  Gordon Lightfoot performs at the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary earlier this week. (SUN MEDIA FILES)
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Google Gordon Lightfoot and the hits nearly number one million.
A YouTube search will produce everything from a late 1960s Lightfoot performance with Johnny Cash, to what appears to be a recent homemade image produced via cellphone, showing a hokey side of the Canadian music icon.
It's curious that someone who secures so much space in cyberspace doesn't appear to give a hoot about the technology itself.
"I don't think very much on that as a whole," was about all Lightfoot would say on the subject during a recent telephone interview from his Toronto home.
Now 70, he appears content to tour on the strength of his extensive catalogue of chart hits and classics, including Early Morning Rain, If You Could Read My Mind and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The latter two pieces he confirms are on the set lists of every show of his current spring tour, which doesn't come to Toronto -- but he is scheduled to perform his annual November shows at Massey Hall.
As he first told Sun Media last year, he says he's not penning new material anymore, is not planning to return to the studio any time soon and has dispensed with big music labels. He chose to record his latest studio album, 2004's Harmony, independently -- perhaps as much a means of survival as a keen business decision.
"It's caused a lot of emotional trauma ... It's caused a lot of ups and downs in my life, in my personal life," Lightfoot said of his more than three decades of being tied to major music labels. "I mean, in a way, it was very detrimental to be tied and committed the way I was, because it affected my personal life.
"My marriages failed and I've got a whole bunch of kids ..."
No kidding.
Lightfoot's 1970s battle with the bottle is well known, as is some of the questionable company he kept then, perhaps most notoriously Cathy Smith, the groupie and drug dealer who would later be known for her involvement in the 1982 death of comedian John Belushi. Smith also supposedly inspired the lyric to Lightfoot's 1974 smash hit, Sundown.
"It was an exciting time," he says of the heady 1970s L.A. music and celebrity scene. "And it's a time I would like to sometimes forget about."
It wasn't all merry-making in La La Land.
Lightfoot cut a few albums, including Don Quixote, south of the border and can still rhyme off some of the studio musicians with whom he worked and came into contact. There was guitarist Dean Parks, best known for his work with Steely Dan, and Steve Lukather, a member of Toto who played guitar on countless Top 40 singles by everyone from Lionel Richie to Michael Jackson.
"God, we even had John Sebastian play on tracks."
In recent years, Lightfoot has adopted a much more healthy lifestyle, not so much as a fashion statement but out of pure necessity. Lightfoot stood at death's door in 2002 after suffering a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, which kept him in serious condition in hospital for some time.
"The whole thing took two years to plow through," said Lightfoot, no stranger to recovery; he kicked his long, tumultuous relationship with alcohol in the 1980s.
"Yeah, there were times when I used to get pains in that area ... It was right in my mid-section. But I never figured it was serious enough to go and see a doctor over."
Lightfoot's loyalty to bandmates -- many of whom have been in tow for decades -- is beyond question. And old soldiers of the Canadian music scene hold a special place, including Ronnie Hawkins, who has had his own health issues in recent years.
"I don't get into (discussing sicknesses with Hawkins)," Lightfoot said. "We talk about other things because I go back with him to happier times and the early days in Toronto ... The Yonge Street strip, you know. The places were always packed with people and Ronnie was always hospitable. God, even our children played together."
But being old buddies doesn't mean joined at the hip. When asked if he and Neil Young -- who plays Sault Ste. Marie tonight, a night before Lightfoot does -- might get together if time allows, Lightfoot seemed taken aback.
"Probably not ... No," he said.
"I know him. We are friends. That's a guy I've known all the way back to Yorkville. But, no, he won't (stay for my show). They'll be on the road and heading to their next show."
How does he compose a set list that both challenges him and keeps audiences content? Wouldn't a Gordon Lightfoot concert be a little dry without Rainy Day People, or plain without Beautiful?
"There's probably about 35 (songs) that are really the ones people like the best, and they're the ones we like doing," Lightfoot said. "So what I've got to do is pare that down into a two-hour stretch. I can't do 35 songs in a show ... Let's get that clear."
