Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  The congress was held in a monastery on the outskirts of Santiago. We attended meetings, which were translated, and offered what moral support we could. Our three-nation group devised a statement to be delivered to our artist brethren in Chile, a draft of which said:

  We face, instead of an all-too-visible military dictatorship, an invisible and all-pervasive enemy in the form of the institutionalized economic repression on which our society is based, and the complacency that results from it. We don’t mean to make light of the horrors you have faced for the past ten years. While you carry on a process that is so auspiciously beginning here, we hope we can work from the other end to alter our own system and lighten the burden it places on you. Tell us how we can help you. Be patient with us, for we are not a heartless people. The reality of your lives, or the effects of our way of life on them, are perceived and understood by only a few of us. This is why we’re here. The world needs the example of the social experiments precariously taking place in Nicaragua. It needs your example of the power of artists and workers of all kinds.

  There was music every night, from us and from the Chileans. At that time “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” was still a new song for me—we hadn’t recorded it yet—but I figured it might have some meaning for these folks, and for the DINA spies who undoubtedly attended every gathering. The way the song is structured, there is ample room between lines for translation. A Chilean singer performed the song with me, reciting the lyrics in Spanish line by line. In this fashion we delivered the song to six hundred people seated on folding chairs in a large room in the monastery. The atmosphere was charged. When we got to “some son of a bitch would die,” the translator thrust his fist in the air and shouted the line, and the crowd erupted. They could relate. It was a standout moment, a once-in-a-lifetime rush of human coalescence and expanded meaning.

  The next day we visited one of the hundreds of squatter communities that surrounded Santiago. The structures there were technically illegal but obviously were not going anywhere. People in the shanties were far better off than the Guatemalan refugees I’d visited earlier in the year, but there was a similar feeling of desperation because the Chileans too faced daily hunger, and there was a feeling of permanence to the poverty and privation as well. In Mexico many of the refugees believed that someday they would return home. The Chileans were home.

  In these communities, thousands of people lived in makeshift shelters of all sorts. They accessed water by digging up and breaking into municipal water mains, and they stole electricity by hijacking it off the power lines. When visiting people in their tents, I’d duck nervously away from insecure webs of wire filament. Lightbulbs hung here and there. The residents had built a small stage, where I sang “The Blues Got the World by the Balls.” I could offer only one line in Spanish, the title, “El Blues Tiene el Mundo por los Cojones,” which got a laugh. They knew exactly what that song was about.

  The squatter communities, or poblaciónes, were estimated to house a million souls in total and were an embarrassment to the government. They were also places of anti-establishment ferment, which the authorities feared. The community we visited had recently been raided by the army, a periodic occurrence designed to keep the oppressed population in its place. This time, though, the inhabitants had been ready. By night they prepared stacks of tires that could be quickly moved into place. When the military began its dawn house-to-house sweep, the residents used the tires to barricade the streets, then torched them and trapped the invaders in a fuselage of rocks that were also stockpiled in advance. The soldiers, seriously outnumbered and soon bloodied, were forced to withdraw in disarray. The people had in effect defeated the army, and they were very proud of that. That they had gotten away with it seemed to suggest that after ten years, the dictatorship was beginning to weaken. Certainly, many members of the middle class who had supported the coup out of fear of Communism had seen the error of their ways, as they watched their well-being slip away.

  Something moves in the still dark hours

  Sunday in a shantytown

  Eyelids open two by two

  But not a single light goes on

  Tension builds as the only sound

  Is the quiet clash of metal and boots

  And now and then an order barked

  At the bullies in the drab green suits

  Military thugs with their dogs and clubs

  Spreading through the población

  Hunting whoever still has a voice

  Sure that everyone will run

  They come in strong but it’s not that long

  Before they know it’s not so easy to leave

  To keep a million homeless down takes more

  Than a strong arm up your sleeve

  At the crack of dawn the first door goes down

  Snapped off a makeshift frame

  In a matter of minutes the first rock flies

  Barricades burst into flame

  First mass rings through smoke and gas

  Day flowers out of the night

  Creatures of the dark in disarray

  Fall before the morning light

  Bells of rage—bells of hope

  As the ten-year night wears down

  Sisters and brothers are coming home

  To see the Santiago dawn

  Santiago sunrise

  See them marching home

  See them rising like grass through cement

  In the Santiago dawn

  I got a dream and I’m not alone

  Darkness dead and gone

  All the people marching home

  Kissing the rush of dawn

  Santiago sunrise

  See them marching home

  See them rising like grass through cement

  In the Santiago dawn

  “SANTIAGO DAWN,” 1983

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/52.

  By the time we got to Chile, hundreds or even thousands of Chileans were gathering downtown every day to protest what was being done to them, to their country. And it wasn’t just the poor. Teenage boys in ratty Coca-Cola shirts stood alongside schoolteachers and people in business attire, all hurling stones. An armoured bus loaded with riot cops sat on every second corner in the downtown area, so there was always a quick response. Police had helmets, truncheons, and gas grenades; protesters wielded rocks and bottles. Soon came the taunting chant: “Ay! Ay! Que calor! El guanaco por favor!” (“Hey, hey, it’s so hot, the water cannon please!”) The guanaco is an Andean relative of the alpaca and llama known for spitting at the unwary, an apt nickname for the lumbering machine. Sure enough, out would come the armoured vehicle shooting high-powered jets of water, and there would go protesters rolling like melons down the street.

  As a songwriter newly attuned to political subject matter, I came away from Chile with altered assumptions about the relationship between creative expression and politics. The unexamined notion that art must remain “pure,” untainted by the political, had already been shaken by my experiences in Italy, and of course in Central America. In the sophisticated Latin American setting of Chile I understood that the distinction was specious, that politics actually demanded art. In Chile I found popular acceptance of songwriting that focused on social and political issues. I began to understand that if an artist’s job is to distill the human experience into something that can be shared, then the political, as much a part of that experience as God or sex or alienation, deserved to be seen as raw material. The arts contribute significantly to social movements and cultural cohesion. This wasn’t something I encountered much in Canada, though I could see that even Canadians might someday require singers and painters and street theatre to help define and translate current events as a means of resisting authority—a premise that may seem absurd, given Canada’s humble stability, but then few people anticipated a military coup in Chile, a nation that had run on democratic principles since achieving independence from Spain in 1844. Artists can help clarify confusing events an
d herald the vanguard’s solutions. Artists inspire and inform. A song can be a rallying point around which popular feeling can galvanize. Pinochet’s people had put serious thought into whom to round up once they took over, and artists were at the top of the list.

  On December 27, 2012, Chilean judge Miguel Vásquez charged eight former Chilean soldiers, including two officers, with the murder of Victor Jara. Naturally one of those charged, Pedro Barrientos, was living in comfort in Florida, and at this writing the Chilean authorities were attempting to have him extradited. (Pinochet died in Chile in 2006 without ever being prosecuted for his crimes.)

  Legendary Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda, who had supported socialist platforms and candidates since the 1940s, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, said in his acceptance speech, “A poet is at the same time a force for solidarity and for solitude.” When Pinochet’s secret police raided Neruda’s home a few days after the coup, he said to them, “Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.”

  Maybe the poet is gay

  But he’ll be heard anyway

  Maybe the poet is drugged

  But he won’t stay under the rug

  Maybe the voice of the spirit

  In which case you’d better hear it

  Maybe he’s a woman

  Who can touch you where you’re human

  Male female slave or free

  Peaceful or disorderly

  Maybe you and he will not agree

  But you need him to show you new ways to see

  Don’t let the system fool you

  All it wants to do is rule you

  Pay attention to the poet

  You need him and you know it

  Put him up against the wall

  Shoot him up with Pentothal

  Shoot him up with lead

  You won’t call back what’s been said

  Put him in the ground

  But one day you’ll look around

  There’ll be a face you don’t know

  Voicing thoughts you’ve heard before

  “MAYBE THE POET,” 1982

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/53.

  Where was God in all of this? That nagging question came up in Chile, as it has in many times and places since the 1970s, as I’ve hovered around the bizarre cruelties of man.

  14

  In the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, the heroic Titan steals fire from the gods and shares it with humanity, thereby weakening the Olympians’ hold over us. The tale seemed a workable metaphor for the way some struggles, like that of Nicaragua, can become beacons for oppressed people everywhere. The Powers That Be always exact a terrible price for noncompliance. Prometheus was condemned to spend eternity chained spread-eagled to a rock. Daily, an eagle would swoop down and rip out his liver, which grew back each night, just as every day Nicaraguans were met with harassment and war for having pried loose the grip of the gods of commerce.

  Aside: Once the Sandinista revolution and social programs were halted by the 1990 election, the gods could get back to their important work, which at this writing includes plans for an alternate waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In June 2013 the Nicaraguan government approved a fifty-year concession for a Hong Kong company to build and run this new canal, which would be three times longer than the Panama Canal and accommodate Triple-E ships, which hold four times as much cargo as the biggest vessels that can fit through the Panama Canal. It’s the old Cornelius Vanderbilt dream of a Nicaraguan canal, writ large. The ripples of stones in that water will be felt for generations.

  We recorded my thirteenth studio album, Stealing Fire, at Manta Sound in Toronto in March and April 1984, where we made all of my eighties records as well as Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws. For this record I put together a new band. I wanted less subtlety and more rock and roll from the drums, but a feel for Third World rhythms was also important. Ottawa drummer Miche Pouliot played beautifully and injected tasty blues and reggae rhythms, though more than once I’ve regretted replacing jazz drummer Bob DiSalle, who was such a great and loyal performer on the previous six albums and on tour. Chi Sharpe added West African percussion, and Hugh’s brother Fergus Jemison Marsh took over on bass.

  Fergus also played the Chapman Stick, an exotic ten-stringed instrument invented by musician Emmett Chapman. Its range combines that of the bass and the guitar. It is played by tapping the strings against the fretboard with the fingers of both hands. I wanted to explore the sonic possibilities the stick and the guitar might produce together. It is very difficult to play, requiring a frightening level of independence between the left and right hands, but Fergus plunged in with great fervor and came up with interwoven parts that brought the music to life. As we dug deeper into the songs, he became a true master. Our guitar-stick rapport formed the basis of four albums and hundreds of concerts during the eighties. (The virtuosity of Ferg’s stick work is particularly noticeable on the 1990 album Live.)

  I enlisted Jonathan Goldsmith and Kerry Crawford to produce Stealing Fire (Jon also played keyboards), a change from Gene Martynec, who produced twelve of my first thirteen records. By the early eighties Gene was shifting his focus to electronic music and film scores, which he still does, and I was ready for something new. There was a certain irony in the fact that Jon and Kerry had become successful producing . . . TV jingles! Let Stealing Fire, then, be the anti-jingle. As a team, Jon and Kerry were highly skilled elicitors and weavers of sound.

  Now and then my dad used to accuse me of being “anti-American.” He thought it unseemly to be critical of a friend and neighbour. My response was that the only place anyone ever calls me anti-American is in Canada. What I get from most Americans is tolerance, sometimes empathy, often a good debate. It’s true that some radio personality once refused to play “Call It Democracy,” calling the song “un-American,” and certainly there’s more where that came from. Overall, though, Americans have a capacity for self-criticism that may not be obvious when viewed from the outside, but is clear when you’re in country. It’s one of the nation’s great strengths. A lot of societies don’t have such open discourse. That’s what makes it particularly tragic to see the Tea Party or its ilk polarizing things the way they do. They nurture discord and divisiveness, those well-broken-in tools so useful for controlling people and for getting money out of them. It’s disaster capitalism with a big banner and bombast. But the potential for genuine dissent and critical dialogue was built into the birth of the country and still runs strong.

  I hadn’t thought much about this capacity for healthy disputation until the release of Stealing Fire, my most “political” record up to that time and the one that initiated an affair with the United States that continues to this day. “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” reached the top ten of album-oriented rock FM playlists in the States, and number eighty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Once that happened I toured all over the States, where a world of friends and music quickly revealed itself.

  The Germans, too, particularly liked that song, which is one of three on the album about Central America, along with “Dust and Diesel” and “Nicaragua.” All of a sudden I found myself touring Europe regularly, especially Germany, which had the added benefit of producing fodder for the next few albums as well. I had a German fan base before Stealing Fire, mostly Christians, people who liked “Lord of the Starfields,” but it was small and I wasn’t much aware of it. Stealing Fire quickly sold seventy thousand copies in Germany—not an avalanche compared with superstar numbers, but significant for me.

  More so, though, it was Americans who were drawn to these songs. Under the Reagan administration, arms and “advisors” were being shipped to Central America and cocaine was being shipped back to the United States. U.S.-promoted wars against the poor of the region were well understood. The Vietnam generation watched a familiar scenario unfolding, and a college-age crowd suddenly understood what their parents had been talking about. That late
in the Cold War game, and on turf so close to home, the fact that U.S. involvement was all about business was transparently clear. The significant minority of Americans who recoiled from what they saw their government doing were almost completely without representation in public media. In a small way Stealing Fire told listeners that their outrage was justified, that they were not alone.

  In Canada, “Rocket Launcher” reached just forty-nine on the RPM chart, the equivalent of the Billboard Hot 100, whereas the album’s leadoff song, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” hit number twenty-four (and number eight on the Adult Contemporary chart). “Lovers” also ranked number eleven on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2005 compilation of the “fifty most essential songs in Canadian pop music history.” It was actually slated to be the single from the album, the one we would push in America, but that song didn’t get nearly the same attention from U.S. radio. (It did get some notice, though. Bono quoted it in the U2 song “God Part II”: “Heard a singer on the radio late last night / Says he’s gonna kick the darkness til it bleeds daylight.”)

  Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by

  You never get to stop and open your eyes

  One day you’re waiting for the sky to fall

  The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all

  When you’re lovers in a dangerous time

  Lovers in a dangerous time

  These fragile bodies of touch and taste

  This vibrant skin—this hair like lace

  Spirits open to the thrust of grace

  Never a breath you can afford to waste

  When you’re lovers in a dangerous time