Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Documentary highlights the musical hijinks of an iconic Canadian troubadour.



Streaming on ammyzon.



Really well done. Funny, admiring but not a complete suckjob, makes a good case for his dedication and craftsmanship and.. musicality.

[Frayed Knot]

I've recently developed more of an appreciation for Lightfoot than ever before after going a large chunk of my life knowing little beyond his handful of radio hits.

So when I heard about this one a while ago it became something I wanted to see. But in this era of fractured availability it is an Amazon property while I'm on

a Netflix feed so it's possible that it will be years before seeing it unless I want to begin tithing to Mr. Bezos.

[Edgy MD]

I dunno. I'm halfway through this, and I'm finding it to be really sycophantic.



They seemingly aren't sure of how they want to tell the story. For a time, it's a story about the songs, but then it tries to be biographical, so it jumps back, but not to the beginning. We're one hour in before we get to his childhood, and they have an amazing clip of him singing in church, but they only play two lines from it. They also jump around the Canadian geography, which is challenging for a non-native, but I think it's really important, because if there's any thesis that really works with Lightie, it's that he and his fucking train song helped give the spread out country a unifying national identity.



He's clearly been through some health challenges, and the revenant he has become is hard to reconcile with the fullback he was back in the day, but he always looked kind of middle-aged. There's a subtext running through it that's hard to ignore about how smoking fucks you up. A lot of the old scenesters (him, Ian Tyson, Ronnie Hawkins) look like living ghosts, but Randy Bachman looks better than ever. Joni Mitchell, who was never not smoking, looms large in her absence from the proceedings.



It's interesting how the road to the United States for Canadian artists, both eastern and western, ran through the midwest, and instead of taking their act from Toronto to Boston or Vancouver to Seattle, they tried to break through in places like Detroit and Cleveland.



But mostly it's the authorized quality of it that undermines it. In order to get Lightfoot's cooperation, ex-wives, ex-partners, ex-groupies, and his long shit-list of enemies has to be uninvited. And what fun is that?



Also ... Alec Baldwin?



Anyhow, the parts where they just focus on a song for a while, ask folks what that song meant to them, and show two dozen artists covering the same song — is fun, and really underscores the times when he absolutely struck a vein of gold.

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

Those are fair criticisms. I felt like the movie tho was a better presentation of good Gordness than the bio I read which was also admiring, I think the author appears as a talker.



If you haven't seen it, musician Robbie Fulks' examination of Lightfoot here is a hilarious and insightful gold standard of Lightfoot Analysis. https://www.talkhouse.com/robbie-fulks-dives-headfirst-into-the-strangely-messy-world-of-gordon-lightfoot/https://www.talkhouse.com/robbie-fulks-dives-headfirst-into-the-strangely-messy-world-of-gordon-lightfoot/

[Edgy MD]

And no discussion of our hobbit-named balladeer is complete without Rick Moranis' finest moment.



[YOUTUBE]kZlrrwUIwcE[/YOUTUBE]

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

lollloolol

[Edgy MD]

I tell you, I'd watch the hell out of a two-hour documentary about Cathy Smith. That story fascinates me.