Ten degrees and getting colder
We had a great time meeting our radio hero Hugh Hewitt for lunch on Saturday in suburban Minneapolis. The lunch produced a full turnout of Northern Alliance bloggers over whom Hugh presides as Commissioner of the Northern Alliance of blogs -- the Northern Alliance being the Minnesota-based blogs whose success Hugh has devoted himself to promoting. Hugh was in town to broadcast from the St. Paul Winter Carnival and got a full dose of serious Minnesota winter.
Upon his return to southern California on Sunday, Hugh characterized each of the Northern Alliance bloggers who turned out for the lunch via a pop music alter ego. He designated Rocket Man Gordon Lightfoot, which elicited a groan on Rocket Man's part. I'm sure Rocket Man was thinking of someone more along the lines of Alan Jackson or George Strait if not Toby Keith.
The assignment of Gordon Lightfoot, however, is a great compliment. The guy is a brilliant songwriter, an old-fashioned carouser who is also an incurable romantic, and a thoughtful kind of man's man. Who could ask for anything more?
In 1999 Rhino issued a four-disc boxed set of Lightfoot's work: "Songbook." It covers roughly thirty years and eighty songs. When I went to the cashier to pay for it at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis -- a store that specializes in music way cooler than Lightfoot -- the cashier started singing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" to give me grief. He knew nothing!
The boxed set is a revelation. Lightfoot was still writing great songs into the '90s. Take a look at the first verse and chorus of "Shadows," a song with a haunting melody from his last Warner Brothers album:
Let me reach out love and touch you,
Let me hold you for awhile.
I’ve been all around the world --
Oh how I long to see you smile.
There’s a shadow on the moon
And the waters here below
Do not shine the way they should
And I love you just in case you didn’t know.Let it go,
Let it happen like it happened once before.
It’s a wicked wind
And it chills me to the bone
And if you do not believe me
Come and gaze upon the shadow at your door.
Or this fitting, classic story song from Lightfoot's heyday -- "Ten Degrees and Getting Colder":
He was standin' by the highway with a sign that just said "Mother"
When he heard a driver comin' 'bout a half a mile away.
Then he held the sign up higher, where no decent soul could miss it.
It was ten degrees or colder down by Boulder dam that day.He was raised up in Milwaukee -- though he never was that famous.
He was just a road musician -- to the taverns he would go
Singin' songs about the ramblin', the lovin' girls and gamblin'.
How the world fell on his shoulders back in Boulder I don't know.It was out in Arizona that he heard the lady listenin'
To each word that he was sayin', to each line that he would write.
So he sat down by her table and they talked about the weather --
Ninety-eight point six and risin' down by Boulder dam that night.And she told him she would take him for a ride
In the mornin' sun. Back in Boulder he had told her,
"I don't know when I had a better friend."Now he's traded off his Martin [guitar], but his troubles are not over
For his feet are almost frozen and the sun is sinkin' low.
Won't you listen to me, brother? If you ever loved your mother
Please pull off on the shoulder if you're goin' Milwaukee way.
It's ten degrees and getting colder down by Boulder dam today.
HINDROCKET is amazed: Trunk, you are a walking encyclopedia of music. Hugh arbitrarily picks Gordon Lightfoot, and it turns out you own his four-CD collected works? Amazing. You're right, of course, that I'd rather be George Strait. But my wife votes for Alan Jackson.
UPDATE: I have no idea why this photo of Gordon Lightfoot showed up in today's Yahoo News Photos--he isn't in the news, as far as I know, other than on Power Line--but now, Hugh, I'm really offended! I see no likeness whatsoever.
