Second of a two-part article featuring Paul Hoffert, founding and continuing member of Lighthouse, who talked to Music Life Magazine about the band’s career, legacy and the creation of their most successful album. Part two looks at the band’s formation, unique musical outlook, legacy and the early 1970s rise of jazz/brass-based rock bands alongside Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears.
By Jim Barber
Serendipity played a huge role in the creation of Lighthouse, with Paul Hoffert finding in Skip Prokop a kindred spirit, a similarly passionate, talented and driven artist who was looking for an opportunity to expand his musical horizons but also get involved in a project that was successful and sustainable.
“When we got our first record deal, it was an unusual and amazing experience that Skip and I had. We decided to put together this band that was going to solve a particular problem at that time. So you had George Martin producing the Fab Four – the Beatles – and putting orchestral instruments like piccolo, trumpet and even full orchestras on their records. And then the Beatles couldn’t go out on tour anymore because they would have to take an orchestra with them. They couldn’t reproduce their studio stuff. Skip and I were both in our early 20s and we were both very successful in sort of different areas of the music business, and we met by accident in New York. I had an off-Broadway show that was running for six months, and Skip was playing the final concerts with his band, The Paupers. I walked into the Electric Circus, I think, in New York where he was performing. At the intermission, he recognized me as a fellow traveler from Toronto. He came up and he said, ‘I’m a rock and roll drummer, but I love jazz.’ And I used to go see him play at the jazz clubs in Toronto. We chatted for a few minutes. And then the next morning, by chance, what are the odds? We were sitting next to each other on an Air Canada flight back to Toronto,” Hoffert said.
“And we started chatting about the business, what he had been doing, what he planned to do, what I had been doing, what I planned to do. And he told me that he was managed by Albert Grossman, who at the time was the biggest, most important manager. He managed Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Mamas and the Papas, Janis Joplin, et cetera. And Janis Joplin had a problem at that time because she had started as a bar band, and then she became ‘Janis Joplin,’ a big rock and roll star. Her record company deemed that her band was not good enough to go into the studio and record. They wanted Skip to leave The Paupers, which he did, and put together a new band for Janis. And when Skip was meeting at that time with Janis, he identified her guitar player as the weak link in her band and wanted to replace him with another guitar player. And as he related to me, he was having problem convincing her because number one, the guitar player was her boyfriend. Number two, the guitar player was her drug dealer. Skip was becoming despondent that he wouldn’t be able to fulfill what the record company wanted. And so he shared that with me and said, ‘so I don’t know if this thing of Janis Joplin is going to work out, but I have this other idea of how to solve the problem of The Beatles and other bands not being able to tour because there’s all these instruments that they record in the studio with.’ He said, ‘what if we put together a band that had horns and strings and could do music that was like the music in film scores.’ My passion and his passion were film scores. He said, ‘I love to go to see the Westerns and when the horses are coming over the horizon, you hear the French horns and you hear the string sections and it evokes the big outdoors. What if we had a band that had those kinds of orchestral resources, but we could go and perform live?’ And I said, ‘I’ve done two film scores, I do that for a living.’ So he said, ‘well, if the thing with Janis doesn’t work out, maybe we should put a band together.’ Two weeks after we met, he called me and the thing with Janis didn’t work out, and that’s why Lighthouse became a thing. But I didn’t know anything about the pop music business at the time.
“I had my background mostly doing jazz and classical music and writing film scores and stuff like that. We wrote four songs and we took them down to New York and we had this extraordinary experience that the first record company that we took them to listened to the four songs and offered us a deal on the spot because they not only loved the songs, but they told us that it solved a problem that they and all the other record companies were having at that time, which was all their big income in pop music had been coming from the Big Band era. Frank Sinatra, you know, all the crooners, all of that Count Basie, Woody Herman stuff, all the big bands. And those big bands all had trumpets and trombones and string sections. And this goes back to producers and the business at the time, they could go into every high school and every college and every university, your prime markets of teenagers. And they all had a dance band and a stage band and a school orchestra where kids learned how to play saxophones and clarinets and trumpets and violins and cellos. And they could sell them or provide them with these sheet music arrangements of the recordings that they were putting out from the Big Band era. The kids would play them in school, they’d go out and buy the records and they could, what they call, close the financials, the sales deal. And as the record company told us when we brought in our four song demo, they said, ‘you guys have figured out how to take this new rock and roll thing, which is just guitars and drums, and figure out how all those kids who are learning how to play clarinets and play saxes and all those things, and they can be part of it.’ So they were very excited and made us a huge offer, which was then expanded by a huge personal advance for us, so that we wouldn’t go to other record companies. RCA then bought that label, Verve, and they realized that we had a problem. We had all these instruments, and when we would go out and play gigs, none of the clubs had sound systems with enough faders for the horns and strings and all the background vocals and all the things that we had. So they built us a custom sound system and bought us a truck to take it around. Anyway, so we started out with a huge record deal that included RCA guaranteeing us a sold-out first US concert in Carnegie Hall.”
Throughout the first couple of decades of the rock and roll era of popular music, record labels were most likely the ones supplying and paying the people who produced the records of the artists that they signed. This means they had the power and control, as demonstrated by Jimmy Ienner [see part one of this article, which introduces him as the producer of One Fine Morning], to decide on everything from the studio used to do the recording, the decision on replacing band members with studio musicians, the content and structure of songs, and the overall sonics of the finished product. Today, with the advent of technology, including processes pioneered by Hoffert himself, artists are able to produce themselves, meaning those who still call themselves producers are often independent contractors, and have to work collaboratively with the artists, rarely with any ability to direct or veto decisions made by the artist. Hoffert talked about the good and bad about how producers worked back in the 1970s, and how it was actually a good thing that Lighthouse ceded control over to Jimmy Ienner after trying the self-produced route at first, with the blessings of their new label, RCA.
“Once we got picked up to be managed by the Albert Grossman Agency, we went on a tour as the opening act for Jefferson Airplane [‘Somebody to Love,’ ‘White Rabbit’] and started playing 15,000-seat arenas, so all these crowds of people were seeing Lighthouse. We ended up doing a thousand concerts approximately in the first three years of Lighthouse because of two things; number one, it was the age of the festivals. And the festivals in those days, they didn’t have big sound systems, they didn’t have pixel boards. And tens of thousands of people would go to these folk festivals, jazz festivals, and then rock festivals. And they could hardly see the tiny performer on the stage. But then Lighthouse would show up with this big theatrical thing with violins and stuff, and we had this great sound system that RCA built for us. Now they could actually hear the band because they had these big bass cabinets and stuff,” he said.
“The bad thing about having that success up front is our manager negotiated it so that Skip and I would be the producers and we had absolutely carte blanche, which was nice for us, but we had never produced a record. So we produced these records that we liked and the band liked and they were really band centric. The guys would come in, we’re doing the mix, and we’d say, what do you think? Are you ready to sign off on the mix? And the band member, whatever they were playing, maybe the saxophone, they say, it’s pretty good, but you cut out some of the sax solo or could you leave it all in and make it louder? So we were trying to reconcile our musical objectives with the reality of the business, which was that the solos were too long, the solos were too loud. It wasn’t that radio friendly thing. The thing about record producing is after three albums that sold very well wherever Lighthouse performed, but didn’t get played on AM radio, our record company dropped us because we weren’t selling enough to get those gold and platinum records that they needed to justify supporting a big band financially.
“Now we had a huge decision to make. Will we get an outside producer and give that producer all of that power and control that you’re talking about? Or do we break up the band? We decided to keep the band together, and to keep all of those long solos in our live shows. And so we had a real dichotomy which exists today as well. When people come to hear us live, there are a lot of long solos. We do some songs live that are 15 minutes long because they’re full of solos and you can’t get cuts like that even on an LP. And that’s what we decided. The songs would be shorter on the record, but we would let loose when we played them live. So we gave all that power to our new producer and thank goodness he was right. It was a tough decision, and it wasn’t necessarily the right or wrong decision for the band, but we were happy to make that decision.”
Hoffert got into even more detail about the dynamic between the band, especially his co-founder and primary songwriter, the late great Prokop, and Ienner. It’s interesting to get such a behind-the-scenes peek into the machinations that went into recording albums at that time, the dynamics of which are probably similar with some of the big name acts today, regardless of genre.
“Like, we needed it. Without that, Lighthouse would have never survived. When we were auditioning producers, we thought that Jimmy would be a good guy to get us radio friendly recordings. And he said, ‘the only condition is I have to have absolute power.’ And he says, ‘I won’t surprise you.’ He said, ‘we’ll need to have a band meeting and everybody in the band will have to agree that there will be no instrumental solos for the albums. We have to make shorter songs. You guys, I’m going to give you some quick lessons on how to write a radio friendly hit song. We’ll talk about a hook. We’ll talk about the verses and choruses, intros out, no intros, no outros, and so on and so forth.’ And he did that and we had that meeting. And I remember when we went in to record the first song on the One Fine Morning album. We were going back into the studio the second day after we had recorded the first song. And I don’t recall what the song was, but Jimmy Ienner had a briefcase and he said, ‘oh Skip, I have something for you.’ And Skip said, ‘oh, what is it?’ And Jimmy reached into his briefcase and came out with a tape reel that goes on a tape recording and had the multi-track master with just a small amount of tape on it, and he said, ‘why don’t you keep this. This is your drum solo that you played yesterday. It’s certainly not going on the album.’ And this was to the leader of the band! Everybody else looked at Jimmy and he said, ‘listen, we had this meeting and I want you to know, this is not up for discussion.’ After that we got it and we did our best. Had Jimmy Ienner not done this, we would not have been able to get that next album and the albums after that,” Hoffert admitted.
“For us, it was a tough decision. And I think for the guys in the band, you know, some of them really felt we were selling out. It was a term that was used in those days. It’s like selling out was doing that. Selling out was also when we had to go on our first cross-Canada tour with Lighthouse. We had to deal with the reality that Canada was a huge country distance-wise but with very few people, except in a few populated areas. So the cost of touring across Canada made it impossible for bands to really do those tours because of the cost of accommodation and food and traveling, you know, large distances over unpopulated areas. And our record company said that they couldn’t fill in enough money to support us doing that. I believe we may have done the first ads, the first sponsorships with Labatt’s. And once that happened, and we were able to play, goodness knows how many dozens of little towns and stuff across Canada because in those days, Everybody was now really happy to do what a couple of months before that would have been ‘selling out’ because it allowed us to do that. For Skip and I, and then the guys in the band, we came to realize that just like broadcast television, advertising was a business model and that you couldn’t say, ‘oh, but I don’t want any ads on my television show because it breaks up the flow of my show.’ It’s necessary if you want to survive and grow.”
As vital as compromising to the choices made by the producer, many of which ultimately proved to be the right way to go, the addition of vocalist Bob McBride may have been even more important to the success of One Fine Morning – and beyond, for Lighthouse.
“It was huge. It was absolutely huge. I’ll tell you another story that’s kind of funny and it’s true. When we started Lighthouse, Skip’s experience was crucial, and I totally relied on Skip. He was so helpful to me because he had been through putting a band together, getting a record out, getting a manager. He knew about the rock and roll business and he had been very successful for a young person at that time in doing it. So when I asked, ‘how do we put together a band?’ He said, ‘you have to make a demo. You have to do this and that.’ And he said, ‘the only thing I feel strongly about is that we don’t want to get a lead singer that’s really too good.’ And I thought, oh, that’s surprising. I said, ‘I want to have a band where everybody has to be the best, the best players.’ He said, ‘oh, I agree. But not the lead singer. I’ve been in bands and I’m the drummer. And when I sing, I sing, but I’m just, you know, I have a mic on the drums. The lead singer basically gets all the chicks, gets all the media reviews, and everybody just talks about what they’re doing,’” Hoffert said of the discussions at the time.
“He told me about how his friend Al Kooper was putting together this band called Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the original one didn’t have [vocalist] David Clayton Thomas – you could say Bob McBride, in a certain way, was our David Clayton Thomas. Our sort-of lead singer at the time, Pinky [aka Vic Dauvin], who also did some percussion, came up to us and said, ‘guys, I’m leaving the band. I love Lighthouse. I love the idea of it. But every time I have to get on stage and front a 13-piece band with all these loud horns and strings and fantastic solos and everything, I get so scared to be the front man that I have about a half a bottle of Newfoundland Screech before I go on and I’m becoming an alcoholic because of a stage band.’ So it was precipitous that we said, okay, so now we need to get a new lead singer. Skip and I decided we did need to get a good lead singer because Jimmy Ienner was not going to produce us, because he wanted us to start writing songs that feature the lead vocalist. And so we did, we found Bob McBride and it all worked out.”
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the notion of what constituted rock music or pop music splintering off into many directions like atoms in the Hadron Collider. There was country rock, southern rock, progressive rock, heavy rock (metal), and eventually glam rock, arena rock (the likes of Boston, Kansas and Styx), Punk Rock and then New Wave. Lighthouse was part of another offshoot that saw rock bands bringing in more jazz influences, particularly the use of extensive brass/horn sections. Alongside the likes of the aforementioned Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago, Lighthouse pioneered this movement, which obviously found an audience because those bands, in one form or another, spawned modern imitators and are still on the road themselves.
“Again, it’s a great question, but I don’t know if I’m really smart enough to give you an authoritative answer. We were quickly followed by, you know, a bunch of other horn bands that didn’t reach the same level of consumer success. I don’t think from my interaction with Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears and my knowledge of Lighthouse that the guys in the bands themselves knew that this would start a kind of trend. I just think that in the case of Lighthouse, the thing that really drove Skip and me was the fact that we like film scores. And film scores were really orchestral. But it may have been a different reason for Blood, Sweat & Tears. I think for them, it was the fact that they were a bunch of guys that really liked jazz. And so unlike Lighthouse, which retained the rock and roll rhythm section, Blood, Sweat & Tears had more of a jazz band feel with a sort of rock overlay. Lighthouse was more of a rock and roll band with jazz solos. Like as Miles Davis sort of put it, because at this time, Miles Davis was experimenting with his jazz band and bands like Blood, Sweat & Tears and Lighthouse could play all the jazz festivals because we had jazz horn players who were playing jazz solo. I think the Newport Jazz Festival was the first time that we played a festival with Miles Davis. And he came to the wings of the stage and as I recall, Bruce Cassidy, who was one of the trumpet players in Lighthouse at the time, told me years later that he was chatting with Miles. And Miles said to him, ‘you got the jazz horn solos, but instead of playing a swing beat behind it, swing music, big band, all that jazz, you do it over straight eighth notes.’ He analyzed it that way. And then according to one book that was written about the emergence of fusion music, which is jazz and rock, it helped steer Miles into doing the Bitches Brew album [released in the spring of 1970] which was considered the fundamental thing because of that thing that was happening at rock festivals. So I would say that there were a lot of different influences, you know, coming from jazz, coming from rock,” Hoffert said.
“There were so many good things about Chicago as a band, but it’s hard to deny, and I certainly don’t deny, that the guys in Chicago just wrote so many fantastic hit songs that they would have probably been hit records, I think, with or without the horns of the band. But that’s just my view of it. So I think there were a lot of different reasons as to how and why those bands came together and why they became so successful. In hindsight, one of the things I’m most proud of with Lighthouse, from an egotistical point of view, is the only time that Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago and Lighthouse played at the same venue was at the Isle of Wight Festival in the UK in 1970, which was a four-day festival with everyone there. The British equivalent of Billboard magazine promoted that as a battle of the bands, between the three bands, and Lighthouse won. As a result, we were the only band asked to play a second set [the following night] because we won the battle of the bands contest. So of course, I’m happy about that, and I brag about that. A lot of the guys that played in Lighthouse went to play in Blood, Sweat & Tears and vice versa. So there was a lot of respect between all of us. And we all enjoyed the music of each other.”
Woodstock gets the most press, mostly because it took place in the United States, the most oversaturated media market on the planet then and now. But if you look down the roster at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, and the implications for the future of popular music, and rock and roll in particular, it’s hard not to see the British event as the most significant. It certainly was an eye-opener for Hoffert.
“I was totally overwhelmed. I was totally intimidated. And I was totally scared shitless. When I looked out as far as I could see there was this sea of people, – 300,000 people were at that event. We were playing some decent sized festivals, which were also really intimidating. Especially for me, because I’m afraid of people; I’m not a very social person. A lot of musicians, not all of us, you know, get on stage because it’s like a bit of a wall between us. Like, we’re not that good with being social with the face to face. But put us on a stage and you get a stage persona. At Isle of Wight especially, I was very afraid that for some reason the fans who were half a mile away from us, who couldn’t hear what was happening, who couldn’t see what was happening before the pixel boards, would maybe start rushing the stage and people would be hurt and I would be hurt. So I was looking at escape routes of how I might be able to, you know, did they have helicopters to get us off? It was very intimidating. But at the same time it was also fantastic,” Hoffert said, smiling at the memories flooding back.
“I was in a little motel and the guy a few doors away from me was Jimi Hendrix. We all ordered dinner and were sitting at a table with Hendrix, who had just given an interview to Rolling Stone or something saying that he had decided to give up drugs because it was causing a lot of problems. But then here I was sitting and having dinner with him and there was this is a pile of cocaine right by his place setting. There was all kinds of stuff like that. And then there was The Who, who were one of my favorite bands. I passed them walking up to the stage but I was too shy to have a big conversation with them. I did interact on some level with all of those big acts that you mentioned and many more, but I also felt way out of my league. I was as awkward as many fans might be when they met their heroes. I wish I would have had the life experience back then to have more conversations.”
“So, yeah, it was fantastic. It was certainly the most incredible moment rubbing shoulders with other people whose music I admire. The other thing that just came back to me happened around the same time. There was this new act coming in from England that hadn’t yet released any recordings in the United States and they opened for Lighthouse at a club in Philadelphia. One of my bandmates in Lighthouse came down to the green room where I was sitting, but I wasn’t listening at that moment to the opening act. He said, ‘you gotta hear this band. It’s like piano, bass and drums and the guy is actually playing acoustic piano. This guy figured out how to play an acoustic piano in rock and roll. And his songs were really good.’ And I went up and it was Elton John who was opening for Lighthouse although at this time, he wasn’t ‘Elton John!’
Lighthouse’s Hoffert, Prokop, McBride and co-founder Ralph Cole were inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2022, and into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2023. Besides Hoffert, the current lineup of the band features Dan Clancy on vocals (since 1992), bassist Doug Moore, veteran Canadian drummer Paul DeLong (Kim Mitchell, Roger Hodgson), guitarist Marc Ganetakos (Nelly Furtado, Ashley MacIsaac), another original member, trombonist Russ Little (who originally left in 1972, but returned 20 years later when Hoffert, Cole and Prokop revived the band), 25-year veteran trumpet player Chris Howells, baritone saxophonist Simon Wallis, noted veteran touring jazz saxophonist Michael Stuart, and vocalist James Naro (son of the acclaimed rock vocalist Phil Naro).
Most of the players have other gigs, as Lighthouse doesn’t tour nearly as extensively as it did 50-plus years ago, which makes each show a special occasion. Three dates have already been confirmed for the band in 2026, including Feb. 5 at the River Run Centre in Guelph, Ontario, Feb. 21 at the Pickering Casino with Five Man Electrical Band, and April 1 (no fooling!) in St. Catharines at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre.
“Howard Shore, our saxophone player at the time, in an interview he gave, I don’t know, maybe eight or 10 years ago, was talking about his time in Lighthouse. And he actually kept track of every gig that he played with the band. For the years that he was with Lighthouse, he said he played over a thousand concerts. We used to play 200 plus concerts a year. Nowadays, we play about 20 concerts a year. So a tenth as many, but still a good amount – a couple of concerts a month. We work just the right amount of time for many of us, in part because when we reformed the band nearly 35 years ago, we decided that because some of the guys were high school teachers or music teachers – Skip was the host of a radio show – we wanted Lighthouse to be a permanent band that would continue playing, but only in part-time ventures. So we could have a family., so we could get to see our kids grow up and not have to get divorced and split up and do all that stuff, which if you’re on the road is very, very likely to happen,” Hoffert explained.
“We are all, I think, incredibly thankful for the fact that we can do that without making a huge commitment. And I think it’s so much harder for bands these days. Back then, you could play all those gigs because the business started with little bar bands playing little bars, before graduating to mid-level rooms. If you really made it big, you’d go to arenas and maybe even stadiums. But over the years, the middle dropped out of every business, including the concert business. So it’s awfully difficult nowadays for bands to make the leap from the local bar band scene to that huge thing. Now the band has to figure out how to sell millions of records before they even have a record company to be important enough to get that. So it’s a very different business than it was. And it’s much more difficult.
“For myself, It’s really, really, really easy for me to want to keep playing. I’ve had a very fantastic ride in life. I’ve been very successful at music and a bunch of other things as well. But there’s nothing, nothing that comes close to getting me to feel passion about life, like live performance in front of an audience. I’ve often likened it to jumping off the top of a mountain and hoping that you have a soft landing on some trees or something and that you just don’t kill yourself before the end of it because of the risk. Live music is so different for me than recordings. Recordings you make and you try to be as perfect as you can because people are going to listen to it more than once. Live music, you only have one chance and it’s that risk that you take that makes it so exciting for actors, for dancers, for musicians to get on that stage. And the other thing about it that’s so much different and so much better than writing a book, which I’ve done, I’ve written books. You write a book; it takes a year before it comes out and then you have to find out different markets and is it a hit? You do that every single night you go on stage with a live act. At the end of it, you either get applause or you don’t. And if you don’t get applause, this really big applause for three or four gigs in a row, you won’t get any more gigs. And it’s that pressure that overrides the need to be perfect. And knowing that you can go for it, for me and lucky to be in a band like Lighthouse where I get to solo and my band mates get to solo. Every gig is totally different. The solos are totally different. And it’s that risk that is fantastic. I feel very blessed that I’ve been able to spend the second half of my career focusing on performing live wherever I can.”
For more information on the anniversary re-release of One Fine Morning, or Lighthouse touring plans for 2026, visit https://www.lighthouserockson.com.
To read Part One of this interview click here.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
