Track Listing

1. If It Should Please You
2. Endless Wire
3. Hangdog Hotel Room
4. I'm Not Supposed to Care
5. High and Dry
6. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
7. Pony Man
8. Race Among the Ruins
9. Christian Island (Georgian Bay)
10. All the Lovely Ladies
11. Alberta Bound
12. Cherokee Bend
13. Triangle
14. Shadows
15. Make Way for the Lady
16. Ghosts of Cape Horn
17. Baby Step Back
18. It's Worth Believin'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65136 in Music
• Released on: 1990-10-25
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Customer Reviews

A Controversial "Greatest Hits" Album
Gordon Lightfoot, as any fan knows, likes to rerecord when he puts together a "greatest hits" album. For his first, Gord's Gold, he rerecorded all the songs from early in his career. Because the original recordings were on United Artists, before Lightfoot's emergence as a top recording artist in the US, the Gord's Gold version of the songs is often the first - even only - version that the listener has heard.

But it is different with the songs he rerecorded for Gord's Gold Volume II. Here, all the songs were heard first by most people in the original version. Lightfoot went back into to the studio to rerecord them, to create recordings with the feel (or sound, rather) of a live performance. He has undoubtedly achieved that here, but many fans still prefer the original studio recording over the new one, especially if the original was the one they fell in love with. Where it really hits home is in the recording of the big song here "Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald".

Now, don't get me wrong. The Gord's Gold Volume II recording of Wreck is a masterpiece. In this version, Lightfoot is backed up by the band with which he still tours today: Terry Clements (lead guitar), Rick Haynes (bass), Barry Keane (drums) and Mike Heffernan (keyboards). The moving performance on Gord's Gold Volume II is very much like every passionate performance of Wreck that he and the band performed in 1998. Magnificent, and gripping live. But if you want to hear Wreck the way it sounded in 1976 on the radio, then you must have the original recording which luckily is also available today (on the Summertime Dream album). On that recording, Pee Wee Charles, playing steel guitar, was still in the Lightfoot band. The world has two outstanding recordings of an incredible song.

The rest of the songs on this album are also truly great songs. None of the others achieved the prominence that they deserved, for many of them are easily in the class of his earlier hits. Songs like Race Among The Ruins, Cherokee Bend, Shadows and Triangle are - in my opinion - among the very finest in his impressive catalog. There is one new song here, not available elsewhere (If It Should Please You) and there are also four other songs that Lightfoot did not rerecord. The most magnificent of these are It's Worth Believin' (from Old Dan's Records) and Ghosts Of Cape Horn (from Dream Street Rose), neither of which is available on any other CD at this time because four of his original albums have never been rereleased on CD.

The Gord's Gold Volume II album is a fine album with some of Lightfoot's best songs from the 70s and 80s. It is good listening for any Lightfoot fan, and contains quite a few songs that - because they are from albums not yet on CD - are not available elsewhere (this includes one of my favorites, Triangle). You might, however, want to buy both this one and, where available, the album with the original recording too!

This album is not one of my very favorite Lightfoot albums because, although he achieves a sound reminiscent of a live performance, it doesn't match the passion of a Lightfoot concert. Perhaps that is the weakness here. He could reproduce the sound of a live performance in a studio, but not the inspiration he draws from his audience. I guess we'll all just have to go see him in concert to get both.

Poorly named, but well performed
Gord's Gold 2 suffers in reputation because a buyer only finds out after opening the package that it's mostly materials re-recorded live in the studio. The big disappointment to ears expecting the original version of "Edmund Fitzgerald," is that the re-done version loses the eerie power of the reverb-enhanced studio track. Another problem is that Gord's voice, frankly, aged poorly between the making of the originals and these newer versions. That said, GG2 includes some fine songs. The opening track, "If It Should Please You," is a concert opener available nowhere else. And the final one is from an LP not yet released on CD. Because the latter, as well as the last four or five tracks on GG2, are un-retouched from the initial album versions, I suspect that this project suffered from confusion or a lack of focus. Perhaps Gord and friends had second thoughts about the "redo the originals" approach; perhaps the project began as a "Gord and band live in the studio" effort, and got waylaid into something the record company could label as a followup to one of the most successful anthologies ever. The result is that GG2 is mis-named and poorly assembled. It is neither the disaster some call it, nor is it one of his best. Most of GG2 is a footnote for Gord fans starved for a live (albeit in the studio) document of a maturing Gord and Band, playing competently and enjoyably. A real one-disc followup to Gord's Gold I has yet to be issued.

Huge Disappointmenet
I, like most other reviewers here have Greatest hits Volume 1 and looked forward to volume 2. I listened to it once and put it aside. I didn't realize at the time that most of the songs had been rerecorded. The new recordings are flat and Gordon's voice sounds strained and weak.