Rumours of Glory: A Memoir

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When I was born on 27 May, 1945, my father, Doug Cockburn, was not around. That was not by choice. The Canadian army had put him through medical school during World War II, and Dad was sent to Europe just before the end of hostilities. While he was stationed in England waiting to be transferred to the European mainland, Germany surrendered. Dad then became part of the occupying force. I was about a year and a half old when he saw me for the first time. I suspect I was not happy to have to share the attention of my mother, Lois, with this guy I had never set eyes on. I do remember, though, a fair amount of jollity in those early years. (The arrival of the first of my two brothers when I was five was the occasion for a better-remembered resentment.)

Union Street, Kingston, Ontario, 1948

On my father’s return to Canada, we moved from my maternal grandparents’ place in Ottawa to Kingston, Ontario. Dad went back to school to continue his studies, specializing in radiology. We had a ground-floor apartment on Union Street, where we lived for what I suppose was the next couple of years. I have a clear picture of my dad hauling me around in a sleigh, bundled up in a brown snowsuit and swaddled in a blanket, over frozen sidewalks. He’d be jogging along in his Queens University jacket with the leather sleeves, taking the corners too fast. The sleigh would tip over and the bundle of me would roll out into the road. In my memory this happened more than once. I’m told I was too young to really remember this—that it’s a recollection made from having heard the story repeated. Maybe.

I guess as the firstborn, I inspired my father to ensure that I was exposed to the finest of what Western culture could offer. He subscribed to some sort of record-of-the-month thing as well as the Book-of-the-Month Club. Twelve times a year, an album would arrive in the mail. Originally, it was actually an album—a book like a photo album whose pages were sleeves for 78-RPM Bakelite discs. These were played on the hi-fi (we didn’t have a windup Victrola, as I recall, though relatives did, and I was familiar with them).

Aside: When my mother’s brother Gerald was little, he confused the words for Victrola and toilet. This resulted in her side of the family referring to the latter fixture as the troley till I was well into my teens.

In the evenings my mom and dad and I would sit in the living room and listen to this music. Mostly it was performances of great classics by somewhat second-rate orchestras. Let it be said that my father had a good ear for music and a keen sense of pitch. It always bothered him that the brass band of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, which had a weekly radio show, tended to play out of tune.

There we would sit, music filling the room. The vocal pieces, sung in formal classical style, were a total turnoff to me, especially the high female voices laden with vibrato. The men, too, though. What I remember being particularly taken with was Manuel de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance. When that piece played I could see human figures leaping in silhouette, circling the flames of a huge bonfire. Had I even seen a bonfire at the age of two or three? Maybe, maybe not, but the association of fire and ritual and human action slipped in from who knows where. That piece of music fired me up every time I heard it.

Other memories from Kingston in the 1940s: running under the front porch—refusing to go in for either dinner or bed, I forget which. My dad couldn’t get me to come out. I only screamed No! when he suggested, then asked, then ordered me into the house. It took a gentle intervention by an older man who lived next door to coax me out of my hiding place. Even with my fear of cobwebs, I felt that squatting in the dirt—having crawled through an opening in the latticework on one side of the veranda, under sticky-soft stalactites of spider silk—was better than going inside, admitting that the day was over. I always hated the ending of the day. I felt like not enough had happened. Still do.

The pond at Grandpa’s farm

One morning I deliberately locked my mother out of the house. I remember standing in the hall in my short pants and beige knitted cardigan with images of cowboys on it. Mom must have ducked out briefly, for what reason I don’t know, and I thought it would be a good joke to latch the door behind her. When she demanded that I let her in, I refused. I thought this was the funniest situation I’d ever seen, and I laughed and laughed—and kept laughing till I saw the expression on her face as she climbed in the little bathroom window, over the back of the troley. She was hopping mad. My amusement instantly turned to gut-melting fear. I guess I got spanked. Can’t really recall. Later I learned that she had been six months pregnant. That pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I was assured that climbing in the window was not a factor.

When Dad’s schooling was done with, we moved back to Ottawa. He got a gig at what was then the Ottawa Civic hospital. Eventually he became head of diagnostic X-ray there. Now and then as a schoolboy I would go with him to work, or meet him there for a ride home after my trumpet lessons. He would show me the X-rays he was reading, and I could sit and try to follow along as he dictated his findings into the then state-of-the-art Dictaphone, verbally putting in commas, periods, and paragraph indentations.

To a little kid in Ottawa in the late forties, diversity meant there was a French boy who lived down the block. That, and once on Bank Street with my mother I saw a black man. I pointed and stared, and was instantly shushed and admonished against commenting on people’s appearance (especially if they were within earshot). This lesson was repeated another day when we encountered an old man with a gin blossom nose, which caused me to point and laugh and cry out, "Look at his nose!" Major disapproval.

Mostly everyone was the same. There were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but nobody ever mentioned that. Everybody was just people. I played with Billy from across the street and Donnie M. There was a bad kid named Norman who was maybe a year older than my playmates and I. My parents chased him away whenever they saw him around. Gilles, the francophone kid, was a bit older and quite polite.

What constituted a bad kid? We lived on the upper floor of a duplex. Downstairs were people called the Meldrums. Next door to us lay a vacant lot overgrown with shrubs and one or two big trees. For us it was a jungle, or the northern bush. Many games unfolded there: war games, cowboys and Indians, Tarzan. Guns were crooked sticks or cap-firing toys. My friend John Whynot, the engineer who has recorded many of my albums, once voiced the observation that boys are all about projectiles. We certainly were, though we were cautioned never to throw anything at each other that could inflict harm. Now and then I could play with my mother’s BB gun, but I’d better not shoot anyone in the eye.

One day Donnie and I were playing next to the Young Stick Tree, so called because around its base grew a large number of shoots that we could break off to use for swords and the like. Nearby stood a sawn-off stump. Norman appeared with a kid I didn’t know and the kid’s little brother, who must have been two. Norman cajoled the two-year-old into putting his hand on the stump and then pounded on it with a brick. Blood shot across the rough-looped annual rings. The little guy screamed. Norman grinned happily. Bad kid. I remember him urinating in our yard as some kind of gesture. I can’t recall the circumstances, but there he is pulling out his penis and pissing on the lawn, and my mother calling him a dirty dog.

Now and then Billy would intentionally foul his trousers. I have a very vivid memory of us playing on the lawn outside the Meldrums’. We’re squatting there fiddling around on the grass, and he gets a kind of reflective look on his face and goes vacant on me. We’re wearing shorts. Next thing I see is brown matter oozing out of his pant leg. I say, What are you doing? Oh, he says, I just wanted to do that. I guess that was a gesture too. When I told Mom about it, she said something like Oh, the poor child. At that age we knew nothing about what went on in the adult world. Nobody said. If Billy was abused at home, I have no idea. Maybe he was. There were murmurs of disquiet about what kind of parenting Donnie received.

Clothes were different then. I was sent to kindergarten, which was a few blocks away, wearing breeks and knee socks. The breeks were like riding breeches, made of wool, warm and scratchy. They had a button fly. I had a lot of trouble with that. Being left-handed, I lacked the dexterity to button myself up after going to the bathroom at school. I could unbutton myself well enough, but not the reverse. I got teased for having my fly open. That resulted in me holding it in until, on my way home, I could disappear into the vacant lot and relieve myself. Thus I was saved from embarrassment at school, but my mother always knew I’d peed outside, and I got scolded for that.

There was music. One day Billy and I went marching past the storefronts on Bank Street, with saplings from the Young Stick Tree over our shoulders, singing Onward Christian Soldiers at the top of our lungs. Old ladies stopped and smiled. Now and then at school they had rhythm band. We were issued tambourines and bells and other percussion toys, and we were supposed to play organized parts while the teacher sang or played the piano. I guess we were supposed to sing too. I was completely at sea. I had no idea what was meant to happen, though the other kids seemed to know. I was given two wooden sticks, sort of like drumsticks, and told to hit them together on a particular beat. Not knowing what that meant and being too nervous to feel the rhythm even if there had been any, I just whacked away when it seemed like I should. I remember the teacher being a rather sour woman.

My head was already too big for my dad’s homburg.

For me school consisted of feeling centered out and humiliated, right from day one. I discovered a gift for constructing alternate realities. When my dad got home from work after my first day of kindergarten, he asked me how it was. I very enthusiastically replied, It was great. We got to wear cowboy hats and chaps, and there were guns hanging all around the walls! At that moment I completely believed what I was saying. Dad said, Are you sure you’re not imagining that? No! That’s how it was!

My dad and I had a routine. When we sat down at the dinette for dinner, I’d say to him, What have you got to tell me today? He’d have to come up with something to explain to me: how volcanoes were created, for example, or the order of the planets, or how in World War I soldiers had to pee in their handkerchiefs and then breathe through them to survive poison gas attacks. He was pretty good at it. I remember only once or twice when he seemed too tired to get into it. He did it anyway, though: he told me about being twelve and seeing a boy on a bicycle get hit by a truck. The vehicle ran over the boy’s head, causing it to split open like a melon. He told me about history, and about Greek mythology. That would have been my first invitation to consider the possible interaction between the Divine and the human day-to-day.

I was fed some Bible-derived stuff too, pretty much in the same tone as that in which the Greek myths were presented. Mom and Dad were trying hard to be believers, I think he more than she. The grandmothers, especially my dad’s mom, Mayme, and her sister Margaret, aka Auntie, were serious devotees of the United Church of Canada. So we went sometimes.

Somehow I missed being baptized. It wasn’t till after my brother Don was born that they got around to that.

Another humiliation and cause for resentment: me, in the summer I was five, having to walk the length of the church aisle at Southminster United next to my squalling infant brother, to have done to me what they did to babies! If I’d been braver, these outrages would surely have driven me to a life of crime.

During those preschool years I had a recurring dream in which a seagull flew into our apartment. It did nothing but be a big white bird flying around, but it was utterly terrifying. I woke up screaming and sweating from that one every time. Of course, there were also monsters under the bed. I always slept with my little black tin revolver and a rubber knife under my pillow.

I found it impossible to hide embarrassment or guilt. I had a face that would turn red at the slightest provocation. Whenever I was active, it would glow in a way that prompted Grandma to offer an aside to Mom: Poor Bruce. She figured I had high blood pressure at the age of four or five, but I didn’t. I was, however, born with a mild case of spina bifida, resulting in a right leg that was an inch and a half shorter than the left, as well as a deformed pelvis and hammertoes on the corresponding foot.

For a brief period I wore metal braces on my lower legs. The difference in leg length was minor and no one else seemed to notice, but I have always been acutely aware of it—especially as a kid, and particularly when wearing the braces. I maintain a vivid memory of walking along Second Avenue in Ottawa wearing short pants and being very self-conscious of the braces, metal devices with leather around the top and bottom that clamped onto my legs, holding my ankles straight. Later my parents told me it was a false memory—that I was made to wear a brace only on the right leg, and only when I went to bed at night—but the picture remains. My aunt Jean, Dad’s sister-in-law, remembers me going around in the daytime with a brace on each leg.

My left foot grew to be almost two sizes larger than my right, which I could see very well, right down to the bones, through the fluoroscope on visits to the shoe store. Radiation was popular in the fifties. One hundred roentgens per minute was a small price to pay for an accurate fit. (Some fluoroscopes reportedly delivered more than 350 roentgens per minute.) Dad was a radiologist, so he probably kept us from spending too much time on the fluoroscope.

Aside: There’s a good chance he was one of the few people in North America who read the 1949 paper on fluoroscopes by Louis Hempelmann, M.D. Hempelmann had previously worked with the health division of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. In his paper, he said the unsupervised use of low-voltage fluoroscopes would most likely result in the malformation of children’s feet, as well as skin damage in adults and damage to blood-forming tissues of store employees. What scientists hadn’t yet discovered is that the fluoroscope also contributed significantly to breast cancer, as mothers hovered near children who gleefully pushed the button over and over to repeat the exposure.

Back then the Ottawa River ran wide with enormous log booms. Lumbermen in spiked boots skipped across the bobbing trunks, jabbing them with long pikes to keep them from jamming. The E. B. Eddy Paper Co. sat suspended in spray on an island in the rapids between Ontario and Quebec, and now and then, when the wind was right, the Ottawa air reeked with sulphur fumes from the pulp mills downriver at Thurso. During the hot summers people packed popular swimming beaches on the Ontario side, at Britannia and Norway Bay, but we seldom went to them. Mom and Dad preferred a spot on the Rideau River near Carleton University, a place called Hog’s Back that offered a series of pools above a narrow gorge through which the river churned and foamed. A trip there was always accompanied by admonishments to stay away from the outflow of the pools.

Big Timber has thrived along the Ottawa River for centuries—ever since Canada began supplying logs to Great Britain during England’s twenty-two-year war against France, which ended with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. The logging industry is still huge in Canada, which holds 10 percent of the world’s forests, and clear-cutting remains the rage.

According to National Geographic, Canada is home to the largest intact forest on earth. [The forest] supports 25 percent of the world’s wetlands, as well as millions of pristine lakes and thousands of free-flowing rivers. It contains 197 million acres of surface fresh water, an area twice the size of California. It harbors more surface area of fresh, clean water than any other ecosystem on earth. All of which remains true, for now. Canada’s national and provincial governments have not shown much propensity for protecting increasingly important resources. Our 1.2 million square miles of bush have been allowed to become a net contributor to climate-altering greenhouse gasses.

Of course, when I was a child, climate change meant that the first nip of fall was drifting down from Hudson Bay, or spring buds were blinking from the seasonally bare sugar maples and magnificent elms near our home. Our elders believed the forest to be so vast that it would last forever. Mom’s father, Arthur Graham, was, in the terms of the day, a protector of the forest. He served as district fire inspector for the Canadian Pacific Railway between Montreal and Ottawa during the early twentieth century, and later became chief fire inspector for the Lower Ottawa Forest Protective Association. The idea was to guard forests against fire so they could later be cut down for industrial uses. In 1915 the Commission of Conservation/Committee on Forests issued a report, Forest Protection in Canada, with such chapters as Financial Losses by Forest Fires and Great Loss of Stumpage Values, in which Grandpa’s efforts were commended.

Seventy-three years later, in Toronto, I wrote If a Tree Falls, a lament for forest loss worldwide. The song is mostly focused on the rapid destruction of tropical rain forests, but it was clear by then that temperate and boreal forests—in Canada and around the world—were also falling at rates that might be described as biblical. In a 2008 interview the great Canadian scholar and environmental activist David Suzuki said that If a Tree Falls was one of his two favourite songs; he cried when he heard it. (The other was Beds Are Burning, by Midnight Oil. Good company.)

I wonder what Grandpa Graham would think of my tree song. Would he lament or applaud the current conditions of North American forests? When he retired, Grandpa and my grandmother, Eleanor, moved onto a farm near Chelsea, Quebec, just beyond what was then the outskirts of Ottawa/Hull, where they raised much of their own food and produced maple syrup and soap. But it wasn’t long before the agency charged with overseeing relations between the federal government and the City of Ottawa expropriated the farm as part of a forward-looking but poorly planned scheme to create a greenbelt around the city. My grandparents had their farm taken from them in an act of eminent domain.

They loved that farm. It was their dream to retire there. I was nine years old, I think, when they were forced out, and I remember the event as sad and a little confusing. The place left a big impression on me: Grandma in the kitchen doing something at the sink; the cats meowing and rubbing themselves on her legs, which caused groans from my mother, who was always nervous about cats; Tom the Hired Man collecting eggs in the henhouse; Grandpa plowing the field with his Massey Ferguson tractor. I can still see someone milking Daisy Mae the cow, white froth splashing into a pail below pumping fists; Dad and Grandpa going to work repairing the little dam that created a trout pond in the creek flowing between the barnyard and the bush. In high summer Grandpa took me walking through the woods, and I got lessons in how to tell a red pine from a white pine or jack pine by the number of needles in a cluster.

In a favourite memory it’s early spring and Dot, the big black horse, is hitched to the sleigh. We plod through deep snow, collecting sap from buckets hung on spigots hammered into the sugar maples. The jugs of sap are hauled to the sap house, a small structure in the bush behind the main house, where it gets poured into an oversized fire-heated vat. The pale brown sap bubbles and darkens, morphing into that most Canadian of condiments, maple syrup. (No offense to Vermont’s maple syrup producers.) Grandma Graham would sometimes bake us a maple syrup pie.

Halfway through my kindergarten year we moved again, to the Westboro neighbourhood. Our house, at 483 Highland Avenue, was a two-storey brick structure built in, I’m guessing, the twenties. There was a room in the basement that had been a coal cellar, and another small cement-walled space that had seen service as a cold storage, which I got to set up as a hideout. The house stood on a double lot, the other half of which was lawn, with two or three tall spruces and a pergola with seats, mostly hidden from the street by the trees. We were less than a mile from the river, which from there flowed southeast to the St. Lawrence and the work in progress that was the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The Ottawa forms the boundary between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and between the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau, which until recently was known as Hull. Just north of the urban zone, which today holds more than one million souls, the landscape transforms quickly into the largely unpopulated Canadian Shield, or Laurentian Plateau, a vast expanse of forest and rock that surrounds Hudson Bay and extends into the northeastern United States. As a child and teenager I enjoyed many adventures in this wildland. My parents had a cottage on Grand Lake, north of town, which was one lake over—in a land of thousands of lakes—from the cottage my grandparents had acquired on MacGregor Lake, which took the place of their expropriated farm.

For several years I attended a month-long summer camp in Algonquin Park, about a hundred miles from Ottawa, with as much as two weeks of it spent canoeing through a wilderness of rock, water, and evergreens. We kept the company of bears and otters, raccoons, deer, chipmunks, bass and sunfish, bloodsuckers, woodpeckers, raptors, and ravens. It was in Canadian Shield country that I learned to love the peace and expansiveness of the world as it was made. I have lived a mostly urban life, but the nearby wilderness fixed itself in my brain as the essence of how things should be. When I think of nature, I think of the Canadian Shield, which returns me to a sense of freedom of spirit. When I am confronted by the degradation of our surroundings, I feel that freedom being threatened, eroded.

Love of the wilderness, love of knowledge . . . there was never much talk about love of each other. My dad, Doug, and my mom, Lois, expressed very little deep feeling while raising me and my younger brothers, Don and John, other than what could come through laughter. Love was present, certainly, but was never stated and rarely shown. My parents expressed the normal amount of anger at inappropriate behaviour on our part, but never at one another. They never kissed in front of us, not more than a peck anyway, and never embraced. When my grandfather, Arthur, died in 1961, my dad hugged my mom. She then ran upstairs crying. That was the most emotion I saw out of either of my parents growing up.

Aside: I don’t remember hearing the word love in a family context until I was nineteen, and then only through circumstance. I was in music school in Boston. I met a friend of a roommate, recently back from the war in Vietnam, who was planning on spending the summer running guns from Central America to Cuba. He needed someone to watch his back and offered me the job. I thought about it. I think he became interested in me because the roommate told him I was in the habit of going for long walks late at night, haunting the alleys with the rats and the other skulkers, armed with a bayonet in case of trouble. My lack of training in anything martial was on a par with the would-be gunrunner’s lousy judgment. I declined. When my dad came to Boston to drive me home for summer break, I told him about the job. He was shocked to hear of the offer and appalled that I would consider accepting it. What do you care what I do? I said, filled with both indignation and anger—emotions with which I was on intimate terms. Dad stared forward and faltered, stumbling on his words. A father loves his son, he said. Never had he uttered anything like this in my hearing. He didn’t even know how to say it. I was stunned. I had no way to express how deeply moved I was, how bittersweet the feeling. We drove on in silence.

Ours was a secular household, in spite of the exposure we all had to the surface ideals and imagery of Christianity. We went to church on the Sundays when we weren’t at the cottage or skiing, because that’s what was expected of us. This was the fifties. There was a need to observe the social norms to keep people from calling you a Communist. Canada didn’t suffer the same problems as the United States did—lives and careers ruined, friends and family ratting each other out even when no actual rat was to be found—but similar sentiments infiltrated our culture. We had no counterpart for the McCarthy witch hunts, but it was not wise to be different. We went to church partly out of concern for that convention, but also because Auntie would have been upset if we didn’t attend. It was a conservative time.

Most church experiences during my youth were simply endured. My parents provided crayons and paper to keep me quiet during sermons. Some years later—I may have been ten or eleven years old—I voluntarily eschewed the crayons and actually listened to the sermon, and a lightbulb went on. What’s this? Something interesting? I don’t remember what the minister was saying, but he was nailing something. For the first time I realized that they actually talked about real stuff during the sermons. This newfound interest, however, was brief. It wasn’t long before I was a preteen joining other kids spending our collection money on candy at the corner store instead of depositing it into the plate.

Southminster United Church was part of the United Church of Canada, which was created in 1925 out of three Protestant denominations: Methodist, Congregationalist, and two-thirds of the existing Presbyterian churches. This amalgamation was officially sanctified by an act of Parliament, a union of church and state that our southern neighbours—except, of course, America’s growing class of reactionary fundamentalists—might frown upon. Today the United Church of Canada is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, though these days attendance is down about 50 percent from a high of 1.1 million in 1965. In those years the United Church accentuated the protest in Protestant, and today the church continues to pursue programs that address several critical social and environmental issues, including resource extraction, Indian residential schools, and globalization.

Of course these concerns were absent, from the public radar at least, in 1950, when at the age of five I was finally baptized. What did happen that year was that the United Church of Canada became the first major denomination to eschew the doctrine of inherent immortality. No longer would parishioners be required to exile nonbelievers to a place of eternal torture and punishment for their failure to accept Christ. Thank God! That day, though, when I was marched down the aisle along with my infant brother, Don, I felt thoroughly tortured and punished. I didn’t like attention anyway, except on my own terms. I still don’t. Even positive attention can be oppressive. Early in my solo music career, I had to affect a disdain for audiences in order to make myself get up onstage and perform without being overcome with nerves. Fortunately, this dance between alienation and the need to be loved in order to connect with my audience only lasted about thirty years.

When we moved to Ottawa we settled into an apartment on Sunnyside Avenue, in the area called Ottawa South. Halfway through my kindergarten year we moved again, to the west end, and I had to switch schools, which meant reliving the feeling of alienation I’d had a half-year earlier. I remained an outsider, the shy kid with a lopsided walk. Though it probably wasn’t true, I felt like everyone was always staring at me. I was among strangers in a strange place, a gnawing discomfort I have never shaken. Throughout my young childhood, though I played with other kids, I remained mostly a loner, an introvert. School report cards contained observations like Bruce would be a good student if he would just stop daydreaming. I had a gift for constructing alternate realities: one that dealt with the external world, and another that was all my own. They became so sharply divided that often my day-to-day self didn’t know what my inner self was doing. Even so, the world in my head was vivid to me, despite, or perhaps because of, its hidden chambers and secret stairways.

Music continued to creep in. In grade three the school held involuntary auditions for the choir. The woman in charge of the choir program visited every classroom. She and my teacher, Miss Beauchamp, walked up and down the aisles while the class sang, stopping next to each of us to listen and judge whether we qualified for the job. I sang terribly on purpose. No way was I going to be in that choir. I guess I overdid it. My deliberately out-of-tune voice took on a caterwauling tone reminiscent of Jerry Lewis. That got me in trouble, and I had to write lines. At least I was off the hook. (A greater lesson I learned from Miss Beauchamp was that a radical is a person who addresses social problems at their root, and she cited Pete Seeger as one of North America’s great radicals. More than fifty years later, in 2009, I would be honoured to sing at Seeger’s ninetieth birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York.)

I didn’t mind singing with the class, though, maybe because there was no audience and we were all in it together. Misery loves company. I remember being particularly touched by the Welsh folk melody All Through the Night:

While the moon her watch is keeping

all through the night

while the weary world is sleeping

all through the night

O’er thy spirit gently stealing

visions of delight revealing

Breathes a pure and holy feeling

All through the night.

I look back on this song with some fondness. All through my life I have embraced and questioned the night, and loved its random light: the aurora borealis, the starry reaches of the cosmos, streetlight ricochet off car metal and darkened windowpanes . . . the light of friends and lovers.

We are on a great journey, through darkness and dawn, across time, though sometimes I fear that our journey is about to end. We must not succumb to fear or avarice; we must continue to embrace life, seek light, and gather in the charity of night. This is what God wants from us and for us. Mirrors of the past shine with the hue of unborn days, just as stars glitter in the dark night to light our way.

When I was ten years old, Mom and Dad raised the subject of music lessons. Would I like to play an instrument? I was not opposed to this.

Both Mom and Dad played piano: Mom, light classical pieces from printed sheet music, and Dad, the pop music of his youth, by ear, in any key as long as it was F. They both embraced musicals, and when I was really little they were given to singing together. We’d be going somewhere in the car, and they’d croon show tunes from My Fair Lady and Oklahoma, Home on the Range, and music-hall songs like Barnacle Bill the Sailor. When I was a toddler I liked it, but as growing boys my brothers and I found it embarrassing. What if our peers were to hear this? Oooooklahoma, where the wind goes . . . I’d want to shoot them. Eventually they stopped singing, probably because my brothers and I became intolerable about it. We had a special loud groan we used just for such occasions.

My uncle had an unused clarinet lying around, so this became my first instrument. I didn’t really relate to the clarinet, but I did enjoy playing music. Later my parents bought me a trumpet, and I played that until I was thirteen. When I hit grade nine, the first year of high school, I felt entitled to advance to grade ten music. The music teacher disagreed, so I spent months of music classes bored with the basics that I already knew. At the end of the year I dropped the trumpet, and the study of music, though I continued to consume it through the tinny earpiece of my little transistor radio, covertly tuning in late-night rock and roll. I also discovered Igor Stravinsky in my parents’ record collection. It was a second-rate performance of The Firebird, and I’d spin it frequently on the family hi-fi. My dad would have preferred Vivaldi or Mozart, and he’d drolly condemn the Russian composer as Bruce’s tone-deaf hero.

When I wasn’t absorbing music, I was devouring books. Never drawn to academics, I nonetheless have always loved words. By grade six we’d evolved from rhyming ballads, such as Alfred Noyes’s The Highwayman, to more modern material. On one occasion we were assigned the task of memorizing a poem of our choice from an English textbook. I stumbled on Ars Poetica, by the Illinois poet Archibald MacLeish:

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves

Memory by memory the mind.

Here was a juxtaposing of imagery, of evocative impressions, suggesting the vastness of things. I was hooked. Soon I’d visit T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, masters of beauty and depth.

Much of the rest of my reading time was filled with sci-fi. Ace Doubles offered two stories; you’d finish one and then flip the paperback for the other. I’d read Jack Vance’s Big Planet/The Slaves of the Klau, then immediately crack Andre Norton’s Sargasso of Space, backed by Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets. Though I have never given up sci-fi, I was soon on to Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs would come later, but he would definitely come. Later, too, came the darkly transfigurative travelogues of poet Blaise Cendrars and Ginsberg’s roiling Fall of America.

Aside: Our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Peddie, the mother of Ian, who was my age and with whom I played, wrote regular letters to her parents in her native England. Ian’s sisters were kind enough to share some excerpts from those letters. . . .

Sun. 30. V. 54

. . . [Ian] and the boy next door are crazy about space ships and you should see all the contraptions they have fixed up. Bruce has an outer space outfit which his father bought in the States and Ian has his own crystal set complete with earphones . . . they pretend [the programs] come from Mars. . . .

In 1959 my parents realized that my brothers, ages nine and seven, needed to stop sharing a room. So we moved across town to the house my dad had grown up in while a new structure was built on the lot next to our existing house, which was sold. Grandma Cockburn occupied that home with Auntie, her sister. It was at Grandma and Auntie’s house that I would find my holy grail, the North Star and trail guide of my life.

As a younger child I had always loved going to the sisters’ house. They were kind ladies who made a fuss over me and produced delectable Sunday dinners of roast beef and browned potatoes, with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert. It was a three-story house, with access to the top floor provided by a narrow stair that opened onto a landing, on either side of which lay a small bedroom. Historically Grandma and Auntie had rented these rooms to young, single working women. (I had had a little boy’s crush on Alma, the blond airline stewardess.) There was a single bed and a dresser, a small table for homework. The wall on the street side sloped inward, following the slant of the roof, and opposite that was a low, mysterious doorway, which led to a large attic closet. Something to explore! The attic was piled with boxes, a decrepit tennis racket, some folding chairs, and in the shadows—my heart leapt!—a beat-up cardboard guitar case.

I dragged the case into the room and opened it. Inside was a small, dark brown guitar with strings discoloured by rust. Whose it had been was a mystery. Who it was meant for was not.

History and family and experience and hormones collided in a singular molten moment. A guitar! It was a beat-up old no-name thing, set up for playing with a steel, Hawaiian style. It had not been strummed for a long time, so no one minded if I abused it. I was terribly excited. I painted gold stars on its top, posed with it, and banged away on it seeking the rudimentary grooves I’d heard on the radio, without much success. But it pulled me in. I spent a lot of time with that guitar. In my mind I was already a guitar player, and I spent a lot of time in my mind, so what’s real is real. I couldn’t relate to much of what went on in the outside world, except for rock and roll, and here, suddenly, was a ticket to ride.

Even before finding the instrument in the attic I had become infatuated with the deep twang of Duane Eddy, the jangle of the Crickets, the raunchy crunch of Scotty Moore on Elvis Presley recordings. Mom and Dad were not especially happy about this development. Like many of their generation, they looked at rock and roll the way a collector of fine automobiles might view a Ford Pinto. They were nervous because rock and roll meant teenage gangs and general bad behaviour, lewd dancing and cigarette packs in shirtsleeves. Dad thought the singers sounded effeminate and didn’t even sing in tune. But it was clear to me, as soon as I found that guitar, that this was what I would do. To their credit, my parents were keen on honouring their children’s interests.

I wasn’t thinking of a career. At first I didn’t even know what to do with the instrument, I just sort of hammered at it. I’d figure out one riff and play it all the time. My parents said, Look, if you’re going to play guitar, that’s fine with us. But you have to promise that you’ll take lessons, and you have to promise that you won’t grow sideburns and get a leather jacket, and you won’t play rock and roll. They imagined that if I learned the instrument properly, I would no longer want to play the awful teenage stuff. Eventually they were right.

My guitar teacher, Hank Sims, took one look at that guitar and declared it unplayable, so my parents bought me an inexpensive Kay, a fat-bodied acoustic archtop with flat wound strings. We got a DeArmond pickup to mount on it and make it electric. Some of the old blues greats, such as Jimmy Reed, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and many others, played Kay guitars because they were cheap but also because they produced the sound they wanted. Mine went underappreciated. That music was still waiting to be discovered.

I took my lessons. I learned some standard tunes and a lot of basic guitar techniques. Hank introduced me to the music of Chet Atkins and Les Paul. And, though I waited until I thought my parents wouldn’t care anymore, in the fullness of time I acquired sideburns and a leather jacket, and I played in a rock-and-roll band.

2

I don’t think I’m alone in remembering high school as a prison sentence. Nepean High was adjacent to my old public school, and both were only three blocks from my house, so in transitioning to high school I didn’t feel like I’d really gone anywhere. There was a change, though. Academic demands weren’t the issue. In spite of being lazy and a daydreamer, I have always loved words and non-mathematical intellectual challenges. Rather, it was the banal yet intimidating pressure to compete with peers, to fulfill someone else’s ideas of what, exactly, needed to be learned, and to look and act in ways that felt antithetical to my dawning sense of personhood that made high school such a drag. Never mind the minefields laid by the hormonal rush of puberty. I still wince at the memory of sitting in French class, after an hour of physical education, in a state of horrified embarrassment at the smell emanating from my sweaty crotch, which I was certain was offending every person (read: girl) in the room.

High school yearbook, 1963

All through school I resided to a large degree in a world of my own making. Though I always had a couple of friends, I was shy, a loner in my heart. Nowadays I would likely be diagnosed with ADD, but alas, I missed out on the Ritalin.

In those days everyone seemed afraid of something. There were rules for everything. I have never much liked other people’s rules, which is maybe why I was drawn to the Beat poets and their predecessors in the first place. Their poems often broke establishment rules for poetry and mocked the safe subjects that pundits deemed acceptable for the written word. In 1956, when I was eleven years old, Ginsberg published his famous broadside Howl and Other Poems, which didn’t so much break rules as crush them. Howl was a paratactical deconstruction of an illusory American dream, a demythologizing chapbook standing squarely on the shoulders of dissident greats like Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. It signalled the end of Father Knows Best and the beginning of Elvis, and challenged the powers-that-were with the understanding that their social control structures were so weak that a mere poem could undo them.

For me it was an opening of worlds, adrenaline delivered in letters. I found the poetry itself to be powerful, but I was also very much taken with the style of the Beats (which at the time was portrayed bemusedly by Time magazine). It contained a fierce rejection of conventional mores and a willful embrace of the artists’ poverty, which was thrust on them, at least in the beginning. I got a sense of headlong motion, breathless in the verbal paragliding.

Fear of poetry on the part of the powerful seems to have always been with us, and it doesn’t go away. Communist Russia was in the habit of confining dissident poets in insane asylums. North American society marginalized them as having no commercial value. And yet we were taught the works of the previous generation’s iconoclasts as part of a government-approved curriculum.

T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and William Butler Yeats set the literary scene for me. The Beat poets and writers shortly followed, and then I began dabbling at poetry of my own. I filled a notebook with derivative poems, full of veiled sexual fantasy and not-so-veiled imagery from horror stories I was reading. I took the work seriously but maintained a sense of irony. I drew a picture in ink on the cover—a man’s head with a big worm coming out of the forehead—and gave it a title: Excretions of a Mental Leper. The notebook lived in my top left desk drawer so I could retrieve it while I was supposed to be doing homework. One evening my father told me he had found it and was very concerned lest my younger brothers lay hands on it. I was really offended that he’d gone through my drawers, but I said I would make sure that they didn’t see it. He said he had already made sure by destroying it. I maintained a poker face in my absolute outrage, but I knew from that point that I could not trust him, or by extension any authority, ever again.

Toward the end of grade nine I got word from my friend Alan Greenberg that a certain day had been declared Beatnik Day. It was a subversive, unofficial declaration that felt to me like a safety-in-numbers opportunity to fly my true colours. (It occurs to me now that it may have been a declaration only by Alan, and only to me. No matter: I went for it.) I had seen a TV interview with an actual beatnik, who said she wore black as a gesture of mourning for the world. I didn’t have any black clothes. I had to improvise. I went to class on the appointed morning in a V-neck sweater, a tie without a shirt, and sunglasses. Hey, I’m a beatnik! I don’t recall seeing many other manifestations of latent Beatness, maybe a couple of kids wearing shades in the hall. I was not lauded for my uniqueness. I was ordered to the principal’s office, and then sent home to dress myself properly.

I was born into a generation of North American youth who enjoyed enormous privilege. But like most teenagers, we were aware of what was happening around us. Sheltered as we were in 1950s Canada, we could still see the rapid expansion of suburban life and world populations, the delirium of anti-Communist witch hunts, the mushrooming wars of empire, and especially the looming shadow of the crazy nuclear arms race. And while we may not have realized it, it was clear something was going on with the church, which I later understood to be an incremental but consistent diminishment of the institution’s authority in the face of state dominance. These were huge changes symbolized and catalyzed by the Big Bang of World War II, the results of which are only now coming to bear. Climate change and other environmental transformations may be irreversible, and human misery has never been more widespread as wealthy nations maintain their mad scramble to monopolize scarce resources such as fossil fuels, arable land, and water. Back then we couldn’t have predicted these changes, but even as teenagers, if only through the osmotic absorption of energetic shifts, we were aware of the nature of the path. We also understood, if only by intuition, that there wasn’t much authentic spirit to be encountered along the way.

I had my friend Alan, and a couple of others. Really I looked up to the tough kids. I’m not sure exactly why; maybe I envied what looked to me like their freedoms. I found them appealing