And in the absence of compassion there is cancer
Whose banner waves over palaces and mean streets
And the rhythm of the night train is a mantra
“NIGHT TRAIN,” 1996
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/83.
We all make choices, and we have to live with them. Sometimes those choices are neither wise nor fruitful. In the song the train starts off as a getaway vehicle, an escape from external bonds. One of the seductive aspects of travel is the illusion of freedom, but on the road we’re trapped just as much as at home. Our demons travel well. No man is an island. At the subatomic level we are as connected to each other, and to everything else, as if we all share organs. At this level, prayer, as a focusing of spiritual energy, has tremendous power. This is where we find Charles Williams’s Co-inherence, the unified Divine presence that exists in each other. To the extent that we are not conscious of that, we are islands. We live in the illusion of separateness. The islands in the song are not vacation spots. Alcatraz, St. Helena, Patmos, and the Château d’If are all prison islands.
Everyone exists to some degree, at some point, as an island, isolated, and as such we make up a bizarre, often dark but just as often beautiful human archipelago.
We also have death in common, an island all to ourselves. “Anyone can die here, they do it every day.” We try to ignore it, we play it down, but in fact it’s like Ambrose Bierce’s collection of darkly ironic stories, In the Midst of Life, a book that made a strong impression on me when I read it as a teenager. All of the tales are actually about death: death by hanging, death from the predations of a supernaturally fearsome wildcat, death by death. Bierce took his title from an eighth-century Christian aphorism (often confused for a Bible quote), “Even in the midst of life we are in death.” It’s so utterly inescapable. Every now and then we notice it. Most of the time we try our damnedest not to.
“Night Train,” “Pacing the Cage,” “The Coming Rains,” and “The Mines of Mozambique” all appear on my 1996 album The Charity of Night. Several important elements coalesced on this record, including some of the finest musicians and singers in North America. It was also the first collaboration between Colin Linden and me as coproducers. I insisted on the “co-” designation because I wanted to be in the driver’s seat, but Colin did most of the work. He was the one with the studio expertise—knowledge of microphones, how to get desirable drum sounds, and the like. We kept up the charade for a couple of albums and then dropped it, subsequently listing him as producer. I have as much control over what happens during the making of an album as I’ve ever had and have ever needed.
The Charity of Night was my second recording with Toronto’s Gary Craig (the first was Christmas), one of the best groove drummers on the planet, and he has appeared on every album since. Gary is a gifted musician, very tasteful, and he can be subtle or explosive where needed. I was excited to bring in Rob Wasserman as bassist. The folds and textures of Rob’s playing are bold and magical throughout the album. He is a master bassist, highly individual, melodic, adept at playing in and around other sounds. Janice Powers added lovely, atmospheric keyboard on four of the tracks, and classical accordionist Joe Macerollo played on the title song. We were also blessed with beautifully creative background vocals by Jonatha Brooke and Patty Larkin, and Ani DiFranco. Bob Weir made a guest appearance, which we recorded at his house in Marin County. While we were there, Maria Muldaur happened to drop by, and her soulful voice became part of the mix.
The album’s “foil” was vibraharpist Gary Burton. I had thought that the sound of vibes would complement Wasserman’s upright bass sound, each of them bracketing the guitar with its distinctive colour. I thought if we were going to have a vibes player, we might as well ask the best one. Right away he said yes, and he’s present on about half the record. His countermelodies and riffs on The Charity of Night are sublime.
Me, Gary Burton, and a fine burgundy during the recording sessions for The Charity of Night
photo credit: GAIL HORMUSES
Burton was a dean at the Berklee College of Music when he recorded with us. He’s a brilliant musician and theorist, and a champion multitasker. Because the vibraharp is a subtle instrument, we put him in an isolation booth, and when he wasn’t playing we’d hear him through the live mics, clacking away on a laptop. When it was his turn to play, the laptop would go down and the mallets would come up, and he’d be perfect.
He and I play an instrumental duet, “Mistress of Storms.” What you hear on the album is a first take, which is remarkable enough, but the first time Gary heard this complex piece was ten minutes before we recorded it. I played it for him, and as fast as I was playing he was scribbling down the notes. By the time I was finished, so was he. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He got one note wrong: a C sharp instead of a C natural. Then we recorded, and Gary nailed it.
Another guest artist on The Charity of Night played on just one song, but her part is a highlight of the album: Bonnie Raitt contributed slide guitar on “The Whole Night Sky.” Inviting Bonnie to play caused a minor stir in our musical family, because Colin Linden is among the best slide players in the world. He was a bit put out that I didn’t want him to play on the song, but if you’re going to be supplanted by someone, it might as well be Bonnie Raitt, who is a very soulful and intuitive player and, of course, she’s Bonnie Raitt. What she gave to that song no one could have duplicated, it came from such a deep place in her heart.
I used to run into Bonnie in the seventies at folk festivals. At that time Kitty had a flirtation game going with Bonnie’s bass player, Freebo. Bonnie and I got reacquainted in the late eighties, when we were on the same bill at a couple of festivals. A dedicated environmental and human rights activist, she has organized and more than once been arrested at rallies and protests. Like Jackson Browne, she is one of those high-profile performers who leverage their fame to benefit good causes.
Bonnie is deservedly known as a singer and has had her share of hits, but she has long since proved herself as an exciting and soulful blues guitar player as well. I thought, “Bonnie’s so famous now, a million people must ask her to sing on their records. I wonder how many people ask her to play guitar?” Even though we were pretty small potatoes in her world, I thought she might get a kick out of the invitation, and she did.
Sitting in with Bonnie Raitt, mid-nineties.
Bonnie was nervous about her part, which we recorded at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California. The Record Plant was a historic establishment that had been the scene of much psychedelic music making in its heyday. It still had decor featuring curvy, swollen mushrooms. We were proudly shown the echo chamber in which Jim Morrison shuttered himself to perform the vocal on something or other. Sausalito, with its stereotypical Bay Area beauty, is a wealthy and once-hip Marin County village fronted on the shore of San Francisco Bay by a flotilla of houseboats, just two miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. We played the track while Bonnie sat there with her guitar and listened, her face framed by crimson hair with its distinctive silver streak. She stuck a finger in the slide and stroked out a gorgeous set of riffs. She didn’t think it was good enough. She went at it a few more times. It kept getting better, and we ended up with the heartbreakingly haunting cry you can hear on the album. We were in there for a while. She felt like she had taken so much of our time that she offered to pay for the whole session herself, which of course we wouldn’t let her do. What she did for that song would have been worth days of recording, even at the Record Plant, which was not cheap. (The studio closed in 2008.) Bonnie left us with a plaintively lovely guitar part that sings as much as I do about the melancholy chambers of the heartbroken soul.
They turned their backs
I made it too hard
Every place they touched me
Is a laceration now
Sometimes a wind comes out of nowhere
And knocks you off your feet
And look, see my tears
<
br /> They fill the whole night sky
The whole night sky
Derailed and desperate
How did I get here?
Hanging from this high wire
By the tatters of my faith
Sometimes a wind comes out of nowhere
And knocks you sideways
And look, see my tears
They fill the whole night sky
The whole night sky
“THE WHOLE NIGHT SKY,” 1994
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/84.
What doesn’t kill you makes for songs. All the angst I lived with through the nineties fed some pretty good songwriting. The Charity of Night might be my finest record, a pronouncement I don’t make with any attachment because these things are so subjective, but others besides myself have thought so. In 1997 The Boston Globe called it my “sterling new album,” and the Houston Chronicle said it offers “a deeper vision of what contemporary music can be.” The hometown press was quite kind, with the Toronto Star reporting, “There will be many Canadian worldwide record releases this year, but none is likely to resonate with the haunting, expansive heft of this one. Probing imagery of darkness with the flashlight of hope, Bruce Cockburn’s The Charity of Night is likely to be remembered as one of the most devastating musical metaphors of the 1990s.”
Charity was recorded aggressively, with relatively little overdubbing, so it has the vitality of a live recording. T Bone’s influence contributed something as well—though I’d gotten over the notion of writing “simple” tunes, and I brought jazz back into the sound.
Mostly, though, The Charity of Night and the next album, Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu, reflect, in a time-lapse manner, the slow unfurling of a life. I wrote songs when they needed writing; I played them where and when I could, but mostly where and when I wanted. I didn’t want to be a Jimi Hendrix, strung out on a plane for months on end. I was conscious of listening and looking out for the next important thing. I have neither sought nor even really wanted fame, but I have always been grateful that my modicum of commercial success has allowed me, my entire adult life, to explore and experience music in all the forms that I could engage with.
At the same time, I wanted to know neighbours, women, children, God. I wanted to see the world. I did all of these things while harnessing creative energies when they came to me. There was no rush in any of it, much to Bernie’s chagrin. Change is good and history is now. I needed to take these things at my own pace, along my own evolutionary track, and I think my albums reflect this patience as well as a few things learned along the way.
The song “The Charity of Night” offers three separate vignettes spanning thirty years. It has already been quoted twice in this book, with scene one describing the predator on the Stockholm bridge in 1964, stalking the nineteen-year-old boy who happens to have a pistol in his pocket. Scene two was Honduras in 1985, as a bemused traveller watches the government of El Salvador bomb its own people. And the third scene? The journeyers meet, “can’t say when” or where, embracing the slow turning of the Wheel of Life, classically immersed in the painful, beautiful, and never-ending process of growing.
Pacific glimmers silver
Moon full over shadow mansion
West coast—Can’t say when
There is incense and the heat-driven scent of flowers
Tongue slides over soft skin
Love pounds in veins brains buzzing balls of lust
Fingers twine in wet hair
Limbs twist and roll
On the dresser wax drips in slow motion down the long side of
A black candle
Ecstatic halo of flame and pheromone
Wave on wave of life
Like the great wide ocean’s roll
Haunting hands of memory
Pluck silver strands of soul
The damage and the dying done
The clarity of light
Gentle bows and glasses raised
To the charity of night
“THE CHARITY OF NIGHT,” 1994
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/1.
The Charity of Night represents an evolution of songwriting and collaboration, and may be viewed as the record of a personal journey involving love, mystery, knowledge, and energy. While the songs stand on their own, they are also intimately connected with my past and the lives of many others, a cinematheque of lovers, landscapes, war zones, books, art, history, ideas, trauma, joy, friends, enemies, families, fear, enthusiasm, and music. There is refuge in the darkness, light in the music, and life in the amative soul. Though unnamed, Ani DiFranco makes an appearance in “Birmingham Shadows,” an account of our perambulation through the orange vapor-glow haze of a muggy Alabama industrial park after a festival gig. It’s a tale I tell at a walking pace about my strong but star-crossed wish to be closer to this gyre of seemingly boundless creative energy.
Mozambicans are in the studio with us, fused with Madame X, Bernie, Mayans and Nicaraguans, Jesus at the altar, Kitty and Jenny, Judy and Sue, mountains, weapons, Chileans, my parents and brothers, lovers and stalkers, Toronto, Italy, Atlantic freighters, jet fighters, and the last wild hot spring. Jonah shows up too, not sleeping through the tempest but lashed to the wheel, whipping into the storm, agape at refinery flames rising broken, red, and riveting. A glass of fine red wine gently tosses back the sparkle in the centre of my lasered eye, while the other warily watches a cop’s thumb release the safety on his submachine gun. The album is backlit by black candles brightly burning. It’s imbued with mysteries and scouring secrets, as well as sometimes soothing expeditions of the searching Fool. These songs, their stories, come from life. They are not reproductions of life. They spring from a confidence that God, in leading me beside what at times have been very strange waters, knows what he’s doing.
I’ve seen a high cairn kissed by holy wind
Seen a mirror pool cut by golden fins
Seen alleys where they hide the truth of cities
The mad whose blessing you must accept without pity
I’ve stood in airports’ guarded glass and chrome
Walked rifled roads and land-mined loam
Seen a forest in flames right down to the road
Burned in love till I’ve seen my heart explode
You’ve been leading me
Beside strange waters
Across the concrete fields of man
Sun ray like a camera pans
Some will run and some will stand
Everything is bullshit but the open hand
You’ve been leading me
Beside strange waters
Streams of beautiful lights in the night
But where is my pastureland in these dark valleys?
If I loose my grip, will I take flight?
“STRANGE WATERS,” 1995
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/85.
20
Strange Waters” is the closing song on The Charity of Night. When I was in public school, it was still the norm to have a religious component of primary education. The twenty-third Psalm was a significant part of that, though I don’t think I understood much of the King James English. It was a mystery to me why I would not want the Lord my shepherd. (“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”) And why would I want to eat dinner in the presence of mine enemies? (“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”) Reciting it always left me with a dark, moody feeling.
Similarly, one November night, as I was watching a river of Toronto headlights rush along the 401, North America’s busiest highway, a parallel Psalm took shape in my mind. There were no still waters. All was turmoil, strangeness. I started listing scenes, moments, reflections. Where I stood did not feel like any kind of resting place. I barely recognized the person who stood in my boots, yet I was gripped by the understanding that all was familiar. My Psalm was addressed to the same God as “Lord of the Starfields,” twenty
years before, but a lot of river had passed under the bridge. So much learned, so far to go.
The words that came wanted the edginess of electric guitar and drums. They felt best against the hollow tone of a National Resolectric guitar. We overlaid a crunchy rhythm part, and I gave myself the present of an electric lead, something I never get enough of. Harmonies by Jonatha Brooke and Patty Larkin are spooky and glorious, floating above the rumble of Rob Wasserman’s bass and Gary Craig’s drums.
The song was meant as a prayer, but it’s also something of a stock-taking: here’s some pretty cool music, plus a window into where I’ve been, what I’ve done, whom I’ve loved, what I’ve seen—it doesn’t get much stranger than this. Funny, though, I hadn’t yet been to Mali, Vietnam, Venezuela, Iraq, or Afghanistan, hadn’t seen Angkor Wat or the Mount of Olives, and it would still be five years before I’d find myself racing to cross the Canada-U.S. border on September 11, 2001. “Strange” is relative. I also hadn’t yet walked away from the horse farm.
Brave as she was when it came to all things equestrian, Sue felt threatened by the world in which I literally travelled, the musician’s touring life, which had resumed in earnest upon the release of Nothing but a Burning Light. She mistrusted my relationships with my friends. Her idea was to create a nest for me to shelter in when I came home, but as time went on the nest acquired a psychic barbed-wire boundary, outside of which I was supposed to leave everything else that I considered valuable. I didn’t want the shelter of a “nest” at all. After the fact, it slowly became clear to me that Sue and I should never have been together in the first place. Seven years had to pass before I worked up the clarity and the nerve to extract myself from a situation that over time had come to feel more and more like starvation.
One day in the summer of 1995 we had been grumbling at each other about something, and Sue confronted me about my ongoing lack of spark.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here because I said I’d be here.”
Rumours of Glory Page 41