Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Increasingly I was haunted by a gnawing sense that Berklee and I were not meant for each other. I went there expecting to study fingerpicking guitar techniques. I had already become familiar with the flat pick before outgrowing my original guitar lessons, so I could deal with the situation, but it was a disappointment. I was able to hone my fingerpicking skills outside class, with the help of many players in the folk scene.

  I was majoring in composition and I took my studies seriously, despite being an undisciplined student. In that era the classes were small—Berklee’s entire population was only about three hundred students—and I got to know my professors. During my third and final semester I had an early-morning arranging class with a professor whose demeanour only intensified my desire to leave. James Progris was a gruff, sometimes hostile man in a tweed jacket who insisted on being addressed as “sir.” He had no patience for tardiness, which was unfortunate for me because I was frequently late. In these moments Progris demanded that I stand by his desk at the front of the class and state my excuse. I found this irritating. Eventually I was able to allow the sense of exposure and humiliation to roll off, but the idea that I needed an excuse always grated. I felt that there were no excuses, only reasons for things. One morning I told him I was late because I had fainted upon waking, which threw off my timing. His mien altered perceptibly and he sent me back to my seat. At the end of class he bade me stay.

  “Why did you faint?” he asked. I told him that lately my encounters with food, as well as sleep, had been fleeting. Although my parents regularly sent cheques, I tended to spend all the money shortly after it arrived. By now I had probably gone a couple of weeks without a real meal. Occasionally I stole leftovers off plates in the restaurant across the street from my room. Once I bought a bag of potatoes and ate only those until they were gone.

  In a quiet tone nothing like the one he used in class, Progris told me that if I was going to go without food, I should do it properly. He pulled a book from his briefcase and handed it to me with an instruction to keep it, read it, and learn how to fast without hurting myself.

  His eyes were full of concern. I was bewildered. I didn’t know how to respond to this act of kindness coming from a man who had been so off-putting. Of course, I also felt relief that I wasn’t being kicked out of his class. I mumbled a “Thank you, sir” and walked out.

  I still have the book: The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.

  I was growing, learning a little about who I was, and absorbing a lot of music. The cultural life of Boston, the music school, the degree to fall back on: these were fine, even admirable objectives, only not for me. It was clear I needed to be somewhere else, doing something else. It was always going to be about the guitar, but it was no longer going to be about the Berklee College of Music.

  I dreaded telling my parents that I was going to leave school. I wrote them a letter, and they took it better than expected. I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to be, but Boston, for sure, wasn’t it. If I ended up playing for change in the subway, so be it. Here’s the door. There’s the cliff. Go through. Jump. Just don’t forget your guitar.

  Leaving Berklee catapulted me into the next crucial, and completely unexpected, phase of my life. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but that’s what decisions are all about: each one leads to the next place, each step is connected with the others, and they don’t always derive from intellectual machinations but rather from spiritual guidance that we may not even realize is in play.

  What are instinct and intuition, really? Maybe they are the fruit of the whole human experience, handed down through the ages to provide us with crucial information that otherwise can’t be written or seen or even properly stated. Maybe they are nudges from the finger of God. Leaving music school significantly shaped my life to come, and the decision to leave was far more spiritual in the making than it was intellectual.

  Thirty years after I left Boston I would again work with a Berklee professor, now a dean, the brilliant vibraharpist Gary Burton. Gary is a six-time Grammy winner and one of the all-time greatest jazz artists, and he anchored and accentuated half of the songs on my 1996 album The Charity of Night. In 1997, in return for a valedictory address, Berklee awarded me an honourary doctorate in music, so I guess I finally graduated.

  5

  Ottawa welcomed me home for Christmas 1965 with a temperature of minus five degrees Fahrenheit and an invitation to join a rock band. I was warm to both.

  Almost the entire population of Canada lives in a narrow hundred-mile-wide band, from the east coast to the west, as if we press ourselves as far south as possible to pick up an extra degree or two of warmth. In this way Canada is something like Chile: an excessively long, skinny nation of thirty-five million people (a number reached in 2012, when Canada’s population became the fastest growing, due mostly to immigration, in the G8). But unlike Chile, Canada’s shoreline is not the majestic South Pacific Ocean but the pounding tide of American influence.

  It was a relief to return home. The extraordinary music scene I encountered in Boston was not enough to buffer the wartime and other tensions I felt from the American citizenry. Canada was calmer—I have always appreciated calm—but the rapid influx of Vietnam War–era draft dodgers and deserters (possibly up to one hundred thousand total) was bolstering Canada’s already blossoming alternative culture.

  Not that I paid much attention to it. I was withdrawn and antisocial, and the movements all around me were overt and inherently social. Even as I participated in the music, I watched the rest from a distance. Today I pay attention to the news, and I address it in the songs I sing and comments I make at public appearances. But back in 1966 I believed, and did for a long time after, that music was somehow above politics, that art could be held separate from the mundane and tainted rest of human affairs. Growing up Canadian, we saw the United States as just something that happened to us, the same as racism and other historical and current ugliness. Especially in Boston, I would find myself at parties listening to student radicals rant about the kinds of injustice they were confronting. I found them boring and irritating. They seemed like myopic kids on a mission, and I didn’t believe their tales of being persecuted, spied on, and set up. Lesson number one: It all turned out to be true. COINTELPRO and the like happened; they were being persecuted, spied on, and set up.

  My sojourn in Boston revealed the promises and pitfalls found in abundance in the land of the free. Afterward, and especially beginning in 1969, when I began recording, my sense of identification with the concept of Canada, which had existed as a kind of unexamined assumption of belonging, actually grew. I came to realize that there had been forged in me what at first was an unrealized, and what remains an elusive, allegiance to the Canadian landscape, Canadian culture, and the people. This allegiance was not applied to business or government, though as the years unfolded I encountered some exceptions.

  Canada has always been the most peaceful country in North America, though certainly not without its violent outbursts. Its genesis as a nation is embedded in a historical loyalty to the British Crown, which wrested Canada from France after the Seven Years’ War (which might properly be thought of as the first “world war”) that ended in 1763. As opposed to most other countries in the hemisphere, we developed henceforth with the emphasis on consensus rather than confrontation. That said, both Canada and the United States, each in its way, have decimated aboriginal tribes and pillaged the natural landscape. Of late, the Canadian government is prosecuting a hard-rightward dissolution of environmental laws and civil rights. But there are distinctive differences in the daily and cultural lives of both nations, in particular with regard to violence both at home and overseas, persecution of whistleblowers, and (I think) surveillance and spying.

  I spent part of the winter of 1966 in the family home, but it soon started feeling a little cramped, psychically anyway, and I moved into an unheated room on the second floor of a house rented by Bill Hawkins; his wife, Sheila;
and their two small kids, Andries and Jennifer. Hawkins, at the time manager of Le Hibou, was the mastermind behind a new band, The Children. He was a member of the band, but except for one occasion, he never performed, at least while I was involved. Hawkins was the lyricist with musical ears. The band’s members came from the folk music world I was acquainted with. Neville Wells played guitar and bass, as did my friend Peter Hodgson (now better known as Sneezy Waters), who had introduced me to the music scene blossoming around Le Hibou. Another friend in the band was Sandy Crawley, who played (wait for it) guitar! Eventually Hodgson left and singer-songwriter David Wiffen took his place. Wiffen, of course, also played guitar. Chris Anderson, an old schoolmate of mine, did actually play drums, with great enthusiasm, but was made to walk the plank halfway through the band’s life for the sin of having somewhat shaky time. Richard Patterson, a veteran of at least one of Ottawa’s more successful young bands, replaced him.

  When I told my friends in The Children that I was leaving Berklee, they invited me to join. With all those guitar players, there had to be a division of labour. They decided I would play organ, since I had some piano training. Soulful music was generally made on a Hammond organ, or at least a Lowrey. I was provided with a Farfisa, an Italian atrocity that produced a thin nasal wheeze perfectly suited to, even cool in, the sort of sixties Italian lounge music you’d find in Fellini films of the day. As a rock-and-roll instrument it was not satisfying. I couldn’t really play it anyway, beyond one or two blues riffs of the English persuasion, and basic rock chords. But it was very portable. And it was free.

  Someone, likely Hawkins, had convinced Harvey Glatt to put some money into the band. In addition to being co-owner of Le Hibou, Harvey ran a record store on the Sparks Street Mall called the Treble Clef, and below it, the Bass Clef, a basement shop that sold musical instruments. (He also supervised a song publishing company with which I was briefly affiliated.)

  Partway through the band’s life Bill left Le Hibou and took a strategic job as manager of the instrument store, which allowed us to borrow gear from time to time. This gave us access to a range of guitars, amps, etc., which suited me, as I was by then playing more and more guitar in addition to my keyboard role. I paid no attention to what “borrow” might mean. Later, after The Children petered out in ’67, Harvey surprised me with a bill for the “rented” items. My father volunteered to pay it, overriding my protestations with the comment that lots of fathers set their sons up in business, and I should regard his gesture in that light.

  We wrote. We practiced. We played the occasional gig. We were going to be the next Beatles. None of us, except maybe Hawkins, yet knew that there is never a next anything. Other than war.

  Hawkins stood out as a poet. He inspired me and the other aspiring lyricists to explore the meaning and power of words, to use them in judicious and unexpected ways. It was a big deal for me to be that close to Bill. He was a voracious reader, a contemporary of Leonard Cohen and other lesser-known but no less accomplished Canadian writers. When I first joined the group I wrote music for Hawkins’s words, but he encouraged me to write my own lyrics as well. We shared an interest in philosophy and the occult, exploring mysticism, the Tarot, and some darker things. And we wrote a lot of songs.

  The Hawkins home was a hub for all kinds of artists, musicians, poets, and songwriters, especially for those of us in The Children. Bill freely dispensed tips and guidance, usually unsolicited, almost always useful. His life in those days was gritty. He was a drinker with a penchant for extramarital adventures. He announced one night that he had accomplished one-third of his design to fuck his way through the zodiac. Sometime in the past Hawkins had spent time in jail for some youthful misbehaviour. He had the four points of a cross tattooed in a little constellation on the web between his thumb and forefinger. He was tall, with longish, straight home-cut hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He had bad teeth, which is how, in part, he justified his use of alcohol, to kill the pain. There was a constant ebb and flow of tension between him and Sheila, a smart, attractive, and harried woman who was stuck with the thankless task of trying to maintain some sort of order in the house.

  Eventually they began to see me as dead weight, and they kicked me out. Sandy Crawley and I each took a room in an apartment rented by Bill’s then paramour, Barb Luther’s sister Gail. She thought she was getting roommates. I thought I was getting a free room. I was seeing a lovely girl named Monique. I liked her a lot and I think it was reciprocated, but I was mired so deeply in my fear and self-disgust that I couldn’t make anything happen. I wrote a song about it, later recorded by 3’s a Crowd.

  In the circle of your arms

  I could have set the sun in silver

  And made for you a ring so fine

  If we had grown together babe

  We might have made it to the seashore

  And left this muddy river far behind

  Ah, but I couldn’t find the key

  That would unlock these chains of mine

  And my songs were not complete enough to sing

  I could only feel your music one line at a time

  And there’s no chance for a bird without wings

  If only I had read

  The meaning that your eyes held

  As they shone like diamonds burning in the dawn

  But the raindrops in my own

  Changed the colour of the sky

  And I just sat and helplessly looked on

  So I’ll go on worshipping

  My world of faded dreams

  Though the church bells are of lead and will not ring

  And to those who try to tell themselves I’m more than what I seem

  I say, “What good is a bird without wings?”

  “BIRD WITHOUT WINGS,” 1966

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/6.

  Life was not easy. I was drawing a salary of ten dollars a week from the band. Some days dinner would be a peanut butter sandwich, some days a couple of carrots. I was anxious all the time.

  To walk downtown from Gail’s place took about twenty minutes. I had to pass a schoolyard, which during recess was full of milling, scrambling, shouting children. It produced a feeling of panic. Whenever I walked past the school, if the children were outside I would have to cross to the opposite side of the street. That explosive child energy got under my skin in a way I could not then fathom. One night I dreamt I was on foot in something like the macro version of the school grounds. I had to get across. What seemed like a mile away I could make out a grassy bank and a line of trees, but to get there I had to wade through a malignant sea of small, ferocious children who clutched at me, trying to pull me down. I struggled to hack a bloody swath through them with the Indian battle-axe I kept lying around my room.

  Harvey Glatt was, and remains, effective in business. He got us gigs, including a slot as cannon fodder opening for the Lovin’ Spoonful at Toronto’s cavernous Maple Leaf Gardens hockey arena on December 11, 1966. The lineup was us, the well-liked Toronto band the Paupers, and then the Spoonful. This was a seminal event, not only given the audience size compared to what we were used to, but because we were all to some extent fans of the headliners. We didn’t get to meet them, but did hang a bit with the Paupers. Their lead singer was a Scotsman by the name of Adam Mitchell, who had performed in Ottawa and been an occasional guest at the Hawkins abode. The band was managed by a corpulently wild-looking young chain smoker named Bernie Finkelstein.

  Hawkins did not typically perform with us, but we all thought it would be a good move if he appeared for this show. As part of our setup we dragged a wooden rocking chair onto the stage in which he sat and read a book while we played, like the éminence grise that he was. The experience confirmed to Hawkins that his place was not on the stage. Forty-two years later he told a reporter, “The house lights went up and I saw all these 14- and 15-year-old kids screaming, and suddenly I felt out of place. I was twice their age. I turned to Bruce [Cockburn] as we walked off the s
tage and said, ‘I’m finished.’”

  It was Hawkins’s first and last gig with The Children. After that, although we saw each other quite frequently for a while, my life did a slow peel in its own direction, and so did his. In the preface to his 2005 “comeback” book, Dancing Alone: Selected Poems, Hawkins wrote, “I just dropped out sometime in 1971, when I woke up in the Donwood Clinic, a rehab centre in Toronto, with no idea how I got there, weighing 128 lbs and looking like a ghost in my six-foot frame.”

  Bill was a constant drinker back then, but it may not have just been alcohol that compelled him to shun rock-and-roll crowds and opt instead for the life of a popular Ottawa cab driver (a life he continues to live). The public is a ravenous beast. For some people, the spotlight is a dagger.

  If in fact it was fear that drove Hawkins to drop out, I know exactly how he felt. An overwhelming dread of crowd scrutiny almost prevented me from pursuing a solo career. It wasn’t so bad with a band, especially as a guitar player. I could jump onstage, act aloof, and slap away at the white Fender Esquire I had acquired, which I decorated with Om mani padme hum in Tibetan script. If I didn’t interact with the audience, nobody cared. “Oh, the guitar player is cool.” That remedy isn’t available to the solo performer, or to a band’s front person.

  There was a lot of time between Children gigs. I played harmonica at Le Hibou every Friday night, from midnight to 4 A.M., with a crazed band called the Heavenly Blue, another brainchild of Hawkins, in which he was lead singer. I did a fair amount of solo acoustic performing, mostly at the club, eventually playing just my own songs. The only way I could get up the nerve to take the stage alone and make my voice work was to mask my psyche with a cultivated lack of concern about how the audience felt about me. I’m just doing my music. If you like it, great; if not, fuck off. I didn’t really believe that—I actually was desperate for people’s love and approval, no matter my penchant for withdrawal—but that’s what I told myself because it was the only way to get through a performance. Without that defense I was paralyzed.