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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #101 (August /September 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
Although he's been known to essay lengthy speeches between songs, tonight Cockburn lets the music speak more than he does. But at one point, in direct reference to the events of Sept. 11, he quoted a friend: "If we're going to have a war against an -ism, it should be fundamentalism."
As the applause rises, then fades, someone calls out "No war!" It sounds as if he's politely but vehemently amending Cockburn's pronouncement.
Asked about this event in a phone interview, from his manager Bernie Finkelstein's office in Toronto, Cockburn was typically thoughtful and strong-willed. "I don't feel bound by anybody else's idea of what I should be. Sometimes there's a reaction like that. Occasionally somebody's upset with me because they thought I should be something I'm not, or shouldn't be something I am. But that's their problem. I do my best to communicate what I understand to be true."
When you're a person with strong beliefs, you're going to butt heads with other strong believers now and then. Bruce Cockburn doesn't pick fights, but at this point in his life, he does pick his battles. Said Bernie Finkelstein, who has known Cockburn since 1969, when Cockburn recorded the first album on Finkelstein's True North Records: "He doesn't look for controversy by any means, and he's not really out there looking for press, looking for getting his name in the paper or any of those things." Finkelstein said that Cockburn, rather, "does his job, does what has to be done."
Cockburn's job is writing songs and singing while accompanying himself on acoustic or electric guitar. Sounds simple — and perhaps it is simple for him, at least as evidenced by the directness and sincerity of his body of work. Now 57, he has been recording for over three decades. He has released over 25 albums — with EPs, compilations, and various repackagings, it's hard to maintain an exact count. He has worked hard to achieve a level of critical and popular success unheard of for most singer/songwriters. He's even changed the world. Of his work in support of causes such as human rights in Central America, landmine eradication, and ecological concerns, he said: "I think all of us have a responsibility to do what we can, whatever it is, whether it's arguing with people in a bar or getting up and sounding off in front of a whole bunch of people or being directly involved, as many of the people I've had the privilege of working with are, in helping other people."
The personal side of Cockburn was recently explored in a segment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Life and Times" series. "My Beat: The Life and Times of Bruce Cockburn" presents an enigmatic figure whose personality, when it emerges, isn't always likable. In the video, Cockburn is candid about his lack of paternal instinct when speaking of the daughter, from an early marriage, whom he seldom saw as she was growing up. (The film shows them bonding as adults.) His earnest avowals of belief can leave him seeming supercilious; sometimes, a shy person from childhood, he comes across as cold, remote. The best light one can put on the deficiencies revealed in "My Beat" is that he's a man who's missing certain things, but has had other things fill him up. Whether God and music and justice drove out a nuclear family and lightness of heart — that's not a question easily answered, and perhaps not worth exploring too deeply.
Cockburn is careful about what he reveals, what he conceals. "There's a lot about myself that I don't put in songs. Why would I? All the stuff I don't like I don't tend to put in the songs, as a rule. Or the mundane, the very mundane things. But the deeper truths, and whatever passes for insight into the big picture, go into the songs, and people of necessity make of it what they will. They can ignore it, they can love it or hate it or whatever, but it's up to them what they do with it."
The specter of the Wainwrights and Newmans and Thompsons of the world, the idea that songs might reveal darker impulses, is raised. "Darker impulses, yeah, I suppose. And there's an argument to be made for the catharsis that might provide. But it's not really my thing."
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #101 (Aug./Sept. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
