© 1992 Dallas Morning News
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Most people in this room have never heard of Mr. Cockburn, and there's something about the mature silence of this bookish, 46-year-old man in wire-rim glasses that doesn't draw a lot of attention. But when Mr. Cockburn finally takes his turn on stage, the musicians quietly set aside their work as he breaks into "If I Had A Rocket Launcher" -- a haunting, angry song about death squads invading Guatemalan refugee camps. The stage crew claps appreciatively when he finishes, and continues to applaud after every song -- a unique gesture on this set.
Long adored in Canada, long ignored in the United States, Bruce Cockburn (pronounced "Coburn") has very quietly emerged as one of the most compelling voices in U.S. popular music. He has certainly paid his dues -- recording 21 albums in 22 years and earning the praise of countrymen and critics alike for his earnest, socially conscious songwriting despite scoring only one commercial hit in the United States ("Wondering Where The Lions Are", in 1980). In addition to winning 10 JUNO awards (Canada's Grammy), Mr. Cockburn has been awarded the Royal Order of Canada -- the most prestigious civilian honor bestowed in his country.
But now Mr. Cockburn is building a larger audience in the United States -- thanks to "Nothing But A Burning Light", one of the most intelligent and provocative albums of last year. Mr. Cockburn's first major-label U.S. release has changed his life dramatically: There will be a high-profile U.S. tour (a Dallas stop is tentatively set for March), Columbia has purchased and will reissue his entire back catalog and, in addition to "Austin City Limits", he will appear on David Letterman's show.
"I've always had a lot of creative opportunities. But how long has this show been on the air? Seventeen years?" Mr. Cockburn muses after his "Austin City Limits" rehearsal. "Until this album, there was never an opportunity for me to do a program like this."
"Nothing But A Burning Light" is an organic album, full of melody and life, featuring such guests as organist Booker T. Jones and violinist Mark O'Connor. But it's Mr. Cockburn's lyrical passion -- as he examines themes ranging from the Native American experience to the environment to boundaries of faith -- that sets him apart from other singer/songwriter/rockers of the 1990s. Mr. Cockburn's songs deal with the search for love and meaning in dangerous, desperate times, and they're sung with a voice that appeals to both poet and activist, rich with the spirit of reflection:
I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever Everything that exists in time runs out of time some day Got to let go of the things that keep you tethered Take your place with grace and then be on your way.A highly cinematic songwriter, Mr. Cockburn presents very concise, dramatic images within the shortest song fragments: "Carnival faces and Rembrandt light" . . . "Guitars and rifles in blue moonlight" . . . "The butterfly sparkle in my lasered eye." He's fascinated by the contradictions of modern times, as well as the juxtapositions of intense beauty and intense pain. It's only fitting that he fills out his "Austin City Limits" song list on the back of an airsickness bag.
"I've had a chance to see things that not everyone gets to see", he says. "And I feel a certain urge to communicate that with people".
Indeed, Mr. Cockburn has seen -- and experienced -- a great many things. In his travels as a human rights activist, he has witnessed Sherpa funerals in the Himalayas, seen the horror of human slaughter in Central America, been touched by dire poverty in Katmandu and even asked to carry a rifle with an armed convoy in Mozambique.
As a young man, Mr. Cockburn was fascinated both by the mystery of medieval European culture and the genius of jazz pianist/composer Thelonious Monk. He spent one year studying jazz composition at the prestigious Berklee College of Music; he spent the next living in the back of a pickup truck with his young wife while travelling across Canada. Spiritually, Mr. Cockburn explored everything from Hinduism to the occult before becoming a Christian.
"My experience with the occult (in the late 1960s) was a transitory flirtation", says Mr. Cockburn. He was strongly influenced by the spiritual imagery and insights of evil provided by novelist Charles Williams, a member of an English writers' circle that included C.S. Lewis. "But after a couple of years, I sort of decided I'd had enough of that. I just didn't like what it did to people. It was kind of like cocaine for the spirit."
"It wasn't all worthless. It wasn't all negative. But it was very unhealthy spiritually, I think."
Mr. Cockburn converted to Christianity approximately five years later, in 1974. Ever since, his Christian musings have become a large part of his music, whether in his bare-bones rendition of Blind Willie Johnson's "Soul Of A Man" (Mr. Johnson, the spiritual counterpart to the "possessed" Robert Johnson, refers to the Bible as "nothing but a burning light") or 1989's confrontational "Gospel of Bondage":
You read the Bible in your special ways You're fond of quoting certain things it says Mouth full of righteousness and wrath from above But when do we hear about forgiveness and love?"To me, the message of Christ is so evidently love and freedom, I just don't understand how anyone can read into the message and get anything but that," he says. "And it . . . (angers) me . . . when I see people hustling that other kind of knee-jerk belief -- all rules and conformity and non-freedom -- exemplified by some of the TV evangelists and David Dukes of the world, spouting off this stuff that they claim is Christianity. I hate the idea that people might actually think this is what it's all about. Their message is so anti-love."
The classic solitary man, Mr. Cockburn spent most of the 1970s tucked away on an Ottawa farm, playing the role of the reclusive singer-songwriter. Even after winning his first JUNO awards in 1971, 1972 and 1973 as Canadian Folk Singer of the Year and converting to Christianity, he retreated within himself.
"I had no use for people at all in those days," says Mr. Cockburn. "I didn't know much about people because I spent my time trying to avoid them. I never understood human society. I always felt quite remote from people around me -- well, in most cases, not everyone. But I always felt like an observer, looking in from the outside.
"But around 1980, I moved to Toronto with the express purpose of absorbing myself in human society to see what it was. One reason for that was if, as a Christian, I was being asked to love my fellow human beings, I couldn't love them very well if I didn't know anything about them."
The move had a remarkable effect on Mr. Cockburn's sense of purpose and perspective in the 1980s. The biggest change was his involvement in political and social causes -- working with international charity organizations in Central America and development agencies in Asia and Africa. In 1989, he was appointed honorary chairman of the environmental group Friends of the Earth: Canada.
Musically, Mr. Cockburn focused more on social themes, and his songs grew more specific. "Radium Rain" dealt with Chernobyl; "Kit Carson" debunks the white-hat myth of an American legend; "Actions Speak Louder" is the theme for a documentary about Greenpeace. "If A Tree Falls", written in '89, laments the ruined tropical rain forests and minces no words. In the song, Mr. Cockburn describes the forests as "the ancient cord of coexistence hacked by parasitic greedhead scam".
"Some people have found some of my stuff to be too literal, too sloganistic," he says, thinking specifically of "Indian Wars" on "Nothing But A Burning Light". He dismisses them with a profanity.
In terms of his other musical changes of the 1980s, Mr. Cockburn began to experiment with world rhythms on his albums -- long before it was trendy to do so. Most significantly, however, his voice changed. The youthful breathiness gave way to a deep, rich baritone that reminds some of Warren Zevon, others of James McMurtry.
Along the way, innocence gave way to the hard facts of life, too. His face still draws tight and his muscles stiffen when he sings "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" -- which created a small musical ripple in the United States in 1984 and has recently been covered by U2.
It's the same absurd contradiction -- intense beauty, intense pain. He recalls visiting the Guatemalan refugee camps in southeast Mexico in 1983, and how the villagers would scatter, fearing for their lives, at the sound of helicopter blades rising behind the lush forests.
"These people were dealing with this fear every day -- Guatemalan helicopters would fly over the camps, maybe drop a bomb on them, or some soldiers would kidnap some of the refugees, take them into the woods and chop them up," says Mr. Cockburn. "You know the scene at the end of the movie 'Apocalypse Now?' That's nothing compared to what I saw."
His experience in war-torn Mozambique inspired the same anger years later. "I was so enraged by what I saw there," he says. "You never knew where the Renamo guys (the principal insurgents in the country) were going to turn up next; they were vicious, vicious guys. The people were suffering so much. They were short of truck drivers and everything, and couldn't move anything over land. I was just mad enough to go, 'OK, give me an AK (assault rifle), and I'll ride shotgun for somebody.' But it was sort of a naive idea, really..."
"It was a very sad, very beautiful country. And it's still just like that."
Balancing his faith against these visions of dangerous times, Mr. Cockburn says he's often struck by a sense of insignificance. After all the travels, after all the meditation, he says, "I still don't know if I understand any more about people than I did before."
Perhaps, as a result, several songs on "Nothing But A Burning Light" are strikingly fluid, less urgent, more accepting of mystery. "Child of the Wind", the album's soothing closer, is an existentialism-tinged lullaby proposing that life's best roads are its most uncertain. "A Dream Like Mine", the album's opening cut, depicts a Native American daydream about "balance restored" in the future -- representing retribution, peace, and a return to the land.
"It's a funny thing," he says later. "Life is just so brief and transitory, so obviously a tiny part of something so immeasurably huge that we can't begin to grasp. On one hand, there's a sense that there's no time to waste, you've got to seize every moment. But on the other hand, there's also a complete inability to know what constitutes wasting time." He's laughing now. "So there you go!"
Before long, the man with the thick, gray hair and wire-rim glasses has mounted the stage at "Austin City Limits", stealing the hearts of an audience that, for the most part, is hearing him for the first time. The energy of live performance obviously pleases him -- he's a terrific guitar player who learned to hand pick from vintage blues records -- and his messages are not lost on this audience.
"Bruce's songs just blew me away," Rosanne Cash whispers with wide-eyed respect as the night comes to end. After 22 years and 21 albums, Bruce Cockburn feels that fine new feeling, once again, of what it's like not to be a secret any longer.