© 1991 Philadelphia Inquirer
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When he has something to get his dander up, that's fine. Cockburn's world view is more thought-through than any politically minded pop songsmith this side of Billy Bragg, and nearly all of the gripping moment at the Keswick Theatre Thursday night came when he was looking injustice in the eye, and seething. He's beautiful when he's angry.
Trouble is, Cockburn also writes love songs. So the first half of his 90 minutes got bogged down with the likes of "One of the Best Ones" and "Somebody Touched Me," mid-tempo muddlers that mean to illuminate his global spirituality with intimate insights, but wind up banal and anonymous. The only things that generated any real heat were the Drifters-style ballad "Coldest Night of the Year" and Blind Willie Johnson's "Soul of a Man," in which Cockburn bellowed with far more force than he does on his handsomely produced but uneven new Nothing But a Burning Light (Columbia).
But then Cockburn tossed in a loose, unrecorded tune called "Let the Bad Air Out" that borrowed its beat from Chuck Berry, and he was off. He followed with the bitter "Mighty Trucks of Midnight," and gathered momentum with a mix of his better personal songs (the graceful "One Day I Walk" and "Waiting for a Miracle," featuring opener Sam Phillips on high, sweet harmonies) and bracing anti-imperial salvos.
The most powerful of those were "If a Tree Falls," on which Cockburn lashes out a pillagers of the rain forest, and the raging "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," in which Cockburn comes to the unhappy conclusion that extreme oppression demands extreme retaliation, and that his turn-the-other-cheek Christianity won't always do.