Another caveat is that all relationships are different. Forging close ties has been particularly hard for me, given the flatlining of emotional content that was the unstated rule in my childhood home. Not everyone feels so constrained. Love was in our house yet rarely expressed. I learned how to bottle up feelings, which would later lead to psychic capitulations and failures to connect, sabotaging deeper relationships with others. Over a lifetime I have had to develop other ways of being. We don’t become different people as we age. We just add on to what we came in with, and hopefully modify it as we go along. For me it was modify or remain trapped forever in a cage of reticence.
Conversely, business is mathematical, it’s definable, and—perhaps speaking to a core reason I have never liked this aspect of my career—it is the very nature of the frenetic and often sterile world of business to undermine the contemplation, the open spaces of the heart, that we need to access and to honour artistic creativity. Commerce, in an era when the market has become god, can derail our quest for the Divine. It’s easier to sell something than to intimately know something, or someone, but the price we pay for the ensuing derailment can hardly be put into words (though I’ve tried).
So we wait beside the desert
Nothing left to give away
Naked as the Hanged Man’s secrets
Nothing left to do but pray
You don’t have to play the horses
Life’s a gamble all the same
It don’t take much to make you lose sight
Of the object of the game
Anyone can be a soldier
It’s a prevalent disease
Oh God I don’t know where to step now
Help me find the right road please
“YOU DON’T HAVE TO PLAY THE HORSES,” 1972
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/12.
Our journey is driven by longing. The novelist Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winner, once told me that he teaches his students to incorporate longing in what they write, because longing is perhaps the overarching human emotion. Longing has to do with God, because what humans long for the most is a relationship with the Divine. We may not be conscious of it, but we long to know God, in whatever context or guise that might mean to the individual. Which brings us back to projection, to thinking that the missing elements of who we think we are can be supplied by another person, or through the pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Only God can fill that hole.
We often put more thought and energy into establishing business relationships than into creating close relationships with fellow humans, or with God. This is a prevalent pattern. Commerce prospers handily at the expense of human love and spiritual contact. While it has provided some of us with basic needs such as food, shelter, and water, and given a few of us comfort, opulence, and power, the gods of market culture often demand interactions that are stripped of feeling and soul, that devalue the sweetness and openness that are natural attributes of the human heart and invite an allegiance to the material world. At a certain level of immersion this almost guarantees an inability to maintain meaningful relationships with the Divine and with each other.
This is not to say that my business relationships have all been sterile. Far from it. Many of the people I’ve worked with have become friends, at least while our work together continued. Bernie and I, for instance, remain close. But it may be that our arrangement has outlived all my romantic relationships because we never had to risk creating and maintaining a deep human bond. It was business. I don’t like business, and Bernie does. It’s worked. Bernie has represented me for forty-four years on a handshake. With one exception, I don’t know of any similarly long-lived business relationship in the music industry.
That exception, interestingly, is the one between Neil Young and his manager, Elliot Roberts, which has lasted about as long as ours. Bernie tells a story about discussing the phenomenon with Roberts, who said that he and Neil have enjoyed such longevity because they talk every day, and Neil is deeply involved.
“Well,” said Bernie, “I think my relationship with Bruce has lasted as long as it has because he never calls me. I have to call him all the time.” For four decades Bernie has had the unenviable job of representing the business to me. I’m not in business. I need and want to know what’s afoot, but I don’t want to hear about it every day. I don’t want to hear about it even when I have to hear about it. Bernie tries to do this job, which he does extremely well, and I’m obstreperous about it. Don’t call me all the time. It got a little better after the first decade, but I still harbour a distaste for the business side of the Business.
Bernie steamed full bore through the early days of True North, the record label he founded in 1969. He took everything very seriously and ran his ship like Captain Bligh, building a record company and a modest music management empire. In those days he was disheveled, like a cat that had left its mother too early. His temper flashed and his attitude careened between quick-witted joviality, serious hard work, and an unstrung rudeness. He wasn’t a natural traveller. Early on Bernie and I toured western Canada in my truck. He was always trying to talk to me, and I don’t like to talk all the time. For me, long-range driving has a meditative quality. I like to sit in silence and have my thoughts, savor the unfolding landscape. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with that. Bernie is more sociable. He needs to talk. He subsequently chose to avoid travelling with me that way.
When it came to band travel, on a tour bus, the issue reappeared in a different guise. Some people are good at travelling in a group. They know how to blend in, when to allow their companions the necessary psychic space. Bernie is not one of them. Maybe I’m projecting here; maybe nobody else cared but me. But, charming and funny as he can be, I found the space too full with Bernie in it. At some point I had to tell him he couldn’t come on the road with us. Besides, if I was going to be paying a tour manager, which I would be, I didn’t need Bernie there as well in an executive role, hovering over everything and making everyone nervous. We settled into a routine where he would come out for the first week of a tour, to make sure everything was working, and then follow the rest from his office.
I was averse to business long before I met Bernie, due in part to a lack of aptitude but also on aesthetic grounds. The idea of having someone run interference between the music industry and me had great appeal. I couldn’t always keep the “biz” at arm’s length, though. Case in point: a fatuous 1970 article in the Canadian newsmagazine The Province about my early career. The headline, “How Long Can a Man Dodge $100,000 a Year?,” rankles to this day. My first album had been out for a few months, but the writer seemed interested only in the money I could be making, not the music I was making.
“The talk [between me and Bernie] turned gently to money,” the article went, “and to how much Cockburn might earn in the next year. Cockburn was only a little interested, and he mentioned that he had made out quite well on the $10 a week that was his share of the take when he played lead guitar in an obscure Ottawa group called The Children three years ago. But the news that his manager was trying to break to him now was that, at 25, Cockburn is a successful solo artist; that his first album has sold more than 15,000 copies in six months, and that the sales curve is not slackening; that a growing number of other singers are recording Cockburn’s songs, and paying him royalties; that the film for which he wrote and sang the sound track, Goin’ Down the Road, is a hit in New York; and that he, Bernie Finkelstein, is turning down an appearance for Cockburn in January at $1,700 a night ‘because the place is a pub.’ What it all adds up to, Finkelstein said gently, was that Bruce Cockburn could gross about $100,000 in the next year, if he wanted to.”
I have nothing against money, but I was raised to regard it as a personal thing. It was rude to ask how much someone spent on something, or how much he made. To see this in print was embarrassing. In 1970, when these numbers were significant, I was opposed to pursuing anything artistic just for the sake of income. Obvious
ly you have to pay some attention to money. The decision to accept a gig is based in part on the remuneration offered, but it has to honour the muse. To make artistic choices based on money or the anticipation of getting it is not an option. Of course, if you grow up without it, it’s likely to mean a lot more to you than if you were reared in comfort, as I was.
The writer of the article was at least insightful. He quoted me saying, “Money is a hard thing to deal with. . . . It’s easier for me not to have it.” Then he somewhat gleefully, if not accurately, recorded my response to the success of my first record, and Bernie’s reaction to my response: “Not long after last summer’s release of his first album—an event that would see any other singer spending time ingratiating himself with disc jockeys so they would plug the record—Cockburn took his wife, Kitty, and his dog, Aroo, on a non-working tour of Western Canada in a camper truck. They made their leisurely way across the Prairies, over the Rockies to the B.C. Coast, then back again, enjoying the delights of the Canadian countryside that loom so large in Cockburn’s songs. . . . Bernie Finkelstein is only bewildered. ‘Success is happening for Bruce now,’ Finkelstein said. But then he added with a touch of professionalism: ‘It might have happened earlier, if only Bruce hadn’t gone out west . . . but, he did, right?’ . . . Sadly now, but resigned: ‘He’s taking December off, too. . . .’” (emphasis in the original)
The notion of “taking” my life partner anywhere also seemed obnoxious. Kitty and I embarked on our adventures together, as a team. We loved the wide-open west. Our explorations of the numinous Canadian landscape fed the songs, and our souls. We caught the west in the last of its wild state. Many of the songs I wrote in the seventies reflect our travels through the great expanse of the Canadian prairies, across the Rocky Mountains, to the moisture-rich West Coast. Space was everywhere, and there is space in the songs. Everything wasn’t a tourist trap yet, clear-cutting was not so evident, and agribusiness hadn’t completely killed off the family farm. In the first couple of years that Kitty, Aroo, and I travelled westward from Ontario, we were practically the only road campers out there. Seldom did we run across anyone else travelling the way we were. The prairies were full of abandoned old farmhouses—no families to be seen—harbingers of the reversion to feudal agricultural economics. All around the land still looked wild. Our journeys offered at least the illusion of freedom, as well as a deep sense of the land as Divine creation. Soon, though, we were seeing the spaces fill up with scabrous industrial sites, hotels, housing developments, shopping opportunities. We’d watch like gawkers at a train wreck as the land was eaten up before our eyes by inevitable human expansion and greed. There were ever more rules about where you could park your camper. It was the tail end of an epoch when the land was open and it, and we, could breathe freely. That will never come again.
Kitty and me, Mariposa Folk Festival, 1971
PHOTO © ARTHUR (ART) USHERSON
I went up on the mountainside
To see what I could see
To see what I could be
On the shining mountain
I watched the day go down in fire
And sink in the valley
And sink into the sea
Drown in golden fire
Fireflies danced in the forest night
The trees began to sing
The crags began to sing
Above the black forest
I went up on the mountainside
To know what I did know
To know whence I did know
On the crowning mountain
“SHINING MOUNTAIN,” 1970
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/14.
Bernie was just twenty-two when we first met at Maple Leaf Gardens, but he’d been dabbling in music management since high school and was already a fixture in an expanding Canadian music scene. At the time that scene enjoyed little of the infrastructure (record companies, recording studios, talent agencies, performing rights organizations) that was booming in the United States. So Bernie stepped into the vacuum and built one of Canada’s most influential, if modest, music empires, eventually opening an office on Scollard Street in Toronto’s Yorkville district.
Bernie held his assets tightly, but he also knew when to let go. Though the band he was managing when we met, the Paupers, sizzled onstage and enjoyed moderate success in Canada and the United States, in 1967 he sold his interest to Albert Grossman, the New York manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, among other illuminati. Within two years the Paupers had dissolved.
By 1969 I was performing exclusively solo and was eager to record an album. I had written dozens of songs, and it felt like they were choking me up. I wanted to get rid of these damn things in my head to make room for new ones, and I thought making a record would do that. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t want a big-time producer who would insist on adding what I saw as superfluous elements: bass and drums, or strings. I wanted the record to be just me singing and playing my songs, nothing else. I wanted a producer who would help me present the songs with the simplicity and purity of albums put out by Mississippi John Hurt and Mance Lipscomb.
One spring day, in the Upper Crust café on Yorkville, I ran into Gene Martynec, a guitar player I knew from the recently disbanded group Kensington Market, which Bernie had managed. “I really want to get into record production,” said Gene. I felt the pot being stirred. Here was a colleague who wanted to be a producer, and I wanted to make a record. He said, “And I know this guy who wants to start a record company, Bernie Finkelstein. He’s got the funding and he’s looking for talent.” Gene brought Bernie to hear me play at the Pornographic Onion, a coffeehouse on the campus of Ryerson University. He liked the music well enough, but what encouraged him to take me on was that I insisted on being the only player on the record. Bernie welcomed the idea. It suited his budget.
Said budget was provided by a Yorkville character named Brazilian George, a shady dude known for dealing the psychotropic chemical MDA. In his 2012 memoir True North: A Life Inside the Music Business, Bernie described Brazilian George as “the nicer side of the Tony Montana character played by Al Pacino in the movie Scarface.” When our trio of neophytes—Gene the producer, Bernie the record label owner, and me the artist—set out to make what for each of us was our first record, Bernie financed it with a $6,000 loan from Brazilian George, who was rumoured to sleep with a loaded rifle under his bed.
Bernie booked recording time at Eastern Sound, in Yorkville, and we knocked out the album in three days. We went through two engineers. The first one made a point of commenting on how pleased he was that there were no drums to record, drums not being to his taste. Bill Seddon took over for this guy, and he would go on to record four of my first five records. The studio had hired Bill because he’d worked at a radio station, so he knew how to thread two-inch tape onto the machines, but that was all he knew about recording. Turned out he had a good ear and a knack for dials. With the exception of an annoying degree of background hiss, the album turned out fine.
Bruce Cockburn came out in the spring of 1970. The day of its release was reasonably pleasant for Toronto at that time of year, sunny and mild. As I rambled through Yorkville without a winter coat, I heard something disturbingly familiar oozing out of the open door of a bookstore. It was me. In those days free-form FM radio was new, a rapidly growing phenomenon. The Toronto station CHUM-FM was one of these stations, and it was very popular. They had crazy DJs who would rant and read their stoner poetry and spin all manner of obscure, esoteric, and interesting music. It was not unusual for them to play an entire album. I entered the shop, incredulous that my song was on the radio. It freaked me out. I left in a mild panic and escaped, or so I thought, into the boutique where I usually bought incense, but the album was on in there too. It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. I realized CHUM was playing the whole record, and it was on in almost every store in Yorkville. Most performers would have been thrilled: They’re playing my album! I was terr
ified. I thought, “I’m never going to have privacy again!”
Living in the past
Is not living at all
The old fear going fast
Everybody’s scared to fall
Turn with the times
Change your mind
Sullen and profane
The ancient temple stands
Dissolving in the rain
Its gods long turned to sand
Forgotten childhood rhyme
Change your mind
Listen for the ring
Of tomorrow’s bell
Be the first to sing
From beyond the wishing well
Know what’s behind
But change your mind
“CHANGE YOUR MIND,” 1969
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/16.
After a few years of Kitty and I being together, coming apart, and getting back together again, I determined that we needed to move our relationship forward somehow. Move it forward, pin it down. I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. On the penultimate day of the decade, we were married at St. George’s Anglican Church in downtown Ottawa. Kitty wanted a church wedding. I wasn’t concerned with how we did it, but I was fascinated with all things medieval, and I thought it would feel good to get married in a place with Gothic arches and stained glass. The bride wore a long antique dress and looked like she could have stepped out of the fifteenth century. I wore my standard outfit of the day: jeans and moccasins and the woolen troubadour’s tunic someone had made for Murray McLauchlan, which he had given me. (You can see the look immortalized on the back cover of the first album.) The priest, Father Patrick Playfair, was a man who instantly commanded respect. With his strong Scottish countenance, he looked like God: long robe, big red beard, and longish hair. As usual, I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself, so we kept the wedding small, inviting only immediate family and offending scores of others.
Rumours of Glory Page 11