Bruce Cockburn

Barsamian, David

THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by David Barsamian Bruce Cockburn Bruce Cockburn has won practically every music award that his native country, Canada, has to offer. The recipient of multiple Junos...

...And I chanced upon Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson...
...But politics is a totally legitimate area of focus for any art, whether it's painting or songwriting or anything else, as much as sex is, as much as spirituality is, as much as any other behavior of people is...
...Born in Ottawa in 1945, he now calls Montreal home, though he's on the road a lot, and not just for gigs...
...They really want to see your eyes...
...The Denver Post called Cockburn "a strident political activist...
...She could only lie down and not roll over...
...I crossed the border into the United States that same morning, shortly after the second plane had hit...
...Here's Iraq, where irrigation was invented, where law was invented, where writing was invented...
...But at the same time, we don't have a say...
...Cockburn: My overall responsibility is to be truthful...
...Cockburn: The main demographic is getting older with me but I am encouraged to note that there are always some younger people around...
...People respond to the music in that way, totally free of any conditioning or expectations, so you know it's working...
...Sometimes I think of it as Finland in the Soviet era...
...Q: You are graying, and so are your fans...
...They had an enormous sow in a pen with a whole bunch of piglets...
...In order to make sure that she didn't roll on the piglets, the pen was so small she couldn't actually turn around in it...
...He's a thoughtful, sensitive person, not to mention a gifted musician and a remarkable guitar player...
...You've got a song in there called "Put It in Your Heart...
...Some of it goes into physical activity...
...In the courtyard, he was cooking fish in a way I had never seen before...
...We're totally free, but we're totally free to agree, basically...
...That's from 1981...
...You don't have to listen to it at all...
...We watched the interaction on a number of occasions between U.S...
...But there was no understanding...
...How do you keep yourself fresh and not stagnate...
...They're a proud people, and they trace their historic roots way, way back...
...But those were rickety because they could not get the spare parts to fix them up properly...
...The process of applying music to words is a bit like scoring a film...
...I got invited to lunch at this guy's art studio...
...They're just out there in the world, doing stuff...
...His latest book is a collection of interviews from The Progressive, "Louder Than Bombs...
...Music itself isn't enough to completely wear down my stash of anger...
...And the people who live there damn well know that...
...and the Iraqis...
...Cockburn: After September 11, 2001, I was as shocked as anybody...
...But resentment exists, and some of it goes into the music...
...Then I just throw it away...
...Cockburn: It's partly in music...
...I spoke with him in Aspen at the end of the year, the day after he gave a solo performance before a jam-packed audience at the historic Wheeler Opera House...
...There are one or two exceptions over the years, but that's pretty much the way it's been...
...Cockburn: That blew me away...
...Q: What is the line between making art and being pedantic...
...Q: In one of your most popular songs, you write: "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse, fashionable fascism dominates the scene...
...It was more of the same, that endless treadmill of blame and incriminations that we seem to be on...
...In January 2004, he was in Baghdad...
...The people who have impressed me most-and the closest I've come to having heroes-are the people who have devoted their lives to making things better for others...
...It seems like parts of your audience really want to hear this song...
...You don't have to like it...
...Cockburn: It's not new what we are witnessing...
...Is somebody going to shoot me in the middle of the night...
...A number of Iraqis told us they had welcomed the U.S...
...Of all the songs I'd put out that I thought would have had radio possibilities, that wasn't one...
...Cockburn also has a big following in the U.S...
...Why did you write that...
...Love and affection are chief among them, as he sings in "Open" and "Don't Forget About Delight" on his latest album...
...Abu Ghraib, as bad as it was, can't be compared to what Saddam was doing to people...
...There's so many ways in which we are inextricably connected politically, economically, socially...
...Q: Your latest album is You've Never Seen Everything...
...I thought, you self-serving bastard...
...Cockburn: It's hard for me to be objective because there are so many people I love in the United States, and I've had such great adventures in this country and have been so well received by people here...
...Q: You draw attention to inequality in your new song "Trickle Down" and in your classic "Call It Democracy...
...It seems obvious to me that you've got to use it for something, but you have to separate it from your ego...
...On stage, he's a confident performer with a big personality, but in person, he's unpretentious, and he didn't have any prerecorded soundbites...
...And I don't have all that much more to be angry about than anyone else...
...The power would go out continually, the hospitals would try to rely upon their emergency generators...
...My American friends were distraught, and I felt a great empathy with them...
...One that comes to mind immediately was the huge gap that existed between the U.S...
...If people pay money to come and see me, looking for something other than that, then they've made a mistake...
...A lot of people who didn't even know that it was about Guatemala responded to the sense of outrage in it, and that made it popular...
...You've said that you're afraid of repeating yourself...
...Getting involved with NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and nonprofits helps, too...
...All these things that we consider necessities of civilization started there...
...You run into a lot of people in that scene, as I'm sure you have, who either haven't thought of that or aren't very good at doing it...
...Anger is energy, and you've got to find a place to put it that works for you...
...I take a certain liberty in saying I felt this way in this particular situation, and there's a good chance you would too...
...I still think about those things...
...The more I've done, the more that's likely to happen...
...We all grow up with anger...
...Q: As a Canadian, how do you see the United States...
...Most of the time, our deeper, stronger feelings are things we all have in common...
...It was disgusting...
...I had a pretty comfortable childhood with parents who took good care of me...
...In "Call It Democracy," he denounces the chief institution of neoliberalism: "IMF dirty MF/Takes away everything it can get/Always making certain that there's one thing left/Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt...
...We met Iraqis from all walks of life, from the arts, the intelligentsia, business people, various religious communities, homeless people, human rights workers...
...We heard firefights every night...
...In some ways, Canada is the piglet...
...Cockburn: I think it is...
...So you have to be able to separate those things before you are going to be able to do anything useful with your anger...
...If we don't, it's only going to get worse...
...We went to a couple of different hospitals and doctors would talk to us about the shortages of everything from trained nurses to morphine...
...And that's not only a product of the war but also of the thirteen years of sanctions that preceded it...
...We finance the obnoxious elites in those countries and they exploit their people so we don't have to say that we're doing the exploiting but nevertheless we are benefiting from it...
...In it, I was trying to describe the feelings I had in the presence of Guatemalan refugees who had experienced unbelievably horrible things...
...In more than three decades, he has recorded twenty-seven albums, the latest being You've Never Seen Everything...
...Falwell looks right into the camera at me the viewer and says, you know this terrible tragedy is the fault of you gays and lesbians and you people who've had abortions...
...And I felt bad about it, and I think anyone in their right mind would have...
...It's part of the human condition...
...David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado...
...And that's where the ego and the anger have to be scrupulously kept apart...
...forces as liberators initially but in the intervening months, they had come to feel that they had swapped one oppressive regime for another...
...But on the other hand, it'll be good for especially some of my American friends who are so disappointed in the outcome of the election and so dispirited from it to remember that this is not the first time we've been up against this kind of crap...
...And you have to be able to sit back and say, yeah, I'm really mad about this but I'm only one of 10,000 people who might be mad about that particular thing and everyone has a slightly different take on it...
...Q: And for you it's in music...
...And I applied it to that and wrote the song...
...Many activists who were involved in Central American solidarity work know Cockburn for his defiant song from 1983, "If I Had a Rocket Launcher...
...We can all benefit from hearing each other's takes on these things...
...The grinding devolution of the democratic dream...
...And sometimes they're not very nice to work with either because of it...
...The recipient of multiple Junos (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys), he also has been honored with the Order of Canada...
...Q: Your song "This Is Baghdad" came out of that trip...
...We were in Baghdad for a week, we being myself and three Americans under the leadership of Thomas Gumbleton, a Catholic bishop from Detroit...
...Am I going to get carjacked and killed...
...The soldiers were doing their best to not be heavy, to not be any more confrontational than a guy with a gun can be when the other guy doesn't have one...
...Going to places like Honduras, Nicaragua, and various African countries you get to see very clearly what the cause and effect is...
...So immediately they can't trust the Americans...
...Q: Where else...
...You don't have to buy it...
...I'm telling it like I see it...
...But what do you do with that...
...Q: In the summer of 2003, when I saw you in Boulder with a small ensemble, you performed "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," much to the delight of the huge crowd at the Boulder Theater...
...Great guy...
...It wasn't until I went to Central America and Chile in 1983 that I really understood that there is no gap between art and politics...
...It doesn't mean that all the art has to be about politics-in fact, heaven forbid...
...I'm not trying to convince people of things, other than the fact that I'm trying to make as vivid as I can my own feelings and experiences...
...Q: You say it's important to attach anger to something useful...
...Possibly you've got characters and a story...
...But what they also traded away-well, they didn't trade it away, it was taken from them-was any possibility of personal security, whether it was economic or physical...
...Canada is a different country...
...It was a very interesting phenomenon because I never would have imagined in a million years that anybody would play that on the radio, and yet they did...
...Once you tie anger and ego together then you're a monster, at least a latent one...
...I was angry...
...And people ask for it to this day...
...Cockburn: I always write the lyrics first...
...Everything that makes a society run is broken in Iraq...
...And in the process of thinking about these things, I was actually meditating and the phrase "put it in your heart" came to me...
...That's as close as I get to preaching, in my mind, anyway...
...So at the very least we know that by resisting the powers that be, we are keeping things from getting worse than they otherwise might be...
...The music creates a field for those things to unfold in...
...No Iraqis wear sunglasses...
...You've got imagery...
...I don't mean that it has to be about anything in particular, but there has to be some art applied to it, simple or otherwise...
...Q: Over the course of your three-decade career, you've produced a large body of work...
...The prevailing attitude in Baghdad was fear: Are they going to kidnap my kids...
...There you are, promoting your little agenda on the back of all that pain...
...I suppose "Rocket Launcher" is like that, too...
...The last line of each verse begins, "If I had a rocket launcher...
...But one time I was at an agricultural exhibition, and these farmers were boasting about their modern animal husbandry techniques...
...Those people, the ones who are really effective and really able to make a difference, are people who've sorted that anger/ego equation...
...Are you reaching younger audiences...
...Actually, he's anything but...
...In fact, we'll never not be up against this kind of crap...
...Cockburn: "Call It Democracy" came about because I was spending increasing amounts of time among people who were the victim of the world economic system...
...This song tells of a helicopter in Guatemala that keeps coming back to murder more kids...
...Which was brutal...
...There's just no communication there at all, at least not on the street level...
...Where are we now...
...These are people whose names you never hear, people who work for Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and other humanitarian groups...
...But it's the only way I can really work...
...Cockburn: I've been accused of being a little pedantic here and there, but I don't buy that criticism...
...I couldn't stomach it...
...His most recent interview was with Studs Terkel in the November issue...
...This is why...
...Cockburn: It's partly in the way I go through my day, too...
...Almost all the military personnel were wearing sunglasses...
...They burn out, fast...
...And people were afraid of getting sick because there just are not enough facilities to take care of them...
...Here's what I saw...
...She couldn't even stand up...
...For the final verse, he completes that line with the words: "some son of a bitch would die...
...It's not like I was abused as a kid or anything...
...You just got to keep banging away at it...
...On the one hand, that's kind of discouraging...
...Everyone keeps their drapes closed in Baghdad because of the possibility of flying glass...
...There were many things that stood out...
...If we disagree too heartily or over too sensitive an issue, then we pay a price for that...
...I wait until I've got the right way of getting a thing done, which means my songwriting proceeds at a very slow pace...
...Q: What is the role of artists in creating social change...
...The only real structure is the people's own sense of themselves as Iraqis, which was very strong...
...The Iraqis did exchange one oppression for a lighter kind, in some ways...
...That politics is a part of life and art is about life...
...Sometimes I catch myself doing something that I've already done...
...But I realized that in my reactions to Falwell I was as guilty as he was of perpetuating bitterness...
...You live next to the United States...
...And though some of his lyrics are political, he covers a lot of different subjects...
...Bruce Cockburn: It was a whirlwind...
...Q: Do the lyrics come first...
...I asked him about it, and he said, "It's a Sumerian recipe...
...Many of the places he visits-from Mozambique to Cambodia-are marred by the heavy footprints left by the United States...
...There's no stepping away...
...Q: Tell me about your trip to Iraq...
...And that effort is very much worthwhile...
...soldiers and the Iraqis...
...Cockburn: It's an attempt to describe the scene as I saw it, which I've done in many other songs about many other places...
...Here's what I felt...
...I got a couple of young friends, and they'll bring their friends around, and we'll end up sitting around with guitars, and these kids will hear what I'm doing, and they're like, whoa, what is that...
...I'm particularly attuned to lyrics, and very often a bad set of lyrics will ruin a song for me, while my friends will be just grooving on the music...
...Cockburn: It goes back to trying to be truthful...
...So I was around for all of that, watching TV, channel surfing...

Vol. 69 • March 2005 • No. 3


 
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