On the Road with Bruce Cockburn
by Michael Geisterfer
Pinning Canadian music icon Bruce Cockburn down for an interview is like trying to have a conversation with someone through the open window of a bus as it whizzes by on the highway. It works a lot better if you are actually on the bus with him, which is precisely what I proposed to his lifelong manager, Bernie Finkelstein in Toronto.
“Go on tour with him?” Finkelstein laughed. “He’s never allowed any journalist to do that before,” he said “I doubt he’ll go for it.”
The proverbial rolling stone, Cockburn is notoriously cagey with the media, and even worse when ambushed by a journalist. I’ve seen him in action. He gets a panicked look in his eyes, like a wild animal pacing its cage, and his answers are curt and prickly like he really hates being in the public glare.
“Bruce is an intensely private person,” said Finklestein. “He doesn’t even talk to me about his personal life.”
A few months later, long after I’d given up on the idea, I received a phone call from Bernie. “Meet him in at the Hilton in Eugene, Oregon next Thursday,” he said. “You can stay with him until Seattle two concert stops further.”
Scrambling to arrange my flights from Ottawa, I had a twinge of anxiety. What if I went all of the way to Oregon and he refused to talk to me? What if I asked the wrong question and he kicked me off the bus? Flying over the wheat fields of Eugene a week later, my stomach was in knots. Apart from the single phone call from Bernie, there had been no confirmation. I had no idea how I would even find Cockburn once I arrived there.
Inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2001, Cockburn garnered international acclaim back in 1979 when his catchy hit “Wondering Where the Lions Are” broke through Billboard’s Top 25 in the U.S. Playing to packed houses not only in North America but also around the world, the intrepid folksinger became one of Canada’s most recognizable and controversial traveling minstrels, mixing politics and religion in a rich tapestry of music.
“Bruce Cockburn's career is like a decades-long quest to make sense of the beauties and the brutalities of the world,” says U.S. rock journalist Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers, author of Rock Troubadours and The Complete Singer-Songwriter. “Finding words and music that express his thoughts and observations along the way has led him to explore many styles of music from around the world -rock to reggae, jazz to folk to electronica - but it all seems of a piece. Cockburn is a real troubadour in the traditional sense, traveling and sharing poetry and news.”
Now I had to find him in some bustling U.S. coastal town in Oregon. Hopping into a cab at the airport, I told the young driver of my predicament: I needed to meet a Canadian musician at the Hilton, and how I wasn’t even sure he’d be there.
“What’s his name?” he asked.
“Bruce Cockburn.”
“Don’t worry. He’s there.”
My jaw dropped. “You know who Bruce Cockburn is?”
The driver nodded his head. “Everybody around here knows Bruce.” I didn’t believe him. Cockburn is probably Canada’s most elusive icon. You hardly know he’s around until he comes to town on one of his perennial tours, and even then there is little fanfare. No media blitzes. No mega-concerts. Just a quiet announcement of his coming, and then an equally discreet departure, often in the middle of the night as it turns out.
I really doubted that many U.S. had ever heard of him and that this cab driver was just a fluke. I was wrong on both counts. Bruce Cockburn was at the Hilton. In fact he was standing right in front of his dark green tour bus as we wheeled into the main entranceway.
Clad in biking shorts and a bright yellow nylon pullover with matching helmet, he was straddling a gray mountain bike and talking to one of his crew members. At 58, he was a silver-haired man with a gold earring in his left ear and round wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, the same style he has worn since his career began over thirty years ago. I vaulted out of the cab and introduced myself.
“I’m Bruce,” Cockburn said, eyeing me coolly. “We’ve been expecting you. This is Leslie, my road manager. He’ll show you where to put your stuff. I’ll see you at the venue.” With that, he turned and rode off on his bicycle.
Leslie Charbon is a thin dark-haired man who, on this blistering hot summer day, was dressed in a tee shirt and shorts. “This is our home,” he said, leading me into the tour bus. With wrap-around cushioned seats, a kitchenette, bathroom, ten bunks and private quarters in the back it is luxurious but cramped, housing Cockburn, his nine-member crew and now me. The bus lurched forward just as I set my bags down and we eased into the early afternoon traffic.
“The routine is simple,” Leslie told me. “We usually leave the hotel around noon and go straight to the venue. Set-up is from 1-3, then a sound check at 5 p.m., dinner at 6 and then the concert at 8 p.m.” After the concert the crew packs everything back into the tag-along trailer and the bus sets off for the next stop of the tour, often traveling until three or four in the morning.
Cockburn gives about 200 concerts a year in a dozen different countries. This past year alone he has traveled through all of Europe including the British Isles, Australia and even made a quick foray into war-torn Iraq where he met with medical officials, religious leaders and children in a cancer ward in Baghdad. His peripatetic itinerary is often grist for the mill. He’ll release viscerally stunning albums after visiting global flashpoints like Guatemala or Cambodia, his social passion stoked by the cruel images he witnesses.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, on May 27, 1945, he grew up in the Ottawa Valley and attended Nepean High school where his 1964 yearbook photo reveals a brooding teenager with a fitting epitaph, “Waiting quickly.” The caption reads: “Bruce sang in the choir and hopes to become a musician. He has a guitar. His pet peeves include phoney people and advertising.”
This latter peeve may help explain why superstardom has always eluded him. In spite of 27 albums and a sizzling 30-year career, Cockburn remains a bit of an international enigma, his career path seemingly hampered by poor marketing and lacklustre distribution. As recognizable an icon in Canada as his counterpart, Bob Dylan is in the U.S., Cockburn has nevertheless failed to break into the North American market in any spectacular way. Part of the reason may be that he was never really hungry for that kind of success.
“I would have been to make my living playing on the streets if that’s what it took for me to support myself,” he told me. At one point early in his career, that is precisely what he did.
Strapping his aunt’s guitar to his back in the early 1960’s, Cockburn busked for francs on the streets of Paris, spending at least one night in jail for performing without a licence. He returned to North America in 1966 and after a brief stint studying theory at Boston’s Berklee School of Music, he set up musical shop with The Children, a local Ottawa band. In 1969 he went out on his own, embarking on a richly textured spiritual odyssey that would take him around the world numerous times and find him standing alone on a hot July afternoon, outside the Macdonald Theatre in downtown Eugene, waiting for his guitars to be unloaded from the back of the tag-along trailer.
Unsure as to what the rules of engagement were, I stood a few feet away and waited for him to make the first move. Only, he never did.
I watched expectantly as he chatted amiably with members of the band and crew as they set up, then with chagrin as he walked by, ignoring me completely. After two hours I was convinced that all I had suspected of him was true: he was aloof, unapproachable, even a little arrogant in his attitude towards members of the media.
Confused as to why he had agreed to invite me on tour with him, I decided that come hell or high water, I would have to make the first move. My opportunity came when he suddenly announced that he was going to go and pick up a new guitar that he had bought just a day earlier.
“Mind if I join you?” I ask.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I could use the company.” We strolled out of the backstage door and were immediately accosted by a young man who had been waiting for hours in the hot sun for precisely this eventuality.
“Would you autograph these?” he asks, thrusting a leather-bound binder of CD covers into Cockburn’s reluctant hands.
“Sure,” Cockburn said, removing one of the black leather gloves he wears almost constantly to protect what are probably the most valuable tools of his trade: his guitar-picking fingers. Within minutes we were on our way again and engaged in an animated conversation. Suddenly the young fan passed us on his bicycle and nearly crashed into the back of a parked car, an adoring gaze firmly fixed on Cockburn.
“He really likes you,” I said.
Cockburn just nodded his head, as if all of this were routine. I had my doubts until a few minutes later when yet another young man suddenly came bounding towards us from across the street.
“I thought it was you,” he said, dancing a backwards jig in front of us. “I’m sorry to interrupt but I just had to say hello. You’re my hero. I have all of your CDs. I think you are great.”
Then he turned to me. “You’re probably great too, but I don’t know who you are.” I was shocked. If this had been Moosejaw or Halifax I would have been less surprised. But downtown America? How did anyone here know who he was?
“Bruce Cockburn is probably Canada’s best-kept secret,” said Doug McClary, another Eugene resident and faithful follower of Cockburn whose own children have now become avid fans. “He has a thoughtful spirituality and intelligent lyrics that come straight from the heart.”
As we walked into the McKenzie River Music store on 11th Avenue a few minutes later there was an immediate tingle in the air. About seven people were milling about –customers and sales staff- and they all stopped what they were doing and slowly made their way towards the front. They didn’t crowd him, or pepper him with questions but rather orbited around him in reverential silence as he completed the transaction for his new guitar.
From the expressions on their faces it was clear that this was an event that would be seared in their memories, a story that would be told to their grandchildren. Bruce Cockburn walking into that tiny guitar shop would be like Wayne Gretzky stopping by to play a game of pickup hockey at a small-town arena, or the Pope dropping in to conduct a mass at a local parish church. For hundreds of thousands of people throughout North America and the world, Bruce Cockburn is not just an accomplished musician. He is a legend that is larger than life.
Any doubts I may have had about this were erased as we were about to leave, when cameras began to appear as if from thin air, and the small throng clamoured for his autograph. He acquiesced with respectful gentility. There was not a hint of arrogance in his attitude, no sense that he was any better than any one of them.
“This guitar is exactly like my first guitar, a 1961 Gibson ES 175,” he told me as we walked out the door. “It cost me $250 back then.” He didn’t tell me how much he paid for this one, but I managed to peek at his VISA slip as he signed it. It set him back a cool $5200 in U.S. currency, and it is just one of over a dozen guitars that he owns.
“I started getting interested in guitars at about the age of 14,” he said “Of course that was back in the 1950s when guitars went with leather jackets and drugs and sex. My parents said that if you promise not to buy a leather jacket and do any of those other things then you can take guitar lessons. So I promised them and then proceeded to break all of those promises.”
After dabbling in rock and roll with The Children in the late 1960s, Cockburn’s tastes turned to the acoustic guitar. His first few albums were characteristically mellow and spiritual. He was an introverted mystic that sometimes seemed to get lost in the matrix of solo guitar music. In the late 70s and early 80s though, things began to change. An OXFAM-funded trip to Guatemala fuelled his moral outrage and the result was the politically charged missive, ‘If I had a Rocket Launcher.’
From that point on, he was more than just another musician making the rounds. In the minds of critics and fans alike he became an angry prophet, a fiery preacher brandishing his own unique brand of doom and redemption through musical artistry and lyricism.
“I took to the guitar almost immediately,” he told me as we continued down the street in Eugene. “It became a refuge for me through my teenage years. I never really knew what I wanted to do with my music. I went to Berklee (College of Music in Boston) and then dropped out when I realized it wasn’t taking me in the direction I wanted to go.”
His candour and easy manner surprised me. Of course I had been treading lightly, lobbing softball questions for fear he would kick me off the tour even before I got started. Still, there was not a hint of the prickliness I had been expecting.
Crowds began trickling into the 750-seat theatre at 7 p.m. and in short shrift their throngs swelled to an unusually colourful torrent. Stepping into the lobby of the theatre on that particular night was like being whisked back to 1969 when beatniks and hippies roamed that part of the earth. Tie-dyed tee shirts over homespun gingham dresses proved to be the evening couture of choice, while barefoot diapered toddlers ran squealing down crowded aisles in a carnival atmosphere fairly bursting with anticipation.
With barely ten minutes remaining before the official start of the concert, I made my way backstage to the green room expecting to see the band engaging in some form of pre-performance ritual. There was no one there though, just Cockburn quietly playing scales on his new guitar. The others had not yet returned from dinner. Spying me, Cockburn quietly retreated to his dressing room and closed the door. Then he opened it again with an apologetic smile. “You’re one of the crew now,” he said. “Help yourself to some wine.”
He pointed to a table sagging under the weight of fruit, cheese, crackers, wine and an assortment of international beers, all compliments of the house. He closed the door and the sound of vocal arias drifted through the cracks. Over the years his voice has developed a rich timbre, catching up to the rest of his prodigious musical talent.
The others began drifting in a few minutes before the looming 8 p.m. deadline. “Aren’t you nervous?” I asked Julie Wolf, the Seattle-based keyboard player as she eased herself into a dusty green lounge chair.
“Not nervous,” she replied. “Excited perhaps. I like getting up there and playing for an appreciative audience.”
Apart from the lone American Wolf, the rest of the band members are all Canadian. Bass player Steve Lucas is a professorial, bespectacled man who has followed Cockburn on numerous tours throughout the world, including Japan. His percussion counterpart is a fresh-faced youngster from Etobicoke by the name of Ben Riley. The baby of the group, he began playing for Cockburn seven years earlier at the tender age of 19.
At 8 p.m. the band still showed no signs of moving. They were all lounging about, snacking on crackers and soda water, exuding nary a hint that anything out of the ordinary was in the offing. This may in fact have been the key to their apparent indifference: having followed this routine night after night so many times it is no longer extraordinary. “It is actually all quite routine and boring,” said road manager Leslie Charbon.
At ten minutes past the hour, he banged on Cockburn’s dressing room door and poked his head in. “Two minutes,” he yelled. Then he smiled at me. “I’m the only one who can do that,” he said.
A few seconds later the door opened and Cockburn strolled out dressed in a purple shirt and matching trousers. Flashlight in hand, Leslie led them up the back stairs to the curtained stage wings. The lights dimmed and a roar erupted from the cavernous auditorium where every seat was filled right to the rafters in the back.
With no introduction, Cockburn and his band walked onstage and the crowd screamed its delight.
“It took me a long time to get used to this sort of thing,” Cockburn later confessed. “The power of it scared me. I thought it might overwhelm me.”
Having attended numerous Cockburn concerts over the years, I had never seen an audience as engaged as this one. There was a frenzy of exuberant banter as he strapped on his guitar, then a wave of joy as the first pulsing strains of his new release, Tried and Tested, flowed from his guitar. With his latest album having just been released in the U.S. market, it is unlikely that many of them have even heard it before, yet they greeted the opening bars with such enthusiasm, it is clear that for them Cockburn can do no wrong.
Heads bobbing in unison, they became a single entity, their bodies arched forward as if to capture every rift, every harmony, every intricate poetic nuance. They love his music in whatever form it takes, and over the years it has taken many forms. He used to be considered one of Canada’s foremost acoustic folk musicians, capable of weaving complex arpeggios with equally elaborate strands of lyrical mysticism all through the hollow body of an unplugged guitar.
I remember watching with dismay as he picked up an electric guitar during a late 1970’s concert in London, Ontario and began tearing through a set of fiery jazz and rock rifts. This was not the cuddly folksinger that everyone had come to know and love, but a much angrier doppelganger. “From the beginning, Cockburn has been a musical traveler,” says American rock journalist Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers.
At a point in U.S. history where political protest is barely tolerated and often punished on the airwaves, Bruce Cockburn is a bit of an anomaly. He had barely picked out the opening notes of his angry 1984 breakout protest song, If I had a Rocket Launcher, before a roar of approval erupted from the audience. For many of them, Cockburn’s appeal is not just musical but political. Yet if he was tempted to preach between songs, it didn’t show.
The chorus of requests at the end of each song elicited nothing more than a woeful smile from Cockburn who has become adept over the years at ignoring pleas to hear his old familiar tunes. Some might argue that he is pretty good at ignoring his audiences completely. On this particular night, well into his third song he has not uttered a single word, and it was clear that his audience would have none of his coyness.
“What did you do today, Bruce?” one of them cried.
He laughed and shook his head in mock disbelief. “Not much,” he said. “Well actually, I did buy this new guitar.”
“What kind is it?”
“A 1961 Gibson, just like my first guitar.”
“Did you get a good deal?”
“No,” he laughed. “I think I paid more than I should have.”
“Hey Bruce,” someone else cried, “How’s Gord?”
“Gord?”
“Gordon Lightfoot.”
“Oh, well he’s been sick you know. But I think he’s doing better.”
And so it went. I have never seen this level of interaction in any Cockburn concert anywhere in Canada. It was becoming clear to me that just as he would not talk to me on our first meeting until I first reached out and talked to him, so too is he unlikely to engage his audience in any kind of conversation unless they start it. This dynamic seemed to work just fine among the gregarious and outgoing U.S. audiences, but I could see how it might be disastrous in shyer, more reserved venues, like those in Canada.
“Canadian audiences are a lot different than American audiences,” said Cockburn. “Basically they sit on their hands until the end of the concert. It can make you lose confidence. You start wondering if they actually like the music.”
Back in Eugene, it was clear that this was more than a concert. It felt more like an Irish kitchen ceiligh and that Cockburn had a personal relationship with each one of his audience members. In fact, at the concert in Portland the next night, someone cried out, “We love you, Bruce.”
His reply: “The feeling is mutual.”
If true, it is a strange sort of love. Whatever the appearance might be, there is an invisible line between performer and audience. Unless you have a backstage pass, you cross that line at your own peril. At all of the three concerts that I attended, security was extraordinarily tight. I would have to show my pass to at least three burly guards in order to gain access to the greenroom backstage, and even if an interloper did manage to get past the guards, they would still have to deal with Cockburn’s personal gatekeeper, Leslie Charbon.
I saw proof of this at the Seattle concert on Saturday night. Cockburn and the other band members were relaxing in the greenroom during intermission when a young woman carrying a large shoulder bag tentatively approached the plate glass patio door from the outside. Security normally so tight, everyone assumed that she had a backstage pass.
I was standing across the room, chatting with Leslie Charbon when suddenly he stopped talking, and his body tensed, like he was poised to dash off. His gaze was fixed intently on the young woman. As road manager it is his job to book hotel rooms, confirm venue sites and handle all of the logistics of keeping the band happy on the road. As personal bodyguard, it is his job to ensure that nothing happens to Cockburn.
The young woman popped her head through the door and thinking she was a friend of a band member Cockburn said, “Come in. Who are you looking for?”
Placing her bag on the table in front of him, she reached into it. “I wanted to give you a present,” she said, which is about when pandemonium broke loose. Bolting from his chair a few feet away, Leslie Charbon grabbed her around the waist and with lightning speech wrenched her out of Cockburn’s range.
“Get the hell out of here,” he screamed pushing her out of the emergency doors. Her ‘gift’ could have been anything: flowers, a notebook of homespun poetry, or a loaded gun.
“People become bitterly disappointed when I don’t turn out to be what they thought they were going to get,” said Cockburn wistfully. “Many people who have made overtures want to be friends have been crestfallen or worse when they weren’t reciprocated. I like the people but my life is what it is. I can’t accommodate everyone that wants to be part of it. If they really knew what it was to be part of it not as many of them would want to be.”
It is a bewildering but not uncommon irony among professional musicians that apparent intimacy with an audience is mirrored by profound loneliness in their personal lives. “I’m not in an intimate relationship at the moment,” Cockburn confided to me on the bus between Seattle and Vancouver. “I’ve been in several long-term ones, which haven’t lasted for various reasons.”
“How do you feel about that? Do you feel sad?”
“Well at the moment I do because I don’t have a partner and I get lonely. On the other hand, it has been over a year now since I split up with my last partner and I feel like I’ve learned a lot in that time. Being alone has been really instructive and helpful.
“This is the longest that I’ve been without female company. It is an opportunity to grow, at my age at this stage of my life I value that opportunity and I intend to make the most of it. Obviously if I am ever to get into another relationship, whatever it is I bring to these things that makes it not work, I want to fix so at least I know what I am dealing with in myself. Maybe it has a chance, maybe it doesn’t. If I’m meant to be with somebody they’ll show up. Right now they are not showing up and I’m not too worried about it.”
When he is not on the road, Cockburn lives alone in a rented house in Montreal. His only daughter lives in an apartment in the same building. She was born in 1975 when he was married to his first and only wife. They divorced a few years after his daughter’s birth.
The irony is that in fact women did show up, continually. They stood in eager packs at the backstage door after each concert, clutching pieces of paper, ticket stubs, birthday cards, anything for an excuse to get close enough to him for an autograph. Yet it is precisely this level of eagerness that makes Cockburn cringe, almost in fear.
At the backstage door in Portland, Cockburn cast a furtive glance through a crack in the door. “Are they still out there?” he asked, his eyes fixed on a particularly zealous pack of groupies.
When it was clear that they were not about to leave until they had at least caught a glimpse of him, Cockburn stoically opened the door and made his way to the bus. They all applauded as he approached, and he gave them an awkward smile.
By this time it was clear to me that he doesn’t avoid his fans out of arrogance or pride, but rather out of simple shyness. Cockburn is a classic introvert: complex, intense and pathologically incapable of engaging in small talk.
On that night in Portland he actually did go and speak with that small band of admirers and his demeanour was apologetic, as if he knew he couldn’t possibly meet their enormous expectations. Were it not for an extrovert among them the result could have been an awkward shuffling silence.
For all of his intensity, Cockburn seems to have mellowed with the years.
“One of the benefits of getting older is that you don’t get as bothered about stuff when you were young,” he said as we approached the outskirts of Vancouver. “You reserve your concern for the essentials.” He confessed that for a long time he struggled to enjoy the experience of playing in front of an audience. “I would come off-stage and little things would get to me a lot. Like if I blew a line here I would get all worked up about it.”
Finally his manager, Bernie Finklestein came up to him and said: “It’s time you stop being the only one who doesn’t enjoy your shows.”
Just off the highway near the ferry in Tsawwassen, I unloaded my bags from the bus and turned to Cockburn. “I hope that wasn’t too painful for you,” I said, extending my hand.
“It was fine,” he replied, giving me a huge bear hug in return. I think that’s what I liked most about those four days on the road with Bruce Cockburn: being surprised by him. I had come expecting to be kicked off the bus. I left with the delicious feeling of having discovered a friend.
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