Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  There is plenty in life to protest, but I did not write “Gavin’s Woodpile” (or anything else) as a protest song. It was a personal lament, a cry of spiritual anguish that arose from feeling helpless in the face of endless assaults against people and the land. Each of these injustices became a personal affront. I’ll be challenged on this, perhaps rightfully so, but I have never intended that my songs “protest” anything. They are attempts to share observations, both of the world around me and of my feelings about what I see.

  It has to be art. There’s an important line to be drawn between art and propaganda, a line easily blurred. Certainly nothing is blurry about Stalinist-era propaganda posters, with their very effective graphic design, or Leni Riefenstahl’s imaginative and technically advanced films celebrating Nazi ideals in thirties Germany. In these cases the Soviets and the Nazis were trying to stimulate support for otherwise insupportable regimes.

  My goals are different. I want to paint sonic pictures of what I encounter, feel, and think is true. The songs are not about trying to convince you to rally against the G8 (though I might celebrate it when you do by singing at your protest) or demand a return of land to displaced aboriginal peoples (ditto). I don’t like the idea of preaching—although I’ve been accused of it, usually by critics annoyed at anything that doesn’t conform to their brand of cynicism. The injustices that spike my visions are in the songs because they matter, because they have touched me. Sometimes they show up immediately, sometimes later. I learned about the murder of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash, a member of the Míkmaq First Nation of Nova Scotia, shortly after it happened, at the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, in the aftermath of Wounded Knee in late 1975. In 1986 she found her way into a song.

  From Tierra del Fuego to Ungava Bay

  The history of betrayal continues to today

  The spirit of Almighty Voice, the ghost of Anna Mae

  Call like thunder from the mountains—you can hear them say

  It’s a stolen land

  Apartheid in Arizona, slaughter in Brazil

  If bullets don’t get good PR there’s other ways to kill

  Kidnap all the children, put ’em in a foreign system

  Bring them up in no-man’s-land where no one really wants them

  It’s a stolen land

  Stolen land—and it’s all we’ve got

  Stolen land—and there’s no going back

  Stolen land—and we’ll never forget

  Stolen land—and we’re not through yet

  In my mind I catch a picture—big black raven in the sky

  Looking at the ocean—sail reflected in black eye —

  Sail as white as heroin, white like weathered bones —

  Rum and guns and smallpox gonna change the face of home

  In this stolen land. . . .

  If you’re like me you’d like to think we’ve learned from our mistakes

  Enough to know we can’t play god with others’ lives at stake

  So now we’ve all discovered the world wasn’t only made for whites

  What step are you gonna take to try and set things right

  In this stolen land

  “STOLEN LAND,” 1986

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/27.

  Is this propaganda? Admittedly, I do ask listeners what step they might take to “set things right,” but this is pretty much the only song of mine that explicitly challenges the listener to do something. “Stolen Land” is a rare instance of a piece that was created deliberately on a chosen theme. I wrote the lyrics (the music is by Hugh Marsh and me) to have something relevant to perform at a benefit concert in Vancouver. The show was in support of the Haida First Nation and their claim to lands in what used to be known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, now renamed Haida Gwaii as part of a settlement deal reached in 2007 between the Haida and the Canadian government. The granting to the Haida Management Authority of much of this rich island ecosystem off the northern British Columbia coast represents a rare victory for Native peoples in North America. Eighteen hundred miles east, on the English River, there has been no such “victory” for the Asubpeeschoseewagong and Wabaseemoong peoples, who remain plagued by mercury contamination and have been vastly undercompensated for their great losses of life, health, and homeland. In “Gavin’s Woodpile” I was able to harness my anger and effectively represent it; you can hear it in my voice, certainly in the words, and perhaps even in the guitar’s intentionally slicing sound, but I’m not trying to persuade people to act as much as to paint as vivid a picture as I can. Make of it what you will.

  With Haida artists Bill Reid (seated) and Robert Davidson at a press conference for Haida, 1986. Robert’s painting Raven Brings Light to the World was the cover art for Waiting for a Miracle.

  Another important, and intentional, element of In the Falling Dark is the prominence of jazz throughout the album. I lacked the guitar chops to provide the jazz myself, but by 1976 I was confident enough in my skills to gather a group of players whose abilities obviously surpassed my own: Michel Donato on bass, Bob DiSalle on drums, and Kathryn Moses on flutes and piccolo. Freddie Stone played brilliant and somewhat crazed flugelhorn and trumpet. On songs that did not call for that flavour we used Jørn Anderson on drums and Dennis Pendrith on bass. Bill Usher provided percussion throughout. Though many of the musicians came from the top echelon of the Toronto session scene, the music is consciously collective in intent. We were going for the sound of a band rather than that of a singer-songwriter with studio backup.

  In the Falling Dark also offered what might be characterized as a refinement of Christian lyrical content. It is the album that Joy Will Find a Way was resolving toward. When I was writing songs for Salt, Sun and Time and Joy Will Find a Way, my Christianity was somewhat fundamentalist in nature. As a new Christian I wanted to understand what it was I had signed up for, and the voice of fundamentalism—that is, you do and believe what the Bible says you should do and believe—roared loudest in claiming to have the answers. By 1975, when I began writing the songs that make up In the Falling Dark, I had shucked most of what I began to see as shackles of fundamentalism in favour of a less tribal and more questioning search for understanding. Joy Will Find a Way mentioned Jesus more than In the span Falling Dark, but on the later album I was clearer about what it meant, for me, to be a practicing Christian. My faith had developed. The songs are perhaps more accessible to a broader spectrum of listeners, which was not necessarily the intent, but was the result, because I’d moved beyond fundamentalism toward mystery. The fundamentalists emphasize a personal relationship with Christ, but they often constrain this possibility with rigid cultural elements that have little to do with the spirit. The “spiritual” songs are about celebrating the Divine and our place in the cosmos, and doing so from a place of seeking, from a desire to know, as best we can, the heart connection with God, however one might define such an entity. I wrote the opening song, “Lord of the Starfields,” as an attempt at a Psalm. It came to me one clear summer night, walking on a gravel road near my friend Eric Nagler’s cabin at Killaloe, Ontario. The road was lined with dark walls of dense spruce and cedar. Deep space overhead, far from urban light spill, blazed with millions of distant nuclear furnaces. All the way to the edge of everything, love resounded.

  Lord of the starfields

  Ancient of Days

  Universe Maker

  Here’s a song in your praise

  Wings of the storm cloud

  Beginning and end

  You make my heart leap

  Like a banner in the wind

  O love that fires the sun

  Keep me burning

  Lord of the starfields

  Sower of life,

  Heaven and earth are

  Full of your light

  Voice of the nova

  Smile of the dew

  All of our yearning

  Only comes home to you

  O love that fires the
sun

  Keep me burning

  “LORD OF THE STARFIELDS,” 1976

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/28.

  My songs are influenced by what I read, where I travel, and what I witness. “Silver Wheels,” the sixth song on In the Falling Dark, reflects all of these things. At the time I was particularly excited by Allen Ginsberg’s latest work, The Fall of America, published in 1973. That Ginsberg book in particular resonated with the longer poems of early-twentieth-century Swiss/French poet Blaise Cendrars, an important figure in the Cubist movement. Hawkins had introduced me to his work in the previous decade. Cendrars was so in love with words that he would collect thousands of them—from the dictionary, from ancient edicts—then use them all in a book. He produced marvellous travel poems—The Prose of the Trans-Siberian, for example, and Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles—that span the globe and ring with a mythic quality. Ginsberg is less myth, more industrial grit. “Silver Wheels” falls somewhere between the two and represents a documentary style that I still employ. I try to create vivid scenes and then, as a filmmaker would do, juxtapose them in such a way that they add up to something bigger than each is on its own. Readers familiar with The Fall of America, a collection of poems that capture Ginsberg’s travels through the United States, will see right away the influence that book had on Silver Wheels.

  High-speed drift on a prairie road

  Hot tires sing like a string being bowed

  Sudden town rears up then explodes

  Fragments resolve into white line code

  Whirl on silver wheels

  Black earth energy receptor fields

  Undulate under a grey cloud shield

  We outrun a river colour brick red mud

  That cleaves apart hills soil rich as blood

  Highway squeeze in construction steam

  Stop caution hard hat yellow insect machines

  Silver steel towers stalk rolling land

  Toward distant stacks that shout “Feed on demand”

  A hundred miles later the sky has changed

  Urban anticipation—we get four lanes

  Red orange furnace sphere notches down

  Throws up silhouette skyline in brown

  Sundogs flare on windshield glass

  Sudden swoop skyward iron horse overpass

  Pass a man walking like the man in the moon

  Walking like his head’s full of Irish fiddle tunes

  The skin around every city looks the same

  Miles of flat neon spelling well-known names

  USED TRUCKS DIRTY DONUTS YOU YOU’RE THE ONE

  Fat-wheeled cars squeal into the sun

  Radio speakers gargle top-forty trash

  Muzak soundtrack to slow collapse

  Planet engines pulsate in sidereal time

  If you listen close you can hear the whine

  “SILVER WHEELS,” 1976

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/29.

  In 1995 the New York Times music writer Stephen Holden told Daniel Keebler that In the Falling Dark was his favourite of my albums. (Interestingly, the interview came out shortly before the release of my 1996 album, The Charity of Night, and the subsequent Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu—which, along with In the Falling Dark and whichever CD is newest at the time you ask me, are probably the records of mine with which I am most satisfied.) “The lyrics,” said Holden, “especially in ‘Lord of the Starfields’ and ‘In the Falling Dark,’ have the kind of imagery that makes me see through his eyes in a way no other songs have done quite so well. That album has a kind of visionary, spiritual/romantic directness that I think eclipses anything else he’s done, although this quality is all through his music.” Whether or not one agrees with Holden’s assessment of the album, he understood what he was hearing.

  Keebler asked Holden for his views on why I wasn’t as popular in the United States as in Canada. Holden was blunt.

  “The kind of moral debates that go on in his songs are, I think, slightly over the head of the mainstream pop audience in the United States. There’s something very Canadian about his music, too, in its spareness in the pictures of the landscape, that maybe Americans in the ‘mall culture’ don’t really relate to. He’s not a self-promoter, not the way American pop stars are, or the way big Canadian pop stars are. He doesn’t have that lust for fame, that obvious lust for fame, that most stars these days seem to have. There’s a remove or detachment about him that prevents him from reaching a mainstream audience.”

  In the Falling Dark coincided with another new direction. On July 14, 1976, Bastille Day, after fifteen hours of labour, Kitty gave birth to our daughter, Jenny. This was something Kitty had been eager for—she wanted a child—and one day she recounted what she felt was an angelically inspired vision of “a being” who was waiting to come into the world. I did not share her enthusiasm for the project, but I believed her and was committed to her, so I went along. We didn’t have a great sex life, but we managed to pull it off and get ourselves pregnant. In due course a beautiful baby was born, though it took a day or two for the beauty to shine through. I got in trouble right away for remarking that she looked a bit like Idi Amin. Well, what the hell . . . she did. I thought it was funny. Newborns always have the look of old folks who are very unhappy to be back in the world. It fades over their first few days. I was in love with her even before she was born, and the passing resemblance to the brutal dictator did not shake that.

  Little seahorse

  Swimming in a primal sea

  Heartbeat like a

  Leaf quaking in the breeze

  I feel magic as coyote

  In the middle of the moon-wild night

  In the forge-fire time

  Your mother glowed so bright

  You were like a

  Voice calling in the night

  And I’m watching the curtain

  Rising on a whole new set of dreams

  The world is waiting

  Like a Lake Superior gale

  A locomotive

  Racing along the rail.

  It’ll sweep you away

  But you know that you’re never alone

  Little seahorse

  Floating on a primal tide

  Quickening like a

  Spark in a haystack side

  I already love you

  And I don’t even know who you are

  “LITTLE SEAHORSE,” 1975

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/30.

  We were going to need a bigger camper. I traded in the old Dodge pickup, with its 318-cubic-inch engine and makeshift accommodations, for a Chevy three-quarter-ton with a beastly 454 engine and a large, commercially made camper that extended over the cab and weighed a ton. I naively imagined us just travelling along as we always had. We tried it once, on the first leg of a lengthy tour following the release of In the Falling Dark. Inevitably Kitty found herself in the back of the truck nursing the baby, changing diapers, wishing she had a warm home and a fire to curl up by and something to do besides sit in the Styrofoam camper all day tending to Jenny, since I disappeared as soon as we got to the next hall. None of this helped our marriage.

  Nor did my travel regimen following release of In the Falling Dark. I was so wedded to the road that I wrote “Silver Wheels,” a road song, a week after Jenny was born. I definitely spent time at home—in fact, I even put in a short, miserable stint as a “youth leader” at St. George’s church—but I was gone, or at least distracted.

  I took myself, and my work, very seriously. It’s the nature of artists to believe that what they have to say is going to matter to the world at large. I felt a great burden to create more and better and deeper words and music. I had no tolerance for anything that might interfere with this important endeavour. To this day I wince whenever I recall the morning that Jenny, who was two at the time, came smiling into our sunroom where I was practicing, carrying her little plastic Mickey Mous
e guitar. It had nylon strings and pictures of Mickey on the white top. She was excited to come in and play along with Daddy. Daddy, however, was caught up in the pressure of having to get a repertoire ready for some occasion or other. I snapped at her to be quiet. Jenny burst into tears, crushed. I was so immersed in my own thing that I didn’t recognize the beauty and import of the moment. I saw it immediately afterward, but you can never get back those missed opportunities. Jenny and I have since talked about the incident, but I’m not over it. I’ll always regret it.

  The memory flooded back twenty years later while I played a duet, filmed for Canadian television, with the great Malian musician Toumani Diabaté, at his house in Bamako. In the middle of the song his two-year-old son toddled into the courtyard where we were playing, clambered onto his dad’s lap, and started plucking at the strings of Toumani’s kora. Dad simply beamed. He was proud. I thought, “That’s how it should have been. Even if I had been performing on national TV, Jenny should have been able to wander out and play with me.” But that wasn’t me back in the day.

  On the first Falling Dark tour, when we finished the shows in British Columbia, Kitty and Jenny flew home and the band went back in their van. I drove the long road solo. It was one of the few times during the next three decades that I would journey alone across Canada, something I would come to miss as we began hiring tour buses and flying. I got a few songs out of the trip, some of which appeared on the next two albums. A visit en route to an uncommercialized hot spring in the Slocan Valley produced a sketch of some verses that didn’t get completed for another two decades. Such is the timeline of the poet. The stories evolve forever.

  Here come those silver celestial horses

  Rays of the moon in the mountain air

  I’m steeped in the steam of the last wild hot spring

  Maybe I’m melting but I don’t care