165: If You Could Read My Mind (featuring Mike Messner)

You might remember a few episodes back when I teamed up with Mike Messner. He's the host of the Gordon Lightfoot appreciation podcast Carefree Highway Revisited. Well, Mike is back, and this time around we're talking about Lightfoot's first big American hit, "If You Could Read My Mind." I actually went looking around for the album that I'd first heard this song on, and it turned out that I was exactly correct about its title: This was a four-album box set that came out in 1973, so clearly the folks at Warner Brothers didn't have a lot of hope for the rest of the decade, musically. However, this is a pretty amazing collection. I don't think K-Tel ever put anything like this together. And it's a shame that A) it's never appeared in cassette or CD format; and B) it's not likely to be, considering the nightmare it's got to be to get the rights to them by now. (You can get it on 8-track tape if you're so motivated, according to Discogs.) At any rate, I've actually wanted to cover this song for a long while, but didn't really have enough material for an entire episode, so I was glad to have Mike along for the ride this time around. Click here to support the show via Patreon. As a reminder: Patrons of the show get a newsletter in their email box every Sunday, whether there's a new episode or not. So I've been keeping them apprised of what's been happening in the news and in my life. They've been following me through the "medical issue" that I alluded to early in this episode. And they'll be getting something extra-special in the next week or two. This show doesn't have a transcript except for the one provided by the Blubrry player.