Trivia / Gordon Lightfoot

• Breakthrough Hit: In the US, "If You Could Read My Mind", although he'd already been recording for almost a decade when it hit, and he was already a regular chart presence in Canada.
• Channel Hop: Or, rather, Label Hop. After gaining critical acclaim but not a lot of chart success outside of Canada during his stint with United Artists Records, he left in 1970 and signed with Reprise Records, where he became a star.
• Covered Up: Gord's earlier songs especially have been covered by a wide variety of musicians, including Ian and Sylvia, Judy Collins, Elvis Presley, Neil Young, Peter, Paul and Mary, Gloria Estefan, and Bob Dylan.
• Creator Backlash:
  • One of the most literal examples. When an album of his early pre-folk material was released in The '70s to capitalize on his newfound fame, Lightfoot had his personal assistant buy every copy he could find, then Lightfoot personally destroyed them with an ax.
  • He also wasn't all that happy with his United Artists albums, electing to re-record a bunch of songs from them for Gord's Gold.
  • He also stopped performing certain songs in concert because he wasn't comfortable with them anymore, like "For Lovin' Me" (he was embarrassed by the song's male chauvinism) and "Black Day in July" (since it's a song by a white Canadian commenting on race relations in the US, he decided it came across as an outsider being too preachy). He'd gotten burned out on "For Lovin' Me" enough by 1969 that he mashed it up in a medley with "Did She Mention My Name" on Sunday Concert.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: He was very proud of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".
• He Also Did: Randy Newman did the orchestral arrangement on "Minstrel of the Dawn".
• Money, Dear Boy: Lightfoot, in his own words, was "irate" about Reprise Records' plan to change the title of his album Sit Down Young Stranger (which was not selling) to If You Could Read My Mind after the latter single charted — even going so far as to fly out to L.A. to have the label explain themselves. They told him the name change was "the difference between x and 7x". Needless to say, the name was changed and he got his 7x.
• Sleeper Hit: The single released to promote Sit Down, Young Stranger was the album's only Cover Version, of Kris Kristofferson's "Me & Bobby McGee". A DJ at KJR in Seattle listened to the album and decided to play "If You Could Read My Mind" on his show. It got such a huge response that Reprise rush-released it as the next single, becoming his Breakthrough Hit.
• What Could Have Been: "Sit Down, Young Stranger" and "Don Quixote" were originally written for the soundtrack of Hail, Hero!, a 1969 movie starring Michael Douglas. Both were rejected by the film's producers, although two other Lightfoot songs (a Title Theme Tune and an alternate version of "Wherefore and Why") were included.
• Write What You Know: Many of his most famous songs are autobiographical.
  • "Early Mornin' Rain" was inspired by his homesickness when he left Ontario after high school to study music in Los Angeles (and would go to LAX to watch planes take off when he didn't have anything else to do).
  • "If You Could Read My Mind" was about the breakup of his first marriage.
  • "Sundown" was based on an incident when his then-lover, Cathy Smith,^note the same Cathy Smith who later went to prison for giving John Belushi his fatal drug dose went out partying without him, and he was seething with jealousy.

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