The Mother Of All Musical Experiences

I’ve been very lucky throughout the course of my life as a writer to have have had interactions with a lot of extremely talented people.Over the past few years I have been writing stories about them, and what do you,…here comes another one now.

It was sometime in the early part of the summer of 1978.
We were living in a coach house on Beaumont Road in Toronto. We were fronted and backed by the deep Rosedale and Don Valleys. The main house was owned by Gordon Lightfoot, who was pretty much one of the reigning musical icons in Canada and a good chunk of the world.
We got to live in this coach house for a grand total of $125 per month which essentially covered the utilities. In exchange for this low rent, all we had to do was keep up the facade that there were people in the big house. We did this by going over in the early evening and turning on the lights. Then later in the evening we would go back and turn them off.
In between I would shoot a game or two of pool and wander around just to let anyone who might be casing the joint with ill intent know this was not an empty house.
We were the defacto night watchpersons.

The Gesture

I was also writing a lot of lyrics at the time and would often go over to the big house and talk to Gord about writing and how he went about it.
He told me that he liked to write and chart all the music for the songs first and that the general feel for the tune came from a line that could be a title or what he called a ‘money’ line in the chorus of the song.
Then he would pretty much write all the lyrics in a marathon session and record acoustic versions to analyze and play for his band so they could figure out their parts. Gord worked with three of the most talented musicians in the country, who, when they weren’t working with Gord were highly in-demand session players for film and commercial composers around town.
Running through these songs with the band gave him a chance to fine tune the lyrics, which he called the easy part. But he confessed to me that he had always considered the lyric writing part of it the most challenging in the entire process.
I asked him if he had ever performed songs from other songwriters. Other than one or two Ian & Sylvia Tyson songs very early on in his career (which was closing in on 20 years), he had always done his own material. And pretty much controlled his own publishing.
At the time, he was up there with Bod Dylan, David Bowie, and The Beatles in terms of having his material covered by other artists.
He was very open about this process and he enjoyed our chats because I was a fellow writer and honestly got where he was coming from.
Gord always believed that inspiration was something that came from both without and within and that the smart artist was the one who jumped on it and, at the very least, got the thought down somewhere before it scampered away.
That was some advice I took to heart and after that started carrying a notebook (now an Ipad) with me everywhere I went. Because you just never know.
As our discussions progressed, Gord became curious about the work I was doing and was wondering if he could take a look at some of the stuff I was happy with. And maybe if he saw something that turned his crank, we could collaborate on it, strictly for publishing, of course.
I was floored. But this kind of gesture was not something that was new to Gord. He was, at his core a really nice guy. Forceful, a little crazy and incredibly talented, but still a good egg.
I pored over my tight lyrics for the better part of a week, picked a dozen things I thought would work with his voice and musical style, rode over to Business Depot and copied them, then bound them up with my Cirlox binder and presented them to him.
He he took the thin booklet and asked me how many lyrics were in there. I told him about 12. He told me he would carry it around for a while and read it over a few times and see what’s what.
A couple nights later we were having dinner with Ken Tobias and his wife in our coach house when Gord walked up the stairs with an acoustic guitar.
|We introduced Ken and his wife, then he sat down on an occasional chair and started to re-tune his guitar.

He told us he had been working on tunes for his new album and was pretty much done. He started to play the chords from a song that would later become the title track of an album called Sundown which would go on to be one of his best selling albums.
We sat there completely mesmerized. He said that he wanted to call this tune Sundown. The song he played and dum de dummed along with was amazing. He also told us that this was the last song of his latest batch and that tomorrow he would start the lyric writing process.

The Little Blue Pill

The next day, I went down stairs to see Gord packing up his Cadillac Eldorado convertible with three guitars, as cooler and a briefcase.
I asked him if he had rented a studio to write in and he told me it was something like that.
He told me to go get my stuff and throw my bike in the trunk and he would take me with him so I could see what was going on first hand.
We drove across from Rosedale to Forest Hill Road and pulled into the driveway of a large three story brick house. He told me to lock up my bike and grab the cooler. We lugged the gear up an steel staircase to a room on the third floor of the house. Gord told me that he owned this house but rented it out to a couple who both traveled a lot.When he got to the top of the stairs, he unlocked the outside doors and walked into a room that was about 20 feet square. There were acoustic panels on the walls to baffle the sound. In the centre of the room was a music stand, a side table and a padded dining room chair.
Gord explained that he would use a portable cassette recorder, which he produced from his briefcase, along with the charts for his songs, and he would start playing and writing until he had all the songs roughed out to the point where he could play them for the band.
He said it would take about three or four days of working straight through.
I asked him how he managed that, and he responded with a single word…pharmacology. He produced a prescription bottle containing about 2 dozen little blue pills. He popped one and washed it down with some water.
I asked him what they were and he said that he wasn’t exactly sure but they were a very clean buzz with very little crash.
He asked me if I would like to try one. Back then, my interest in altered states of consciousness was very high, so I took one and popped it. You won’t actually feel anything but really alive. I asked him how long the high would last and he told me that it all depends. sometimes a day, sometimes two or three.
I left Gord to his labours and got on my bike to head home. But it was a beautiful day and so I rode over to Spadina an got a big twisty bagel with cream cheese and a Diet Coke and rode to the nearest park to have lunch and maybe write something.
This was Thursday afternoon, and as the little blue pill took hold I started to feel more energetic than I had in a long time. I had actually just come home from about three weeks on the road doing a large photo shoot for Oglivy and Mather and for all intents and purposes I was beat. But not anymore.

The rest of the day and the two that followed were a blur. I can’t really remember too much of what I did, other than taking pictures and writing, but there had to have been a lot more.
My wife never told me that I looked stoned out, because whatever this drug was, it simply made you feel completely refreshed all the time.
Saturday night I laid down on the bed to read a book and finally crashed. I slept the whole day Sunday and the next thing I new my wife was kissing me goodbye and telling me she was off to work.
All I remember is asking her what day it was.
A few days later I went to see how Gord was doing. His girfriend, Cathy, answered the door and invited me in. Gord was sitting at the table with a coffee and a big plate of bacon and eggs and toast. Beside his plate was the lyric book I had given him.
He asked me how I enjoyed the pill. We both laughed when I told him.
I had very little recollection of anything, but I loved it. I asked him how things went with Sundown. He just nodded….’it’s in the bag’, he said and told me the boys were coming over that afternoon to get started.
Then he picked up the lyric book and waved it around a bit and told me there was some damn fine stuff in there. My heart was racing. ‘But I talked about it with Cathy and did a lot of thinking on my own and decided that as much as I liked this material, the timing’s not right to get into this with you….sorry.’
I told him that he didn’t need to apologize, and that I was flattered all to hell that he would even read my stuff.
All he said was, keep writing, Your stuff will find its place. And so I did.
But I also got to sit in on a lot of the development sessions for the Sundown album and watch some real genius at work.
That kind of experience is worth its weight in gold.

If your business has reached the point where talking to an experienced  communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.
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