Rumours of Glory Read online

  DEDICATION

  To everyone who, through lo these many years,

  has done me the honour of paying attention.

  This book would not exist were it not for Greg King,

  who fed me back my recollections with insight and

  a sense of order that allowed me to take them and run.

  He was not a ghost writer but a close cocreator of

  the work you are about to read.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Overture

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Finale

  Photo Section

  Acknowledgments

  Discography

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  OVERTURE

  This is not your standard rock-and-roll memoir. You won’t find me snorting coke with the young Elton John or shooting smack with Keith Richards; dangling babies from hotel balconies or fleeing rehab; shooting guns or sleeping with someone else’s wife. Well . . . you will find me shooting guns and sleeping with someone else’s wife, and these are significant elements of my tale.

  Since 1966 I have worked as a musician and performing songwriter, making music, making love, making mistakes, making my way across this beautiful and dangerous planet. I have witnessed the sweet promise of human achievement and the grim spectre of our ignorance and greed. Along the way I found Jesus Christ, then let go of his hand amid the din of disingenuous right-wing Christian exploitation. I have attempted to live my life somewhat in line with his Word, without necessarily taking it as, well, gospel. I have learned a lot about humanity and spirit from other faiths as well. Yet I still feel that I, and most of us, understand little about the Divine.

  Whole wars have been fought in Jesus’s name. In the end these conflicts usually have little or nothing to do with God. These days, at least in the West, wars are justified less by religion than by fear, but almost always they are attempts by the wealthy to monopolize resources held by others, even if those others are desperately poor.

  In the late seventies I became known, among some, as “that Christian singer,” which brought me a like-minded following. In 1971, 1972, and 1973, when I received Juno Awards for Canadian Folksinger of the Year but before I had “found” Jesus, I was known more for the music itself than for any religious affiliation. (I did get a bit of “the Canadian John Denver,” though, because of my round glasses.) I played a decent guitar. I wrote songs as explorations of culture and nature, and of the spirit. When Jesus came into my life, in 1974, he also made it into the music. Since then our relationship, like most relationships, has ebbed and flowed. I have tried to keep Jesus the compassionate activist close to my heart, along with Jesus as portal to the cosmos, but I have long been leery of the dogma and doctrine that so many have attached to Christianity as well as to most other religions.

  I honour nonviolence as a way of being, and as a political tactic, but I am not a pacifist. As we continue to watch the world’s greatest military powers plunder weaker states and peoples as an integral, almost pro forma method of planetary domination, it’s clear that a violent response to such injustice, and carnage, would be useless and ever more destructive. But that’s easy for me to say as I sit on my peaceful deck in my peaceful city in my relatively peaceful country. Here the secret police are not (yet) routinely kicking down doors and dragging off dissidents. The government is not bombarding towns and cities as a tool of pacification. We are spared the horror of internment camps and mass graves being filled with union leaders, community activists, those who worship the “wrong” god, or simply those who happen to live atop some coveted natural resource (at least since the end of the era of westward expansion). I can’t tell people who are experiencing these realities that a violent response is unjustified. When it’s fight or die, what do you do? Gandhi and MLK would tell us to just take it, and they were wiser for it than I am. And deader. (Though of course I expect to be catching up with them on that score.)

  Today I sit in the San Francisco home I share with my wife, M. J. Hannett, and our daughter, Iona, working on a book thirty years after writing “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” the song with which I will probably be most closely associated in the public’s memory. Those lyrics came to me in a Mexican hotel room after my first visit to a refugee camp on the fringe of the free-fire zone that was 1980s Guatemala. That experience was to be the beginning of a series of journeys to regions afflicted by war, and the first attempt to share my experience of, even fascination with, that thing which some would call the great human aberration, but which is perhaps more accurately described as the default condition of mankind.

  Through design and circumstance, my songs are multifaceted. They are not just about war, injustice, and exploitation, though these subjects are well represented. They are certainly not just about Jesus, though faith and grace frequently find a place in the lyrics and in the tunes themselves. Mystery, beauty, love, pain, joy . . . the power of a wild place . . . the power of people to rise above oppression, above pettiness: these are things I have worked to portray. The songs derive from life itself. They’re not a reproduction of life. They’re not an attempt to pin life down. They ought to assume a life of their own.

  Change has come to me often, with seminal alterations of course and consciousness. With some strange precision, many of my most profound changes have occurred at the turn of each decade. In 1970, after a few years in Canadian rock bands that shared the stage with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Cream, I released my first solo album. In 1980, fresh from the breakup of my first marriage, I moved to Toronto and for the first time sought connection with, and solace from, community. In 1990 I began working with a big-league producer, T Bone Burnett, and spent more time in the United States. During that fecund decade I became embroiled in a brief, secret, and transformative romantic relationship; made friends with firearms and horses; produced a couple of albums that some consider to be my best; and achieved a level of fame and acclaim that made me—a seeker of privacy and introspection, a disdainer of awards—somewhat uncomfortable.

  I am blessed with two children, both girls, one being thirty-five years older than the other. Relationships with women have had a huge influence on how I think and feel; they have opened portals to worlds I might not have otherwise discovered. It might be said that my relationship with music has been even more intimate and profound. In a way we, and all living things, are made of music. The time and psychic space required to produce music to any depth can also generate understandings that might otherwise remain elusive. Music eased my searching and often angry adolescent soul. My grown-up wanderings, sometimes no less angry, are largely catalyzed by, and reflective of, music. Music is my diary, my anchor through anguish and joy, a channel for the heart.

  Seventeen years ago I wrote, “Haunting hands of memory / Pluck silver strands of soul.” This book is made of memories. Some are more exact than others, but they’re all mine. Not all I recall is in here. There are people who were and are dear and important to me, whose names and roles do not come up. Sometimes what comes up are only pictures, feelings, musings. The soul, as we experience i
t, is a nucleus surrounded by an accretion of experiences, of traumas, not just mine but everybody’s, those of other generations, other cultures, other faiths. In witnessing the same events, those strands are plucked at in a way unique to each of us. In each of us lives a different story. This one is mine.

  1

  When I was born on 27 May, 1945, my father, Doug Cockburn, was not around. That was not by choice. The Canadian army had put him through medical school during World War II, and Dad was sent to Europe just before the end of hostilities. While he was stationed in England waiting to be transferred to the European mainland, Germany surrendered. Dad then became part of the occupying force. I was about a year and a half old when he saw me for the first time. I suspect I was not happy to have to share the attention of my mother, Lois, with this guy I had never set eyes on. I do remember, though, a fair amount of jollity in those early years. (The arrival of the first of my two brothers when I was five was the occasion for a better-remembered resentment.)

  Union Street, Kingston, Ontario, 1948

  On my father’s return to Canada, we moved from my maternal grandparents’ place in Ottawa to Kingston, Ontario. Dad went back to school to continue his studies, specializing in radiology. We had a ground-floor apartment on Union Street, where we lived for what I suppose was the next couple of years. I have a clear picture of my dad hauling me around in a sleigh, bundled up in a brown snowsuit and swaddled in a blanket, over frozen sidewalks. He’d be jogging along in his Queens University jacket with the leather sleeves, taking the corners too fast. The sleigh would tip over and the bundle of me would roll out into the road. In my memory this happened more than once. I’m told I was too young to really remember this—that it’s a recollection made from having heard the story repeated. Maybe.

  I guess as the firstborn, I inspired my father to ensure that I was exposed to the finest of what Western culture could offer. He subscribed to some sort of record-of-the-month thing as well as the Book-of-the-Month Club. Twelve times a year, an album would arrive in the mail. Originally, it was actually an album—a book like a photo album whose pages were sleeves for 78-RPM Bakelite discs. These were played on the hi-fi (we didn’t have a windup Victrola, as I recall, though relatives did, and I was familiar with them).

  Aside: When my mother’s brother Gerald was little, he confused the words for “Victrola” and “toilet.” This resulted in her side of the family referring to the latter fixture as the “troley” till I was well into my teens.

  In the evenings my mom and dad and I would sit in the living room and listen to this music. Mostly it was performances of great classics by somewhat second-rate orchestras. Let it be said that my father had a good ear for music and a keen sense of pitch. It always bothered him that the brass band of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, which had a weekly radio show, tended to play out of tune.

  There we would sit, music filling the room. The vocal pieces, sung in formal classical style, were a total turnoff to me, especially the high female voices laden with vibrato. The men, too, though. What I remember being particularly taken with was Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance.” When that piece played I could see human figures leaping in silhouette, circling the flames of a huge bonfire. Had I even seen a bonfire at the age of two or three? Maybe, maybe not, but the association of fire and ritual and human action slipped in from who knows where. That piece of music fired me up every time I heard it.

  Other memories from Kingston in the 1940s: running under the front porch—refusing to go in for either dinner or bed, I forget which. My dad couldn’t get me to come out. I only screamed “No!” when he suggested, then asked, then ordered me into the house. It took a gentle intervention by an older man who lived next door to coax me out of my hiding place. Even with my fear of cobwebs, I felt that squatting in the dirt—having crawled through an opening in the latticework on one side of the veranda, under sticky-soft stalactites of spider silk—was better than going inside, admitting that the day was over. I always hated the ending of the day. I felt like not enough had happened. Still do.

  The pond at Grandpa’s farm

  One morning I deliberately locked my mother out of the house. I remember standing in the hall in my short pants and beige knitted cardigan with images of cowboys on it. Mom must have ducked out briefly, for what reason I don’t know, and I thought it would be a good joke to latch the door behind her. When she demanded that I let her in, I refused. I thought this was the funniest situation I’d ever seen, and I laughed and laughed—and kept laughing till I saw the expression on her face as she climbed in the little bathroom window, over the back of the troley. She was hopping mad. My amusement instantly turned to gut-melting fear. I guess I got spanked. Can’t really recall. Later I learned that she had been six months pregnant. That pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I was assured that climbing in the window was not a factor.

  When Dad’s schooling was done with, we moved back to Ottawa. He got a gig at what was then the Ottawa Civic hospital. Eventually he became head of diagnostic X-ray there. Now and then as a schoolboy I would go with him to work, or meet him there for a ride home after my trumpet lessons. He would show me the X-rays he was reading, and I could sit and try to follow along as he dictated his findings into the then state-of-the-art Dictaphone, verbally putting in commas, periods, and paragraph indentations.

  To a little kid in Ottawa in the late forties, diversity meant there was a French boy who lived down the block. That, and once on Bank Street with my mother I saw a black man. I pointed and stared, and was instantly shushed and admonished against commenting on people’s appearance (especially if they were within earshot). This lesson was repeated another day when we encountered an old man with a gin blossom nose, which caused me to point and laugh and cry out, “Look at his nose!” Major disapproval.

  Mostly everyone was the same. There were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but nobody ever mentioned that. Everybody was just people. I played with Billy from across the street and Donnie M. There was a “bad” kid named Norman who was maybe a year older than my playmates and I. My parents chased him away whenever they saw him around. Gilles, the francophone kid, was a bit older and quite polite.

  What constituted a “bad” kid? We lived on the upper floor of a duplex. Downstairs were people called the Meldrums. Next door to us lay a vacant lot overgrown with shrubs and one or two big trees. For us it was a jungle, or the northern bush. Many games unfolded there: war games, cowboys and Indians, Tarzan. Guns were crooked sticks or cap-firing toys. My friend John Whynot, the engineer who has recorded many of my albums, once voiced the observation that boys are all about projectiles. We certainly were, though we were cautioned never to throw anything at each other that could inflict harm. Now and then I could play with my mother’s BB gun, but I’d better not shoot anyone in the eye.

  One day Donnie and I were playing next to the Young Stick Tree, so called because around its base grew a large number of shoots that we could break off to use for swords and the like. Nearby stood a sawn-off stump. Norman appeared with a kid I didn’t know and the kid’s little brother, who must have been two. Norman cajoled the two-year-old into putting his hand on the stump and then pounded on it with a brick. Blood shot across the rough-looped annual rings. The little guy screamed. Norman grinned happily. Bad kid. I remember him urinating in our yard as some kind of gesture. I can’t recall the circumstances, but there he is pulling out his penis and pissing on the lawn, and my mother calling him a dirty dog.

  Now and then Billy would intentionally foul his trousers. I have a very vivid memory of us playing on the lawn outside the Meldrums’. We’re squatting there fiddling around on the grass, and he gets a kind of reflective look on his face and goes vacant on me. We’re wearing shorts. Next thing I see is brown matter oozing out of his pant leg. I say, “What are you doing?” “Oh,” he says, “I just wanted to do that.” I guess that was a gesture too. When I told Mom about it, she said something like “Oh, the poor child.” At that age we kn
ew nothing about what went on in the adult world. Nobody said. If Billy was abused at home, I have no idea. Maybe he was. There were murmurs of disquiet about what kind of parenting Donnie received.

  Clothes were different then. I was sent to kindergarten, which was a few blocks away, wearing breeks and knee socks. The breeks were like riding breeches, made of wool, warm and scratchy. They had a button fly. I had a lot of trouble with that. Being left-handed, I lacked the dexterity to button myself up after going to the bathroom at school. I could unbutton myself well enough, but not the reverse. I got teased for having my fly open. That resulted in me holding it in until, on my way home, I could disappear into the vacant lot and relieve myself. Thus I was saved from embarrassment at school, but my mother always knew I’d peed outside, and I got scolded for that.

  There was music. One day Billy and I went marching past the storefronts on Bank Street, with saplings from the Young Stick Tree over our shoulders, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” at the top of our lungs. Old ladies stopped and smiled. Now and then at school they had “rhythm band.” We were issued tambourines and bells and other percussion toys, and we were supposed to play organized parts while the teacher sang or played the piano. I guess we were supposed to sing too. I was completely at sea. I had no idea what was meant to happen, though the other kids seemed to know. I was given two wooden sticks, sort of like drumsticks, and told to hit them together on a particular beat. Not knowing what that meant and being too nervous to feel the rhythm even if there had been any, I just whacked away when it seemed like I should. I remember the teacher being a rather sour woman.

  My head was already too big for my dad’s homburg.

  For me school consisted of feeling centered out and humiliated, right from day one. I discovered a gift for constructing alternate realities. When my dad got home from work after my first day of kindergarten, he asked me how it was. I very enthusiastically replied, “It was great. We got to wear cowboy hats and chaps, and there were guns hanging all around the walls!” At that moment I completely believed what I was saying. Dad said, “Are you sure you’re not imagining that?” “No! That’s how it was!”