Gordon Lightfoot tribute show shuts out key performers, including long-time promoter Bernie Fiedler

Mr. Fiedler, a long-time friend and business associate of Gordon Lightfoot, at his home in Ancaster, Ont.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail

“I was a better singer than Gordon Lightfoot.”

Bernie Fiedler, the 85-year-old bon vivant and former boy soprano, is dropping truth bombs. Both he and the late troubadour, who were long-time great pals and business associates, sang in children choirs (Lightfoot in Orillia, Ont.; the German-born Fiedler in Berlin). Fiedler says tapes of their pipsqueak voices still exist.

“We had that in common, but I could sing five notes above high C,” Fiedler says. “I was fantastic.”

There is no reason not to believe Fiedler was a superior singer. (No reason, that is, except that he is a lovable scamp.) Of course, Lightfoot was no slouch as a kid crooner himself. As a preteen in the early 1950s, he took first-place prizes in a pair of Kiwanis Festival singing competitions held at Toronto’s Massey Hall.

Lightfoot died on May 1, 2023, at the age of 84. A sold-out tribute concert in his honour is set for May 23, with guest artists including Burton Cummings, Sylvia Tyson, Murray McLauchlan, Kathleen Edwards, Tom Cochrane and Blue Rodeo. Proceeds from the event go to Massey Hall itself, as requested by the Gordon Lightfoot Estate.

As an adult, the Sundown singer performed on that Massey stage more than 170 times. Except for a festival appearance there in 1964, Fiedler promoted every one of Lightfoot’s Massey shows. Surprisingly, Fiedler is not involved in the tribute.

“The Lightfoot Estate totally cut me out,” he says, speaking in the living room of the well-appointed house he shares with his girlfriend outside of Hamilton. “The concert was Gordon’s idea, and I think he assumed I would present it.”

Despite the tribute concert’s well-known participants, the show has attracted attention for the artists who won’t be there: No Neil Young, no Joni Mitchell and no Bob Dylan. The Globe and Mail has learned that Lightfoot contemporaries Bruce Cockburn and Anne Murray were not invited.

Mr. Fiedler looks through a book of pictures from the days of the Riverboat Coffee House.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail

“I was going to talk to Dylan, but then the estate told me I wasn’t a part of it,” Fiedler says. “I just had dinner with Joni Mitchell at her house in Los Angeles. She’s frail, but if I would have asked, she could have said a few words in front of a camera.”

Fiedler has known Mitchell since her name was still Joan Anderson. He founded and ran the famed Riverboat Coffee House in Toronto’s Yorkville hippie district from 1964 to 1978. When Mitchell was a struggling folk artist, she asked Fiedler for a gig at the Riverboat. He turned her down, joking that he could use a dishwasher, though.

“This was before she began writing her own songs,” Fiedler says.

Also missing from the tribute concert bill is singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, who took to social media to lament his absence: “It’s very upsetting to me,” he wrote on X. His fans rallied in his support.

“There’s no bigger Lightfoot devotee than Ron Sexsmith,” commented Lightfoot biographer Nicholas Jennings.

Massey Hall issued a statement to The Globe, saying that Lightfoot was “an artist’s artist” who was “deeply appreciated by a vast number of songwriters worldwide,” and that the selected performers represented a “wide-ranging group of artists, spanning multiple generations of acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriters.”

Fiedler says he will attend the concert. And, technically, he has a hand in the show. He manages Lightfoot’s former sidemen, who currently tour Lightfoot songs in small theatres with an American singer. The Lightfoot Band will be one of the house bands at Massey.

Fiedler was with Lightfoot near the end: “It was his time. He was suffering. Before he died, he looked up at me from his bed and said, ‘Bernie, we had a good run.’”

It was in 1964 when Fiedler first saw Lightfoot at Steele’s Tavern on Toronto’s Yonge Street strip. He caught the last song of the set, walked up to the stage as Lightfoot was stepping down from it and offered to double his weekly pay – $200, up from $100 – if he moved to the Riverboat.

“Gordon told me, ‘Alright,’ and that was the beginning.”

The Riverboat was the foremost folk club in Canada, rivalling the Troubadour in Los Angeles, the Bitter End in New York and the Cellar Door in Washington in stature. Artists who played the 120-seat, maritime-themed, alcohol-free venue included Cockburn, Jackson Browne, Harry Chapin, Simon & Garfunkel, John Prine, James Taylor and Dan Hill.

“Bernie had everybody coming through that club on their way up,” says Hill, who was managed by Fiedler at the peak of his career, starting in 1975. “It was an unbelievable feat. The gift he gave to Canadian culture is unparalleled.”

Fiedler still books some of Hill’s concerts. The Sometimes When We Touch star describes his former manager as “one of the world’s great characters” and a “lovable rogue who doesn’t go by the rules.”

Fiedler and business partner Bernie Finkelstein in the 1970s were known as the Two Bernies – three if you count their flamboyant lawyer, the late Bernie Solomon. Finkelstein, who founded True North Records and continues to manage Cockburn, says Fiedler is a “rascal” and a “terrific guy” who was really good at throwing parties back in the day: “Everyone from Joni to Jack Nicholson really liked him.”

Some liked him even more than others. Fiedler says he had an affair with American folk singer Judee Sill when she played the Riverboat: “We fell in love for a week. That’s the way it was back then.”

After shutting down the Riverboat and splitting with Finkelstein, Fiedler worked with such artists as Liona Boyd, Canadian Brass, Graham Shaw, Pavlo, Quartetto Gelato and the Nylons. He is mostly associated with Lightfoot, however.

“Gordon was my best friend, I miss him terribly,” he says. “And as a songwriter, there was no one like him.”

Who better to sing Lightfoot’s praises than Fiedler.