer to Leonard Cohen than anything he’d previously written. Lightfoot may have felt bad about the side trip, but that hadn’t stopped him writing about it. And the affair gave him one of his best new songs.
Lightfoot’s songs were becoming more autobiographical. For anyone looking for clues in his lyrics, “The Circle Is Small” seemed to raise questions about the stability of his marriage.
It’s all right to leave but not all right to lie
When you come home and you can’t say where you’ve been
You think it’s fine to do things I cannot see
And you’re doing it to me, baby, can’t you see that I know how it is
The words were sung by Lightfoot, but they could easily have been Brita’s. “I use the first person a lot,” Lightfoot has admitted, “[but] what I’m really doing is putting myself in someone else’s shoes.” Whatever the case, he knew his marriage was unraveling.
Lightfoot felt compelled to seek counsel. For a lot of celebrities in the late 1960s, Scientology, the quasi-religious cult formed by L. Ron Hubbard, seemed to hold some answers. Actresses such as Candice Bergen and Peggy Lipton (the starlet on TV’s The Mod Squad) and musicians including Cass Elliot and Jim Morrison had all fallen under the spell of Hubbard’s Dianetics, the now discredited form of psychotherapy combined with personality assessment. Lightfoot was introduced to Scientology by Dinah Christie, a Canadian actress and former star of TV’s This Hour Has Seven Days, and agreed to visit the organization’s Toronto office.*3 There, he sat and submitted himself to “processing” on the Scientology E-meter, a device that measured changes in the electrical circuit formed when a participant squeezed the handgrips while answering personal questions. A needle on the meter indicated to the “auditor” when the subject was faced with a repressed memory of past trauma. “Going clear” meant successfully becoming rid of those memories. For Lightfoot, just talking to someone about his marital problems was a useful exercise. “There was so much truth in what I said that I went clear the first time,” he maintains. But, like Leonard Cohen, who was also briefly drawn into the cult,*4 Scientology proved just a flirtation for Lightfoot. “I never stuck with it the way people like Tom Cruise or John Travolta did,” he says, “but it was good to have someone to talk to, a bit like seeing a psychiatrist.”
At the same time as he was seeking answers and “going clear,” Lightfoot was also escaping into the fuzzy comfort of the bottle. Whether it was beer or whiskey, booze became a constant presence in his life for social and professional reasons, serving as an icebreaker at parties and settling his nerves before concerts. The drinking had started innocently enough in Yonge Street bars when he first moved to Toronto but then grew into a more serious dependency as the decade wore on and he faced bigger audiences, more frequent parties and encounters with women of the sort he sang about in “Early Morning Rain.” When things got complicated with Brita, alcohol gave him an easy way to forget his problems—if only for a while. “It made me feel better,” he says, “and if I felt better, I could work better.”
With Shea and Stockfish, Lightfoot recorded his fourth album, Back Here on Earth, over four days in September at Bradley’s Barn, Owen Bradley’s studio in Nashville. Elliot Mazer handled the production. Mazer was an engineer and understudy to John Simon, who was now busy producing the Band and Janis Joplin for Grossman. Following the sessions, Lightfoot was back in West Hollywood at the Troubadour, this time for a week. The buzz around his shows was strong enough to attract influential critic Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. Hilburn was blown away by Lightfoot, citing his “rich talent” and predicting it would be only a matter of time before “the young Canadian becomes a giant in the industry.”
Before Lightfoot returned east, Grossman booked him into San Francisco’s hippie ballroom the Fillmore on an unusual bill with the electric blues-rock band Canned Heat. Still, Lightfoot, Shea and Stockfish managed to cook up a robust acoustic sound built around recognizable songs like “Early Morning Rain” and “Steel Rail Blues” and tried out a couple of songs to be released on the new album, “If I Could” and “Long Thin Dawn.” Toward the end of his set, he was relaxed enough to crack a couple of jokes about his grandmother before singing “Pussywillows.” And for his final song, Lightfoot launched into “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” which, surprisingly, the American audience recognized and applauded on hearing the opening line.
Significant US media coverage continued. Time magazine ran a profile titled “Cosmopolitan Hick,” based on a self-deprecating remark Lightfoot made about himself. But the article stated that his “assured, straightforward delivery shows him to be that rarity in the folk field—a well-schooled singer.” Then The New York Times sent Robert Shelton to review Lightfoot’s second appearance at New York’s Town Hall. Shelton wrote that Lightfoot “looks like a walk-on from Bonanza” but credited him with writing “melodies [that are] consistently agreeable” and having a “flawless” guitar technique. He concluded, “If Mr. Lightfoot could project as warm and open a personality as his music does, he could become a sizable talent.”
As talented a bassist as John Stockfish was, he had become unreliable: his fondness for amphetamines was causing epileptic seizures. Rick Haynes was working as a technician for the Ontario Research Foundation by day and as a bar-band bassist by night. He heard that Lightfoot was looking for a new sideman and contacted Red Shea to say he was interested. A week or two later, Haynes’s phone rang. “Hi,” said the caller, “this is Gordon Lightfoot. I heard you’d like to try out for my band. Do you know my stuff?” Haynes didn’t really, but he said he did. “Okay, I’ll be in touch,” said Lightfoot and hung up. Haynes heard nothing for a month or two. Lightfoot was touring, so when the call came, it was from Brita. “Hi, I’m Gordie’s wife,” she said, in her thick Swedish accent. “We need to make a change. Would you be able to come do an audition?” Haynes, a large man with a cherubic face and a mustache, showed up at Lightfoot’s home on Poplar Plains and hauled his bass guitar and heavy Traynor amplifier up to the second-floor music room, where he, Lightfoot and Shea played for several hours. “It seemed to go well,” Haynes says. “Red was holding court in the proceedings a little bit, and I realized afterward that they were really just checking out my personality to see if I was a good cultural fit.” Lightfoot called Haynes a week later to say he was in and offered him $200 a week whether he played or not. Plus, all his expenses—except cigarettes and booze—would be paid. Haynes accepted. He’s still on Lightfoot’s payroll nearly fifty years later.
Armed with a new bass player, Lightfoot was now crisscrossing the United States to promote Back Here on Earth. In January 1969, he returned to the West Coast for a high-profile gig at UCLA’s Royce Hall. His appearance there led to two significant write-ups by Robert Hilburn, who was becoming Lightfoot’s biggest booster in the States. Lightfoot was “one of the most exciting new folk-rooted performers in years,” wrote Hilburn. He described his performance as “a dazzling display of singing and songwriting artistry that drew long and enthusiastic response from a full house.” And he cited several songs from Back Here on Earth, including “Bitter Green,” “Long Way Back Home” and “Cold Hands from New York,” as signs of his “continued growth as a writer.” There was no question of Lightfoot’s deepening talent: the fresh melodies and impressively poetic lyrics were flowing out of him. Hilburn followed his review with a feature article that also cited Canadian singer-songwriters Ian & Sylvia, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. “Lightfoot,” he noted, “holds the most promise.” Then Hilburn zeroed in on why: “Lightfoot’s chief weapon, both as a singer and writer, is his strong use of emotion. In an age of the ‘super cool,’ he digs deep into the warmth of the heart to relate some basic feelings about human longing and desire.” Once embarrassed about his unpolished small-town ways, Lightfoot was finding that his lack of artifice had become an asset.
Lightfoot’s honest performance style was on full view when he and his sidemen flew to England and appeared on the BBC’s The Rolf Harris Show. Flanked by Shea and Haynes, both with mustaches, Lightfoot looked straight into the camera and delivered a heartfelt version of “Early Morning Rain.” Dressed late-sixties-hip in denim jacket, beads and bell-bottoms, he conveyed an earnest vulnerability as he sang, raising his eyebrows in an expression that suggested pained innocence. Lightfoot’s appearance was changing. His hair was showing early signs of a perm provided by his Toronto hairdresser Sandy Bozzo. That perm eventually grew more pronounced and came to define Lightfoot’s look through the 1970s. Always big on tradition, Lightfoot has kept Bozzo as his barber ever since.
Adoration for Lightfoot’s songs was especially strong in Nashville. The love affair had begun in 1965 with Marty Robbins’s hit version of “Ribbon of Darkness” and spilled over to Waylon Jennings, George Hamilton IV, the Carter Family and others. In April 1969, Lightfoot and his band flew down to Nashville to appear on The Johnny Cash Show. Cash had been hired by ABC to host a TV show after his two live prison albums, At Folsom Prison and At San Quentin, proved so popular. Taped at the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, the show’s first guests were Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Lightfoot was the headliner on the second episode. After a day of rehearsals, the taping took place on April 28. Cash introduced Lightfoot as “one of the finest entertainers, a singer-songwriter, just a great talent and a friend of mine who came tripping down from the north country fair.” Lightfoot performed “Ribbon of Darkness” and “Softly” before Cash joined him on “For Lovin’ Me.” “I had a real good time with Johnny,” Lightfoot says. “He was a very affable, down-to-earth guy, and there was a lot of easygoing chatter backstage and on the show.”
While in Nashville, the ever-gregarious Red Shea heard there was a jam session going on in a local hotel room and insisted that he, Haynes and Lightfoot check it out. Elliot Mazer joined them. “Gord’s not pushy and would never force his way into a scene like that,” says Haynes. “But Red was very outgoing, so he pulled us into the room where Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury and others were playing.” Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a master’s degree in English literature, was working as a janitor at Nashville’s Columbia Records, determined to become a songwriter. Lightfoot was knocked out by a song Kristofferson was singing, something he’d just written called “Me and Bobby McGee.” “Elliot turned to me and said, ‘You’d better record this before someone else does,’ ” Lightfoot says. His rendition of Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” would get recorded later that year, almost a full year before Janis Joplin made a version that became her signature song.*5
Lightfoot desperately wanted out of his recording contract with United Artists. He was unhappy with the label’s ineffectual promotion of his music. With one album left owing, he came up with the common remedy: deliver a live album, fulfill his contractual obligations and kiss the label goodbye. He asked Mazer to record his next Massey Hall concerts, four sold-out nights at the end of March 1969. Mazer set up a portable studio in the concert hall’s dressing room and went to work capturing the magic of his Toronto appearances. “You know, it’s really great to be back on this stage,” Lightfoot told his audience the first night. “You can wander off around the place, but here in Massey Hall is my home.” He wasn’t just courting local favor; Lightfoot really did feel most comfortable there, surrounded by family and friends.
The live album, Sunday Concert, was released soon after. It included “Ballad of Yarmouth Castle” and four new songs: the philosophical “Apology,” the country-flavored “In a Windowpane,” the poetic “Leaves of Grass,” with its Walt Whitman–inspired title, and “The Lost Children,” a moving number about the human cost of war. And the album featured impressionistic liner notes from Lightfoot’s painter buddy Robert Markle, who described the singer’s followers as “the dollies and the ladies and the buckskinned fringed bandana paint-faced boys and the leggy lower pattern swimming silk bright smiled succulent sure little girls with excited love in their eyes.” Later that year, Markle crashed his motorcycle on the Don Valley Parkway, suffering internal injuries and breaking both arms. To help out his friend, Lightfoot performed on a bill with the City Muffin Boys and the Downchild Blues Band as part of “The Beautiful Big Bob Benefit Bash” at Toronto’s Rock Pile auditorium.
Albert Grossman had his sights firmly set on Reprise Records as the new home for Lightfoot. Reprise was Frank Sinatra’s label, a company he formed in 1960 to give himself more creative freedom, earning him the nickname Chairman of the Board. Sinatra sold Reprise to Warner Bros. in 1968, retaining a 20 percent ownership. He’d already hired Mo Ostin, an experienced record executive, to run the label. With Ostin in charge, Reprise had started moving increasingly toward rock and pop music, signing Jimi Hendrix and singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Ostin had also brought in a bright young A&R man, Lenny Waronker, to develop new talent. “Mo had me come into his office one day to talk about possible signings,” says Waronker. “He mentioned Gordon Lightfoot and wanted my take on him. I said, ‘Enormous potential, both lyrically and melodically. If we could sign him, that would be phenomenal.’ ” Negotiations with Grossman began in earnest.
In August, Grossman secured his client an enviable recording contract with Warner/Reprise, guaranteeing Lightfoot a million dollars over the next five years. It was the most lucrative recording deal ever signed by a Canadian performer. Lightfoot was now financially secure. More importantly, after years of languishing at United Artists, he was at a label where his music would get the proper treatment. At Warner/Reprise, he was joining some of the best artists in the world. Finally, Lightfoot felt, he was exactly where he belonged.
While in Los Angeles to sign the deal, Lightfoot dropped in to the Troubadour for a drink and to catch comedian Joan Rivers. On the barstool next to him was a dark-haired woman. Drinks, conversation and some serious flirting followed. Her name was Helena Kallianiotes, a Greek-American belly dancer who’d just appeared in Head, the Monkees’ experimental movie written and produced by Jack Nicholson. In fact, Kallianiotes was living in the guesthouse on Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive property in the Hollywood Hills, looking after the estate while he was away filming. She suggested Lightfoot come up to the Hills and see her place. Lightfoot couldn’t resist the invitation, and the two spent the night together. The following morning, they heard the grisly news that during the night, just a short drive away, actress Sharon Tate and four others had been horrifically murdered at the home of Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. It was part of a shocking killing spree committed by the followers of cult-leader Charles Manson that left a total of nine people dead. Like the violence at the Altamont rock concert east of San Francisco later that year, the Manson murders signaled the end of the innocent ’60s.
Landing Lightfoot a new record deal would be one of the last tasks Albert Grossman would perform for his client. In May, Lightfoot announced the formation of Early Morning Productions, named for his signature song. From now on, he would be the boss and control his own bookings, recordings and publishing. He bought a building in Toronto at 350 Davenport Road, opened an office and hired Al Mair. Lightfoot knew Mair well. They’d worked together when Mair was a salesman for the Compo label, Lightfoot’s early record distributor. Mair spoke to Billboard about how Early Morning Productions would focus on Lightfoot’s career to begin with but also branch out to manage other artists. “Initially, we’ll just be working on packaging Gordon’s own shows across the country, booking halls, supervising promotion, handling all details in the most professional way we can. We’ll book concerts in the US as well, especially Gordon Lightfoot concerts. He has never really been properly exposed in the States and it’s time he was.” By setting up shop in Canada and not moving south of the border as so many of his contemporaries had done, Lightfoot was demonstrating a new way of building a career.
I didn’t move to the States, because I wanted to keep my family ties. I liked being near my relatives. I was a bit of a homebody. It wasn’t really necessary for me to move lock, stock and barrel. Toronto had a burgeoning music scene and was a great launching pad. It didn’t seem necessary to move. So rather than go through that exercise, I was able to stay here and be close to my relatives. I was able to work in the States on the basis of an H-1 visa, which we kept renewing. All you really have to do is get a work permit sorted. Get set up with the IRS down there and pay your taxes. I learned that early on.
It’s true that Lightfoot was setting a precedent by staying in Canada, but he could afford to do it. Between his concert earnings, songwriting royalties and record sales, he was earning around $250,000 a year. Mair organized a lavish press conference for December 1 at the Early Morning Productions office to celebrate his new million-dollar deal with Warner/Reprise On orange carpeting, surrounded by Lightfoot’s gold records, media and record-company types mingled while knocking back glasses of champagne. But Lightfoot was missing. Mair told the gathering he was absent because he’d only just returned from the Grey Cup football festivities in Montreal, where he’d taken his father to watch the Ottawa Rough Riders defeat the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Truth was, he was nursing a massive hangover. His excessive intake of booze was catching up with him, clouding his judgment and potentially compromising his career.
*1 Ochs had earlier written his own song in response to a race riot, “In the Heat of the Summer,” sparked by the Harlem uprising of 1964.
*2 One of those unused songs, the first-rate “Too Much to Lose,” which likens a love affair to a gambling game, appeared on 1999’s Songbook box set.
*3 According to Lightfoot, Canadian jazz guitarist Lenny Breau also tried to get him to join the cult.
*4 Cohen signaled his familiarity with Scientology in his song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” when he asked about going clear.
*5 Also recorded was Newbury’s “33rd of August,” although it remains unreleased.