Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Buffy Sainte-Marie celebrated her Native heritage. Her songs and onstage comments touched on the struggles faced by aboriginal peoples. This was the mid-sixties, before Wounded Knee, before urban Indians joined the American Indian Movement and gathered at outlying reservations to serve and protect their ancestral communities, before Leonard Peltier was illegally extradited from Canada and railroaded into a life sentence in prison for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit. Buffy was among the first “popular” First Nations people to speak out. While I was touched by her story-songs and tales of growing up Native in Canada, I connected more with the historical than the political. It seemed like a “cool thing” she was doing. I didn’t get the true significance of her stories until the early seventies, when cross-Canada travel put me in direct contact with the stuff she was singing about. I wasn’t paying attention to politics. I didn’t like or trust the political world. I still don’t, though I did learn to pay attention.

  Club 47 held weekly hootenannies. I attended many of these, though I never had the nerve to perform, and enjoyed the successes and failures of all manner of lesser-knowns and unknowns, of varying degrees of musical prowess. All the guitar players seemed to be vying with one another to play something new and impressive that only they could do. Some were insecure about their special techniques and reluctant to share them. One guitar player who would show up sometimes was so afraid of having his licks stolen that he performed with a handkerchief draped over his fretting hand so no one could see what he did. What he did was not that interesting. Gossip swirled around who had stolen what riff or song idea from whom.

  On the jazz front, I was privileged to hear a lot of the artists whose music I admired. Around the corner from the school was a club called the Jazz Workshop. I soaked up performances by John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Mose Allison, and Chico Hamilton among others. I had interesting classmates, too, including guitarist John Abercrombie; Dave Mott, who went on to become head of the music program at York University; and Joe and Pat LaBarbara.

  I became friends with a guy named Ed who lived a few doors down from me. We called him Dr. Death because he always wore the same black suit, which had been worn shiny at the elbows, and he was skinny with a bony face and bad skin. He was a really nice guy, a pretty good tenor player. He was quiet and unassuming till he picked up his horn. He played with real fire. He and I used to get together to do Amphex now and then—a nasal inhaler offered over the counter as a cold remedy. Someone discovered, and Ed taught me, that you could break open the plastic tube and remove the tightly wadded cotton cylinder from inside. That would then be cut into aspirin-sized pieces with a razor blade. If you swallowed a couple of those with a cup of coffee, you got a jaw-grinding speed rush that would last hours.

  There we would sit, Ed and I, synapses firing madly, talking long and fast, our heads full of a million constantly shifting images. For me it felt as if the whole wheel of life was slowly revolving in my brain, crowded with everything there is. There would be new insights, connections made between things with startling clarity. The insights and connections seldom stayed around after the inevitable crash and the comatose sleep that followed, but as affordable entertainment Amphex was hard to beat. It had to have been hard on the body, but we were young. . . . Eventually the recreational use of the stuff became so widespread that it was withdrawn from drugstores, according to rumour by order of President Lyndon Johnson himself.

  Joe Livolsi, a drummer friend who lived down the street in a basement pad, hosted Free Jazz jam sessions on Saturday afternoons, fueled by cheap wine and Amphex. The regulars included Tom Jones on bass; John someone, also on bass but doubling on cello; and, in time, me. We would be joined by anyone who felt like sitting in whom we considered cool. I’m not sure why I was considered cool enough, but apparently I was. It may have been the connection with Dr. Death. John, the bass player, worked in a pharmaceutical supply warehouse. We mostly knew him as Poppa Pill. Ed would show up with his tenor. A trumpet player named Bobby, who had beautiful tone, would appear from time to time.

  I had no idea what I was doing. I loved the frantic energy and absence of form. Every time we played, it felt like a journey into an unknown wilderness. By turns moody, ominous, light-bathed, and triumphant, the music would cascade over itself. Somebody would start to play, a note or a little riff of some kind, and the rest would fall in as inspired. Sometimes we’d decide on a key, but mostly it was pretty random. I had the notion that it would be interesting to align our feelings and mental imagery before launching into the music. I read aloud a poem I’d written about the wind. When I finished reading, we started playing, and the result was pretty satisfying. I think we all felt the exercise was successful, but I don’t remember repeating it. I don’t think I wrote another poem with enough to it during that semester, which was my last at Berklee. One Saturday, as darkness fell outside and our session wound down, I looked at myself in Joe’s bathroom mirror. Under the fluorescent light I was struck by the ugly contrast between the purple veins that seemed to stand out in my eyeballs and the jaundiced pallor of my skin. This had to be the end of the wine and speed adventure. . . .

  Although I wasn’t there long, there’s no question that Boston expanded my horizons in useful ways. In addition to the opportunity to hear some of the best jazz and folk music around, I was approached, while playing on the front steps one day, by a short, wiry young man named Doug Grossman who had some friends at MIT who were working on the Apollo Project—the moon shot—on the side. Their real gig was as a fledgling jug band, which I was invited to join. Bookings were few but we didn’t mind, as we enjoyed playing an eclectic repertoire of blues, Appalachian ballads, and jug band versions of Rolling Stones songs.

  The jug band, later known as Walker Thompson & His Boys, Boston, 1965

  (Caveat: I use “enjoyed” as a figure of speech. I didn’t allow myself to enjoy. In my mind life was too serious and weighty to actually be “fun.” This outlook set in toward my teens and didn’t dissipate for the next thirty years.)

  The jug band played one outstanding gig. Band member Rick Metzinger owned a Pontiac Grand Prix, which had plenty of room for the 421-cubic-inch V8 engine, but the car itself was kind of tight, crammed as it was with our gear and the five of us as we sallied forth to Ottawa for a homecoming of sorts at Le Hibou. My parents put everybody up at their place. After much debate on a name for the band, we came up with exactly nothing (which, looking at it now on the page, could have served us well as a band name), so the club billed us as the Boston Five Jug Band. We played a five-night stint. Mom and Dad enjoyed their gang of guests, and everyone got on well. At the end of the week, my parents sat through the show. They made polite sounds about it, but much later they told my brother, who then told me, that however much they liked the music, they found our stage presence so amateurish that they were embarrassed. They were afraid to come to see me play again, and didn’t for the next five years.

  James Walker Thompson was the lead singer of the jug band, and during my one summer in Boston I stayed in an empty room at the frat house where he lived. Together we became acquainted with a warm and effervescent young singer named Zaharia, Zack for short. She was gifted with a precocious voice and an appealing form. Her ragtime repertoire and guitar work were entertaining. She was beautiful, and I was quite taken with her. So was Jim. Where I was awkward and withdrawn, Jim was confident and handsome, a muscular mix of African American and Native American. Guess who got the girl.

  On the night that happened, I sat in my third-floor room in the frat house quaffing tequila, looking at the wall and listening to it transmit the creaking and moaning of Jimmy and Zack getting it on in the next room. I grew increasingly fixated on the dark rectangle of the open window, and the space became black wings slowly beating. The wings were an invitation. I pictured myself floating past the frame and descending through the warm summer air. Reason won out, and in the morning the tequila was gone, I had an atypical hangover, and we were all still friend
s.

  Some weeks later Zaharia and I took the subway to Cambridge to see Roman Polanski’s movie Repulsion. It was the first English-language film for the incisive Polish director who would later create Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Peter Hall had seen the movie and recommended it, casually describing it as the story of a woman slipping into schizophrenia. I spent much of the film in a shivery sweat. Nasty things I hadn’t known were lodged in my core came alive as the film infiltrated my psyche. I could hardly breathe when Catherine Deneuve, in the role of a young esthetician losing herself in madness, found her apartment walls cracking around her, the hallway a gauntlet of groping arms, her bed a place of terror.

  I left the film feeling that a spot that was previously left blank, or at least darkened, on my psychic map was beginning to define itself. As we exited the theatre onto Massachusetts Avenue, I turned to Zaharia and told her that I now understood that I was paranoid. I don’t remember her response. She seemed to take it in stride. (Since then the film has remained with me. In 2005 I bought the DVD of Repulsion, but I still haven’t had the nerve to watch it.)

  Somewhere around this time I encountered the first of several women who, over the course of a half-century, would joggle my impression of the world. Since those student days, some of my most significant milestones and changes in direction—especially within the realm of my relationship with the Divine—have occurred because I was open to its feminine aspect in the form of friends and lovers. Relationships with women would in large part guide my evolution as a human being. At the risk of sounding trite or clichéd, I wouldn’t be the person I am today; wouldn’t have journeyed to whatever depth of the spirit I have reached; and might have frequently floundered, shipwrecked and alone, on the psychic shoals that surround the obdurate loner had it not been for the women who have blessed me with their company, their wisdom, and their trust, thereby prying me loose from myself.

  Decades later I have forgotten how we met, but she was a girl who would give me the time of day, which right away set her apart from the rest. Dark-haired, brown-eyed, and intense in a good-humoured way, she was self-conscious about what she considered to be her wide shoulders. I don’t know . . . maybe they were a little wider than most women’s, but she looked pretty good to me. She introduced herself as Red Devil. She said she was a member of the Native American Church. As such, she was able to participate in ceremonies in which peyote was taken as a sacrament. She also informed me within minutes of our having met that she was a witch. We began to spend time together. She was in the process of breaking up with another Berklee student, a drummer named Bobby who was older than I and part of an elite group of advanced players who actually landed gigs. He was not in favour of the breakup, and when I came along he was especially not in favour of me. If we happened to find ourselves in the same room he would scowl at me, baring his teeth.

  My pattern at the time was to make a nightly pilgrimage to the gas station around the corner and coax a Coca-Cola from the vending machine. For weeks I hadn’t been able to sleep without downing a bottle of Coke. One week, though, something unexpected came to call. As my eyes closed I felt a tidal wave of fear wash over me, a whirl of nameless dread, like a drunk’s vertigo. I opened my eyes. The feeling vanished. The moment I closed them again, it was back. I felt myself gripping the edges of my mattress. Eyes open, I lay staring at the springs of the bunk above. The room was darkened to the shade of urban night. Dim light filtered in around the blinds. Calm. The air cool. Eventually fatigue triumphed over both fear and light, and I fell into the black pit of sleep.

  This continued for six nights in a row. The seventh morning, as with the others, I felt fine except for the nagging depression that went with being eighteen. Breakfast . . . I’d begun to like oatmeal, which used to make me vomit, even the smell, when I was little. Now it was the most palatable offering the Berklee cafeteria could come up with. There followed an arranging class, a guitar lesson learning scale fingerings and flat-picking technique, and later in the day some more theory and an English class, one of the two or three “academic” courses that were added to the school’s curriculum to allow it to confer degrees. I was one of a very few students who appreciated those non-musical classes. I didn’t especially appreciate having to play with a plectrum, but it was explained to me at the first lesson that no one on the faculty knew how to play finger style, so I would have to go with the pick.

  In the early evening, back in my second-floor dorm room, the pay phone in the hall downstairs began to ring. It was for me. I knew that after one or two rings, as I always did when the caller was Red Devil. Whoever answered the phone called out my name. “It’s for you.” He was surprised to see me already coming down the stairs. “I know. Thanks.” Her voice was cheerful. We hadn’t spoken for a few days. When I told her about my nightly terror episodes, she took it far more seriously than expected. “That son of a bitch!” she said. “Who?” “Bobby. I’m coming right over.”

  It was late spring and the evenings were long. Red Devil arrived and led me to the Boston Public Garden.

  “What are we doing?” “Gathering some things to make magic with.” Her eyes scanned the grass, coming to rest on a short three-pronged twig. This she picked up. Next it was three white feathers, downy curls from under some bird’s wing. With a Swiss Army knife, she cut small slots in the ends of the twig. Into each slot went a white feather. “C’mon,” she said, heading for the subway. We travelled to a street I didn’t know. She peered around, taking in scene and situation. Apparently all was clear, as we crossed to where a row of well-kept townhouses lined the block. At a grey painted door she handed me the device she had constructed. “Put it in the mailbox.” I did. She grabbed my hand and we jogged back to the train, then back to Back Bay.

  Curious. What did we just do? “It’s like voodoo,” she said. “Bobby’s been sending you that fear. Now you’re sending it back. Let’s see how he likes it!”

  I’d read about things like this. Fascinating to see it up close. I had no expectations. I liked that she wanted to help. I wasn’t totally sure I believed that Bobby was responsible for what I’d been feeling. But lo! The fear was gone that very night and never came back. A couple of weeks later I was strolling down Newbury Street on a sunny afternoon and here came the drummer, striding straight at me, heading toward Massachusetts Avenue. He gave me a slight jolt of panic, but about thirty yards out he spotted me, stopped, then quickly scuttled across the street, fear pulsing over his face.

  Red Devil . . . she had some stuff going. My sense that there was more to life than the physical was strengthened knowing her. I was, for the first time as an adult, transported to a human realm outside the ordinary. Occult, mystical, spiritual: these are words I have used to describe the experience, but words don’t do it justice. There is some deep element that binds us as physical beings to something that we call the spirit world, to the Divine.

  And opens the door to power for better or worse. On one occasion we took refuge from a cold late-night downpour in a café on Mass Ave. We were the only patrons until a thin middle-aged man in a leather windbreaker and brown fedora entered. He sat down a couple of tables away and called for coffee, pushing his hat back on his forehead. Pleasant face. Cheekbones casting hollow shadows in the stark overhead light. “Watch this,” said my girl with an impish look and a little chuckle. She stared at the man, but quietly, so he wouldn’t feel her watching him. He grasped the steaming cup that had been set before him, lifted it to his lips, but then put it down without tasting it. He did it again. The twinkle in Red Devil’s eye evolved into a gleam. A dozen times the cup came up. A dozen times it was lowered without the guy taking a sip. A look of bewilderment appeared in the shadows of his face, as if he knew he was being strange but not why. Red Devil got bored or maybe felt pity. I felt the energy change as she let go. Our friend raised his cup yet again and this time completed the motion, taking a mouthful of his now somewhat cooler coffee. He shook his head, perplexed.

  It was the
sixties. A lot of us were becoming interested in possibilities beyond what we had been taught in schools and homes: the science, the morality, the subservience, as we saw it, to convention. There was a major folk club called the Unicorn a block over on Boylston Street. I used to hang out there and in my shy way got to know a couple of the people. There was a cute waitress, a tiny girl with long straight blond hair. Her name was Megan. She was friendly but kept to herself. One night at closing time we were talking and she revealed that she had fled Chicago after the coven of witches to which she had belonged held a ceremony in which they called up a demon to kill someone they didn’t like. Soon after the performance of the ritual, the target fell to his death from his apartment balcony. Megan had not expected such an unambiguous result, and was frightened enough to sever ties with the coven and light out for Boston. She lived in fear that her former crowd, or whatever they had summoned, would find her. In my memory she seemed to right away regret having shared that piece of her history. Not long after that, she left the waitressing job and was gone.

  Red Devil and I had hooked up in the spring. The following summer she was not around, having gone back to California till the fall semester began. We got back together when school started up again, but she got tired of the emotional numbness I wore like a flak vest over my fear of all things intimate, and drifted away. We lost touch.

  Fifteen or twenty years later, she turned up at a concert of mine in Northern California. We had dinner together, and it seemed as if it could have gone further, but I was in a relationship and so we said good night and parted company. I never saw her again.

  Sometimes the path we’re on diverges from what we inherently, and now and then consciously, realize is our true direction. Call it instinct, especially for a young person who has yet to accrue the experience necessary for it to be wisdom, or intuition. In any case it is a knowledge that precedes and exceeds the conscious mind.