Reprise 2177
Producer: Lenny Waronker
Track listing: Somewhere U.S.A. / High and Dry / Seven Island Suite / Circle of Steel / Is There Anyone Home / The Watchman’s Gone / Sundown / Carefree Highway / The List / Too Late for Prayin’
June 22, 1974
2 weeks
When Sundown knocked Paul McCartney & Wings’ Band on the Run from the Number One spot, it was a particularly sweet victory for Gordon Lightfoot. “That kind of bemused me, because in 1963, when I was just starting out, along come the Beatles and boy, they just blew everybody away,” he says.
Born on November 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, Lightfoot began singing at the age of eight. By 11, he was a soloist for his church choir. Although confident with his singing, Lightfoot felt his piano playing could be better. In 1958, while reading a copy of Down Beat, he saw an ad for a course in contemporary jazz music theory at the Los Angeles-based Westlake college and soon journeyed to California.
Upon returning to Canada, a live recording of the Weavers spurred Lightfoot to trade the piano and romantic jazz for an acoustic guitar and folk music. Influenced by Pete Seeger, Bob Gibson, and Bob Dylan, Lightfoot took to performing with a renewed vengeance. Albert Grossman, who managed Dylan and Peter, Paul, & Mary, soon took Lightfoot on as a client.
In 1966, he was signed to United Artists Records, but at this stage Lightfoot was known primarily as a songwriter, as Peter, Paul & Mary had scored a top 30 hit in 1965 with his “For Lovin’ Me.”
In February 1971, he scored his first hit under his own name, “If You Can Read My Mind,” which climbed to number five and propelled his first Reprise album, Sit Down Young Stranger, to number 12. Three albums followed over the next three years, but all failed to top that success.
For Sundown, Lightfoot recalls: “I had pretty good working conditions. I was living on a farm north of Toronto and I had a real good go at writing. I wrote the whole album in two or three months. But I kind of wondered at that point if we were going to have another big album. I was working away, but it was always tough.”
Making things even tougher was Lightfoot’s personal life. “It was a really strange time in my life,” he recalls. “I was in a really difficult relationship with a woman.” It was that relationship that inspired the title track.
Recorded at Eastern Sound Studios in Toronto in approximately a week, Sundown featured a group of musician that had been playing together for five years, but it also marked a change. “We hadn’t used a drummer very much up to that point,” he says. “We were still real folky.”
Drummer Jim Gordon traveled up north with producer Lenny Waronker and engineer Lee Herschberg. As Lightfoot explains, “It was their turn to travel. We were like a couple of hockey teams getting together and we were on home ice.”
With Sundown complete, Lightfoot hit the touring circuit. While performing in Belfast, Ireland, “The promoter announced from the stage at the end of the show that the album had just gone Number One in Billboard,” he recalls. “I just couldn’t believe it.” A week later, the title track topped the Hot 100 as the album held at Number One. “Carefree Highway,” also from Sundown, made the top 10 as well.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 22, 1974
1. Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot
2. Band on the Run, Paul McCartney & Wings
3. The Sting, Soundtrack
4. Buddha & the Chocolate Box, Cat Stevens
5. Maria Muldaur, Maria Muldaur