LIGHTHOUSE: FREEDOM 55

A Fine Morning That Lasted 55 Years

John Formosa Photography

There is a concert coming up by one of my favourite bands and that certainly inspires me to write something! A two-parter story, evennnn!

Lighthouse was formed in 1969. I was six years old. I could tell you what Burl Ives song was my favourite but I wasn’t exactly tracking the pop charts. By 1971 though, something got through. “One Fine Morning” came out of the radio and it inspired me to pick up a guitar. I didn’t stick with the guitar. I stuck with Lighthouse.

Skip Prokop really knew how to write a pop song for radio. The beginning of that song had a perfect hook and Bob McBride’s voice was right up there with all my favourite voices at the time — Burton Cummings, David Clayton Thomas, Terry Jacks, Keith Hampshire, and the Stampeders, the latter being the first band I ever saw live in concert. But that’s another story.

Sunny Days was another golden chart-topper, and Pretty Lady was on North Bay radio on a regular basis. I was eleven years old when Lighthouse played their first show. I didn’t know that yet. I just knew that somewhere across Toronto, something was happening that would eventually become the soundtrack of my entire adolescence. One Fine Morning on the radio was not just a song — it was a weather system. It changed the temperature of whatever room it entered.

Here’s what the history books don’t quite capture: Skip Prokop and Paul Hoffert conceived the whole idea on a single flight home from New York. Two guys on a plane, and out of that conversation came one of the most audacious bands Canada ever produced — a full rock rhythm section fused with a jazz horn section and a classical string ensemble. Nobody was doing that. Nobody had the nerve.

Duke Ellington introduced them at their very first show. Let that land for a moment. Your debut gig, and Duke Ellington is doing the honours. (I’ve always said: “Duke Ellington’s Boardwalk in the game of Jazzopoly!”)

Their second gig was Carnegie Hall. Elton John opened for them in Philadelphia. They turned down Woodstock — turned it down — and then went and killed at the Isle of Wight alongside The Doors, Miles Davis and The Who, and were the only act asked back for a second performance.'

One Fine Morning went to number two in Canada and number twenty-four on the Billboard Hot 100. Lighthouse Live!became the first Canadian album to go platinum. I had it at my house - cuz my parents had great taste!

They went on to win three consecutive Junos for Best Canadian Group. These are not small facts.

I saw them recently in Brantford. I was excited to hear those great songs again but I never could have expected what happened on stage. The band were forever young and played their asses off, and Dan Clancy worked the room like somewhere between Carnegie Hall and Caesar’s Palace. It sounds like an impossible mission to find a new singer for Lighthouse because those songs are iconic — but Dan accepts the challenge and is having a ball doing it. Bob McBride’s voice is irreplaceable, and Dan doesn’t try to replace it. He inhabits it on his own terms, which is exactly the right call.

On June 27, 2026, Lighthouse returns to The Concert Hall; the very room that used to be called the Rock Pile, the room where it all began fifty-six years ago — for a one-night-only performance celebrating the Anniversary Edition of One Fine Morning. Paul Hoffert will be there. So will original 1970 member Russ Little, alongside Dan Clancy, Doug Moore, Marc Ganetakos, Chris Howells, Simon Wallis, Michael Stuart, Peter Kadar, and Paul DeLong. The second set will reproduce the entire album live, with strings, exactly the way it was originally recorded. Hoffert himself has promised to whip the audience into paroxysms of ecstasy, which is a direct quote and a bold commitment and I believe him completely.

The Anniversary Edition pairs a fully remastered One Fine Morning with a second disc of archival material — an unreleased track, a 1970 CBC live performance, and original demo recordings featuring early vocal takes by Skip Prokop, who left us in 2017 but whose voice and vision are all over every note this band has ever played.

These guys don’t need rent money and this is not about ego. They are good friends and they love the music they are playing. You are lucky if you manage to get a ticket.

photo by Mei Lee

Brenda and Paul Hoffert: Childhood Sweethearts, Lifelong Collaborators

Toronto has a way of making you feel like you know everybody and nobody at the same time. You can live here for decades, move through the same rooms, breathe the same scene, and still somehow miss the people who were standing just one conversation away the entire time. That is either the city’s great charm or its most maddening flaw, and on most days I am not sure which.

Brenda Hoffert was one of those people for me.

I knew of her, the way you know of anyone who has been essential to the fabric of this town’s music and arts life for longer than most careers last. She has been married to Paul Hoffert since they were practically teenagers, two kids who showed up at Toronto City Hall when she was eighteen and he was nineteen, and simply decided to build a world together. That is not a biographical footnote. That is the whole story in miniature: a pair of people who looked at the possibilities, however terrifying, and said, let’s figure it out. Brenda told me that over dinner and I have been thinking about it ever since.

Paul, of course, is one of the founding architects of Lighthouse, that magnificent, improbable experiment in rock and strings and horns that introduced itself to the world in May of 1969 at the Rock Pile in Toronto, with Duke Ellington himself making the introduction. They went on to sell millions of records and win three consecutive Juno Awards for Album of the Year. The band played Carnegie Hall eleven days after their very first gig. That is either confidence or insanity and in the best cases you cannot tell the difference.

And behind all of it, beside all of it, thoroughly woven into all of it, was Brenda. As manager of Lighthouse she was the person who kept the lights on and the schedule coherent and the considerable egos of a large and talented band pointed in roughly the same direction. She was also the lyricist, the creative partner, the one whose instincts for language and image ran alongside Paul’s musical architecture. Their score for Outrageous won at the Canadian Film Awards in 1977. The work went deep.

Then there was the children’s album. I Lost My Pet Lizard, 1979, Brenda and Paul together, a Juno-nominated record that captured something genuinely playful and strange and alive. And who did they get to sing on it? Don Francks. My best friend, the great Iron Buffalo himself, whose voice could move between jazz and theatre and pure mischief with the ease of a man who had played the Village Vanguard and starred opposite Fred Astaire and lived on the Red Pheasant Reserve and come back to Toronto to remind us what it meant to be a real original. Don raved about working with Brenda. He was not a man who raved casually. When Don told you someone had it, you took that to the bank.

Don Fracks (aka Iron Buffalo) told me I’d love Paul and Brenda…he was right! (photo by Don Dixon / Asylum Artists)

I carried that endorsement for years. And somehow, the way Toronto works its particular magic of proximity without collision, we kept not quite meeting. The paths crossed, the orbits overlapped, and then the moment would dissolve into the next thing. Until one night Brenda and Paul came to Paradise Theatre to see my short films on the big screen. They loved it - I was invited for supper.

Their home. I walked in (with my pal, poet Brendee Green) and understood immediately that I was somewhere that had been built by two people who take beauty seriously. The walls are covered with Brenda’s colourful photographs. And they stopped me. I have been in a lot of studios and a lot of galleries and I know the difference between work that introduces itself politely and work that grabs you by the lapels. Brenda’s photographs grab. They are bold and graphic and emotionally precise, built on what she describes as that “gotcha” moment when the image caught her eye and her heart at the same time. She shoots quickly, hand-held, without set-ups, striving for work that has emotional impact and compels the viewer to find their own story within the image. She has been showing in Toronto galleries since 2004, and in Montreal, and in New York. The work travels because real work always does.

And then there was the cooking. I will just say this: the table she set was the kind of meal that makes you want to revise your whole relationship with the concept of an evening. Generous and considered and full of personality, which is what a meal should be and usually isn’t.

We talked for hours. She asked good questions, which is its own form of intelligence, and I spun a few yarns, as I am constitutionally required to do. We covered the decades we had spent moving through the same city in parallel, Moses stories, other mutual friends, the shared history, the incredible fact that it took us this long.

Brenda Hoffert was born in Toronto in 1944 and she has spent eight decades making this city more interesting, more musical, more beautiful and more honest. She is a lyricist and a visual artist and a manager and a collaborator and a cook and a partner in one of the great ongoing creative marriages this country has produced. She was doing all of this before most people in her world thought to take notes.

John Formosa Photography

June 27, 2026 The Concert Hall 888 Yonge Street, Toronto, ON 7:00 PM. All Ages

Co-founder Paul Hoffert leads the current all-star lineup alongside original 1970 member Russ Little, and joined by Dan Clancy, Doug Moore, Marc Ganetakos, Chris Howells, Simon Wallis, Michael Stuart, Peter Kadar, and Paul DeLong.