And the president said to Kit Carson:
“Take my best four horsemen please
And ride out to the four directions,
Make my great lands barren for me”
Kit Carson said to the president
“You’ve made your offer sweet
I’ll accept this task you’ve set for me
My fall’s not yet complete”
Kit Carson knew he had a job to do
Like other jobs he’d had before
He’d made the grade
He’d learned to trade in famine, pestilence, and war
Kit Carson was a hero to some
With his poison and his flame
But somewhere there’s a restless ghost
That used to bear his name
“KIT CARSON,” 1990
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/72.
Recording Nothing but a Burning Light reinforced for me the idea that musicians of huge talent can, and should, go deep into a song without taking it over, adding touches of brilliance and meaning without needing to stand out—which is part of what it means to be a session player at that level. To corral such talent and, in our case, enthusiasm into a singular musical entity takes a producer of taste, discernment, and instinct, which is T Bone Burnett. With him at the helm, everything rolled into place like the ball in a roulette wheel.
Of course, like everyone, the man has two sides (or more). If he has an opinion about something, you are going to know it soon enough. We went through the ingredients of that album with a microscope, making sure each was what we wanted. That was the Burnett way of doing things. If a song doesn’t come out the way he thinks it should, he’ll insist on redoing it or throwing it out. He would call me on the music and even the lyrics. Of “Indian Wars,” for example, which includes the phrases “A few woolly sheep . . . A few dozen survivors . . . A few simple people,” he commented, “There are a lot of ‘fews’ in there; are you sure you want that, or is it lazy songwriting?” T Bone’s input was always worth considering. I thought about it and decided it wasn’t laziness; I just liked it that way. I thought the “fews” rolled nicely over and around each other.
No doubt some songwriters would have said, “Who cares? It’s a good tune; leave it alone.” But to respond to T Bone like that would be to waste a valuable resource. He’s too good. His listening skills, his deep experience in the studio, and his sense of what is essential in a song are too acute. He’s hearing the slender nuances from each player and combining them into a whole and compelling sound that elicits the best from each musician’s individual contributions.
From the start, T Bone emphasized that everything that went onto the tape should be there in service to the spirit of the song. If there was something extraneous in there, he wanted it taken out. That’s the leanness people hear in his work. There’s no grandstanding. If something flashy shows up on the record, you can bet that it’s there for a reason, that T Bone has studied it. He’s not necessarily concerned with limiting flash, technique, or complexity, but the spirit has to be front and centre. I found this aspect of working with him refreshing and educational, and I would take these lessons into future recordings.
Making the album was a joy, though it wasn’t always smooth. At one point T Bone became frustrated with a couple of tracks that weren’t gelling the way he imagined they should. He waxed peevish when “Indian Wars” balked at coming to life for us. The song was inspired in part by events at Big Mountain, in the Hopi part of Arizona. Traditional people had been forced off their pastures and into suburban slums because they were in the way of the exploitation of fossil fuel resources by Peabody Coal, a company with a long and unsavory history in the region. We were recording “Indian Wars” with the whole band, but T Bone didn’t like what he was hearing and thought maybe we should just abandon it. I was attached to the song, though, and wasn’t going to discard it. Jackson Browne had come in to overdub harmony vocals, so he was on hand as T Bone fretted over our inability to get it right. Finally he sighed and said to Jackson and me, “Why don’t you guys just go in there with guitars and play the thing?” Sounded good to me. Jackson picked up my Dobro and started playing a Mexican rhythmic strum that fit well against my pseudo-fifties rock feel. Mark O’Connor joined in with his violin, and we played the song live as a trio. It worked very well.
Out in the desert where the wind never stops
A few simple people try to grow a few crops
Trying to maintain a life and a home
On land that was theirs before the Romans thought of Rome
A few dozen survivors, ragged but proud
With a few woolly sheep, under gathering cloud
It’s never been easy, or free from strife
But the pulse of the land is the pulse of their life
You thought it was over but it’s just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?
It’s not breech-loading rifles and wholesale slaughter
It’s kickbacks and thugs and diverted water
Treaties get signed and the papers change hands
But they might as well draft these agreements in sand
Noble Savage on the cinema screen
An Indian’s good when he cannot be seen
And the so-called white so-called race
Digs for itself a pit of disgrace
You thought it was over but it’s just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?
“INDIAN WARS,” 1990
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/73.
The album’s leadoff tune, “A Dream Like Mine,” came out of an invitation Jonathan Goldsmith and I received from a Canadian film company to compose music for their feature. The movie was based on a novel of that title by M. T. Kelly, which imagines the return of a mythic culture hero who sets out to rescue aboriginal forest dwellers from the predations of the timber industry, seeking a return of the land to its sacred status. The song, in turn, attempts to honour the spiritual connection to the land that Native North Americans have always embraced, a dedication that might save humanity and the ongoing biological functionality of the planet if enough of us follow suit.
At our first meeting the film director gave us a synopsis of the plot, and that alone was enough to trigger the song despite the absence of a single frame of film. It was an exciting project, but the chemistry between Jon and the filmmaker got strange. The guy had a somewhat unpleasant demeanor, anyway. It did not come as a shock when we found ourselves dumped from the film without his even having heard the song.
When you’ve got a dream like mine
Nobody can take you down
When you’ve got a dream like mine
Nobody can push you around
Today I dream of how it used to be
Things were different before
Picture shifts to how it’s going to be
Balance restored
When you know even for a moment
That it’s your time
Then you can walk with the power
Of a thousand generations
Beautiful rocks—beautiful grass
Beautiful soil where they both combine
Beautiful river—covering sky
Never thought of possession, but all this was mine
When you know even for a moment
That it’s your time
Then you can walk with the power
Of a thousand generations
When you’ve got a dream like mine. . .
“A DREAM LIKE MINE,” 1990
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/74.
18
T Bone expressed a strong preference for recording the album in Los Angeles. This I happily agreed to. After twenty years of making records in Toronto, I felt ready for a change. New vistas seemed to be waiting just over the horizon. L.A. was an unknown, though I had had repeated momentary exposures to it.
It turned out to be surprisingly likable. Something about it felt like a place I had always known. Right away I was drawn in by the throbbing cultural nexus that didn’t seem burdened by the somber, edge-of-Armageddon moodiness I felt in New York.
L.A. is, of course, plastic surgery central. The whole place lives on concealment of its true character. It’s a desert, but wherever you look is greenery, including majestic imported palms. It’s a hub of finance, yet vast areas of miserable poverty dubiously contrast with the most outrageous excesses. It has a river, but it’s a glorified storm sewer. It has a downtown, but you seldom get to see it unless you’re standing inside the smog screen. Its atmosphere is mellow and friendly, but there’s a big boot heel lurking in the haze, waiting to crush the fingers of desperate climbers who slip while trying to make it to the top of the Hollywood heap.
It would take almost three months to record Nothing but a Burning Light, so at T Bone’s suggestion and Columbia’s expense, I rented a little suite at the Shangri-La Hotel in Santa Monica, an art deco gem built in 1939 for the Hollywood crowd and set across Ocean Avenue from a bluff overlooking the pier and the Pacific. My balcony, however, faced the other direction, with a fine view of a multi-story parking garage that served the Third Street Promenade. The muted freeway roar and the cries of wheeling gulls harmonized with the endless echoing of car alarms.
I had performed in LA dozens of times but had never actually stuck around for more than a day or so, so had never really gotten a good feel for the place. The city I discovered during the summer of 1991 was much prettier and more interesting than the stereotype. The people were predictably pretty as well, unexpectedly welcoming, affable, and engaging. I thought I could make friends in LA, maybe develop lasting, growing relationships with new acquaintances who had similar interests but different experiences. All that cosmetic surgery lets you forget you’re in a big city that runs on lust for gold.
What I came to understand—and I’ve heard similar tales from others who have spent time in Southern California—is that the warmth went only so far. There was little depth to the friendships. Maybe it was my own outsider nature, but I came away feeling that some people I had assumed were close friends, people who would have my back if I needed them, weren’t and wouldn’t. They treated me well, but in the end, with some standout exceptions, I felt I couldn’t count on them. Maybe it takes one to know one, but life didn’t go very deep for me in LA, or if it did it wasn’t so nice. Over time, the charm of the place lost its power, though I still enjoy going there.
Besides the people I was directly involved with, there was another welcoming individual, a woman I met through mutual friends. She was graceful and intelligent, quietly spiritual, dark-haired, with a classy sense of style, a sharp sense of humour, and a gift for painting cleverly ironic pictures of the human world. She was trying to escape the apparent dead-end that her choices had led her into. As was I, though I had not articulated the fact to myself.
I have a keen appreciation of physical beauty. I respond to the same kinds of visual and chemical stimuli as other males of my species. I am not a womanizer, much as I might envy those who wear the label. Throughout my life, loyalty and commitment and the fear of causing pain have always trumped desire. I never imagined myself having an affair. But this woman—whom I will call Madame X—came into my life like lightning that set ablaze everything I thought I’d known. At first I assumed her marriage was healthy and none of my business, but as we got to know each other over a relatively short time, I learned that she longed for something that she wasn’t getting from her husband: maybe space in which to grow, maybe a balanced and solid commitment, love without ownership. This was a longing we shared, a longing I had only just begun to allow myself to feel.
The depth of my feeling for Madame X was not reciprocated. Still, I took advantage of every opportunity to be in her company. I thought about her a great deal when I was alone, tried not to when I was busy, and attempted to alchemize my passion into mere friendship when in her presence. One night, at the end of a social engagement, we found ourselves alone together, everyone else having left or gone to bed. I had enough whiskey in my blood to speak uncluttered truth. Intending to make her aware of how I felt, so that if I went all weird on her she would understand why, I began explaining that I was very attracted to her. She stopped me and said, “I find that I’m attracted to you, too.” Minutes later we were pressed together, kissing long and deep.
I was floored, baffled. This can’t be happening. Here we were, a couple of self-professed Christians, committed to relationships with our respective partners, she with her husband and I with Sue, groping like teenagers on the living room couch. Clearly God had put us face to face for reasons of his own. The choices were ours, but it seemed to me that the unprecedented torrent of feelings I was experiencing had been unleashed for important reasons, and from meaningful depths. My best interpretation was that God was allowing me to see what it is to love without reserve—the way he wants us to love him. The obsessive focus on the object of the feelings, the openness to the slightest nuance of any communication from that object, and the willing abandonment of personal sovereignty were things that by rights belonged to God. In the big picture, Madame X was a stand-in for the Divine. But there was more than that. Madame X was also my missing twin. She had the other half of the ring. Although sexual desire was very much in the picture, the experience transcended lust. I was finally, however injudiciously, opening up, Taser tendrils of actual human feeling welling up and spreading like a conquering horde across the whole landscape of heart and brain.
God set this up. It wouldn’t have happened any other way. Maybe he rolled his eyes and sighed at having to resort to such a tactic, as maybe he often does. Somewhere deep in the web of the collective unconscious, our souls were nudged into position to meet and share what little we did during the on-again, off-again year of our affair. The moment felt ordained, profound. Even when we decided to break it off and give ourselves back to our respective relationships, I felt that I must continue to honour and nurture my love for Madame X. It would have been an act of disrespect toward the Divine, and toward the obvious if inexplicable connection we’d found in each other, if I had attempted to uproot or ignore what he’d given me, or tried to water it down.
You’re thinking: “Yeah, right, ‘God’s will.’” But it was. This was no hambone excuse to fool around. Nothing in what happened between Madame X and me constituted “fooling around.” The unlikely way we found each other, the people and paths that brought us together, and the sense of the purity of the experience added up to a kind of Arthurian romance. Our encounters were spiritually charged, and we both understood them this way. Our coming together was a gift, and we ran with it.
All the days we’ve been together
All the days we’ve been apart
Add up to a bunch of nothing
If I’m not still in your heart
I never want you to be
Just a page in my history
Someone I used to love
Your voice breathed in my ear
Or on the telephone
All the tender things we’ve whispered
To keep from feeling alone
May they never come to be
Just cold gems set in memory
Of someone I used to love
This current flows between us
That will not be denied
You draw me in toward you
Like the moon pulls at the tide
May no shadow ever fall
That will make me have to call
You someone I used to love
“SOMEONE I USED TO LOVE,” 1992
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/75.
Of course the shadow did fall, but slowly. It was one thing for me to understand, back in 1980, that God said it was okay to get divorced after Kitty and I promised at his altar that we’d stay together forever. But it was a major leap from that to believing God was saying tha
t it’s okay, even necessary, to have an affair with someone else’s wife while your woman works the horses at home, that this is the next thing you need to do. But he did, and it was. When it first began, I found myself spinning in a strange spiritual vortex. Madame X triggered an eruption of passion, agony, empathy, and desire straight from a molten core I didn’t even know was there. I was never an unfeeling person, and at times my emotions seemed profound. But I now understood that I had allowed myself to be only a pale simulacrum of a truly balanced emotional being.
The house I grew up in was “passionless,” which is to say that the feelings were there but never expressed overtly, except by my brother John, the youngest. He challenged the rest of us by always letting us know how he felt. John swung in the other direction, perhaps in a subconscious search for balance. He was an aberration, though, and by the time he came along the family stoicism was firmly embedded in my psyche. In our home, deep feeling was never displayed. I had no model for that. I understood nothing about projection or how I worked in my inner depths—or how anyone else worked, for that matter, because if you don’t understand yourself, you can’t understand anyone else. I certainly thought I did, but really I had no idea.
My relationship with Madame X kicked down a door of the heart that had begun to creak open a decade earlier in the pathos of the Chanjul refugee camp. It was a most incredible and timely gift, to be nearing fifty years old and suddenly be forced to explore this realm that heretofore was psychically off limits, and I remain deeply thankful for it. If I’m going to believe in an all-powerful God, then I have to believe that this was one of his gifts. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Rumours of Glory Page 36