The Ienner brothers were masters at the game. I could have lived without the Budweiser sponsorship (“This Bud’s for Bruce and You”), but I liked the feeling that something was happening. I enjoyed the novelty of limo rides and dinners with music-business movers. Somewhere in New Jersey we opened for Warren Zevon, who was pretty hot then with a hit of his own, “Werewolves of London.” Lions and werewolves, go figure. The year before “Lions” peaked at number twenty-one on the Billboard chart, “Werewolves” also reached number twenty-one. For both of us, these songs would be our biggest U.S. hits.
On May 10, 1980, I played “Wondering Where the Lions Are” on Saturday Night Live. At that time the band was a four-piece unit, with Bob DiSalle, Dennis Pendrith, and Hugh Marsh, whom everybody called Hubie. He was a kinetic and very talented young jazz violinist I had met at a charity telethon in Ottawa and snapped up for the Dragon’s Jaws tour. He was very excited about SNL. He was a fan of the show and wanted to meet the cast, which still included many of the early and iconic members. This show, which I hardly ever watched but which everyone else did, was a Big Deal, and I was scared. Live TV is a stressful medium to work in. You’re allowed one chance to get everything right. There’s no warm-up. If you screw up, you can’t make it all better with a dazzling maneuver later in the show. Some people shine in such circumstances. I do not. Program producers had institutionalized an atmosphere of hurry-up-and-wait. We were treated with respect, but the regulars and crew all seemed tense and angry. (Later in the year, SNL went through a major casting shake-up.) When we finally got to play, we pulled it off. It was not the finest rendering of the song, but not the worst either, thank God. After the show there was a party in some restaurant. Hubie asked a visibly stressed Steve Martin for his autograph and was given a snarling brush-off. I drank a lot of Laphroaig. Many people saw us. The thing is still out there, floating like a ghost through cyberspace.
Sun’s up, uh-huh, looks okay
The world survives into another day
And I’m thinking about eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
I had another dream about lions at the door
They weren’t half as frightening as they were before
But I’m thinking about eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
Walls windows trees, waves coming through
You be in me and I’ll be in you
Together in eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
Up among the firs where it smells so sweet
Or down in the valley where the river used to be
I got my mind on eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
And I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
Huge orange flying boat rises off a lake
Thousand-year-old petroglyphs doing a double take
Pointing a finger at eternity
I’m sitting in the middle of this ecstasy
Young men marching, helmets shining in the sun,
Polished and precise like the brain behind the gun
(Should be!) they got me thinking about eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
And I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
Freighters on the nod on the surface of the bay
One of these days we’re going to sail away,
going to sail into eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me
And I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
I’m wondering where the lions are. . . .
“WONDERING WHERE THE LIONS ARE,” 1979
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/34.
My music found few outlets outside Canada before 1979 primarily because I didn’t want it to, which bemused journalists, among others.
“Cockburn still has no immediate plans to extend his performing beyond Canada,” wrote Patricia Holtz in The Canadian magazine in 1976, after release of In the Falling Dark. “In fact, he parted company with his first record distributor, Epic, because he wasn’t interested in lengthy tours to promote his songs elsewhere.” There’s always more to the story: that parting had as much to do with the label’s ineptitude as anything else. They put out the first album believing that “True North” was its title, and promoted it that way.
Touring in the United States picked up after “Wondering Where the Lions Are” hit the charts, but even then the schedule was less packed than it might normally be on the heels of a top-forty hit. I grew up with the typically Canadian attitude toward the United States: superiority mixed with admiration, fear, and envy, as if we were the younger of rival siblings born of Mother England (which is more or less the case). My eighteen months in Boston had left me with a slightly jaundiced view of American culture, a distaste heavily tempered by a love of the music, some of the people, the cavalcade of cars and guitars, the movies, the spirit of daring—but these things weren’t enough to lure me down there. (Another visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, said, “Although the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people, certain momentary outbreaks occur when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained and to soar impetuously toward heaven.” He added, “Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”) For a decade I had held to the notion that I should try to build an audience in Canada before I looked elsewhere, and furthermore, I had no interest in being part of the hit machine. Bernie and I would sometimes argue about what, if anything, should be pushed to radio as a single. I didn’t really care for the concept.
Once a song becomes a “single” it gets tortured to death, played over and over until everyone’s sick of it. The music gets ground in with inane crap and commercials, like audio sausage. I had more love for my songs than that. I don’t feel so strongly about it now, but I think these arguments still apply. Have a listen to today’s top-forty stations. Every now and then a phenomenon such as Feist breaks through the miasma, and what a relief that is; otherwise, it’s almost wholly unlistenable. An incredible amount of talent (see: Justin Bieber) is sacrificed to the mediocrity of what Paul Klein, who was the “executive of audience measurement” at NBC TV during the 1960s, called the “least objectionable programming” theory: that is (and this is my translation), you overproduce your song or show into a homogenized, white-bread state, until all the edge and experimentation are bled out of it, and then it becomes more palatable—or, conversely, less objectionable—to more people, so audience numbers remain high. That is, people won’t change the channel, which means the commercials will reach their target.
It also bothered me that for Canadians to get accepted as legitimate artists—and this is part of our national pathology—we had to first sell ourselves to New York or Los Angeles or London for a stamp of approval before being accepted by our public. So I went in the other direction and set out to build an audience in my own country before I looked elsewhere.
I remember getting into an argument with somebody on an Ottawa street one day about whether Joni Mitchell was Canadian. “She couldn’t be; she’s too good,” he said. That dreary cluelessness typified Canadians’ self-perception in those days.
The quirky Canadian comic Jeremy Hotz, who lives in L.A. and is one of our nation’s covert stormers of the entertainment beachhead, voiced this analysis of our culture: “You know what Canadians want? We want to wake up in the morning and stand there. Because if we move, we might cause some trouble. The best thing is you just don’t fucking move, stand there, let the world move around us. And then, when nobody’s looking, sneak away.” We also frequently display a sort of false modesty by putting ourselves down.
I sneaked across the border—it was threatening rain —
So I could stand in this tunnel, waiting for the roaring train
>
And watch those black kids working out kung fu moves
If you don’t want to be the horses’ hoofprints you got to be the hooves
Hear that lonesome violin play
See the notes float up into the overcast
and change to white birds as they sail on through
and soar away free into incandescent blue
People getting ready behind all those rectangles of light
“Put on your grin mask, babe, you know we’re steppin’ out tonight”
You hear that sound, like hammers only small?
It’s what the people’s heads say when they beat them against the wall
Hear that lonesome violin play
See the notes float up into the overcast
and change to white birds as they sail on through
and soar away free into incandescent blue
Concrete vortex sucks down the wind
It’s howling like a blinded violin.
Oh—tongues of fire, come and kiss my brow
if I ever needed you, well I need you now
Hear that lonesome violin play
See the notes float up into the overcast
and change to white birds as they sail on through
and soar away free into incandescent blue
“INCANDESCENT BLUE,” 1979
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/35.
I toured a lot after the release of Dragon’s Jaws, though I committed to no more than three weeks in a row without a break, to give me some time at home. Home, however, was coming apart at the seams. Not much was said, but the air between Kitty and me was darkening by the day. Both of us felt a sort of suffocation setting in. The presence of a small child will inevitably expose the weaknesses in a relationship, and ours were beginning to creep out from under the rug faster than we could weave it back over them. We were going to church. We were praying for guidance. We were doing our best to be good parents. Only Jenny was happy.
Underneath the mask of the sulphur sky
A bunch of us were busy waiting,
Watching the people looking ill at ease,
Watching the fraying rope get closer to breaking
Women and men moved back and forth
In between effect and cause
And just beyond the range of normal sight
This glittering joker was dancing in the dragon’s jaws
Let me be a little of your breath
Moving over the face of the deep —
I want to be a particle of your light
Flowing over the hills of morning
The only sign you gave of who you were
When you first came walking down the road,
Was the way the dust motes danced around
Your feet in a cloud of gold
But everything you see’s not the way it seems —
Tears can sing and joy shed tears.
You can take the wisdom of this world
And give it to the ones who think it all ends here
“HILLS OF MORNING,” 1979
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/15.
In the fall of 1979 I played solo up and down Japan, took a break, embarked on a band tour through northern Italy, took another break, and then went on an extended run through the province of Quebec. Operating in non-English-speaking environments carried with it a sense of dislocation. In Japan I was even illiterate, no matter how lovely the symbols. Italy was wonderfully surreal but slightly baffling. In the course of all that I developed a dependency on strangers, an uncomfortable reality that melded neatly with the psychic toil at home. The ensuing confluence of emotions forced me open, and I found myself more sensitive to the feelings swirling through me. I also found that I liked it.
Even in 1979 Italians still carried visceral memories of Mussolini. Factions of the current generation were just as volatile, particularly the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades, which were at war with the Italian government, the police, and a very strong underground fascist movement. The Red Brigades formed in 1970 ostensibly to get Italy out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They were a violent and well-organized revolutionary gang that by 1979 had carried out dozens of high-profile attacks against public figures and others, including the assassination of two members of the official neo-Fascist party in Padua, Italy. In 1978 the Red Brigades pulled off their most infamous attack, stopping the car of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, killing five of his bodyguards with machine-gun fire, then holding Moro hostage for fifty-four days while unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a prisoner exchange. When it was clear that the Red Brigades would not get their comrades out of prison, they stuffed Moro in a large basket, shot him eleven times, and left his body in the trunk of a Renault 4 in the old centre of Rome.
My bias against mixing the aesthetic and the political began to crumble when I was confronted with this charged atmosphere. Everybody talked politics. “Politics,” as I would later come to understand the word, is simply humans trying to get along in a group. It’s an external expression of something that we all carry around in our hearts. The average Italian, though, was more likely than his or her Canadian counterpart to be active in, or at least cognizant of and vocal about, political life. Many Italian artists were polarized, at least the serious ones, and several of our concerts were produced by local chapters of the Communist Party. The political turmoil affecting the country was evident in the streets. Fringe leftists were shooting policemen. Fascist extremists bombed Bologna’s central station. The police were occasionally shooting passersby they thought were members of the Red Brigades. The fractiousness carried over into the world of entertainment. Chicago singer and guitarist David Bromberg, an excellent player whose Italian tour was organized by the same people who did ours, had to dodge paving stones hurled at the stage because he happened to be performing on the anniversary of the death of a martyred student protester. There was little room to stand back from all this.
Our tour, like the earlier one in 1978, was promoted nationally by a company called Barley Arts, run by Claudio Trotta and Ivano Amati. They were lovers of acoustic music, traditional and modern. Ivano was certain he had some Celtic blood in him. He had been active politically as a student and paid a price for it. In one demonstration he caught a cop’s rifle butt in the face, which smashed one side of his jaw and cost him a number of teeth. Though his jaw had been wired back together and his teeth fixed, he still had scars. He was wary and nervous whenever he saw uniforms.
My team consisted of band members Bob DiSalle and Dennis Pendrith plus crew members Stuart Raven-Hill, Glen MacLaren on sound, and a spunky, attractive young woman named Sue Cook on lights.
Dennis recalls that when we arrived in Italy, it was not long after the government had lifted a ban on people gathering in large groups. We caught the resulting wave of revelry. Furthermore, so many touring acts, including the Rolling Stones, had been ripped off by Italian promoters that artists had simply stopped going there. We were the first foreign band to play in Genoa in ten years. I enjoyed a rather delicious sense of teetering on the brink of chaos.
Heavily armed police lurked everywhere. The ones to fear were the Carabinieri, who were paramilitary cops somewhat analogous to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but far more military in terms of equipment and attitude. Driving out of Genoa the morning after our show, we were flagged down by a man in a well-tailored grey-green uniform. Claudio was at the wheel. He turned and in an urgent tone said, “This is very dangerous. Say nothing!” We sat in the back of the rented van, a large Fiat painted dog-vomit yellow, while our promoters got out and explained, to the four or five officers who appeared out of the bushes, the function of every piece of equipment we were carrying. All of it was laid out on the side of the road for their perusal. They got worked up over an electronic guitar tuner, which they seemed to think might be a bomb trigger. Eventually they were persuaded that our gear was what we said it was, and waved us onward. As we finall
y pulled onto the road I asked, “What if we had just kept driving and not stopped?” Ivano replied, “That,” and pointed to the shoulder fifty metres on. Over a low pile of sandbags, an additional crew of Carabinieri eyed us from behind a tripod-mounted heavy machine gun.
That episode was a strange anticlimax to the goings-on during the previous night’s dinner, which wrapped up around two in the morning. The local presenters of the concert took us to a nightclub/restaurant, the only place still open by the time we were packed up and ready to roll. We were seated at a long table down one side of a dance floor. A band played sixties Italian pop tunes, sounding like the score for a Fellini film. Three or four couples wove about the floor in various stages of inebriation. One of them consisted of a mournful-looking young man in a sailor’s uniform and an elderly woman in conservative clothing with orange-tinted curly hair. Though unsteady, they held each other with obvious passion. The tune ended, the band took a break, and the old lady led the sailor off the floor and past our table. She stopped to ask who we were. I told her, and right away she switched to English and, looking down with a wistful expression at my plate of profiteroles, said, “If only I could find a man with three . . .” Huh? What? Oh. Ah hah. Apparently quantity, not size, was what she was missing. A short while later, back on the dance floor, I watched her snatch a banana off the buffet as the two of them swept past. She hiked up her skirt and eased the banana into herself. The sailor was in for a strange night.
Many of the Italian concerts were in basketball arenas with questionable sound systems, packed with crowds of excitable patrons. We played Turin the night before a captured higher-up in the Red Brigades was due to go on trial in that city. The atmosphere was very tense. A dense fog shrouded the town, reducing visibility to a couple of yards. Soldiers in full combat gear were positioned twenty feet apart on the topmost tier of the oval indoor arena where we played. In midperformance, a half-dozen armed men appeared on the stage and started moving our equipment around. We kept playing. They focused on the drum kit. One of them shook a leather cymbal case next to Bob’s head and started shouting, but we couldn’t hear him for the racket we were making. Later we learned that someone had phoned in a bomb threat. In the end, there was no bomb, the show ended, and we packed ourselves and our gear back into the yellow diesel van and trundled off into the fog.
Rumours of Glory Page 17