Author's Note: This turned out to be the last time we enjoyed an evening with Gordon. I'm so glad he traveled to Peoria while we were in town.
What a lucky happenstance, my favorite performer making a stop just minutes from our summer home near Peoria, Illinois. How could I pass it up? I pleaded for it to be a birthday gift and was granted the company of my wife and old-soul daughter to the September 27th Gordon Lightfoot show at the Civic Center.
We waited through a very capable opening act, something new to us as a Lightfoot audience. Nashville’s Jack Schneider sang a handful of original songs, demonstrated his guitar chops and even strapped on a harmonica a few times. I wondered if perhaps Gordon found him slightly reminiscent of his old friend Bob Dylan. It was quite enjoyable.
Finally, the frail looking legend himself strolled confidently out on stage, settled quickly in behind the mic and began to strum and sing Sweet Guinevere. After the initial shock at the raspy remnants of his once beautiful voice, our expectations were adjusted for the evening.
At age sixty-eight, my knees complained after we walked up to the second balcony. But I don’t have to perform with my knees. Gord’s voice seems to be going into retirement against his will. After all, Paul McCartney is eighty years old, and Tony Bennett released an album at ninety-five.
But literally “with an achin’ in his heart” – a triple aortic aneurysm nearly took his life in 2002, leaving him to recover from a six-week coma and a tracheotomy that would have sidelined most mortals. That he is alive is amazing, touring twenty years later, astounding. He subsequently suffered a stroke, and most recently a broken arm. The man is no stranger to pain.
His faithful fans are in love with this troubadour, a songwriter with no equal, and a band that could perform with a cardboard cutout of the Canadian national treasure and still hold a crowd’s interest in tribute to their hero.
And then it happened. Just as some random drunk at another show started shouting at the top of his lungs, one dimwit felt the need to yell “GORDON” during every song. Dude, he knows his name, and no matter how many times you yell, “RAINY DAY PEOPLE,” he is not taking requests. The raucous idiot should have been thrown out like the one at the Pabst Theater in 2013. If you’re reading this, you embarrassing asshat, you’re not a fan, stop pretending. Fans don’t do that.
As the show proceeded, Gord’s voice warmed up a bit. At one point he paused to use a nasal spray, then got a laugh when he offered it to lead guitarist Carter Lancaster. It made a noticeable difference, but by that time we were used to his limits and I was openly crying during If You Could Read My Mind. I looked over at the face of my thirty-year-old daughter, a Speech Language Pathologist sitting in rapt attention to the haunting melody written in 1970. We danced to Inspiration Lady at her wedding. Sadly, that song wasn’t included in the evening’s set list, but perhaps more crying would have just been excessive.
She commented that Gordon had difficulty clearing saliva from his vocal-chords and lacked the necessary lung power to propel sounds without difficulty. But far from having pockets full of sand, he continued to pull out hit after hit, some shortened a bit to “tighten up the show.” He spoke of the band performing nine shows in twelve days and the desire to sleep in their own beds. Perhaps after the show he jumped a jet plane, and to thunderous applause was eventually on his way – in the early evening pain.
😎
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