MUSIC
How Bob Dylan remembers late great musician Gordon Lightfoot
Bob Dylan has said that Lightfoot died “without ever having made a bad song”.
Gordon Lightfoot, iconic singer-songwriter, has sadly passed away at the age of 84.
Gordon Lightfoot inspired Bob Dylan
Lightfoot’s music has been widely covered by the likes of Hollywood greats, but Bob Dylan may have been his biggest fan.
Dylan said that his fellow singer died “without ever having made a bad song”, and every time he listened to one of them, he “wished it would last forever”.
When the ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ singer recorded his album ‘John Wesley Harding’, he tried to emulate the sound of Lightfoot — without success, as he himself acknowledged to Rolling Stone in 1969.
“I thought if he could get that sound, I could. But we couldn’t get it,” Dylan lamented at the time.
Lightfoot’s music has also been covered by Neil Young, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Grateful Dead, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eric Clapton — to name a few, and The Band great Robbie Robertson has called Lightfoot “a cultural treasure of the Canadian nation.”
About the late Gordon Lightfoot
Author of such gems as ‘If You Could Read My Mind’, ‘Sundown’, ‘Carefree Highway’, ‘Early Morning Rain’, and ‘Rainy Day People’, Lightfoot was born in Canada and began singing in the local church and taught himself piano and guitar, playing in large pop-folk ensembles across Canada, and studying at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles.
In 1975 Lightfoot wrote ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, a song about the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. It was then that he fell into an alcoholism that drastically affected his personal life and career.
“I was writing, recording, touring or doing TV, and I was always drinking too much,” he said in an interview with Low Country Today. “But I gave that up in 1982 thanks to the help of my sister. I knew I had to make sacrifices to stay in shape and stay in the game.”