COLUMN: Sundown. Lightfoot leaves the world a better place

Nearly every time I saw Gordon Lightfoot perform I was certain it would be the last time.

From the very first time I saw him live – sharing the stage with Gord Downie for a CBC Radio special in the winter of 2010 – I wondered if I’d ever see him do it again. He had already cheated death once, after all, and probably looked a good 15 years older than his then 70 years old. This three-song night, combined with a few backstories, could really be it.

I was wrong, thankfully, but I almost wasn’t.

It was just a few months later when one of the first major Twitter death hoaxes took shape as Gordon Lightfoot was prematurely eulogized. He wasn’t dead, of course. Just at the dentist. The jokes wrote themselves.

Then there were the other potential final moments. Statue unveilings. Massey Hall. The surprise Mariposa sets that were never really surprises. This has got to be it, right?

But they weren’t.

Ever since Mariposa returned to Orillia in 2000, he had been a stalwart, more often than not showing up unannounced. Even at my first Mariposa in 2015 I knew it was coming, it was just a matter of when.

On the Sunday afternoon, he appeared. One of the workshops was a tribute to him, and he took his spot behind the stage to watch his songs reinterpreted. My front-page photo would be him on the main stage, guitar in hand. I just had to be there when it happened.

Then a plane crashed.

An OPP officer at Tudhope Park gave me the tip. Out in Warminster a plane had crashed into a farmer’s field. No one was hurt, but it was still a plane crash. As the only one on the clock at The Packet & Times that weekend, I had to go.

I don’t want to recall how I made it to the crash site and back in cottage crawl traffic, but I was able to get my photo, interview the pilot — who walked away from the crash – and get back to Tudhope just in time to hear the applause.

Sprinting, I take my spot in the photo pit and start shooting. Just as Lightfoot began playing “If You Could Read My Mind” — and I caught my breath — I switched to video.

It’s a tough watch. Far from his best performance, it was another situation where I wasn’t sure I’d ever get a chance to see him play that song again.

I was wrong, thankfully.

Still, he can’t keep doing this, I would think. This is it. It’s done. He’s had a good run. Put your feet up in Bridle Path, have a dart and watch the hockey. You’ve earned it.

But no, he kept doing it. He kept going.

What I learned in the other times I got to interact with him and see him perform was that when you put a guitar in his hand, he was a different person. Even when his voice was shot or his guitar playing wasn’t as good as you’d hope it would be, he was still Gordon Lightfoot and he was still singing “Sundown” or “Carefree Highway” or “Early Morning Rain” or any selection from a catalogue that is arguably without peer among his fellow Canadians.

Perhaps that’s why the only time I was certain I would likely get the chance to see him again was when he re-opened Massey Hall in November 2021.

He’ll do this forever, I thought. He has to.

But, of course, he couldn’t. And unfortunately, that's now official.

At 7:30 p.m., May 1, 2023, Gordon Lightfoot left this world a better place than he found it.

And we are better for what he gave to us.