> Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

On paper, it should never have been a hit record.

But despite the odds stacked against it — the 6-minute length, the somber subject matter, the last-minute recording session — “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” went on to become one of the defining singles of the 1970s.

Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot was a week from his 36th birthday when the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the biggest Great Lakes freight ship of its era, gave way to Lake Superior amid a daunting storm on Nov. 10, 1975.

Gordon Lightfoot in concert in the late 1970s.
As recounted in Lightfoot’s stirring ballad, the shipwreck took the lives of 29 men, a toll marked by a ringing of bells at Detroit’s “maritime sailors’ cathedral,” as his lyrics famously depicted it.

The disaster was still fresh in the headlines when Lightfoot and his band hunkered down in a Toronto studio in December 1975 at the end of a long recording day, amid work on the forthcoming album “Summertime Dream.”

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Virtually on the fly — the lyrics weren’t even finished yet — they crafted the track that would later be heralded as one of the masterpieces in Lightfoot's long, rich body of work.


“It’s funny — it was meant to be filler,” says pedal steel guitarist Ed Ringwald, then best known as Pee Wee Charles. “Gord said we’d use it to fill the album up. I mean, it was a really long song. What radio stations were going to play that?”

In fact, recalls bassist Rick Haynes, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” wasn’t even initially intended for the upcoming record. At that stage, it was “just this little ditty” Lightfoot had tinkered with one night in front of the band.

But the next evening, having made quick work of other songs on the recording docket, Lightfoot and the group found themselves ahead of schedule. The clock was still running on the studio time they’d reserved.

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" appeared on Gordon Light's "Summertime Dream" album, which was released in June 1976.
“The engineer said, ‘You’ve got the time booked. You’ve got the guys here. What about that song about the shipwreck?’” recounts Haynes. “Gordon said, ‘Well it’s not really finished yet. It still needs to be polished up.’”

Still, they decided to give it a whirl. With a few simple directions from Lightfoot, the tape started rolling, band members began playing, and out came a haunting, unrelenting sound that evoked the sensation of a roiling sea, complete with an opening drum fill that struck like a thunderclap.

And by the end of those 6 minutes, they’d created a recording that would join the canon of popular music’s hallowed first-take hits.

https://www.freep.com/story/entertainme … 125454007/

I miss Gord.

wrote:

Fellas it’s too rough to feed ya
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Fellas it’s been nice to know ya
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