Saw Lightfoot once at the Troubador.

It was the last show on Sunday night, the last of his week there, and he played for HOURS, because there was no show the next day and no show later.

Red Shea, his longtime lead guitar player, was amazing.

Great night.

Then he signed with Warner Bros. and jumped the shark, in a major way.

My day of misreading things in more interesting ways continues. I read the first line as Gordon Lightfoot's management says an Internet hoax created false rumours that the ironic Canadian folksinger had died Thursday. On second read, he's not ironic, just iconic.

Don't worry. Alanis is alive, too.

Abe Vigoda & Betty White in Snickers TV advert = classic.

...but the Edmund Fitzgerald (like Franco) is still dead.

And I was one of, at most, 10 people in California who bought that single in 1976 (and apparently, KROQ DJ "Bean" Baxter was another one). In spite of a very regional appeal, it reached #2 on the U.S. pop charts, but was totally cockblocked from the top spot by Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)" which was #1 for most of the decade.

Incredibly, Weird Al has never parodied any Gordon Lightfoot song, although the political parodists The Capitol Steps commemorated the 1984 Election with the perfectly-metered "The Wreck of the Walter 'Fritz' Mondale".

And for a while many geekish music fans called him Gordon Nanosecond, because it takes 1.017 nanoseconds (approximately) for light to travel 1 foot. I don't know why that has gone out of use.

I'm sounding like Casey Kasem here. Well, I'm not Casey Kasem, but he did once yell at me on live TV, which is another story.

foop, did you listen to KPCC in its heyday, in the early 70's? It was a good alternative to KMET, which was the corporate rock station then but also had a few cool people working there.

KPCC was pretty outrageous until they pulled the plug.