Rant #3,123: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Now that I am done with my birthday, it is time to talk about life—

And unfortunately, death.

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer/pop star/troubadour who had numerous hit records spanning the early 1970s and into the early 1980s, died yesterday at age 84.

He is primarily known for three major radio hits: “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown”—his only #1 single—and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and it is that last hit that I have a little bit of a story to tell you about.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”—the 1976 song that got up to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100—was certainly one of the most unlikeliest songs ever to become a hit, and even though I was not much of a fan of Lightfoot’s, personally, that song is engrained in my being, at least it was during my college years.

Coming out in August 1976, it was on steady radio rotation airplay during the late summer of that year into the fall.

The song was about q vessel named after a civic leader in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that sank in Lake Superior in 1975.

The song was really a dirge, but unlike most dirges that I know about, it was catchy as all heck, and it was a song that everyone seemingly attached to during that summer and early fall.

I was 19 years old then, a sophomore in college, at Dowling College in Oakdale, New York, a school that does not exist today.

It was around the time students received their schedules and had to get their books for their courses. Dowling College was a small, liberal arts and mainly commuter school in Suffolk County, and like everyone else, I received my schedule and needed to get my books.

The school bookstore was, like the college, very small, and with all the students getting their books at the same time, trying to get into the bookstore was like a square peg trying to get into a round hole.

So all of us had to wait on a long line that stretched outside of the bookstore, into a not very wide vestibule, and we had to wait, wait and wait some more.

My school friends and I decided we would go at the same time to do this drudgery, and we were all there together, and yes, we had to wait, wait and wait some more to get into the bookstore.

It got to the point that we waited so long in that thin vestibule that I think that we had become oxygen deprived, and it was really getting to our heads.

One of us—not me, as I recall--started to blurt out the lyrics to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and the more he sang the song, the more we all joined in.

To this day I have no idea why he blurted out this song—there were certainly other popular songs of the day that he could have started to sing, like “Disco Duck”—but every time the refrain “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” came up in the song we all—probably five or six of us—gave it an extra “oomph!” and gave it our all.

I guess it made the time pass a little quicker, because after several minutes of doing this, we finally got into the bookstore, got our books, paid for them and left the store, not even thinking one second about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” again, at least not then.

But I did have the memory stored way back in the cockles of my mind, and when I heard that Lightfoot had passed away, that was the first thought that came to my mind, coming from the back of my memories steamrolling right to the front in an instant, if even that long.

Again, I was never much of a fan of his, whether during his hit-making years or afterward, when he blame a constant presence on the concert stage.

But it is funny that one song, one instant in time that maybe lasted just a few minutes, was etched in my mind for such a long time.

It just demonstrates the power of song, the power of music, and just how good and memorable “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was to me, and probably to others, way back when.

That song created an experience of mine that has lasted nearly a half century in my mind, regardless of whether I actually liked the song or not.

I guess I kinda did.

Gordon, you done good … .