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When Gordon Lightfoot determined to document his first reside album, Sunday Concert, it was solely acceptable that it must be captured in his house nation of Canada, the place his singular expertise had been nurtured earlier than his worldwide breakthrough. It arrived at an essential staging publish, as his remaining album for United Artists, earlier than his departure for Warner Brothers and launched simply two months earlier than the top of the Nineteen Sixties.
The setting was Toronto’s Massey Hall, a venue at which Lightfoot’s prodigious expertise had lengthy been admired and celebrated. The efficiency was recorded there in March 1969, a couple of months after the looks of his fourth studio LP, The Way I Feel, and produced, like that set, by Elliot Mazer.
Red Haynes was once more his sideman on lead acoustic guitar, however this time the bass position went to not John Stockfish however to Rick Haynes. The nice lensman Jim Marshall took the images, as Lightfoot delivered a set that includes favorites and new, beforehand unrecorded songs.
He performed early numbers similar to “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and, in a medley, “I’m Not Sayin’” and “Ribbon Of Darkness,” alongside recent compositions similar to “The Lost Children,” “Ballad of the Yarmouth Castle,” and “Leaves of Grass.” Billboard known as it “a well balanced program of the familiar and the new.” The tune in regards to the Yarmouth Castle was based mostly on the true story of a luxurious liner that had caught fireplace and sunk in 1965, en route from Miami to Nassau, killing 88 passengers and two crew. The theme of maritime catastrophe preempted Lightfoot’s return to an analogous topic on considered one of his best-loved narratives, 1976’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
In his Songbook liner notes, the composer wrote: “On Sunday Concert we mixed two early songs, partly to save lots of just a little time in live performance. ‘I’m Not Sayin’’ was in all probability the higher of the 2, and ‘Ribbon Of Darkness’ was a #1 nation hit for Marty Robbins. ‘I’m Not Sayin’’ is about noncommitment, and just a little little bit of that sexist factor comes into play right here.
“‘Ribbon Of Darkness’ is about the demise of the relationship,” he went on. “The two of them go well together, with the first song being about a man telling a woman it’s my way or the highway, and in the second song she’s left and he’s licking his wounds. Pride cometh before the fall.”
Further covers of Lightfoot’s ever-expanding songbook emerged often, by the Irish Rovers, Connie Smith, Harry Belafonte, and others – as did, within the fall, an extra measure of his Canadian preeminence within the LP The Gordon Lightfoot Instrumental Songbook, by the Neil Chotem Orchestra. He was additionally the toast of Liberty/United Artists’ London convention, at which he was pictured in a June version of Cash Box with the corporate’s UK chart-topper Peter Sarstedt.
As the album was launched in October 1969, Lightfoot was treading the boards as ever, for instance breaking the attendance document, beforehand held by Belafonte, with three reveals at Centennial Concert Center in Winnipeg. Then, in Billboard’s November 15 challenge, Sunday Concert grew to become his first album to enter the Top LPs chart, climbing to No.143 in a six-week keep. It was a Top 5 success in Canada. By the top of the month, Billboard was reporting “capacity crowds in every city” on his nationwide US tour, with “The Lost Children” and “Ballad of the Yarmouth Castle” gaining probably the most airplay from the reside document.
Read extra about Gordon Lightfoot’s early albums right here.
As the last decade ended, information was revealed of Lightfoot’s signing to Warner’s Reprise label. “We think Lightfoot will be as big in the United States as he is in Europe and Canada,” label supervisor Mo Ostin advised the commerce press, as the corporate launched a serious artist drive that additionally included the signings of Ella Fitzgerald, Dion, Fats Domino, and Herbie Hancock.
Lightfoot, who had already laid down 15 tracks for his new paymasters by December, was, stated Ostin, “another strong example of Canada’s resources of contemporary music talent for the international market.” The prediction proved correct, and even brighter lights lay forward.
Listen to Sunday Concert on Apple Music and Spotify.
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