Lightfoot kicked off 1975 with Cold on the Shoulder—remarkably, his eleventh album in just ten years. It was easily Lightfoot’s most personal album to date. “All of the songs about relationships are out of my own experiences, either directly or indirectly,” he told a Chicago reporter. “You know, you just take a specific situation and then let your imagination flow. And believe me, I’ve been through all kinds of relationships. Sometimes I’ve been burned and wound up on the losing end and sometimes I’ve won.” Then, paraphrasing one of the refrains in “Sundown,” he added, “Of course, sometimes when you win, you end up losing.”
Where the Sundown album had been forged out of a torrid sexual affair, Cold on the Shoulder was the chilly aftermath of the breakup. Cathy Smith’s influence was apparent throughout, including on the title track, which Lightfoot has said deals with “loneliness and remorse.” “Now and Then” describes how a relationship on its last legs continues to exert its power to attract and repel. “A Tree Too Weak to Stand” is a cascading folk song of startling confession that details “the price of lust” over a chiming twelve-string guitar. Smith could well be the woman in the long dress on the bluesy “Slide on Over,” a song that comes closest to expressing the sexual ache of “Sundown.” And she’s long been rumored to be at the heart of “Rainy Day People,” a wistful number about a lover who could listen well and share darker moods. The song became Lightfoot’s next hit single, topping Billboard’s Easy Listening chart and reaching the Top 30 of its Hot 100 chart.
Cold on the Shoulder explores other themes of love. Lightfoot had made arrangements with Brita to see his children regularly. The bond with his kids had already inspired “The Pony Man.” Now he’d written a tribute to his daughter; the string-laden “Fine as Fine Can Be” was Lightfoot’s song for Ingrid. And “All the Lovely Ladies” is another tribute of sorts, an old-fashioned celebration mostly of women, including maybe even Lightfoot’s mother, Jessie, who sat in his audience each night dressed in all their “finery.”
One song was not the least bit personal. “Cherokee Bend” tells the story of a First Nations boy who fled a life of mistreatment to join the rodeo. It’s loosely based on Hal Borland’s 1963 young adult novel When the Legends Die. Lightfoot had read an adaptation of the novel in Reader’s Digest. It remains one of his few story songs inspired by fiction rather than historical fact.
The album did include one obvious clunker. With a dull melody and such mawkish, simplistic lines as “In the name of love she came / This foolish winsome girl / She was all decked out like a rainbow trout / Swimmin’ up stream in the world,” “Rainbow Trout” was a rare example of Lightfoot at his worst: lazy and uninspired.
As much as Cold on the Shoulder explored matters close to home, Lightfoot remained “paranoically cautious” about opening up in interviews. He occasionally made exceptions. In a five-thousand-word cover story in the influential US music magazine Crawdaddy, Lightfoot told Nancy Naglin, “I find it real difficult to come to terms with the idea of settling down with one person for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’m ever going to get married again, and if I was to do it, I’d wait until I was forty. When you’re away from the woman, continually confronted by other women, you suddenly find yourself in a weak moment. Then you’ve gone and stepped over the traces and you gotta go home and confront your old lady. It’s a two-way street. You’re going to have to offer her the same deal. You can’t ask a woman to be faithful if you’re not going to be faithful to her. That’s where it’s broken down for me twice.” Lightfoot’s candor about his failed relationships was shocking, coming from someone usually so guarded.
The new album’s cover showed a bearded, denim-shirted Lightfoot with his guitar. He was seated at his writing desk, its surface strewn with sheets of paper, and to one side was a pencil and a Chianti wine bottle. An almost ghostly figure of a dark-haired woman was standing in the shadows, just over his right shoulder. Many have assumed that woman to be Cathy Smith, but it was another woman. “She was a fan and we went out for a while,” is all Lightfoot will say about her now. Private as ever, Lightfoot has never understood why people need to know details about his life.
Cold on the Shoulder was racing up the charts, selling more than 470,000 copies worldwide in the first three weeks. Lightfoot toured extensively throughout the year with his band, which now also included Red Shea, who had rejoined for the year, and Ed Ringwald, a pedal steel player from Waterloo, Ontario, who quickly earned the nickname Pee Wee Charles. At the Miami Beach Auditorium, an attractive blond woman in the front row was getting hassled by venue security for photographing Lightfoot. Seeing this, Lightfoot came to her rescue and arranged to have her admitted backstage. She was a fan, who also happened to be named Cathy. Over drinks backstage, she and Lightfoot hit it off. They talked about seeing each other again, and a few weeks later Cathy Coonley flew to Toronto.
Meanwhile, Lightfoot was upset about another record label capitalizing on his fame. This time, it was United Artists reissuing his early recordings. Instead of taking an axe to destroy the unwanted albums as he’d done last time, Lightfoot battled the competition by going into the studio and recording new versions of his songs from the United Artists days. That fall, Reprise released Gord’s Gold, a twenty-two-track collection featuring new takes on Lightfoot favorites like “Early Morning Rain,” “I’m Not Sayin’ ” and “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” as well as his Warner Bros. hits. Another example of Lightfoot taking charge of his career, Gord’s Gold became a bestseller, the greatest-hits package every fan, old and new, wanted to own.
That summer, Lightfoot bought another Rosedale mansion, at 5 Beaumont Road. Like his Binscarth property a short distance away, it was on a quiet street by the ravine and had equally rich and famous neighbors, like the Bassett broadcasting family, the Eatons and Cardinal Emmett Carter. Cathy Coonley joined Lightfoot in the sprawling, 7,500-foot home, with its spacious rooms and high ceilings. It was a little surprising, so soon after the departure of the other Cathy in his life, but Lightfoot didn’t really like living on his own. In fact, Coonley was with him almost everywhere he went: on tour and sailing on Georgian Bay. Lightfoot had purchased his own yacht in Los Angeles and had it driven on a rig all the way up to Georgian Bay. It seemed natural to christen the thirty-nine-foot boat Sundown after his chart-topping hit. Although it was a large vessel, Lightfoot found he was able to sail it himself and would take Coonley and friends, most often his guitarist buddy Terry Clements, on trips.
We had many a pleasurable ride on Sundown. We’d go as far as the west coast or the east coast of Georgian Bay, around the Bruce Peninsula and up to Lion’s Head, which was an all-day or all-night sail. Sometimes we’d sail out to Hope Island, stay overnight to make the crossing the next morning to Lion’s Head. There were places where you could go and dock among the islands, places like Bone Island, up in those areas, the northwest section of Honey Harbour. We’d spend the night, build afire and then set off again the next morning.
Lightfoot and Coonley shared one canoeing experience. She’d joined him, Bob Dion and three others on a twenty-five-day canoe trip along the Churchill River, which flows for a thousand miles across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba into Hudson Bay. Coonley could keep up with the paddling and portaging challenges, which Lightfoot admired, but the heat, mosquitoes and wasps ultimately forced them to cut the trip short by a day. “We were getting near Flin Flon,” Lightfoot says, “and decided to bypass it and keep going down and come out at Amisk Lake, where there’s a place called Denare Beach. That’s where we called it quits. We stopped at a bridge, got picked up by a truck and eventually made our way back home.”
They were good traveling companions. On another occasion, Lightfoot and Coonley took a thirteen-hour train journey to the Ontario town of Hornepayne, north of Lake Superior, just to check the Canadian National Railway’s claim about its train’s punctuality. Lightfoot was writing a new song and had come up with the line “Was it up in Hornepayne where the trains run on time?” He wanted to see for himself if it was true.
It was a fun trip—took a bottle of booze and away we went. We got to Hornepayne and went and checked out the CN rail yards. Afterwards, at a restaurant, some people came in and recognized me. Nice folks. We went out and bought a bunch of beer and had a big jam session with them that lasted all day long. Those same people came and visited me in Rosedale about three years later.
Lightfoot’s first European tour took him to Amsterdam, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt. He was scheduled to travel on to London to perform at the Royal Albert Hall, but his flight was badly delayed. By the time he arrived at London’s Westbury Hotel, he was in a lousy mood. Allan Jones, then a music writer for Melody Maker, was there to interview Lightfoot and remembers him as “cantankerous.” Lightfoot, Jones later recalled, burst into the hotel room where Jones was waiting, flung his shoulder bag forcefully against the wall and bellowed, “Someone get me a drink. Man flies all the way from Frankfurt, the least he expects of his record company is that they get him a goddamn beer.” During the course of their hour together, Jones criticized the music of Lightfoot and some of his folk contemporaries as being “sentimental.” Lightfoot ended the interview and kicked him out of his hotel room. Jones would remember Lightfoot as a “bully.” It couldn’t have gone worse.
Lightfoot fared better when he appeared again at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall. Opening for him was Mimi Fariña, the spirited folk-singing sister of Joan Baez. This time around, Lightfoot didn’t curse his sound system or storm offstage, and the same New York Times critic applauded his performance: “Mr. Lightfoot has a husky baritone with an evocative quick vibrato, and he phrases with a light, precise rhythmicality. He has a blond-bearded, outdoorsy sex appeal that demonstrably pleased a number of women in the crowd. It’s a neatly attractive package, even if Mr. Lightfoot is still unable to disguise completely a shyness or arrogance that translates into coldness onstage. And it was nice to see him in a comeback from the sourness he engendered last time.”
Work often took Lightfoot to Los Angeles. That fall, while there for a meeting at Warner, he stayed with Joanne Magee, a waitress from the Troubadour whom he’d been seeing. When he woke the next morning, there was a four-month-old baby lying next to him. “He’s yours,” Lightfoot says Magee told him. “I said, ‘Okay, he’s mine. I’ll come see him next time I’m in town.’ Which I did. And that’s what I did from that point on. Every time I went to LA, before recording, performing or going to parties, that was the first place I went.” Everyone in Lightfoot’s circle back in Toronto insisted he have a paternity test, but Lightfoot refused, believing the boy was his. His sister, Bev, was convinced Magee was taking advantage of her brother. Lightfoot remembers getting into a major standoff with her about it one night. It says a lot about Lightfoot’s character—his trusting nature and sense of loyalty—that he never questioned Magee nor shirked support duty. Lightfoot continued seeing his son, whose name was Galen, whenever he was in LA. He recalls a time when the boy was seriously ill with an ear infection.
I walked in the house, and there was this miserable child, crying in pain from his earache. Joanne tells me, “We can’t get rid of it and I don’t know what to do. I can’t afford to go to a doctor.” And I remember taking him in my arms and walking him around the house, looking at his poor little face, the tears and the mucous running down his nose. And I said to him, “I think I’m going to be looking after you from this point on.” I came back to Toronto and told Bev, “Set it up so she gets child support by the month. Pay the health insurance and tell her to get a doctor and arrange it all directly through my office.” I did that for the next twenty-two years—until Galen turned twenty-five. I’ve stayed in touch with him. He works for a restaurant, purchasing wines for the operation, and is now married. I attended the wedding and danced with Galen’s mother and Emily, the bride.
In the late fall, Lightfoot was busy working on his next album. He liked to rehearse new songs with his band in the sunroom of his Beaumont Road home. Rehearsals usually went from noon until six. Drummer Barry Keane, by then a full-time band member, remembers that at the end of the first day Lightfoot started playing something no one recognized. “What’s that?” Haynes asked. “It’s a song I’m working on about a shipwreck I just read about,” Lightfoot said.
The week before, Lightfoot had been writing on the third floor of his house and came down to the kitchen for more coffee. A report on the 11 P.M. CBC news told of the sinking of a giant freighter, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, in a fierce storm. “I remember it so well,” says Lightfoot. “The wind was howling even in Toronto that night, and I went back up to the attic thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like up on Lake Superior.’ It must’ve been awful. I didn’t think about it again for another week, but I already had a melody, like the drone of an old Irish chantey. No story, just the chords.”
Lightfoot played the tune again at the next rehearsal, and by the third day he and Clements had worked out guitar parts. For the next two days it was the same thing: music but no lyrics. The following Monday, Lightfoot and the band headed into Eastern Sound Studios, on Yorkville Avenue in Toronto. “First day in the studio, Gord’s doing live vocals with the band on four or five songs,” says Keane. “It’s going really well. At the end of the day he starts playing this mystery tune again. I don’t think Rick has even played a note on it yet. On Tuesday, we record another three or four more songs, and then Gord plays that tune again. The engineer asks about it. The third day, it’s the exact same thing. By the fourth day, we’ve recorded all of the songs and it’s three in the afternoon on Thursday. We’d finished. The engineer suggests we use the remaining time to work on the shipwreck song. Gord says, no, it’s not ready. But the engineer convinced him to put it on tape. I was in the drum booth, across the room from Gord, and I asked him when he wanted me to come in. He said, ‘I’ll give you a nod.’ Gord starts playing, the guys are doing their thing. Gord starts singing, then gives me the nod. I do my drum fill and we finish playing it. And that was the record. Not only was it a first take, but it was the first time we’d played the entire song and the first time we’d even heard the lyrics.”
Tom Treece, a Michigan musician, was in Eastern Sound on the same night, making plans to record there with his rock band Brussel Sprout. The group’s producer had invited him to come check out the studio. To Treece’s delight, he was allowed to sit in a side room and watch as Lightfoot and his band recorded the shipwreck song. It was a magical moment Treece would recount in his memoir, But What Do I Know? “I remember the haunting sound that [Lightfoot’s] guitarist produced by playing through a new device called a synthesizer,” writes Treece, “and how—when he recorded the vocal—Lightfoot cleared the studio and killed all the lights save the one illuminating his parchment of scribbled words. For a fledgling singer-songwriter, I was in heaven.”
Lightfoot had come up with the lyrics after finding an article titled “The Cruelest Month” in the November 24 issue of Newsweek magazine. He read the opening line and was instantly captivated: “According to the legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’ ” As he’d done with “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and other factually based songs, Lightfoot set about thoroughly researching his subject, taking a documentarian’s approach to the task, detailing the ship’s 26,000-ton load, the hellish winds and monstrous waves and the fate of captain and crew—even recounting how the church bell in Detroit’s “Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral” “chimed til it rang twenty-nine times for each man.”
Lightfoot had been fascinated by ships his whole life; he witnessed one being launched when he was just seven years old. “It slid sideways in the water, creating a great, powerful wave,” he told Michael Schumacher in his book Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Lightfoot added, “When the Edmund Fitzgerald went down I owned a sailboat. I imagined what that wave might have been.” For Lightfoot, there was something mystical about a sinking ship that touched him deeply. He’d previously written a sea tragedy song with “Ballad of Yarmouth Castle,” about the 1965 sinking of a cruise ship. As he told Schumacher, “Shipwrecks are different than your coal mine or railroad disasters. They have a different quality, a mystique and mysteriousness. Witnesses usually don’t live to tell the tale.” It was unorthodox subject matter for a pop song, but “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became Lightfoot’s next single and a surprise hit.
On November 17, Lightfoot turned thirty-seven. Bev decided to throw her brother a surprise party at his Rosedale mansion. She invited sixty or so friends and business buddies, who gathered quietly around the pool table under the Tiffany shade. Lightfoot was busy writing upstairs, and they waited while Bev went to call him. When he came down and everyone yelled birthday greetings, he burst into tears. He walked past them and sat down at his Steinway piano in the living room. Looking out the window with tears still in his eyes, he softly played some instrumental tunes from the 1940s, songs his parents loved. Out of respect for his privacy, the guests listened only briefly before moving to other parts of the house, leaving Lightfoot alone to play out his melancholy with just a bottle of wine for company. It’s possible that the birthday surprise had made him think how much he missed his kids and his dad, for whom he hadn’t truly grieved.
Another year, another seven months of travel. In 1974, Lightfoot had scaled back his touring to seventy-one dates from eighty-six the previous year. But there was no letup in 1976, with seventy-two planned concerts. Success meant that Lightfoot could now afford to dispense with commercial airlines and fly around North America strictly on privately leased planes. Lightfoot calculated that the flexibility of traveling by smaller Lear jets, although costly to rent, saved him about twenty nights a year on the road. The first stop on the tour that year was a strange one for a bearded folk singer in faded denim and turquoise bracelets: the luxurious Sahara Tahoe Hotel in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. But playing in the popular ski resort and casino town showed just how high Lightfoot’s star had risen. He was getting an estimated $40,000 for six shows in three nights. Frank Sinatra was performing the same weekend across the street at Harrah’s. “I’ve never played a club like this before,” Lightfoot admitted to the Toronto Star’s Peter Goddard, who flew down to cover the unusual event, “but I was in Vegas a while back and saw Wayne Newton and Gladys Knight and the Pips and figured if they could play places like that, we could too.”
Drummer Barry Keane was making his touring debut at the Sahara Tahoe. Lightfoot with drums was not as revolutionary as Dylan going electric, but it was unquestionably a good move. Combined with the rich textures of Pee Wee Charles’s pedal steel, Keane’s drums gave Lightfoot’s music added depth, drama and dynamism. Keane remembers being really uptight in Lake Tahoe—and not just because it was his first gig with Lightfoot. “Gord likes to be in his comfort zone, and there were a lot of things outside his comfort zone,” says Keane. “He’d never played a casino or a hotel and he’d never played with a drummer. The hotel had hired an orchestra of twelve strings and horns to back him up. Gord had got his arranger Nick DeCaro to come with his charts and conduct. The rehearsals were a nightmare. There was no set list. Back then, Gord didn’t like to be held to an order. I had asked him beforehand what songs I should learn, and he’d simply said don’t worry about it. So all through rehearsal I had to guess what to play or was frantically asking Rick. And I’ve got Nick set up behind me with the orchestra asking me which song is which. Gord got angry, fired the orchestra and sent Nick home. It was an exercise in pure frustration.” But the shows went ahead, with just Lightfoot and his band, and were hugely successful, with encores every night. The hotel management was so thrilled they asked him back—twice in 1977—for much bigger money.
After the stress at the casino, Lightfoot wasn’t pleased about having to immediately fly to Los Angeles to appear again on The Midnight Special for an episode hosted by Wolfman Jack and Helen Reddy. Although the TV series was a big deal, Lightfoot hated television appearances. They always made him anxious—too many things outside of his control. When he and the band arrived at the NBC Studios in Burbank, Lightfoot was already grumpy. As the rehearsal for the taping dragged on, with constant stops and starts, it became clear Lightfoot just wanted to get the hell out. At one point, someone at the foot of the stage kept calling up to Lightfoot. “I’m looking at this guy who’s trying to get Gord’s attention and thinking he looks really familiar,” says Keane. “Gord knew he was there but was ignoring him. The guy was like a little kid and starts pulling on Gord’s pant leg. Finally, Gord looks down and says, ‘John, for Christ’s sake, I’ll be with you in a moment.’ It was John Denver.”*
At the taping itself, Lightfoot was equally impatient with the floor director, who kept breaking in and having him start over as the crew struggled to get sound levels. It became a battle of wills, says Keane. “Gord says to the director, ‘Get your cameras rolling, ’cuz we ain’t stoppin’.’ We were playing the first song, and the floor director walks up and yells cut, and Gord’s not stopping. We played five songs all the way through, but they didn’t have the cameras rolling for the first one. They got what they got [“Don Quixote” and three songs from the new album: “Race Among the Ruins,” “Spanish Moss” and “I’m Not Supposed to Care”]. Gord says, ‘Thanks, see ya,’ and we were out of there. He was definitely in charge.”
The new recording, Summertime Dream, came out that May. It was Lightfoot’s twelfth studio album, the sixth to feature Waronker’s production and the first under a second negotiated deal with Warner/Reprise. Positive reviews greeted its release. The Toronto Star’s Peter Goddard called it Lightfoot’s best and most important album to date, citing a new complexity of meaning in the songs: “It’s a sophisticated work but one, because of Lightfoot’s discipline and love of melody, that seems simple on the surface.” In particular, Goddard singled out “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” as a sign of musical growth and the hit potential of “Spanish Moss” and the title track. Rolling Stone’s Billy Altman also applauded Lightfoot’s melodic strengths and how his “meticulously constructed tunes and arrangements never fail to lift you from the doldrums.” Altman noted that the album contained just two compositions with messages: the folk narrative of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and the anti-war “Protocol.” “Songs like these are now more exceptions than rule for Lightfoot, but that matters little,” he wrote. “It’s hard to argue and hum at the same time.” Goddard and Altman were right. Summertime Dream was another high-water mark for Lightfoot, whose songwriting gifts and recording skills were indisputable.
On May 22, Lightfoot and his band appeared on the first season of Saturday Night Live. Created by Toronto-born Lorne Michaels, SNL catered to hip young viewers with a mix of comedy sketches and musical performances. Michaels featured top Canadian talent, including comedians like Dan Aykroyd and later Martin Short, Mike Myers and others. Lightfoot was just the second Canadian musician, after Anne Murray, to appear on the show. He and the band flew into New York by Lear jet and drove over to the same NBC studio he’d been in eleven years earlier when he appeared on The Tonight Show. Following an afternoon of rehearsals, the episode went live and Lightfoot, wearing a polka-dot shirt and suspenders, and his band, all decked out in denim, performed “Summertime Dream” and “Spanish Moss.” Lightfoot then became part of a comedy skit in which he attempted to play a third song, “Sundown.” Actor-writer-director Buck Henry, the episode’s host, interrupted: “Excuse me, I’m sorry, Gordon, but I thought I explained that you’re only gonna do two songs.” Lightfoot protests, “But look, we came all the way from Toronto.” At that, Henry says, “Now you’re beginning to irritate me,” snaps his fingers and nods at someone off-camera. In steps gonzo comedian John Belushi, dressed as his samurai character, Futaba, who proceeds to snap Lightfoot’s guitar strings with wire cutters. End of song. “John was really intense,” recalls Lightfoot, “but it was a fun experience.” Six years later, Lightfoot wasn’t so pleased to be associated with Belushi. Their names were all over the media in connection with Cathy Smith, who had given the comedian a fatal heroin overdose.
Lightfoot and Smith had never got into hard drugs; she started using heroin after their relationship ended. Smith first met Belushi through Levon Helm when the Band appeared on SNL in the fall of 1976. She had gravitated next to the glittery lights of Los Angeles, where she hooked up with country singer Hoyt Axton and, according to Bob Woodward’s book Wired, became involved in dealing cocaine and heroin to stars like the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Ron Wood. Smith met Belushi again through Richards and Wood and later admitted in court that on the night of March 5, 1982, she injected Belushi with eleven speedballs—combined doses of cocaine and heroin—in Bungalow 3 at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont. She served fifteen months in the California state prison for her role in Belushi’s death and went on to live a peripatetic life under an assumed name. Lightfoot could easily have shut her out of his life at that point. Instead, he helped her out financially—even setting up a book deal for her memoir. “I felt sorry for her and wanted her to make some money of her own,” says Lightfoot, who showed a compassion for Smith that few others would. “We’d had a good time, and I did care for her, but she was just too hot to handle.”
Three days after his SNL appearance, the normally reclusive Lightfoot did something unprecedented: he invited the media into his Toronto mansion for a press conference. Sunburned from sailing on Georgian Bay with Cathy Coonley and sporting his polka-dot shirt with blue jeans and suspenders, Lightfoot announced to forty TV and newspaper reporters that he would perform a benefit concert the following month at Maple Leaf Gardens to raise money for the 1976 Canadian Olympic team. The games were taking place that summer in Montreal and immediate action was needed. “Some of our track and field people are in rags,” Lightfoot told the gathering. Ken Twigg, executive director of the Canadian Track and Field Association, stood up to say the situation wasn’t quite that dire. But the radiator Twigg was sitting on caught his pants and ripped them, giving Lightfoot the best punch line of the afternoon. Joining Lightfoot at the press conference were fellow performers Sylvia Tyson, Murray McLauchlan and classical guitarist Liona Boyd. Some newspaper accounts couldn’t resist noting that Lightfoot was showing a paunch, the result of heavy drinking, and derisively describing the opulent decor of Lightfoot’s home, with its flocked wallpaper, Tiffany lamps, pool table and Steinway piano.
The concert took place on June 11. Lightfoot opened and closed the show, receiving ovations and prolonged applause when he and his band performed “Summertime Dream” and “Sundown.” He seemed pleased to act as host, introducing Boyd, McLauchlan and Tyson in turn. But he couldn’t have been thrilled with the headline the following day: “McLauchlan Steals Show at the Olympics Benefit.” Yet it was true. Wearing the jersey of Maple Leafs star Darryl Sittler, which he’d grabbed from the team’s dressing room before hitting the stage, McLauchlan scored the biggest applause with his performance. Backed by his group the Silver Tractors, he also delivered the loudest set of the night. “Gord was the draw, but I had a great band and a few hits of my own,” says McLauchlan. “We just kicked ass, which I think caught Gord a little by surprise.” Still, Lightfoot stands by his choices for the lineup: “I wanted Murray because he’s such a brilliant performer. I wanted Liona because I knew how great she was, doing her classical thing in her long dress. And I wanted a thrush, so I got Sylvia on board.” Ultimately, Lightfoot met his fundraising goal of $200,000, to be shared between the Canadian Olympic Association and Twigg’s allegedly raggedy organization. He was doing his part for Canada, but his own career kept calling, pulling him back onto the road.
* A major star himself, Denver had credited Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” with inspiring his hit “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” The two would soon share stages together.