Gordon Lightfoot (and a little Carpenters)*

Burton Cummings (former Guess Who) does Gordon Lightfoot "Maggie May" (Rod Stewart remake) & The Guess Who "No Time". At the end, the late Roy Orbison lookalike does "Only The Lonely". Matt Clark Sanford, MI
 
Since this thread really has very little to do with Carpenters, I'm going to move it to the general music forum.
 
Most of my favorite Gordo tracks were mentioned earlier--plenty of good picks! Among a lot of the other sometimes hectic music I listen to, it's nice to hear that laid back Lightfoot vibe for a refreshing change of pace. "Edmund Fitzgerald" of course was a huge local single, given that we border Lake Superior. I remember hearing about the wreck on the news before it became a hit single.

In the early '70s, the Canadian government imposed regulations on radio stations, mandating that 1 out of every 3 songs they played had to be Canadian. The problem was, at the time there just weren't that many Canadian recording artists. The ones we did have, like Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, Joni Mitchell, and The Guess Who, got an awful lot of airplay. At any time of the day, chances were that you could find a Gordon Lightfoot song playing on at least one local station.
Those "Can con" rules pretty much killed CKLW (The Big:cool: in Windsor. They were a major hitmaker back in the day, and having the programming pulled out from under them definitely let the US stations across the river in Detroit take back the airwaves. The program director even tried a few tricks, like playing only a minute or so of a Canadian single, but they got called out on that. Still, there were a lot of good artists from Canada that I knew of back then, or have gotten familiar with in later years. It's all good! Then again, I've always been fond of our southern neighbor (Canada), since we vacationed there many times.
 
My point is, compared to Mr. Lightfoot and their contemporaries at the time, Carpenters were held to an unusual and impossible standard. Perhaps it is okay that Passage or MIA didn't sell a million copies and still be considered a success; or that a few songs only reached the top 40 or 30 on Billboard rather than having to crack the top 5.

I think R & K set the expectations for them when they hit it big with "Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun." Had they had a long mid-level career before those hits, like Lightfoot did, they'd have been in that mold.

A similar situation happened with Fleetwood Mac. They had a nice career going, but they were not superstars by any means. A typical album would sell 200k units and chart in the mid-50s or lower. Then along came the Buckingham/Nicks era and everything exploded. Suddenly they were expected to "turn out" three or four hit singles with every album. and anything that didn't hit the top 10 was a "disappointment." And they experienced burnout -- which also happened to Karen and Richard. The big difference with them was their "pre-superstar" stretch didn't go on for as many albums.

In short, I don't blame the label for these things -- it's just the nature of the business. If you look at the biography of almost any big artist, a remarkable number of them follow a similar career trajectory. Some come through relatively unscathed, others don't fare as well.

Back to Gordon Lightfoot - surprisingly, despite liking quite a few of his songs, I've never owned any CDs by him. I did have the Gord's Gold LP though, but it's been decades since I've played it. I guess I get my fill of his music on the '70s channel on the Sirius radio.
 
In Canada, perhaps. Here in the U.S., it peaked at #58, which is pretty grim and was just barely a turntable hit at mostly MOR and Adult Contemporary stations, with only a few weeks of play. The exception that I can think of was KFMB-AM in San Diego, which kept it in its gold category through the 1970s.

Being focused on Top 40 at the time, it blew past me on release in 1972 (none of the California Top 40 stations I listened to played it), but I heard it as a golden on KFMB in 1975 and put it in the library of the stations I programmed after that.

Probably true. It is a "Canadian" book, so I think most of the chart action cited is probably in reference to the Canadian charts.
 
I think R & K set the expectations for them when they hit it big with "Close to You" and "We've Only Just Begun." Had they had a long mid-level career before those hits, like Lightfoot did, they'd have been in that mold.

A similar situation happened with Fleetwood Mac. They had a nice career going, but they were not superstars by any means. A typical album would sell 200k units and chart in the mid-50s or lower. Then along came the Buckingham/Nicks era and everything exploded. Suddenly they were expected to "turn out" three or four hit singles with every album. and anything that didn't hit the top 10 was a "disappointment." And they experienced burnout -- which also happened to Karen and Richard. The big difference with them was their "pre-superstar" stretch didn't go on for as many albums.

In short, I don't blame the label for these things -- it's just the nature of the business. If you look at the biography of almost any big artist, a remarkable number of them follow a similar career trajectory. Some come through relatively unscathed, others don't fare as well.

Back to Gordon Lightfoot - surprisingly, despite liking quite a few of his songs, I've never owned any CDs by him. I did have the Gord's Gold LP though, but it's been decades since I've played it. I guess I get my fill of his music on the '70s channel on the Sirius radio.

My thought regarding Carpenters while reading Gord's bio, was that had Karen lived, it would have been "okay" to have future releases reach only the top 30 or top 20 with an occasional "sell-through" hit reaching the top 10. They'd still be wildly successful. Same with touring. It would have been okay to tour 50 days out of the year instead of 100. They made their mark. Passage didn't "go gold;" nor did MIA. And with MIA they had a top 20 hit. So what. They were still making music. It shouldn't have been such a toll on them to not be hitting the top 5 regularly forever.
 
Since this thread really has very little to do with Carpenters, I'm going to move it to the general music forum.

Sorry Harry! I tried to bring it back to a comparative analysis regarding Carpenters vs. Gord and the parallels in their careers during the 70's (my original intent). Too bad Gord's wasn't on A&M.
 
If you’ve never listened to “Seven Island Suite” (it’s on the “Sundown” album) you should. Man, how beautiful!
 
I have the Mobile Fidelity cut of Sundown from the early 80s, but it doesn't sound as good as I would have hoped. Nice clean and quiet vinyl, but the EQ is a little off.
 
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