Rumours of Glory
Page 16
There’s darkness in the canyon
But the Light comes pounding through
For me and for you
Tomorrow may be a hissing blowtorch
May be a silken sky shaken by the wind
That whirls in the wake of those whispering horses
But there’s always a pillar of cloud on the valley’s rim
There’s darkness in the canyon
But the Light comes pounding through
For me and for you
Still river full of the depths of candles
Burning for the free ones riding on the other shore
Even at the heart of these breathing shadows
You can feel us gathering at the door
There’s darkness in the canyon
But the Light comes pounding through
For me and for you
For me and for you
“CELESTIAL HORSES,” 1978/2001
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/31.
The music on In the Falling Dark cried out for a band for its live presentation. Up to this point my appearances had virtually all been solo. I was getting tired of my own company onstage anyway, so I thought, “Let’s mix things up.” My first road band came to consist of Pat Godfrey on piano, Bill Usher on percussion, and Robert Boucher—who was with the Hamilton, Ontario, symphony—on acoustic bass. It was such a musical and interesting band that we splurged and recorded a live album during a two-night stand in April 1977, at Massey Hall in Toronto. We wanted to capture the sound and feel of the august and vibe-rich venue, so we hired an expensive remote recording outfit out of New York called Fedco. We also hired a piper from one of the Canadian army’s Highland regiments, P.M. Doug Mackay, to welcome the audience. He marched from the back of the hall to the foot of the stage as an opening for each show. (Love of the Highland great pipes came with my DNA.) I was nervous and didn’t perform very well on the first night, so almost everything on the live album, Circles in the Stream, is from the second night.
Around the same time the quickly growing label Island Records picked up In the Falling Dark for international distribution, which got the record noticed in Europe, particularly Italy, and Japan, and it circulated in the States as well. It was my first record to chart in the United States, reaching number 191(!) on the Cash Box magazine album list. Not long prior I would have shrugged and stayed home, but now I felt ready to stretch outward from Canada. I did some shows in the northeastern U.S., then went to Japan and Italy, finishing off an autumn’s worth of performances for non-anglophone audiences with a two-week tour of Quebec. Who knows what they thought I was saying? In fact, language was less of an issue for me in Quebec, as I had written a couple of songs in French and we had, from the third album on, included translations of the lyrics in the album packaging.
In 1978 we released Further Adventures Of. The album was mostly acoustic, with some rocky edges here and there. We made good use of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s stunningly rich vocal timbre on “Rainfall” and “Can I Go with You.” “Bright Sky” was a celebration of the wild Yukon set to a brisk guitar part inspired by traditional Swedish fiddling. “A Montreal Song” grew out of an encounter with an elderly stranger one afternoon on the Sparks Street Mall in Ottawa. He picked me out of a crowd in a café and without apology or excuse asked if I would buy him a coffee. I did, and invited him to sit with me. His ruddy, round face encircled lively eyes under pale, bushy brows. He wore a tweed jacket and a red plaid shirt with a green tartan tie and had a lot to say about God and the importance of a spiritual life. That night in a Montreal hotel room, the television screen blazed with rocketry as Beirut blew itself to bits. These things wove themselves together into the song.
Italy, 1978
“Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” starts with a moment of disaffection in Toronto and goes both inward and outward. The image of the circles in the stream had of course been used as a title for the previous album, but it seemed to belong to this song as well, as a picture of the randomness of ideas. Finally comes “Nanzen Ji,” a song I kept sparse in honour of the elegantly simple Kyoto temple in which it’s set. It’s the last song on the album, and as its final chord is dying away, Aroo’s bark is heard just outside the studio door.
“Feast of Fools” was written on the electric guitar, as was “Phone Booth.” Gene Martynec plays a tense guitar lead. Is it a protest song? Perhaps in a way: there is a lament to be found there, something about a species that has always fed upon itself and everything else in its path. The song’s conceit comes from the Middle Ages of northern Europe, where for hundreds of years the ruling elite hosted a midwinter Feast of Fools that upended the social order for a day. The annual event took various forms and was observed throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe, particularly in France and the Low Countries. The village idiot or some other unfortunate would be paraded through town with a mock crown on his head and pelted with rotten food and the occasional turd. It was the only day you could call the king a fink with impunity. The aristocracy tolerated this safety valve because they knew that maintenance of the status quo required that their underlings be able to vent the frustration and rage that went with being so far under. (They didn’t yet have TV.) The song was inspired in part by theologian Harvey Cox’s book of the same title. It embraces Jesus’s declaration, hopeful or ominous, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” but it also reflects how, in my lifetime, Western nations have devolved from neoconservatism to neoliberalism to neofeudalism. I didn’t play the song much after 1980, but twenty years later I brought it back, given how things were going.
At the feast of fools
Humour can sometimes be cruel
But under certain conditions
You have to forget the rules
At the feast of fools
Everybody has a voice
Nobody goes to the bottom
Except by their own choice
It’s time for the silent criers to be held in love
It’s time for the ones who dig graves for them to get that final shove
It’s time for the horizons of the universe to be glimpsed even by the faceless kings of corporations
It’s time for chaos to win and walk off with the prize which turns out to be nothing
At the feast of fools
Outlaws can all come home
You can wear any disguise you want
But you’ll be naked past the bone
At the feast of fools
People’s hands weave light
There is a diamond wind
Flowering in the darkest night
It’s time for the singers of songs without hope to take a hard look and start from scratch again
It’s time for these headlights racing against inescapable dark to be just forgotten
It’s time for Harlequin to leap out of the future into the midst of a world of dancers
It’s time for us all to stand hushed in the cathedral of silence waiting at the river’s end.
“FEAST OF FOOLS,” 1977
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/32.
My friend Alan Whatmough turned me on to Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk, writer, social justice advocate, and jazz lover who wrote more than seventy books. I discovered Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest/paleontologist whose writings defied Church doctrine, and behind him I found a trail of Christian mysticism I had not known existed, a strain so powerful that it had been strategically sidelined by mainstream church leaders whose temporal power was anchored in mythic history and rule-making.
As for C. S. Lewis, I read a lot of his books, and though I never completely accepted all of his conclusions, I appreciated his willingness and ability to reason, as a Christian apologist and Oxford professor: to study and philosophize around the Divine and to articulate his careful insights. His little literary group, the Inklings (members included J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams
, among others), produced volumes of inspiring, insightful, and even revolutionary writings—none more so than Williams, who was a terrible writer but had an astounding vision of how Divine/human interaction works. When a fan gave me a copy of War in Heaven, I discovered a Christian author whose background in the occult paralleled my own. Williams was able to spin stories that respected the more worthy of those disciplines by giving them a place in the Christian universe. I steamed through all seven of his novels and a volume of very dense poetry in the period between recording Further Adventures Of and the album that followed, Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws.
Though Further Adventures Of contains numerous biblical references, I don’t call out to Jesus directly except on “Can I Go with You,” which I describe as “joyfully apocalyptic.” Beverly is a Buddhist, but after singing her part she told me how much she liked the song. I said, “You’re okay with the imagery being so Christian?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I can picture the bodhisattvas riding out of the heavens to claim their own.”
I wrote the song in the dead of winter. Except for a brief period when I was approaching fifty, I have always loved that time of year. I love the energizing drama of winter descending, the season’s starkness, its high-contrast visuals. I like the adrenaline that comes with driving in blizzards. The prospect of winter softening into spring, with its sense of renewal and rebirth, carries its own delicious feeling.
When you ride out of the shining sky
To claim the ones who love you
Can I go with you?
Can I go with you?
When the angel shouts from the heart of the sun
And the living water flows down
Can I go with you?
Can I go with you?
When the earth and stars melt like ice in the spring
And a million voices sing praise
Can I go with you?
Can I go with you?
“CAN I GO WITH YOU?,” 1976
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/33.
9
Centred on silence
Counting on nothing
I saw you standing on the sea
And everything was
Dark except for
Sparks the wind struck from your hair
Sparks that turned to
Wings around you
Angel voices mixed with seabird cries
Fields of motion
Surging outward
Questions that contain their own replies. . .
You were dancing
I saw you dancing
Throwing your arms toward the sky
Fingers opening
Like flares
Stars were shooting everywhere
Lines of power
Bursting outward
Along the channels of your song
Mercury waves flashed
Under your feet
Shots of silver in the shell-pink dawn. . .
“CREATION DREAM,” 1978
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/13.
I didn’t study dreams back in the sixties and seventies, but their impact was expansive. I did not retain many, and the ones that stayed with me were mostly nightmares. Some of those stuck with me a long time, retaining their capacity to get my nervous system rippling. In one of them, a pride of ferocious lions attacked Bill Hawkins’s house, where I was living. They prowled around the exterior at first, looking for a way to gain entry. Suddenly they were on the ground floor, then mounting the stairs. I tried to barricade the door of my room, but the lead lioness shouldered through, jaws dripping. I woke up shaking and sweating.
Years later, in early 1979, Kitty and I had dinner with my cousin Doug in a classy little restaurant in Gatineau, then known as Hull, on the Quebec side of the river. He was well into a long career in the world of national security. He was privy to a lot of information he couldn’t share, though we knew his work involved the interception and analysis of encoded transmissions, military and otherwise, to and from several countries. At the time there was a lot of sabre rattling going on between Russia and China over their shared border. Shots had been fired. A distinct possibility of war between the two nuclear powers hung in the diplomatic air. Doug was worried, and I was inclined to take his worries seriously. Hearing press reports was one thing, but hearing it from him was the real thing. He said that NATO and the Soviet Union had a mutual understanding that neither would surprise the other. Spy technology was such that both were very aware of each other’s movements and capabilities. China, however, was not part of the deal. Everybody knew China had nukes, but no one had a clue about what they were willing to do with them. Between bites of filet mignon he said, “For all we know, we could wake up tomorrow to the end of the world.”
Into the night I ruminated darkly over my cousin’s news. Nuclear annihilation was something that my generation had been fretting about since three months after I was born, with the vaporizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Duck and cover and kiss your ass good-bye.
Next morning I awoke to brilliant sunshine. I breathed the fine air. The scene outside the bedroom window was devoid of smoke and ruined buildings. Once again I rose from a dream about lions prowling Ottawa. But this time, in contrast to the terrifying nightmare of years before, they were calm, regal, and beautiful, and maintained a greater and more comfortable distance. After breakfast I ran some errands, and while driving west on the Queensway I started chanting to myself, “Sun’s up, uh-huh, looks okay, the world survives into another day.” Those lions were out there somewhere. Or maybe in here somewhere.
Back home I pulled together a set of images from my notebooks, mostly word pictures caught in British Columbia, and strung them on a thread of time driving us inexorably toward death. The lightly rolling guitar part came easily. I had been listening to Bob Marley and the soundtrack from The Harder They Come, due to a new infatuation with the rhythms of reggae. I had made a point, for a while, of avoiding pop music, but around mid-decade I spun around and began exploring the waters around me. My “discovery” of reggae owed a lot to the presence of my tour manager Stuart Raven-Hill, an affable, casual but confident Englishman with many contacts in Toronto’s large West Indian community and a deep knowledge of its music, which he enthusiastically shared. I liked Stuart, who could often be found in the company of his girlfriend, a stunningly beautiful young blonde named Judy Cade.
I incorporated elements of reggae into the otherwise folkie fingerpicking pattern of the new song, but when it came time to record I decided to use real players from the genre. I didn’t want to be just another white guy watering down someone else’s culture. Stuart contacted Jamaican expat singer Leroy Sibbles, who came to the studio with his drummer, Ben Bow, and bass player, Larry “Sticky Fingers” Silvera. Pat Godfrey played a marimba part that approximated the guitar backbeat typical of the style. (Ben Bow told me that the groove we were playing wasn’t really reggae but more like blue beat, a precursor.) Leroy, Pat, and I added background vocals. The result, “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” became the lead track on a new album, Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws. I was happy with the song, but not at all prepared for what came next.
“I heard about eight bars of ‘Lions’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it,’” Jimmy Ienner, president of the New York label Millennium Records, told Maclean’s, the national Canadian newsmagazine, in 1981, two years after Millennium began distributing Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws in the United States. Jimmy and his brother Donny were the genteel tough guys who ran Millennium. They made a point of listening to a lot of new stuff and taking chances on music they liked, not just on what they thought might become popular. It was a successful formula, and Donny ended up becoming president of Columbia Records, which would distribute a few of my albums in the nineties.
Big brother Jimmy had a long history in the record business. (As a teenager, he sang the bass part on Gene Chandler’s 1962 number one hit, “Duke of Earl.” He told me
he also sang the falsetto part.) Donny liked to play poker, which appealed to Bernie, and during games the brothers freely shared tales of the business, sometimes involving the mob. Jimmy had a story about having been shot, while in his teens, for being impudent to some Mafia don. (In 1990 the Seattle band Nirvana visited Columbia in their search for a new label. Donny Ienner told them, “Listen, men, I’m not going to dick you around. We want to turn you into stars.” The band liked the message, but Kurt Cobain balked, saying he found Columbia “too mafiaesque, a little too corporate.”) Jimmy Ienner went on to produce the soundtrack album for the film Dirty Dancing, one of the bestselling records of all time.
When Dragon’s Jaws came out Donny worked it hard, making the rounds of radio stations, presumably employing the marketing tactic that was routine in those days: introduce the record and the single, glad-hand the DJs and programmers, then ply them with stimulants to get them to play it.
Donny concocted outlandish promotional schemes. Somewhere in the midwestern United States he showed up at a radio station with a lion on a leash, scaring the shit out of everybody. Another time he arranged for me to appear outdoors at the Philadelphia Zoo at eight in the morning, in January, to be interviewed in front of the lion cage. “Bring your guitar,” he said. “They’ll want it for photos.” I was already in Philadelphia, having performed the previous night. Donny informed me, as we were getting ready to leave our hotel, that I was also expected to play my “hit” in front of the lions.
“I’m not doing that,” I said. “I don’t even want to take my guitar out of its case. The cold will crack it. I can’t sing this early.”
“But the people are already there,” said Donny. “You have to. You have to show up at the zoo. You have to play!”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do, because we sold tickets.”
It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. There were bleachers in front of the lion cage, populated by a hundred or so shivering guests bundled against the cold. Little clouds of breath billowed around their heads like thought balloons. A half-dozen lions sporting shaggy winter coats were lounging by the bars, staring at us, licking their lips as if we were breakfast. Everything was frozen, awful. I managed to croak out “Wondering Where the Lions Are,” barely able to move my fingers, everything recorded by radio and TV. The vague fear I had about the music industry became diamond sharp in that moment.