Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  I made a particular choice in approaching the new compositions. I still started with the lyrics, at least partly developed, moving to the guitar to create an atmospheric field for the words to exist in. The melody came out of that. With the exception of a few eighties songs in which the guitar parts were kept small to allow room for keyboards and other sounds, my instrumental elements have been fairly complex. This time, I made a point of trying to create songs that would still sound intact and musical without depending on the intricacies of the guitar parts written into the songs. The idea was to make the tunes accessible to hobby guitar players who might want to play them. That became a guiding principle through the next two albums: simpler song structures that were not contingent on my not-so-simple way with the guitar.

  Somewhere in the fray, our old friend Donnie Ienner ascended to the presidency of Columbia Records. In late 1990 Bernie, through his acquaintance with Donnie (and possibly his ability to beat him at poker), landed me a distribution agreement with Columbia Records for the world outside Canada. It was a pretty good deal. Columbia insisted that the next record be recorded in the United States with a high-profile American producer. I had never recorded outside Toronto. It was time for my horizons to expand.

  After some kibitzing between me, Bernie and Ienner, and Columbia A&R man Steve Berkowitz, I met with two candidates who had expressed interest in the project. The first was Scott Litt, producer for the band R.E.M., who liked my music. Scott was a good candidate and probably would have worked out well, but I wanted to meet the other prospect before making a choice; some intuition whispered that I ought to keep looking.

  The other producer whose name had been on everyone’s list was T Bone Burnett. Even at that time, before the massive success of the 2000 soundtrack album O Brother Where Art Thou and his music direction for the 2012 box-office blockbuster The Hunger Games, T Bone was an industry icon. Prior to our meeting, he had produced pioneering albums by Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Roy Orbison, and Sam Phillips, his wife at the time. Earlier in his career, T Bone had excelled as a talented session player and touring guitarist, with standout performances as a sideman in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. I had known of him in the seventies as a member of the quirky, writing-heavy Rolling Thunder spin-off called the Alpha Band.

  We first met in a somewhat sterile conference room in the looming black Manhattan office building that houses Columbia Records. A finely tailored black suit draped his imposingly tall frame. T Bone spoke with Texan courtliness but projected a clear assumption that he was in command of his environment. He had about him an intriguing intensity and a penetrating intelligence, along with the faintest whiff of a cruel streak held in check by moral resolve. He’d listened closely to the demo we had sent him, and his comments reflected the wisdom of a seasoned professional, someone with an ear for detail and a deep knowledge of how music is made, especially in the studio.

  T Bone Burnett comes with a large pool of highly skilled players from which he can draw, especially in the roots idiom. As we talked, I got the feeling that I was standing on the shore of a new country waiting to be explored. We had found our producer.

  Our second meeting was a brainstorming session at a hotel in Los Angeles in advance of heading into the studio to begin making what would become my sixteenth studio album, Nothing but a Burning Light. T Bone suggested a possible cast of players. The list of names set me to laughing with delight and a slight sense of disbelief. T. Bone said, “We could get Ringo to play drums.”

  “Ringo Starr?”

  “Sure.”

  Ringo turned out to be unavailable, but the next suggestion was even better: Jim Keltner, “the leading session drummer in America,” in the words of Bob Dylan biographer Howard Sounes. Keltner had recorded with three of the former Beatles: John, George, and, interestingly, Ringo. (Among their collaborations: Ringo and Keltner were the drummers at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.) An idiosyncratic and very musical player, Keltner had contributed to many of the best records made in the preceding couple of decades. We asked him and he said yes, but T Bone felt that we would want something different for a couple of the songs, which called for a more rigid, metronomic style than Keltner’s. After some searching, he came up with a dynamic young rock drummer by the name of Denny Fongheiser.

  Bassist Michael Been, fresh from his notable success with his band the Call, rounded out the rhythm section. (Been died of a massive heart attack in 2010. He was sixty years old.) In addition to Michael’s electric bass, we got Edgar Meyer on upright acoustic. He is a supremely talented classical bassist from Nashville who appears as a soloist with major symphonies all over the world. He has played with Béla Fleck, Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, Alison Krauss, and T Bone himself. Edgar’s chunky rhythm part moves under “A Dream Like Mine” like a shifting tectonic plate, pushing the whole track before it. He’s a perfectionist. Once we spent most of a day fixing one of his bass parts. It sounded good to me the first time, but he kept hearing flaws in the rhythmic placement of some notes: “Oh no, that note’s out of sync.” So he’d return to the studio, where the engineer would ask him to play along so he could punch in the replacement note. This was before the sleight of hand of Pro Tools. It was all tape, so it took time. The result: an uplifted and unstoppable groove.

  When T Bone produces an album, he likes to pair the artist with a “foil,” someone to play off, a presence whose sound complements and also creates a dynamic tension with that of the main player. So that was our next question: Who would be the foil? What other instrument would it be on the album? We decided on organ, and T Bone said, “Let’s get Booker T.” I was seventeen years old when Booker T. & the M.G.’s released their 1962 hit “Green Onions.” That record sent shock waves through the tiny community of teen guitar players I knew. The groove was as deep as Lake Superior, as unstoppable as a train. Steve Cropper’s guitar sound had a visceral quality that had never been heard on Ottawa’s airwaves.

  When we met, Booker told me that he had also been seventeen when that song came out. We were the same age. His ethereally melodic and sensitive playing provided the perfect foil for my sound. Like all the players, he was professional and warm. The respect they showed for my songs touched and honoured me, and in turn pushed me to a new standard, especially with respect to rhythm.

  Rounding out the album were appearances by Mark O’Connor on violin; Michael Blair and Ralph Forbes on percussion; a bass part by Larry Klein on “Mighty Trucks of Midnight”; backing vocals and some guitar work by the legendary singer-songwriter Jackson Browne; and vocals by Sam Phillips, whose music I knew through our mutual friend Dan Russell. It was Sam and T Bone who picked me up at LAX when I dropped into that blue-grey town on a lovely spring day in 1991. Sam was a charming and delightful presence, in and out of the studio.

  I had met Jackson in 1986, when the Christic Institute was pursuing a lawsuit against Oliver North and others involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Iran-Contra is one of those typically massive but little appreciated American scandals that was itself connected to another scandal, the suitcase-bombing of a 1984 press conference hosted by Nicaraguan Contra leader Edén Pastora at his hideout on the Nicaragua–Costa Rica border. Four people, including journalists, were killed, and a number of others were wounded.

  Jackson and his then girlfriend, the actress Daryl Hannah, were hosting a benefit party at their house in Santa Monica to raise money for the lawsuit, and I was invited because of the Central American content on Stealing Fire. The actor Ed Asner was present, along with Jane Fonda and maybe a dozen other left-leaning Hollywood luminaries. Christic Institute lawyer Danny Sheehan spoke passionately about the cause, as did plaintiffs Tony Avirgan, a reporter who had been badly injured in the bombing, and his wife, fellow journalist Martha Honey.

  When Bernie and I rang at the big wooden door, Daryl answered, every bit as attractive as she appeared on screen. I said, “It’s great to meet you; I’ve enjoyed you in so many movies.” Then Jackson popped up behind her shoulder. I
couldn’t give him equivalent praise because I really didn’t know his music, but he’d heard me compliment Daryl. It was an awkward moment, which they both graciously ignored. Later I got to know more of Jackson and his music, and developed a deep appreciation for his talent and his heart. During the 1970s he was a leading anti-nuclear activist. In 1979 he cofounded (along with Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, Graham Nash, and Harvey Wasserman) the anti-nuclear group Musicians United for Safe Energy, which remains active today. Later he became a vocal opponent of the U.S.-backed wars in Central America and expanded his ongoing support for Native American rights.

  The next time I met Jackson was in July 1989 at the Pahá Sápa Festival in Rapid City, South Dakota. Jackson co-organized the event, along with the Lakota people of the area, as a fund-raiser for a Native-run radio station and an alcohol treatment program on the Pine Ridge reservation. They also wanted to spotlight Native attempts to regain legal control of sacred lands in the Black Hills, which was originally ceded to the Indians in two government treaties that the United States violated once gold was found in the region. (Pahá Sápa is Lakota for “Black Hills.”)

  The Pahá Sápa Festival featured an outstanding lineup of artists: Neil Young, Willie Nelson, John Trudell, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Floyd Westerman, Buddy Red Bow, Timbuk3, and a number of traditional Native performers. Of course Jackson himself played, along with multi-instrumentalist David Lindley. One of the MCs was Wavy Gravy, who filled the dressing room he and I shared with so much smoldering sage I could hardly breathe. The other MC was Catherine Bach, who happens to be Native American and who was famous for playing the hot babe on The Dukes of Hazzard television program. It was at this concert that, for the first and only time, I asked for someone’s autograph. My mother was a fan of Willie Nelson, so I lined up with the folks and asked him to sign one of his albums for her. He wrote: “To Lois, Love Willie.”

  Jackson Browne made that festival happen, and he put on a very strong performance, but he did more than that. The day after the gig, I went to the Native radio station, KILI, for an on-air performance. The studio was crammed with crates of CDs. The manager told me that Jackson had turned up a couple of days earlier in a brand-new SUV loaded with what must have been thousands of records and had given them to the station as a gift. He also left them the vehicle. No fanfare, no PR, no photo op—he just did it and left. He never said a thing about it to me or to anyone else, as far as I know; I heard the story only because the station staff was fizzing with excitement about it.

  After Pahá Sápa, I worked with Jackson a few more times. At the end of 1990, he helped bring my year away from gigs to a close by inviting me to perform at some other events dedicated to progressive causes. In December I played, along with Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, John Trudell, Kris Kristofferson, and others, at a show in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee. Also that month, I was part of Jackson’s gig in Mesa, Arizona, in support of the Don’t Waste Arizona campaign, which was aimed at halting the construction of a toxic waste incinerator.

  Jackson also created the annual Verde Valley Music Festival, outside Sedona, Arizona. He organized the event as a benefit for Verde Valley School, a private school his son attended. The school asked him to headline a fund-raiser, but he insisted that it had to be about something more than funding a prep school for rich white kids. The result was a scholarship program for Native American students. Over several years, under the desert sun, I got to play alongside Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, the Indigo Girls, Lyle Lovett, Shawn Colvin, and of course Jackson himself, among many others. I have played a lot of festivals through the years, but these were among the best.

  A fringe benefit of playing the Verde Valley Music Festival was that the school had a fine stable of horses. The first time I went, after a day of air travel, I arrived after 11 P.M. As we were loading my gear into the motel, someone asked me, “You want to go riding?” Half an hour later, I was in the saddle on a pale quarter horse as it picked its way across a moon-washed desert landscape so surreal it could have been the road to heaven.

  Jackson might have just called it a road. Of the artists involved in recording Nothing but a Burning Light, he was somewhat of an outlier because he was one of the few who did not identify as Christian. He and I mostly talked politics.

  With T Bone, things were different. He was drawn to work on the album at least partly because of the spiritual content of the songs. His casting suggestions suited that side of things. God had maintained a low profile on my eighties albums, though not in my heart, and as I emerged from that decade it seemed time to invite the Divine back into my music. I’ve already mentioned “One of the Best Ones.” It was followed by “Somebody Touched Me,” a simple song about a sudden awareness of spirit sneaking up on you. (“I know you’re with me / Whatever I go through / Somebody touched me / I know it was you.”)

  The title Nothing but a Burning Light was derived from a line in Blind Willie Johnson’s song “Soul of a Man” (b.hc.com/s/70), recorded by him in 1930, which I have loved since I first heard it in the sixties. Sometime during the following decade, I worked out a version of it using a C tuning on the guitar. It doesn’t sound much like Blind Willie, but I think it stays true to the spirit of the song. When I went over the list of material with T Bone before recording, he asked if I had anything else I wanted to run by him—older stuff or perhaps a tune by someone else. I had almost never recorded a song I didn’t write, but “Soul of a Man” immediately came to mind. It’s an intense and soulful piece, a perfect fit for the tenor of the album. “Soul of a Man” also reflected a place I had reached at that time, its basic premise and its reference to travel resonating even more than when I was first captivated by the original recording.

  I’ve travelled different countries

  Travelled to the furthest lands

  Couldn’t find nobody could tell me

  What is the soul of a man. . . .

  I read the Bible often

  I try to read it right

  As far as I can understand

  It’s nothing but a burning light.

  The tune itself was necessarily lean, and we performed it as a trio. I wanted an effect that suggested people playing on the street. I played my metal-body Dobro, Keltner played drums and a wonderful washboard, and Michael Been played bass.

  The song on Nothing but a Burning Light that I most enjoyed writing was “Cry of a Tiny Babe,” my attempt to retell the Christmas story in something like modern dress. The Holy Spirit gets Mary pregnant, and of course Joseph is skeptical, suspicious, and hurt; the Magi’s visit inadvertently results in the massacre of innocents, and it unfolds like a spaghetti western; the central message of the spirit is freely, but only, available to the humble. I wanted to put recognizable flesh on mythic and biblical bones. The Blessed Virgin, for example, as worshipped in the modern world, bears little resemblance to any Jewish woman I’ve ever known. (Jesus is looking pretty Anglo these days, too.) It felt good to honour the feminine roots of divinity, an element that has been mostly squeezed out of the narrative. Once you get to the core of the story, you basically have the Goddess giving birth to a Divine being, sending ripples endlessly through time.

  Mary grows a child without the help of a man

  Joseph gets upset because he doesn’t understand

  Angel comes to Joseph in a powerful dream

  Says, “God did this and you’re part of his scheme”

  Joseph comes to Mary with his hat in his hand

  Says, “Forgive me I thought you’d been with some other man”

  She says, “What if I had been—but I wasn’t anyway and guess what

  I felt the baby kick today”

  The child is born in the fullness of time

  Three wise astrologers take note of the signs

  Come to pay their respects to the fragile little king

  Get pretty close to wrecking everything

  ’Cause the governing body of t
his holy land

  Is that of Herod, a paranoid man

  Who when he hears there’s a baby born King of the Jews

  Sends death squads to kill all male children under two

  But that same bright angel warns the parents in a dream

  And they head out for the border and get away clean

  There are others who know about this miracle birth

  The humblest of people catch a glimpse of their worth

  For it isn’t to the palace that the Christ child comes

  But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums

  And the message is clear if you have ears to hear

  That forgiveness is given for your guilt and your fear

  It’s a Christmas gift that you don’t have to buy

  There’s a future shining in a baby’s eyes

  Like a stone on the surface of a still river

  Driving the ripples on forever

  Redemption rips through the surface of time

  In the cry of a tiny babe

  “CRY OF A TINY BABE,” 1990

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/71.

  There’s another origin story on Nothing but a Burning Light, this one of a more recent provenance, a tale that seemed to require exploding rather than honouring. In America’s mostly mythical history of its “taming” of the west, the explorer Kit Carson comes out a hero, one of the good guys opening a vast, rich land, wasted on its original inhabitants, to the benevolence of ranchers, bankers, and sod busters. I had seen that version portrayed in the old TV westerns when I was a kid. In Arizona, though, I heard a performance by a Native American satirist named Bob Morning Sky. He painted a different picture, one of Kit Carson as a devious mountebank who befriended the Navajo—or Diné, as they call themselves—who came to trust him to the point of revealing the whereabouts of their villages and waterholes. Carson repaid their trust by guiding the U.S. cavalry in an apocalyptic campaign of conquest. Wells were poisoned, villages burnt, and the Navajo forcibly relocated away from their traditional lands. A great many died. This pattern was repeated in wars against other tribes, such as the Kiowa and Comanche. Of course, Kit Carson was just one of thousands of self-interested opportunists who plundered Native lands and peoples over generations, but he made himself ripe for the role of archetype. The Diné perspective on his legend cried out for a song. The music is simple and bluesy.