The Tributaries

It's a wonderful thing to have an opportunity to pay tribute to an artist whose work has helped shape you. I've been involved again, as I was last year with the Gordon Lightfoot tribute concert series in Toronto and Ottawa. The astonishing quality and quantity of Lightfoot's work, the fact that he broke ground for so many Canadian musicians and artists, his pioneering use of Canadian landscape imagery in songs, all make this tribute a well-deserved and deeply rewarding endeavour.

They usually are. The Bob Dylan tribute concert, many years ago now, drew artists from all over the musical map - from Willie Nelson to Tracy Chapman - to acknowledge his genius. Two Leonard Cohen tribute records, one "underground" and one populist, have both produced superb renderings of the poet-songwriter's work. Victoria Williams's cause (she suffers from MS) got great support from the likes of Pearl Jam and Soul Asylum. I just picked up a Tom Petty tribute CD featuring a bunch of lesser-known alternative bands that sound pretty darned good. There have been not one, but two Johnny Cash tribute concerts, both televised, one multi-genre, one country; ironically, the country tribute was posthumous. And of course Borealis released the highly acclaimed Lightfoot tribute CD Beautiful this past fall, with bands from Blue Rodeo to Tragically Hip offering their own renditions of his work to the cause.

All of which is great. I love being involved myself. There's a great sense of pride and honour in giving credit where credit is due. As a songwriter in his mid-thirties, I have the privilege of having been influenced by some real giants - Lightfoot is one - and it's great to be able to express what that has meant. I think the other artists I've worked with have felt the same.

We're all what I call "tributaries," meaning people who pay tribute. That's not an insult - among the more famous tributaries are people like U2, Sting, Billy Joel - songwriters who often show up on other people's tribute albums, as they do on the Tower of Song Cohen CD.

I sometimes think we may be becoming a generation of tributaries. And unlike the little mountain streams whose name I have stolen to describe us, these tributaries don't flow into the big rivers - they flow out of them. Or at least that's how it seems at first glance.

After all, it's Mr. Lightfoot's work that has trickled into ours, right? Not the other way around. Moreover, the chance that anyone (at least any folksinger) from my generation becomes a river so deep and wide is negligible. The landscape has shifted against it. Besides, an artist like Gordon Lightfoot comes along so infrequently, it's almost like the Big Bang of Canadian music: a singular event, and one whose echoes are eternal. So it would be silly to suggest that the tributaries are flowing into the river.

Except for one thing: on Saturday, January 10, Mr. Lightfoot, looking incredibly energetic despite a year spent rehabilitating from a life-threatening abdominal aneurysm, clambered on to the stage at Hugh's Room in Toronto. (He put his hand on my knee momentarily to hoist himself up, as a matter of fact, an old-fashioned gesture I found charming.) An emotional crowd, there to watch a Lightfoot tribute concert, leaped to a standing ovation, as Gordon Lightfoot himself cheerily announced his comeback. The energy was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful. It was a moment I won't forget, and neither will anyone else who was there.

Backstage between acts, Mr. Lightfoot showed the class of a true artist, taking the time to individually meet and thank every artist who had contributed to the event. Again, that mighty river flowed into our smaller creeks and streams.

But as a beaming Gordon Lightfoot ducked out into the cold Toronto night, fans clamouring after him as he went I couldn't help thinking - hoping - that maybe, just maybe, the water in those tributaries flows both ways. Maybe hearing his own work back through the voices of his many admirers helped Mr. Lightfoot a bit when he was beginning to ebb. If so, it would confirm the true nature of the tributary: water seeking its own level. Maybe all of these rivers do, in the end, run down to the same ocean, after all.