Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  I didn’t mind singing with the class, though, maybe because there was no audience and we were all in it together. Misery loves company. I remember being particularly touched by the Welsh folk melody “All Through the Night”:

  While the moon her watch is keeping

  all through the night

  while the weary world is sleeping

  all through the night

  O’er thy spirit gently stealing

  visions of delight revealing

  Breathes a pure and holy feeling

  All through the night.

  I look back on this song with some fondness. All through my life I have embraced and questioned the night, and loved its random light: the aurora borealis, the starry reaches of the cosmos, streetlight ricochet off car metal and darkened windowpanes . . . the light of friends and lovers.

  We are on a great journey, through darkness and dawn, across time, though sometimes I fear that our journey is about to end. We must not succumb to fear or avarice; we must continue to embrace life, seek light, and gather in the charity of night. This is what God wants from us and for us. Mirrors of the past shine with the hue of unborn days, just as stars glitter in the dark night to light our way.

  When I was ten years old, Mom and Dad raised the subject of music lessons. Would I like to play an instrument? I was not opposed to this.

  Both Mom and Dad played piano: Mom, light classical pieces from printed sheet music, and Dad, the pop music of his youth, by ear, in any key as long as it was F. They both embraced musicals, and when I was really little they were given to singing together. We’d be going somewhere in the car, and they’d croon show tunes from My Fair Lady and Oklahoma, “Home on the Range,” and music-hall songs like “Barnacle Bill the Sailor.” When I was a toddler I liked it, but as growing boys my brothers and I found it embarrassing. What if our peers were to hear this? “Oooooklahoma, where the wind goes . . .” I’d want to shoot them. Eventually they stopped singing, probably because my brothers and I became intolerable about it. We had a special loud groan we used just for such occasions.

  My uncle had an unused clarinet lying around, so this became my first instrument. I didn’t really relate to the clarinet, but I did enjoy playing music. Later my parents bought me a trumpet, and I played that until I was thirteen. When I hit grade nine, the first year of high school, I felt entitled to advance to grade ten music. The music teacher disagreed, so I spent months of music classes bored with the basics that I already knew. At the end of the year I dropped the trumpet, and the study of music, though I continued to consume it through the tinny earpiece of my little transistor radio, covertly tuning in late-night rock and roll. I also discovered Igor Stravinsky in my parents’ record collection. It was a second-rate performance of The Firebird, and I’d spin it frequently on the family hi-fi. My dad would have preferred Vivaldi or Mozart, and he’d drolly condemn the Russian composer as “Bruce’s tone-deaf hero.”

  When I wasn’t absorbing music, I was devouring books. Never drawn to academics, I nonetheless have always loved words. By grade six we’d evolved from rhyming ballads, such as Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” to more modern material. On one occasion we were assigned the task of memorizing a poem of our choice from an English textbook. I stumbled on “Ars Poetica,” by the Illinois poet Archibald MacLeish:

  A poem should be motionless in time

  As the moon climbs

  Leaving, as the moon releases

  Twig by twig the night-entangled trees

  Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves

  Memory by memory the mind.

  Here was a juxtaposing of imagery, of evocative impressions, suggesting the vastness of things. I was hooked. Soon I’d visit T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, masters of beauty and depth.

  Much of the rest of my reading time was filled with sci-fi. Ace Doubles offered two stories; you’d finish one and then flip the paperback for the other. I’d read Jack Vance’s Big Planet/The Slaves of the Klau, then immediately crack Andre Norton’s Sargasso of Space, backed by Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets. Though I have never given up sci-fi, I was soon on to Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would come later, but he would definitely come. Later, too, came the darkly transfigurative travelogues of poet Blaise Cendrars and Ginsberg’s roiling Fall of America.

  Aside: Our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Peddie, the mother of Ian, who was my age and with whom I played, wrote regular letters to her parents in her native England. Ian’s sisters were kind enough to share some excerpts from those letters. . . .

  Sun. 30. V. 54

  . . . [Ian] and the boy next door are crazy about space ships and you should see all the contraptions they have fixed up. Bruce has an outer space outfit which his father bought in the States and Ian has his own crystal set complete with earphones . . . they pretend [the programs] come from Mars. . . .

  In 1959 my parents realized that my brothers, ages nine and seven, needed to stop sharing a room. So we moved across town to the house my dad had grown up in while a new structure was built on the lot next to our existing house, which was sold. Grandma Cockburn occupied that home with Auntie, her sister. It was at Grandma and Auntie’s house that I would find my holy grail, the North Star and trail guide of my life.

  As a younger child I had always loved going to the sisters’ house. They were kind ladies who made a fuss over me and produced delectable Sunday dinners of roast beef and browned potatoes, with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert. It was a three-story house, with access to the top floor provided by a narrow stair that opened onto a landing, on either side of which lay a small bedroom. Historically Grandma and Auntie had rented these rooms to young, single working women. (I had had a little boy’s crush on Alma, the blond airline stewardess.) There was a single bed and a dresser, a small table for homework. The wall on the street side sloped inward, following the slant of the roof, and opposite that was a low, mysterious doorway, which led to a large attic closet. Something to explore! The attic was piled with boxes, a decrepit tennis racket, some folding chairs, and in the shadows—my heart leapt!—a beat-up cardboard guitar case.

  I dragged the case into the room and opened it. Inside was a small, dark brown guitar with strings discoloured by rust. Whose it had been was a mystery. Who it was meant for was not.

  History and family and experience and hormones collided in a singular molten moment. A guitar! It was a beat-up old no-name thing, set up for playing with a steel, Hawaiian style. It had not been strummed for a long time, so no one minded if I abused it. I was terribly excited. I painted gold stars on its top, posed with it, and banged away on it seeking the rudimentary grooves I’d heard on the radio, without much success. But it pulled me in. I spent a lot of time with that guitar. In my mind I was already a guitar player, and I spent a lot of time in my mind, so what’s real is real. I couldn’t relate to much of what went on in the outside world, except for rock and roll, and here, suddenly, was a ticket to ride.

  Even before finding the instrument in the attic I had become infatuated with the deep twang of Duane Eddy, the jangle of the Crickets, the raunchy crunch of Scotty Moore on Elvis Presley recordings. Mom and Dad were not especially happy about this development. Like many of their generation, they looked at rock and roll the way a collector of fine automobiles might view a Ford Pinto. They were nervous because rock and roll meant teenage gangs and general bad behaviour, lewd dancing and cigarette packs in shirtsleeves. Dad thought the singers sounded effeminate and didn’t even sing in tune. But it was clear to me, as soon as I found that guitar, that this was what I would do. To their credit, my parents were keen on honouring their children’s interests.

  I wasn’t thinking of a career. At first I didn’t even know what to do with the instrument, I just sort of hammered at it. I’d figure out one riff and play it all the time. My parents said, “Look, if you’re going to play guitar, that’s fine with us. But you have to promise that you’ll take lessons,
and you have to promise that you won’t grow sideburns and get a leather jacket, and you won’t play rock and roll.” They imagined that if I learned the instrument “properly,” I would no longer want to play the awful teenage stuff. Eventually they were right.

  My guitar teacher, Hank Sims, took one look at that guitar and declared it unplayable, so my parents bought me an inexpensive Kay, a fat-bodied acoustic archtop with flat wound strings. We got a DeArmond pickup to mount on it and make it electric. Some of the old blues greats, such as Jimmy Reed, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and many others, played Kay guitars because they were cheap but also because they produced the sound they wanted. Mine went underappreciated. That music was still waiting to be discovered.

  I took my lessons. I learned some standard tunes and a lot of basic guitar techniques. Hank introduced me to the music of Chet Atkins and Les Paul. And, though I waited until I thought my parents wouldn’t care anymore, in the fullness of time I acquired sideburns and a leather jacket, and I played in a rock-and-roll band.

  2

  I don’t think I’m alone in remembering high school as a prison sentence. Nepean High was adjacent to my old public school, and both were only three blocks from my house, so in transitioning to high school I didn’t feel like I’d really gone anywhere. There was a change, though. Academic demands weren’t the issue. In spite of being lazy and a daydreamer, I have always loved words and non-mathematical intellectual challenges. Rather, it was the banal yet intimidating pressure to compete with peers, to fulfill someone else’s ideas of what, exactly, needed to be learned, and to look and act in ways that felt antithetical to my dawning sense of personhood that made high school such a drag. Never mind the minefields laid by the hormonal rush of puberty. I still wince at the memory of sitting in French class, after an hour of physical education, in a state of horrified embarrassment at the smell emanating from my sweaty crotch, which I was certain was offending every person (read: girl) in the room.

  High school yearbook, 1963

  All through school I resided to a large degree in a world of my own making. Though I always had a couple of friends, I was shy, a loner in my heart. Nowadays I would likely be diagnosed with ADD, but alas, I missed out on the Ritalin.

  In those days everyone seemed afraid of something. There were rules for everything. I have never much liked other people’s rules, which is maybe why I was drawn to the Beat poets and their predecessors in the first place. Their poems often broke establishment “rules” for poetry and mocked the safe subjects that pundits deemed acceptable for the written word. In 1956, when I was eleven years old, Ginsberg published his famous broadside Howl and Other Poems, which didn’t so much break rules as crush them. Howl was a paratactical deconstruction of an illusory American dream, a demythologizing chapbook standing squarely on the shoulders of dissident greats like Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. It signalled the end of Father Knows Best and the beginning of Elvis, and challenged the powers-that-were with the understanding that their social control structures were so weak that a mere poem could undo them.

  For me it was an opening of worlds, adrenaline delivered in letters. I found the poetry itself to be powerful, but I was also very much taken with the style of the Beats (which at the time was portrayed bemusedly by Time magazine). It contained a fierce rejection of conventional mores and a willful embrace of the artists’ poverty, which was thrust on them, at least in the beginning. I got a sense of headlong motion, breathless in the verbal paragliding.

  Fear of poetry on the part of the powerful seems to have always been with us, and it doesn’t go away. Communist Russia was in the habit of confining dissident poets in insane asylums. North American society marginalized them as having no commercial value. And yet we were taught the works of the previous generation’s iconoclasts as part of a government-approved curriculum.

  T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and William Butler Yeats set the literary scene for me. The Beat poets and writers shortly followed, and then I began dabbling at poetry of my own. I filled a notebook with derivative poems, full of veiled sexual fantasy and not-so-veiled imagery from horror stories I was reading. I took the work seriously but maintained a sense of irony. I drew a picture in ink on the cover—a man’s head with a big worm coming out of the forehead—and gave it a title: “Excretions of a Mental Leper.” The notebook lived in my top left desk drawer so I could retrieve it while I was supposed to be doing homework. One evening my father told me he had found it and was very concerned lest my younger brothers lay hands on it. I was really offended that he’d gone through my drawers, but I said I would make sure that they didn’t see it. He said he had already made sure by destroying it. I maintained a poker face in my absolute outrage, but I knew from that point that I could not trust him, or by extension any authority, ever again.

  Toward the end of grade nine I got word from my friend Alan Greenberg that a certain day had been declared Beatnik Day. It was a subversive, unofficial declaration that felt to me like a safety-in-numbers opportunity to fly my true colours. (It occurs to me now that it may have been a declaration only by Alan, and only to me. No matter: I went for it.) I had seen a TV interview with an “actual beatnik,” who said she wore black as a gesture of mourning for the world. I didn’t have any black clothes. I had to improvise. I went to class on the appointed morning in a V-neck sweater, a tie without a shirt, and sunglasses. Hey, I’m a beatnik! I don’t recall seeing many other manifestations of latent Beatness, maybe a couple of kids wearing shades in the hall. I was not lauded for my uniqueness. I was ordered to the principal’s office, and then sent home to dress myself properly.

  I was born into a generation of North American youth who enjoyed enormous privilege. But like most teenagers, we were aware of what was happening around us. Sheltered as we were in 1950s Canada, we could still see the rapid expansion of suburban life and world populations, the delirium of anti-Communist witch hunts, the mushrooming wars of empire, and especially the looming shadow of the crazy nuclear arms race. And while we may not have realized it, it was clear something was going on with the church, which I later understood to be an incremental but consistent diminishment of the institution’s authority in the face of state dominance. These were huge changes symbolized and catalyzed by the Big Bang of World War II, the results of which are only now coming to bear. Climate change and other environmental transformations may be irreversible, and human misery has never been more widespread as wealthy nations maintain their mad scramble to monopolize scarce resources such as fossil fuels, arable land, and water. Back then we couldn’t have predicted these changes, but even as teenagers, if only through the osmotic absorption of energetic shifts, we were aware of the nature of the path. We also understood, if only by intuition, that there wasn’t much authentic spirit to be encountered along the way.

  I had my friend Alan, and a couple of others. Really I looked up to the tough kids. I’m not sure exactly why; maybe I envied what looked to me like their freedoms. I found them appealing and, indeed, authentic. They smoked and drank. They talked back. They had parties where girls and boys made out. They cut tattoos into their arms with razor blades, got into kicking duels during lunch period, shoplifted as a matter of course, occasionally stole cars for a joyride. Had I asked, one or two of them would have taught me how to steal a car, and informed me with a high level of acumen how to joyride, ditch the vehicle, and avoid getting caught (and probably what to do if I did get caught). I found them interesting. I was eager and angry enough, but too aware of the consequences, to act with such drama, and I wasn’t tough at all. (Though I did go through a shoplifting phase, eventually working up to pocketing .22-calibre ammunition and selling it at school to the boys whose fathers taught them to hunt.) I didn’t try to be one of them, which is probably why they didn’t beat me up. Had I tried to be like them, they would have had to fight me.

  They were mostly working-class boys who took shop and auto mechanic
s instead of Latin, as I did. In grade ten I was in a French class with four or five of them. I made sure I sat in their corner at the back of the room. We told jokes and harassed the teacher in stage whispers whenever his back was turned.

  I remember Ed the best. He was the tallest of the bunch, and could “shoot the boots” (fight the kicking duels) better than anyone else. He was also a fairly nice guy, though quick to anger and always ready to defend his position at the top of the pecking order. At the other extreme of this little posse was Tommy, a short kid with an aggressive attitude who would attack you one minute and befriend you the next. He sat beside me in English, and one day pulled out his penis and whispered to me: “And that’s only pissin’ size!” It certainly loomed large in context.

  My tough friends were damaged goods. None of them seemed to have great hopes for the future. In contrast to mine, their parents were poor, uneducated, working-class. Their lives were hard, and when your life is hard it’s not easy to make the best choices, especially when so many important choices are made for you. I treated them with respect, and they gave me back the same.

  In his novel A Perfect Spy, John le Carré tells the story of a boy brought up by a con artist father. He grows up to be a chameleon, blending in with whomever he’s with, so much so that his genuine self disappears under all the quick-change facades, leaving the guise of the moment to be the truth. The tough kids believed I was real with them. Still, I was not one of them. I was a fellow traveller in their company. Not an impostor, but an observer, a contributor, someone who authentically cared—but never a true insider. I would find myself in this role throughout my life.