Tag: Gordon Lightfoot

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“That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”

…is a song by Gordon Lightfoot which falls into a kind of genre of “love ’em and leave ’em” songs. These are songs about (usually) a man who romances a woman, seduces her, hangs around for a short time, but then gets restless and can’t help it but hit the road again. The woman, of course, always wants him to stay. What fun would it be (for the man) if the woman said, “Okay. Well, I guess you feel the urge to go, you should go.  It was nice meeting you. ”

I’ve had a hundred more like you, so don’t be blue
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

Here’s a list of some of them:

  • For Lovin’ Me (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • I’m Not Saying (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • Green Green (New Christy Minstrels)
  • Greenback Dollar (New Christy Minstrels)
  • We’ll Sing in the Sunshine (Gale Garnett – odd reversal: here the
    girl announces she will hang around for one year, and then leave)
  • Ramblin’ Man (Allman Brothers Band)
  • Freebird (Lynyrd Skynyrd, with pale imitation “Travelin’ Man”)*
  • Rose of Aberdeen (Ian Tyson)
  • Heard it in a Love Song (Jimmy Buffet)
  • Baby, the Rain Must Fall (Glen Yarborough)

That last one– after explaining why he must desert his girl, with a booming, incontrovertible voice:

Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow,
Where-ever my heart leads me,
Baby I must go,
Baby I must go.

This was a very popular song in it’s day, around 1965, and also gave it’s title (and theme) to a movie starring Steve McQueen as an aspiring singer. Wow. Weirdness prevails. Anyway, this guy, in the song, is telling his girlfriend– or maybe, in these enlightened times, his boyfriend– that he can’t stay. He has to go. He just has to. It’s not that he’s a no-account bum who exploited her, took advantage of her feelings, and is now setting out to cheat on her. Oh, no no no. He just, well, has to go. It’s a force of nature, the incontrovertible will of God, fate, destiny– all of that. Like the wind must blow. Like blowin’ in the wind, which is where the answer to the question, “did you know this before you seduced me” is.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. If some guy feels an utterly compelling urge to travel and see the world, hey, more power to him. And if he is able to convince some woman that he would be a fine, temporary lover– hey, go for it. It’s just that I suspect that most of these rambler-gamblers are probably a little less than forth-right about those facts at the start of a relationship.

Or maybe they’re just gay. Maybe I’m missing some code here. Maybe the whole thing fits better into the “Brokeback Mountain” sort of scenario. Can’t you just picture Jake Gyllenhaal singing, “Baby, the Rain Must Fall” as he gets back into his little pickup truck to head back to Texas? And Heath Ledger weeping in his trailer?

In that respect, the first song on the list, “For Lovin’ Me”, by Gordon Lightfoot, is refreshingly frank:

That’s what you get for lovin’ me,
Everything you had is gone, as you can see
That’s what you get for lovin’ me.

…I’ve had a hundred more like you,
So don’t be blue.
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

That’ a refreshing tone. It’s like 2:35 seconds of so long, sucker.

Dylan wrote a few, but they’re different. Try “It Aint Me Babe”. He doesn’t have that bitchy God told me to see the world tone that the other songs have, which may make you suspect that that God-told-me-to-see-the-world tone is largely bullshit.

You say you’re looking for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more

How good of a lyricist is Bob Dylan exactly? “Someone who will die for you and more” is brilliant. So is “close his eyes” and then “close his heart”. He is unparalleled as a lyricist.

Not one of these other so-long-baby songs can hold a light to the greatest “I’m a-leavin’ yah” song of all time, also with one of the greatest put-downs in the history of popular music, also by, of course, Bob Dylan:

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Bob Dylan)

Now I aint saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better,
I don’t mind.
You just kind of wasted my precious time,
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Whoa! Wasted his precious time! A line that makes Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” sound like Florence Nightingale, with her: “I’m disappointed in you…”

Love sucks.

* added 2014-04-20

SCTV’s brilliant “Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written“

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Sit Down, Young Stranger

[updated May 2008]

Gordon Lightfoot made the top 50 essential Canadian singles for a mediocre song about a stereotypical slut who hung around his back stairs. If he had to be on the list– and I don’t quibble with that– it should have been for “Early Morning Rain”, “That’s What you get for Lovin’ me” or something else.

How about “Sit Down, Young Stranger”?

For all the songs written about the generation gap in the 1960’s, “Sit Down, Young Stranger” is one of the most touching, and the most diligent. It’s not a lazy lyric (like “Sundown”)– there’s some thought in a phrase like “my love was given freely and oft-times was returned” (even if the “oft-times” is hackneyed). Not “oft-times”, but “often”.

The son’s encounter with his parents parallels his encounter with an imperfect world, in which he is lonely, at times, but satisfied within his dreams.

It’s the weirdness of the song that I like. Lightfoot seems to be struggling to express a real experience and real insight instead of a cliché about rebellion. There is real pain in the distance between father and son. The son’s ideals are somewhat inchoate and fanciful, and his father is harsh but not mean. “How can you find your fortune if you cannot find yourself?” It sounds more real than Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” which sounds schematic and contrived in comparison. There is some sympathy for the father, and understanding, and some distance from the mother’s unconditional and perhaps smothering love. The song is full of little edges that scrape like sandpaper: “not knowing where to sit”, “my father looms above me/for him there is no rest”, “my thoughts are all in spin”, “I never questioned no one and no one questioned me”.

The last verse is a mystery to me. Logically, it is the son responding the father of the previous verse: “I wait for your reply”.

The answer is not easy
For souls are not reborn
To wear the crown of peace
You must wear the crown of thorns
If Jesus had a reason,
I’m sure he would not tell
They treated him so badly,
how could he wish them well?

But it almost sounds like the father speaking at first– it is the wisdom (or foolishness) of age that only violence (thorns) can lead to peace. But then I think it is the son, observing that the mystery of Christ is that he didn’t have a reason for his actions– I presume his self-destruction– in the human sense. And the son doesn’t see the divine in Christ’s rejection of his own family– just silence (“souls are not reborn”). But it’s hard to tell if this is a rejection of Christ or acceptance.

[added November 2009] I missed the possibility that it is a narrator who speaks those lines. It makes some sense– it is an observation that might be made by a third party: to wear the crown of peace… Is it a narrative voice telling us that this thorny distance between father and son, between the generations, can only be traversed in blood?

Those last eight lines are among the most poetic every inscribed by a Canadian song-writer– and among the most haunting.

It’s a puzzling verse.

There is no doubt about the meaning of the poignant last phrase, though. All the searching and questioning comes down to one thing, that shattering, heart-breaking last line:

The answer’s in the forest,
Carved upon a tree.
John loves Mary,
Does anyone love me?

Added Nov 2008: after re-reading this, I am struck again by what a remarkable song it is. I heard it first as a teenager living at home in the late 1960’s, and what I most vividly remember was the unexpected last line, the sneakiness of it– what does it all come down to, after all? What is it that really matters? What is the distance between my parents and myself? Does anyone love me?

I mentioned that Christ rejected his family. For all the “family values” preached by the religious right, would it really surprise you to find that the Bible doesn’t really support something called “family values”? It doesn’t. When Christ’s family approaches him during his ministry, demanding some kind of acknowledgement of family obligation, Christ declared that his followers, his disciples are his real “family”. He warns that his message will tear families apart. He clearly places a priority on the kingdom against the requirements of kinship. He even says that a person who is not willing to reject his family to follow him is not worthy of the kingdom.

In fact, the last verse of “Sit Down Young Stranger” gives you a better sense of Christ’s view of the family than all of the ranting and raving you will ever hear from James Dobson.

But then, fake religion never embraces heartbreak.

Gordon Lightfoot’s and Other Get Lost Songs

 

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Sundown with Assassin’s Eyes

I have been listening to a replay of “The 50 Essential Tracks” of Canadian popular music on the CBC lately.  This is a program from last spring which they are running again due to the lock-out.  Note about the link: the Canadian edition is further down the page. 

I disagree with a fair number of songs on the list, and especially “The Hockey Song” by Stompin’ Tom Conners, which is something like #13. Novelty songs do not belong on “Top 50” lists. They belong on juke-boxes in run-down restaurants in small northern Ontario towns.

I like “Four Strong Winds”– it’s a great song– but not quite enough to justify a listing in the top 15. It’s straining under the weight of that kind of honorific.

I liked seeing “Echo Beach” up there, along with “The Weight” (both of which should have been higher).

Yesterday, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” came in somewhere in the top 20. Here are some of the lyrics:

I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where yah do what yah don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping ’round my back stairs

and

I can see her lookin’ fast in her faded jeans
She’s a hard-lovin’ woman got me feelin’ mean

And then he warns her again to stay away from his back stairs and his porch and his Juno awards.

Does this belong in anyone’s top 25? How exactly do you look “fast” in your faded jeans?

I think I understand what happens to the career of a singer-songwriter. You start out trying to write the best damn songs you can, about real people you know, and real experiences you had, and you strive to say something fresh and original. So Gordon Lightfoot writes five or six genuinely interesting outstanding songs (“Early Morning Rain”, “Sit Down, Young Stranger”, “Whispers of the North”, and “That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”) and a dozen or so pretty good songs. And then…

Then you become successful and famous. Everyone tells you you are great songwriter. And it’s time for some new material. And you’re strumming around on your guitar and you come up with a little riff and the word “Sundown” comes into your mind and you make it a chorus and then you add a few aimless verses and your producer adds some background instrumentation and vocals and presto, another hit.

Does Gordon Lightfoot actually know any “hard-lovin’ ” women who wear satin dresses and creep around his back stairs?  I’ll bet he doesn’t.  (Actually, he does– sort of: the song is allegedly about Cathy Smith, infamous for helping John Belushi leave this world.  Look it up.  I would offer that this does not remedy the use of cliché or the essential hypocrisy of the song: condemning a woman for her morals after sleeping with her. )

(I’ll bet he also had no intention of slipping away on that “endless highway” either.)

And what exactly does “hard-lovin'” mean? That she makes him pay up front?

This is the same woman The Guess Who ran into back in 1970:

Don’t you start coming around my door
Don’t want to see your shadow no more…

Come to think of it– this woman probably moved on to Malibu where she ended up at party with Bob Dylan:

There’s a woman on my lap, and she’s drinking champagne
She’s got white skin and assassin’s eyes

Yes Bob:  a “hard-lovin'” woman.

Bizarrely… Nana Mouskouri recorded a French language version of the song.

Update: 2014-08-19

Here’s what Gordy himself has
to say about the inspiration
for Sundown (>From Reddit, August 22, 2014:)
:

Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my
desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin’! And that’s how I wrote the song “Sundown,” and as a matter of fact, it was written just *around* Sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album.

But that is not what the song is about at all.

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Gordon Lightfoot’s Greatest Bestest All-time Hits of All Time

I buy a lot of CDs and I used to buy a lot of LP’s. I normally avoid “Greatest Hits” type albums, because you are not often getting a collection of the best songs by an artist; merely his most popular songs.

Gordon Lightfoot made a career by not issuing any albums whatsoever except for Greatest Hits Collections. It’s true. His first album, released in 1966, was called “Gord’s Greatest Hits”. Nobody knew who Gord was. He had no previous recordings of original material. But since he had a greatest hits album, and went by his first name, we all figured he must be important and we added him to the collection.

His next album was “Best of Gordon Lightfoot”, which was a collection of songs that were well-known for being on his “Greatest Hits” album. You had to have it. All of the songs sounded familiar, but then, after all, it was the same artist. Almost nobody noticed that it was exactly the same collection as the first album, because, after more than 30 seconds of any Gordon Lightfoot song, most listeners fall fast asleep.

Lightfoot’s third album was, “Solid Gold: Volume I”. These were songs that had become pretty popular because they were on his first Greatest Hits Album, but also included a few songs from the “Best of” album, for variety.

“Best Golden Treasures – Gordon Lightfoot’s All-time Greatest Hits” was released three weeks later. By this time, the scam was going so well, that there wasn’t even a vinyl album inside the cover– just a slip of paper saying that most of the songs would be available on the boxed set due to be released at Christmas, right after “Solid Gold: Volume II”. Gord’s career was going so well that nobody actually bought the album for the music; just for the cool picture of Gord holding his 12-string and gazing lustfully at Sylvia Tyson on the album cover displayed next to his on the record rack.

One year later, Gord issued “All Time Greatest and Bestest Most Treasured Hits Played Live With Previously Unheard Studio Cuts From His Early Albums”. That took a little nerve: I mean, how did Gord know that nobody was actually listening to any of his earlier albums and that, therefore, many of those records were previously “unheard”? But at least, this release contained some new material, consisting mostly of fake applause and assorted funky voices shouting “huh”, “get down”, “go for it, Gord”, and “hey, isn’t that Buffy Ste. Marie?”. Anyway, to make a long story short, with the assistance of my nubile intern/assistant Ms. Fricker, I was able to uncover the following facts:

1. Gordon Lightfoot issued 37 Greatest Hits Collections between the years 1966 and 1973.

2. During this period, he actually recorded 3 different songs.

3. Most of Lightfoot’s Greatest Hits albums consist of these same 3 songs arranged in different order and dubbed at different speeds, or, sometimes, backwards, or with fake audience sounds. In at least one case, a John Denver recording, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, was inserted by mistake. Denver sued, but a jury awarded Lightfoot $6.3 after his attorney convinced them that some people in the future might see John Denver perform the song in public and think they were watching Gordon Lightfoot.

4. A careful study of archival video tapes and films reveals that Gord’s live performances also featured the same three songs performed over and over again, in different order, and, sometimes backwards, or a capella. At no time does the audience appear to have noticed the deception. Lightfoot is occasionally seen leaving the stage for a smoke as the music continues to the accompaniment of a metronome.

5. Desperate for a hit in the late 1970’s, after having exhausted all possible titles, including “Greatest”, “Treasures”, “Live”, “Best of”, “Classic”, “Golden”, “Big Hits”, “Big Big Hits”, “Classic Gold”, “Classic Treasures”, etc., and every other possible permutation, Lightfoot wrote a new song about a ship that sank, called “The Wreck of the Titanic”. However, after he discovered that James Cameron had copyrighted the word “Titanic”, and also that he was two syllables short, so he located a ship with a long name and paid members of Greenpeace to sink it during a storm in Lake Superior.

I would be ever so grateful if anybody reading this has a copy of the Ian and Sylvia album from the 1960’s in which Sylvia shows the best cleavage of any folk singer in the history of tragic Mary Hamiltons. Please let me know, and, if you could, send me a scan of the cover.