Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  One night after a set at Le Hibou, I was greeted by a woman with whom I had become acquainted, one Maury Hayden. She was an attractive, thoughtful songwriter with a powerful, theatrical stage presence who occasionally did a week at the club. She lived in New York and was a former girlfriend of songwriter Tim Hardin. Hardin produced a body of lovely songs, including the worldwide hit “If I Were a Carpenter.” (Hardin also had a heroin habit and died of an overdose in 1980.) I was somewhat in awe of her. She took on something of the nature of a Jungian anima figure in my mind.

  When I came offstage, Maury approached me with a crinkled brow.

  “What was with that song?” she asked. “‘Charlie the Walking Excuse’? What’s that all about?”

  It was actually a pretty cruel slap at a guy I had met at a party, who I suspected was slumming among the “hippies” hoping to get laid. He worked the room, continually apologizing because he slaved at a bank. My song was what an introverted songwriter who can’t relate to people would think was witty. Then she asked, “And that thing with the audience, what’s that?” Maury was put off by my apparent disdain for the people who had paid to hear the music. She said, “Bruce, you have to let them know you love them.”

  A switch flipped. There was a moment of deep dislocation. It was shocking to me: I’m supposed to love them? (Or at least convince them that I love them?) Her statement actually sounded pretty showbiz, like “Leave ’em laughing when you go” or “The show must go on.” But it wasn’t showbiz, it was real, a direct and kindhearted truth. From that point, even though I didn’t really know what it meant to love anybody, let alone an audience, I acted like I did. It changed everything. It changed the way people perceived me onstage, it changed the feedback I got, and that changed me. At a glacial tempo, but it did.

  Chris Anderson, the first drummer in The Children, had introduced me to Kitty Macaulay and her sister Jane backstage at Le Hibou in the fall of 1966. Chris holds the distinction of being the only person I have physically fought with (duking it out in a high school bathroom, with Chris declared the winner for having bloodied my nose), and the first guy I helped kick out of a band. The Children replaced him with a more versatile drummer named Richard Patterson. I found the Macaulay sisters to be interesting and pleasant, but I didn’t think about them much, as they had come with Chris and I had no expectation that either of them would be interested in me. Not long afterward, in the spring of 1967, my brother John alerted me that a room was coming up for rent in the down-at-heel downtown mansion where he lived, on Gilmour Street in Ottawa. It was a four-storey fading beauty divided into as many cheap rooms as the owners could fit. It must once have been quite grand, with its large, double oak front doors, the upper halves glazed with heavy cut glass. The doors had been painted over many times, as the scratches in their studded surfaces revealed, and their colour when I moved in was a fecal brown.

  The notion of moving into the house was appealing not only in its own right, but also because the Macaulay sisters happened to live there too. It was alive, but falling apart. Nobody cared what you did in your room. I took an L-shaped studio with a tiny bathroom built into the crook of the L. It was on the third floor, with windows at each end, one of which opened onto the canopy of a big old elm. As the weather warmed I kept the windows open wide, allowing pigeons to fly in and out. Miraculously, I don’t remember ever having to clean up their droppings. The walls were painted a pale yellowish colour, and I ornamented them with large renderings of mystical symbols from a grimoire I had, and from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  One day the owners notified us that the house would be razed to make space for a development of some sort. The night before the bulldozers were scheduled to arrive, I came home from somewhere to find an array of toilets on the lawn as furniture, occupied by tenants and friends lounging about, more or less discreetly drinking beer and cheap wine and sucking on joints, watching others disembowel the house. With the wrecking crew due the next day, renters took everything they could wrest from the premises: doorknobs and doors, windows, sinks, banisters, light fixtures. Every time you took a swig of your beer, out of the corner of your eye you’d see somebody sauntering off in one direction or another with a piece of the house.

  John and I decided we should have the fine front doors, so we removed them and their massive hinges and stuck them in somebody’s van. I stayed around for a while, but I didn’t really know the people hanging out, a slightly younger crowd my brothers ran with, so I left early. As a result, I missed the drama that unfolded later, when Tom-who-dwelt-in-the-basement decided a bigger statement had to be made. He set his apartment on fire, burning the house to the ground. I heard that the folks partied, watching the flames, until the firemen chased them away.

  Somebody made off with my favourite toy

  That I bought with my government grant

  The world situation seems to be taking

  A definite turn for the worse

  Somebody put me in reverse

  What fence would hold my pride and joy

  Unless he was a man-eating plant

  That mother is asking to wind up basking

  In fame in the back of a hearse

  Somebody made my bubble burst

  Call in the guard, he’s out in the yard

  been lax in his duties for real

  Take him to task for being so crass

  As to let someone in who would steal

  Great thrills are in store for us all

  While the world is on such a slant

  Though he’s a bit funky

  The girls love his trunk

  He’s a hit without deodorant

  But somebody stole my elephant

  If you should meet him please give me a call

  The number’s inscribed on the bathroom wall

  You’re bound to see him

  At the beach or the be-in

  Even though some people can’t

  Get used to believing in elephants

  Call in the guard

  He’s out in the yard

  He bungled this job up for sure

  He blew it in style

  But he’s just a child

  We’ll send him away for the cure

  And we’ll all go away for a cure

  “IT’S AN ELEPHANT WORLD,” 1967

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/11.

  I was onstage when I fell in love with Kitty. In the last days of The Children, she would come to shows at Le Hibou and sit in the front row. She was impossible to miss, all fluid movement and long blond hair. One night she started extending her arms directly at me, opening and closing her fingers as if to shoot waves of energy my way. That got my attention. After shows we would chat, flirt a little. For a while I found it hard to believe that this beautiful woman was actually interested in me, but she was, and we started dating. Our living arrangements were as convenient as a guy could hope for, until the house burned down.

  Kitty made a point of pushing through my emotional barriers and inexperience in the realms of the heart. She was not afraid of the work, nor of me, and she successfully built on some of the discoveries I’d made earlier, on my own and under Bill Hawkins’s tutelage. I had become acquainted with many different interpretations of the interface between the physical and the spiritual: the Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, the Tarot, the writings of Gurdjieff and Alastair Crowley, the I Ching, Lao Tzu. I carried into these readings, and the conversations with Bill and others that followed, an exciting sense of discovery. It wasn’t a wholesale buy-in on my part, but the spiritual landscape that began to take shape became ever more inviting.

  Kitty brought something new to the mix—the experience of a very fundamentalist Christian faith, which she had adopted as a kind of adolescent rebellion against the spiritually aware but freethinking atmosphere in which she had been raised. What that meant to me was that, although she had left the literalism and rigidity of fundamentalism far behind, Kitty offered a view of th
e Bible that made it much more than the chronicle of horrors I had taken it to be. Reminders abounded of humanity’s connection to spirit, such as the famous passage from I Corinthians 13: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

  Because the juiciest bits are mostly found in the Old Testament, I had never spent much time with the New, figuring that with Sunday school and the piecemeal bits of religious education I’d received, I knew what it had to say: the Christmas story, the Lord’s Prayer, walking on water, and so on. Now, as I followed Kitty’s lead, I found there was love and grace, the mystery of the Holy Spirit descending into the human realm. Kitty also introduced me to C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia and other books we read to each other at night. Also Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Lord of the Rings. I liked the tales, and appreciated Lewis’s imaginative rendering of the Christian story, which brought it to life. Increasingly, I found myself thinking about God in Christian terms. I was drawn to dig deeper. I read as much as I could.

  In his 1997 account of the Toronto music scene of the 1960s, Before the Gold Rush, Canadian music critic Nicholas Jennings writes that The Children were “Ottawa’s leading folk-rock act, play[ing] cover tunes at Ottawa high-school dances.” While Jennings goes on to reveal that The Children “saved their original material for evenings at Le Hibou coffee house,” he inadvertently makes it clear, in that tellingly oxymoronic sentence, that if the city’s “leading” band was playing covers at high schools, then one of the band’s aspiring songwriters needed to get out of Ottawa.

  There was a ceiling to the hometown music scene that compelled my exit to more fertile ground. I found it easy to leave. I had become a lifelong nomad as soon as I set foot aboard the Mokefjell headed for Norway. My lack of attachment to people and places was very strong at that time, and I felt quite at ease stepping in and out of bands and relationships. Band members in The Children were actually my friends before we got together, so they were an exception, though not a very powerful one. In Ottawa I watched my peers form attachments, get some girl pregnant, go to work selling shoes. It was happening all around me. This wasn’t going to be me.

  The Children dissolved shortly after Hawkins’s revelation at the Gardens, and I joined a band called the Esquires for a few months, until the summer of 1967, when their former guitar player told me that an acquaintance of his in Toronto was forming a band and was looking for a songwriting guitarist. He had suggested me. Shortly thereafter I got a call from bass player Neil Lillie (who would later relocate to the United States and reinvent himself as Neil Merryweather). That led to me catching a train to Toronto to try out. He had an organist and a drummer already. The players were good and the band had some potential—I don’t think I understood at the time how much potential, really, but it was my ticket out of the hometown, and a step worth taking. I moved to Toronto.

  Musically, that city, and particularly the Yorkville district, had become due north in the North American cultural compass for young, and not so young, people. I arrived in time to watch and participate in a revolutionary ascension of human thought, action, and music that, worldwide, would come to define an era.

  I suggested we call the band The Flying Circus. Back in the thirties, a travelling “flying circus” would perform in rural communities: stunt flying, wing walking. It seemed like a cool name for a band in the sixties, when people were routinely engaging in non-physical flight.

  The Flying Circus

  All of us wrote songs, though mine made up most of the repertoire. Our music was sort of a hybrid of psychedelia and The Band (among the most important contributors to the Toronto scene, and hugely influential). Marty Fisher, the organist, a fervent Garth Hudson worshipper, brought The Band. I brought the psych. I wanted a dark, anti-pop, adventurous edge. We practiced a lot, more or less daily. We played very few gigs, but when we did, they were memorable.

  In the autumn of 1967 Kitty accompanied The Flying Circus to Detroit for an audition with Motown. Neil Lillie had a contact at the label who had promised us a hearing. We piled into a rented van and rumbled down Highway 401, across the tedious miles of alluvial plain that make up southern Ontario to the twin Canadian-U.S. cities of Windsor and Detroit. Here, where these industrial cankers corrode the southern and western shores of Lake St. Clair, we pulled into the tunnel border crossing. This was just a couple of months after the Detroit riots. The customs agent took a look at Neil’s teased-up blond Afro and, past that, a carload of hippies and said icily that he wasn’t going to admit us.

  As far as riots go, the Detroit conflagration was the real thing. Racial tensions had been extreme for years, so it wasn’t altogether surprising that after police broke up a party at a bar in a black community, held to celebrate the return of two Vietnam veterans, the locals pretty much snapped. The riot grew quickly and eventually engulfed vast swaths of the city, tearing it apart. According to Rutgers University, “Looting and fires spread through the northwest side of Detroit, then crossed over to the East Side. Within 48 hours, the National Guard was mobilized, to be followed by the 82nd Airborne on the riot’s fourth day. As police and military troops sought to regain control of the city, violence escalated. At the conclusion of 5 days of rioting, 43 people lay dead, 1,189 injured and over 7,000 people had been arrested.”

  There are two entrances to Detroit from Windsor, one through the tunnel, where we were turned away, and another across a bridge, which is where we went next. There were no computers back then, so we had a good chance of entering the United States on the second attempt. The agent at the bridge was a pleasant older gent. He was a bit skeptical of us but friendly in a paternal way. He said, “All right, I’m going to let you kids through, but make sure you don’t. . . .” He trailed off. Don’t what? Do anything bad? Get mugged? Take jobs away from American workers?

  Even two months after the drama of July, the Motown neighbourhood looked like a war zone. Block after block of burned-out buildings frowned down upon the few pedestrians, who seemed to skulk from shadow to shadow. The street where Motown was located seemed to be the only one that had not been completely trashed. Inside, the place was quiet. Neil’s acquaintance greeted us warmly and brought us into a small office. Because I was the main songwriter, the Motown guy had me play guitar and sing some songs, the others joining in for harmonies. I’d play and he’d say, “That was okay—what else have you got?” Next song, same thing. “What else have you got?” After a while of this, I was pretty frustrated. Subtitles ribboned through my head. What the fuck do you want from me? Why are you putting me through the wringer like this?

  Fall, 1967

  This went on through the afternoon, my resentment building. In hindsight, the man was being generous with his time. He kept trying to find something that would work with the Motown sound. When we got to the end of the thirty or forty songs I had to offer, he said, “You’re more of a Bob Dylan kind of songwriter.” That was bitter. I was a pretty big Dylan fan, but to be described in such a way suggested that my songs were derivative. The nerve! He likely intended it as a compliment. He was a nice guy. I was a clueless youth.

  Partway through the ordeal, Kitty went out to find a grocery store for some drinks and sandwiches. She indeed found a corner market, went inside, and worked her way down the shelves to the back of the store, where it dawned on her that she was the only white person in there. Everyone else, about a dozen people, stopped shopping and stood dead still, staring at her. Kitty froze, unsure what to do. A little girl, maybe nine years old, marched up, took her by the hand, and without a word led her out onto the street. The spirit, in the form of that little angel of a girl, was with us, but it wasn’t enough to get The Flying Circus a deal with Motown.

  Letting the audience know they were loved was not high on the agenda. The notion was to come back later, but for now, in the band context, anger led the charge. Sometime early in 1968 I returned to Le Hibou while we were still The Flying Circus. Our show i
ncluded a big climactic guitar wank at the end of the set. I’d drop to my knees, flail and gesticulate, and bite the strings. After the show I ran into a guy I knew. “Oh, man,” he said, “you used to look so disinterested, and now you look like you’re really into it!” It was fake. It was showbiz, and I only did it because Jimi Hendrix did things like that, and I loved Jimi Hendrix. But playing with my teeth didn’t last. One night I watched a piece of incisor fly into the audience, landing near, or perhaps in, someone’s coffee, and that was the end of that.

  We played under the name The Flying Circus for a while, but I wasn’t the only one who’d thought of it. A band from Australia calling itself the same thing came to Canada and had a radio hit. We searched for another name and settled on Olivus, the suggestion of Michael Ferry. Michael had recently left a career as a soul singer with a band called Jon and Lee and the Checkmates (he was Lee), and was helping us, having stepped into the organizational gap left when we kicked out Neil, who had founded the band. I don’t remember why we did that, but personality differences aggravated by lack of funds had something to do with it. To replace him we enlisted Dennis Pendrith, a top-notch bassist and one of the most likable people I’ve ever met.

  With help from Harvey Glatt, the band landed opening slots for Wilson Pickett in Toronto, and then as Olivus, for Cream in Ottawa and Jimi Hendrix in Montreal. The Pickett show was at Massey Hall, a venerable and classy downtown concert venue with a great feel and excellent acoustics for quiet music, not as well suited to rock. The Pickett outfit was held up at the border and arrived very late for the setup. Doors eventually opened and the hall quickly filled with a predominantly black crowd, already impatient from having been kept waiting outside. The promoter, an old-school show business type with a chewed-on cigar and a grouchy demeanour named Sid Banks, paced about backstage yelling at people. Eventually he got around to yelling at us. “You guys get out there and play, or you’re not getting paid!” Never mind that the tech crew had not even finished setting up the vocal mics. Our own equipment was only partly in place, but on we went. We plugged ourselves in and started to play what we hoped would be a strong opening number. Four bars into the intro, there was a loud cracking sound and a puff of grey smoke rose from the top of the suddenly silent organ. Marty had to perform the whole show on the clavinet he normally used for only a couple of songs. We continued what was now a struggle to put across our material. Before we were done, we had most of the audience on its feet. From a sea of enraged brown faces poured phrases like “Come on, let’s hear some music!” Clenched fists waved in our direction. We played the shortest set that would still get us paid and beat a somewhat graceless retreat. Wilson Pickett followed with an excellent, high-energy show.