Rumours of Glory
Page 27
Lovers in a dangerous time
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime —
But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight —
Got to kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
And we’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
“LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS TIME,” 1983
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/54.
All these chart numbers, like awards, mean little to me. I include them here for perspective. I wasn’t sure that the listening public would accept “Rocket Launcher.” I was afraid that if it did, I would be promoting a violent response to the violence the song deplores. During the 1983 tour of Australia, I played it backstage for Bernie before a gig in Melbourne. It was the first time I had let anyone besides Judy hear it. As Bernie remembers it in his book, “I was blown away. Hearing the line ‘Some son of a bitch would die’ took my breath away. Bruce was quite torn about whether he should even record the song and was deeply concerned about the real possibility of it being misunderstood as some kind of rallying cry, urging people to incite violence.” Common sense won out, of course. The song was honest, something the times were demanding, and self-censorship did not seem to be the right choice. Later Bernie suggested releasing “Rocket Launcher” as a single.
“You feeling all right? No radio station is going to program that song,” I said.
“We’re getting signals that they will.”
Touring with Stealing Fire was exciting. Sold-out crowds radiated enthusiasm and love. The game was on, and I got to play in a lot of new places. “Wondering Where the Lions Are” had opened doors in the United States, but now the opportunities were worldwide. It was especially gratifying to witness the effect of playing songs about Central America for our southern neighbours. U.S. alternative press outlets were small and overshadowed by the mainstream media, whose coverage of the region was shallow and misleading. There was no coverage at all of the public opposition to Reagan’s policies, which was visible everywhere, and there was no Internet. If you wanted information about American skullduggery in Central America, you had to hunt for it in such publications as Covert Action Quarterly or Soldier of Fortune. You sure couldn’t go looking in the nation’s capital: it seemed like no one in Washington was either interested in or effective at opposing the Reagan wars. We’d take the stage and crank out these songs, and you could see a developing recognition of common concern spread through the room. People who had thought they were alone in their dismay realized that they in fact had a lot of company. It was fantastic to see the muse spreading, a roomful of people literally turning to each other with a mutual understanding. These were powerful moments.
I went to considerable lengths to make sure listeners knew that the songs were not merely the product of reading and speculation. During the “Central America” part of the set, I talked almost as much as I played; I was especially concerned that audiences understand where “Rocket Launcher” was coming from. Sometimes the introduction was longer than the song. Not everyone appreciated that. Once, during a lunchtime show at a club in St. Louis, I was on a verbal jag when a young man near the stage, his table festooned with empty beer glasses, took issue. I was describing the Guatemalan refugee camps when he bellowed, “Yeah, yeah. Life’s a bitch and then you die.” I may have responded rudely.
Still, at the time I was skeptical about the ability of music to accomplish anything in a direct way. Music can have emotional impact, and it maintains an important place in the nurturing of culture and of dissent. Pinochet’s shock troops understood that when they killed Victor Jara. But a song by itself does not foment change; it is a harbinger or chronicler, a spark. Often journalists ask me, “Do you think music really changes anything, changes the world?” I’d answer, “No, I don’t. People do.”
When there is a body of popular feeling around an issue, a song can be a focusing agent, a rallying point. If it gets enough exposure, it can help spread public awareness of the issue. That’s the power music has, no more. We made a pretty good video for “Rocket Launcher.” It combined musical performance with dramatized scenes of a Central American family in flight, intercut with news footage of the war in El Salvador. The medium was new at that point, and the TV world was still trying to figure out how to profit from it. MTV gave us quite a bit of airtime, as did its Canadian counterpart, Much Music. Being on television meant I was recognized a lot more on the street, though the visibility did not imply that people were paying attention to the content. On one occasion a young guy rushed up to me, declaring how much he liked my song and the video. “Things must be really bad there in Africa!” he said.
Some people seemed mystified that such a song would even be written. More than once, in the course of an interview for radio or television, the question would be posed: “Tell me, would you say you’re a happy person?”
My little howl of outrage was noticed in Washington—by no less than Vernon Walters, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Walters was, according to the British paper The Telegraph, “thought by some to have cultivated unhealthily close ties with certain Latin American military dictatorships” and suspected of “being involved in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.” In June 1984, when things were starting to spin out of control in El Salvador—with ARENA Party presidential candidate and death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson (who had ordered the killing of Archbishop Óscar Romero) threatening to assassinate U.S. ambassador Thomas Pickering—President Reagan tapped Walters to fly to San Salvador and point out to the army major that killing Pickering would “unquestionably terminate U.S. assistance programs.” In the course of an interview with CBC Radio during the late eighties, Walters lamented that many American artists, actors, and writers had become “dupes” of the Sandinistas. “In fact,” he said, “you’ve got one of your own right there in Canada: that singer Bruce COCKburn.” I happened to be listening. Oh, the rush of pride I felt!
With the exception of “To Raise the Morning Star” and “Making Contact,” God is more implicit than explicit on Stealing Fire. Many of the songs reflect the vestigial divinity I kept finding in other people, whether in everyday encounters at home or in the drama of war zones. I had God very much in mind when I wrote “To Raise the Morning Star.” During that first Australian tour I was told about an Aboriginal custom of singing to raise the morning star. This was a literal application. Early, before dawn, people would gather and sing until the morning star lifted off the horizon. They believed that if they didn’t sing, it wouldn’t come. Back in Toronto, I stood on the roof of my Little Italy apartment and started thinking about all the people who were sleeping and dreaming, and I visualized the energy of those dreams rising skyward, sending light back at me from the cloud cover made by that energy. The light was God’s creation, just as much as the light of the morning star. The imagery and creative spark for the song came from worlds away and from right in front of me, all of it one, each part connected to the others by that unfathomable mystery that we seek, even as it fills and surrounds us.
Rising like lightspill from this sleeping town
Like the light in a lover’s eyes
Rising from the hearts of the sleepers all around
All those dreamers trying to light the sky
Burning—all night long
Burning—at the gates of dawn
Singing—near and far
Singing—to raise the morning star
Rising like lightning in the pregnant air
It’s electric—I can feel its might
I can feel it crackling in my nails and hair —
Makes me feel like I’m dancing on feet of light
Burning—all night long
Burning—at the gates of dawn
Singing—near and far
Singing for the yellow and the brown and the black
For the red and the white people, too
Dovetailing strong points with the things we lack
Singing for the people like me and you
Burning—all night long
Burning—at the gates of dawn
Singing—near and far
Singing—to raise the morning star
“TO RAISE THE MORNING STAR,” 1983
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/55.
During breaks in recording I’d scan the news for tumult, of which there was plenty. It was early 1984, when the Islamic Jihad Organization kidnapped William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, eventually killing him. Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau announced his retirement. Nokia launched what was essentially the world’s first commercially available cell phone. And Iran accused Iraq of using chemical weapons three years into their devastating eight-year war, and almost exactly twenty years before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
The Iranian charge was true: the Iraqis had used mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian soldiers and civilians, and against Iraqi Kurds. At least one million Iraqis and Iranians eventually died in the war, which raged from 1980 to 1988 and settled nothing. Where did the Iraqis get chemical weapons? The Iranian accusation came just four months after Donald Rumsfeld, President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East (and at the time a hired shill for the pharmaceutical industry), met with longtime Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, newly anointed as a U.S. ally, on December 20, 1983. (Like a dark comet, Rumsfeld would return to visit another wave of ill fortune on Iraq during the reign of President George W. Bush.) In 1982 the Reagan State Department removed Iraq from its highly selective list of “states supporting international terrorism” in order to send arms and money to Saddam for his fight against Iran. The United States had had it in for Iran since 1979, when a revolution deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who took power in a CIA-led coup in 1953 (another production of the Dulles brothers). In 1983, the United States apparently decided to give the Iraqis whatever they wanted. According to a 2009 report by The Washington Post and CBS News, “[T]he administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush both authorized providing Iraq with intelligence and logistical support, and okayed the sale of dual use items—those with military and civilian applications—that included chemicals and germs, even anthrax and bubonic plague.”
This is the real Ronald Reagan: an international gunslinger wearing a bandolier of crack vials, taking territory and scalps, trading in chemical and biological weapons with the likes of Saddam Hussein. Fifteen years before Rumsfeld first went to Iraq, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” The echoes continue to resound.
In 1985, shortly after Reagan was reelected, I gave him his own song, which appears on my 1986 album World of Wonders. “People See Through You” reached number four on the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart, which may or may not say something about Canadians. Reagan inspired the song with his sinister crackdown on the U.S. Sanctuary movement, a peaceful Christian effort involving more than five hundred churches that provided safe haven and a modern underground railroad to Canada for Central American refugees, one million of whom crossed into the United States during the 1980s to escape death in their homeland. (Canada, at the time, offered asylum to the refugees, while the United States refused on the basis that there was no war in Central America; therefore, there could be no refugees. The million just wanted to come and clean floors and bus tables. Reagan went to Canada’s new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, asking that he do something to end the embarrassing imbalance in policy between the two countries. Canada was dishearteningly quick to oblige, requiring that asylum seekers apply for refuge at the Canadian embassy in their own country instead of at the border.)
Within the United States, government agents, by way of intimidation, staged break-ins at houses of worship. Many Sanctuary leaders were arrested.
You’ve got covert action
Prejudice to extremes
You’ve got primitive cunning
And high-tech means
You’ve got eyes everywhere
But people see through you
You’ve got good manipulators
Got your store of dupes
You’ve got the idiot clamor
Of your lobby groups
You like to play on fears
But people see through you
You’ve got instant communication
Instant data tabulation
You got the forces of occupation
But you don’t get capitulation
‘Cause people see through you
You’ve got the sounding brass
You’ve got the triumph of the will
You do what you want to
And we pay the bills
You hype the need for sacrifice
But people see through you
You’ve got anti-matter language
Contrived to conceal
You’ve been lying so long
You don’t know what’s real
You’re a figment of your own imagination
And people see through you
You’ve got lip service tributaries
You’ve got death fetish mercenaries
You hold the tickets to the cemeteries
You’re big and bad and scary
But people see through you
“PEOPLE SEE THROUGH YOU,” 1985
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/56.
My travels have immeasurably informed my understanding of world events, of peoples, of the ways that rivers move through landscapes. The songs are made of these things. Without travel I could only marginally understand geopolitics, reflect on deforestation only as a concept rather than as a mountainside bleeding soil, see only in photographs the eyes of an old woman who has lived her entire life at thirteen thousand feet of elevation, who has seen ten of her thirteen children die before reaching adulthood.
Which is not to downplay the importance of reading. Like travel, writings of all stripes have fired my imagination. Reading and travel are joined at the hip. News accounts, political tracts, and even the charitable solicitations that show up in the mailbox have been crucial, as have all the poetry and prose with which I’ve seasoned my less-than-systematic mind. A fine example is Doris Lessing’s strongly allegorical sci-fi classic Shikasta, which profoundly influenced my perspective on the flow of human history. (“Of all the planets we have colonized totally or in part this is the richest,” Lessing wrote of her not-so-fictional world. “More than once the inhabitants of Shikasta have included creatures so large that one of them could consume the food and living space of hundreds of their co-inhabitants in a single meal.”) The book was a forceful read on the Playa del Inglés, on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, facing the Moroccan coast fifty salty miles east. Standing at night on the edges of the sea and star-shot space, filled with vertigo at the bigness of things, I felt the words wash in.
Stare into the moonlight
Silver fingers press my eyes
Probing in my heart with longing
These footprints by the sea’s edge
Disappearing grain by grain
Lose their form but keep their substance
And the waves roar on the beach like a squadron of F-16s
Ebb and flow like the better days they say this world has seen
Government by outrage
Hunger camps and shantytowns
Dignity and love still holding
This blue-green ball in black space
Filled with beauty even now
battered and abused and lovely
And the waves roar on the beach like a squadron of F-16s
Ebb and flow like the better days they say this world has seen
Each o
ne in our own heart
Desperate to know where we stand
Planet of the clowns in wet shoes
“PLANET OF THE CLOWNS,” 1981
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/57.
My songs tend to be triggered by whatever is in front of me, filtered through feeling and imagination. I went looking for humanity in all its guises. I wrote about what I found: the love, the meanness, the artists, the farmers, the juntas; the books, the slums, the palaces; the conflicts, the peace, the music. That’s why I don’t think of the things I write as “protest” songs. They reflect what I see and how I feel about it. The songs are not ideologically driven. They are meant not as calls to action—though if someone heard one of my songs and was inspired to help the poor or save an ecosystem, all the better—but as an attempt to share my personal response to experience with anyone who feels a resonance, or even someone who doesn’t, because life is one long conversation.
“Berlin Tonight,” the fourth track on my fifteenth album, World of Wonders, is a case in point. Stealing Fire brought me to Germany three times in nine months, and many times thereafter. Apprehension hued my first journey there. I had hitchhiked across a corner of the country in the sixties, and Bernie and I had flown to Munich once in the late seventies for a meeting with Manfred Eicher of ECM Records, but the bulk of what I “knew” about Germany derived from World War II movies and John le Carré novels. Like all of Europe, Germany is fascinating, rich in culture and history, yet it remains imbued with the shadow of the Holocaust. One afternoon during that first tour, we were sitting in a sidewalk café in Cologne when Bernie remarked, “All that stuff, you know, it happened on days like this. It happened in colour.”
The Berlin Wall was a scowling, twelve-foot-high, ninety-mile division and encirclement from the city, a dam designed to hold back the allure of Western influence from the Soviet-dominated East. In 1961 the East German government built the wall to “protect” its population from latent “fascist” elements that they said still existed in the West. In fact, people were fleeing totalitarian and impoverished East Germany in droves, so the authorities simply cut them off with a symbol so base it would be invoked for decades as a metaphor for human division.