| Q: The song Trickle Down exposes the folly of the trickle-down theory of economics. That if we keep making the rich richer, then somehow the resources will trickle down to those who need them. I'd like to talk about that. But before we do, let's (talk about) the song itself. It has a very jazzy feel, which is a style that you've explored before. And you co-compose with a pianist named Andy Milne. And the song we're about to hear, Trickle Down, features solos by both yourself and Andy. But you only recently met this gentleman, right?
A: Yeah. Andy's a young jazz pianist based in New York. A brilliant composer and musician. I had never heard of him, until he showed up at a gig one day and handed me a couple of CDs and said he was interested in collaborating on some stuff for another CD that he wanted to do. And nobody's ever quite suggested that exact thing before. I mean, lots of people hand me CDs after shows, but you know, they just want me to hear what they're doing or whatever.
But my friend Hugh Marsh, who plays a lot on the album, too, a violinist from Toronto, knew of Andy and said, "Oh, yeah, check this guy out." So I listened to the CDs and they were amazing. And Andy's timing was great, because I had just been going through this long dry spell. And I thought, yeah, this might be the perfect catalyst to kind of get the creative juices flowing again. And because it's something I haven't really done.
I mean, in the '60s when I first started writing songs, I wrote music for other people's lyrics. And once or twice over the years, I've collaborated partly on songs with people. Hugh, for instance, and I wrote Stolen Land together. But there was my words and both of us worked on the music. And in these songs it was pretty much my words and Andy's music. Although, Trickle Down, in my version, is simplified so that I can play it. Because when we recorded it originally with Andy's band, Andy's band does virtually nothing in 4/4 time. Everything is in these hairy time signatures. And they are way funky into these things. So you can't miss the groove. But if you try to count it, your head starts spinning. And I'm not really used to playing that way. And I wanted to be able to perform the solo as well. So I had to kind of make it into something that I could make work with just myself and a guitar. And then we built it up from there. And Andy was very tolerant of my messing with his music for this song. But it still keeps the spirit of what he wrote. And the chorus is pretty much the same, but the verses got a bit more accessible to me.
SONG: TRICKLE DOWN
Q: Boy, there's a lot packed into the six minutes of that song. Trickle Down is the name of that jazzy, outspoken piece you just heard. It's from Bruce Cockburn's latest, "You've Never Seen Everything". Andy Milne co-composed that song and played the piano solo.
Bruce, there was an album in, I think, 2000 of your songs done in a jazz setting called Creation Dream by guitarist Michael Occhipinti. It really pointed out the jazz flavor of a lot of your work. Was that the first kind of music that you listened to growing up, jazz?
A: Not the first, but it came to mean a lot to me as soon as I did hear it. The music that made me want to play music was the first rock and roll. It was early Elvis and Buddy Holly and the music of that era that was so guitar-oriented and made me want to play guitar. But once I started taking lessons, I got introduced to other kinds of music. And one of the earliest of those was jazz. So I -- right away, I started buying jazz guitar records. And for a while, I thought I would be a jazz musician. After high school, I went to Berkeley in Boston, majoring in composition, thinking that that's what lay ahead. But it wasn't what lay ahead, as it turned out. So I dropped out after a year and a half or so doing that and joined a rock and roll band and started writing songs.
Q You have a really powerful guitar style, both playing acoustic and electric. How have you managed to keep growing as a guitar player over these years?
A There's a sort of work ethic involved, I guess. And a kind of guilt about not growing. If I feel like I'm not growing, I feel kind of antsy about that. With anything creative, in fact, probably with anything much at all, you either grow or die. Or stagnate, which is the same as creative death. So I really -- I like to expose myself to new situations musically. That was another nice thing about working with Andy on the two songs. The Trickle Down, as you said, and another song called Everywhere Dance on the album that is a lovely melody that Andy wrote. And both of those required a pretty big learning curve for me, guitar wise. So I was very pleased about that. A situation that forces you to expand into areas that, you sort of know are out there, but aren't necessarily where you would think of going. I mean, at no point would I ever be ready -- well, I shouldn't say ever, but certainly in the foreseeable future, I'm not likely to start calling myself a jazz guitar player. But over time, I've learned more and more about that. And that I can apply to my own music.
And what interested me on this album and in the live shows that we're doing around this music is kind of to make things jammable and to involve improvisation in the performance of these pieces in a way that I haven't really done a lot of before. I mean, I tend to write a song and then it stays the way I wrote it. My part of it does, at least. So that's sort of true with these pieces, but I tried to leave room in them for messing around and stretching a little bit here and there. And I've encouraged the other people to take an improvisational approach. So they don't really play them exactly the same way every night. And it makes it a lot more fun. And again, stimulates me to kind of have to keep up with them. And some of the things that the rhythm section do in our shows get way out there in the jam kind of pieces. And you've got to listen hard to stay with them. And they listen really hard. It's all very educational. And it's part of the process of being an artist, I guess.
Q: Well, as Mr. Dylan once said, "He not busy being born is a busy dying."
A: Yeah.
Q: And I was reading this interview that you did, the mics got turned around and you did an interview with Ani DiFranco in a Performing Songwriter magazine. And you said that Bob Dylan was not the voice of your generation. So I was wondering who was, then.
A: Well, I don't think there was one. That's what I meant by that. I think Bob Dylan was a great artist -- is a great artist, although I'm more interested in his earlier stuff than I am in what he's doing now. He was a huge influence on me. But I don't think there was one person who was the voice of the generation. And I don't think it does anyone a good -- a great service to label them that. It's sort of like -- it's like the way the church made St. Francis into a saint so that other people wouldn't have to think they had to live that way. And if you make Dylan into the voice of a generation, nobody else has to be like that. But we should all be trying to be that good. That's the job.
Q: Well, then, it's more about, I think, being part of a continuum of songwriters. And you and Ani spoke about this as well. A continuum that stretches to the past from Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie to you to Ani. Do you feel a part of that continuum going back to those other guys?
A: In a way. I think maybe less so than Ani does from the conversation that we had. My sense of place in things goes back further, I think, in a way. I mean, when I started out, I kind of imagined myself as a kind of medieval Jean Glur (phonetic) or something. You know, like one of the - a troubadour from that era. Not in the class -- not in the truthful sense of what a troubadour literally was in medieval times. But I had more of an affinity for that kind of thing than I did for the songs of Woody Guthrie, for example.
Although I appreciated those and appreciated Woody. I loved reading his book. And you know, I loved the fact that he was on the planet doing what he was doing. I guess I do feel like part of a continuum, but it's a very, very long continuum. And it goes from at least sort of the medieval times and maybe back to cave art. And it goes on way into the world of sci-fi. And it probably comes from the fact that those were the things I was interested in before I was a musician, when I was a kid in school and I was always interested in history and I read a lot of sci-fi. So it's those kinds of things that shape our sense of how we fit.
Q: In the last song we heard, Trickle Down, you can hear elements of being a troubadour or elements of being in the Woody Guthrie tradition. In the song Trickle Down, when you say, "Trickle down blood," does that mean you believe the ultimate result of this style of voodoo economics and greed itself is violence?
A: Yes. The trickle down theory is a symptom, a verbal expression of a set of attitudes. Another way to look at it would be that greed used to be one of the seven deadly sins. And that's a recognition of the fact that it's part of the human makeup. We all have it in us. But formerly, it was something you were supposed to be embarrassed about it. Now we celebrate it as a cardinal virtue. We try to make it into a lifestyle. And I think this is very destructive. It's spiritually destructive for the individual and hugely, physically destructive for the planet. And if we don't reign it in, we won't survive. I think it's that simple. And the time is coming when we will be at a threshold where we won't be able to fix what we've done. The damage will be too great. And it's not that far off.
Greed is the enemy at this point. And we have to reign it in again. We have to not necessarily make it into some sort of suppressed Freudian thing that's going to make us all messed up and neurotic later on down the line, but we've got to -- we can't let that rule. And that's what we've been doing.
Q: Spiritual awareness has always been a component of your work. And one thing your new album does share with some of your others is that the darkness and the light are both represented. Sometimes equally, sometimes not. Trickle Down is a tough song. And the next one has you coaxing those of us listening to that hope triumph. It's called Put it in Your Heart. Do you think the darkness in the world helps bring about a greater spirituality in those who aren't consumed by avarice?
A: That's an interesting question. I think that humanity is at a point where there is a kind of spiritual crisis that we're confronted by. It has to do with environmental things and with our affects on the physical world. But it also is a spiritual issue. And that is, it's kind of a race between the thing in us that wants to be aware of the interconnectedness of all things, that wants to recognize and respect and value our dependency on the planet that gives us life and on the cosmos as a whole. It's a race between that and what is in us that wants to self-destruct -- that wants us to self-destruct. And we all have this too. But it's -- you can see it around the world.
At the same time, there's the evil side, the obvious evil side of globalization. There's also the aspect of it that furthers communication, that allows people protesting the US invasion of Iraq, for example, in all parts of the world to be aware of each other and to know that there's really a movement. That it's not just a bunch of isolated people in Montreal, or in San Francisco or in London or whatever. It's millions of people all over the place. And we can see this. And so even globalization, which I'm pretty much an enemy of, has it's good side.
And at the same time that's going on, I feel like -- although I don't know what I can offer in the way of evidence, but I just kind of have this gut feeling people are waking up, more and more, to our interdependency among ourselves and the interconnectedness of ourselves with everything else.
I see great spiritual traditions that have formerly been hermetic, been secret. The Sufis, the Cabalists and so on, coming out and saying, "hey, it's time to make our understanding of the cosmos public. It's time to share this knowledge with people." I don't know how much that means to people. But to me, it says -- to me it is evidence that this spiritual crisis is being seen by the people in charge of sort of maintaining that kind of understanding. And I think we should pay attention to it. So the song's try to point at that, too.
SONG: PUT IT IN YOUR HEART
Q: Bruce, your songs reflect the duality that we all live with. Looking inward, looking outward. At some point, your music and life began to be dedicated to, in part, activism on behalf of various causes that you believe in: the environment, animal rights, landmine concerns, the rights of indigenous people. Do you remember when your activism became awakened and when you began traveling literally all over the world to try and change things?
A Yeah, pretty much. Growing up, I was not interested in politics at all. It just looked like just a big mound of baloney to me. And in many ways it still does look like that. But that mound of baloney has an effect that we need to pay attention to, I think. And it took me some time to learn that.
But travel had a lot to do with gaining that understanding. Initially, travel across Canada. I, for instance, never met any native people growing up, that I knew of, anyway. But all of a sudden, you know, I'm up in western Canada and a friend is there and a friend of a friend happens to be somebody that grew up on a reserve, or they grew up in a foster home that was taken from their parents at an early age in what was then kind of the pattern. And I began to get an understanding of what these people's lives had been like. And therefore, the light kind of went on, there's more in the world that what I've experienced. An obvious point, but one that kind of came home emotionally through things like that. This is in the '70s at this point.
What really crystallized it was in the early '80s when I first went to Central America and - I had been interested in that. My brother had been doing solidarity work, my brother Don, with the rebel movement in El Salvador for years and had been trying to get me interested. And I'm going, you know, it's all just more of the same crap. I'm not interested. But he kept feeding me literature. And when the Nicaraguan revolution was successful, there were allegations of persecution of the church, for instance, against the Sandinista government and various other things that were said. But there kept being this other information. There's an organization called Pax Christi that did a study on whether or not there was persecution of the church. And came to the conclusion that no only was there not, but -- and this is a Catholic organization. Not only was there not persecution of the church, but the conservative elements in the church said shut up and get out of the way and let these people get on with trying to improve their lives.
And things like this got me interested. And I thought, "you know, I want to go see what that looks like for myself," because obviously, all these reports are giving me a confusing view and I want to see what it looks like on the ground. But I didn't want to just buy a ticket and be a tourist, because what would I see? I wouldn't know what I was looking at. And right about then, Oxfam, an aid agency, came along and asked me to go to Nicaragua on their behalf and be a witness to the work that they were doing and the need for that work and so on. And it was exactly what I was hoping for. And that was the real beginning.
This is kind of a long answer to what was essentially a simple question, but when I got there, any vestige I had of the idea that art and politics should be separated in some way disappeared, because in a situation like that, you see so clearly that you can ignore politics all you want, but it's going to come up and whack you. And so you better be paying attention. And the people who live in countries like Nicaragua understand that very, very well. And like people anywhere else, in America or Canada or wherever, they would much rather get on with their day-to-day life and be thinking about those things. But when they try to do that, somebody comes and kills them.
So you know, at that point, it's like, okay, if the job of an artist is to write about life, this is a big chunk of life we're talking about here. So it's important to include that in the target material for songwriting. And once you've done that, once you've got songs about things, once the word goes out that you're willing to make these kinds of trips, there are invitations (that) come along all the time.
Q: Well, at the very start, was it your profile as a musician that lead you into being invited by Oxfam to go to places?
A: Yeah. What I can bring to the ballgame is my visibility, my ability to get the attention of at least elements of the media and of the public. And to help spread the word that there are these issues that exist and there's work that needs to be done. I don't really think of myself as an activist. I'm kind of a helper, in a way, because to me, the people who are really out there doing the work are the people who work for agencies like Oxfam or -- well, any number of other ones, who really spend their lives trying to fix the problems in the world. And so, it doesn't really take much out of my life. And in fact, it's added hugely to my life for me to kind of lend my -- whatever I can offer in terms of support to their work. And most of the time, that means being a mouthpiece.
Q: And we talked about whether you had a mission or not. That seems like a mission, even if it's to be a mouthpiece versus always being in the trenches. I mean, that's your -- part of your raison d'etre as a human being.
A: Well, yeah, I guess it is. It's become that. And it just seems to me that we all need to do whatever we can do. I mean, most of us that have 9:00 to 5:00 jobs don't get the opportunity to travel to exotic places and get to find out what it's like to stand in the middle of a minefield. But those of us who can do that, I think, have a certain obligation to take advantage of our position and help spread the word. And those of us who are stuck with 9:00 to 5:00 jobs can talk about it. We can just keep it in our conversations and keep thinking about it and keep the issues in front of the people we work with or that we sit next to on the bus or whatever. |
Bruce talks about his early influences... 
