You Get Bigger as You Go: Bruce Cockburn's Influence and Evolution

By M.D. Dunn and Daniel Keebler

Bruce Cockburn has enthralled audiences with his insightful lyrics and innovative guitar playing for over half a century. Hit songs like "Wondering Where the Lions Are," "If I Had a Rocket Launcher," and "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" are just part of the story. In You Get Bigger as You Go: Bruce

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fermata Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780973196337

M.D. Dunn

Musician and writer M.D. Dunn has performed for over thirty years and released nine albums. He lives in Northern Ontario, Canada.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Rumours and Stories

The cat had something in the corner, and I was on the phone to a folk club in one of British Columbia’s Gulf Island communities — Denman, or Pender, Salt Spring maybe — a day’s travel by bus and ferry from the cabin on Burnaby Mountain where I lived that summer. Some weeks before, I had sent out rough demos and not heard back from anyone. Rather than wait ten years for email to come into fashion, I placed a follow-up call.

The voice on the other end told me she had been a schoolteacher. And her tone reminded me of grade-school teachers I had known.

You sound like Bruce Cockburn, one of those Neil-Young types, she said.

This seemed to be a good start, flattering comparisons to renowned songwriters.

Bruce Cockburn! Bah! she went on. Now there is a man with bad diction. Enunciation, I mean, not choice of words. He is quite a good poet. But he is a mumbler. He sings down.

She’d retired from teaching more than a decade before, she said, and had led the local choir and managed the concert series for years.

Cockburn would benefit from elocution lessons. He sings with marbles. You sing like he does, said the voice, concluding her review. Like you are scoffing at the world.

I drew a blue line through the name and the number I had just called. The cat in the corner lost the mouse and chased it through the kitchen and into the porch, crashing into silence.

Nothing from that demo, recorded on a portable cassette player through a small condenser mic that dangled from a plant hook in the ceiling, sounded anything like Cockburn’s music. I’d stomped out a half dozen strange songs I thought everyone should be excited about. It was as raw and lo-fi as my means. Other than the marble-mouthed, mumbling diction and a need for elocution lessons, I suppose, it was nothing like Cockburn.

Something about a white guy with an acoustic guitar can bring out Bruce Cockburn stories in people. Throughout my life in and around music, more than half of it playing cafés and street corners, at the occasional festival, and in many, many bars, I have learned that just about every Canadian with an interest in roots music has a story about Bruce Cockburn. Often, people want to hear his songs, which used to be an annoyance. They can listen to the original recordings with a click of a button. Why make someone else do it? But that was just ego and pride clouding the moment. Seen clearly, when an audience asks to hear a recognizable song, it is an attempt to find common ground. They were attracted by something familiar in the sound. Something you played reminded them of music that has touched them. And so they ask for a song by the musician they think you sound like. But playing Cockburn’s songs well, or even recognizably, is a feat. His music is inimitable and the guitar parts unattainable for the average campfire strummer. Still, people ask.

A drummer named Murphy tells of landing at Toronto’s Pearson Airport for the first time in the mid-nineties. Just a young guy from Newfoundland on his own in the big city. He stepped through the sliding doors to line up for a cab along with the rest of the travellers. Following the line back to its end, he saw among the grim faces that of Bruce Cockburn.

I stop Murphy there. Or my expression stops him. Maybe it was Rick Moranis? I offer. The Canadian actor known for his performances on SCTV and as Louis Key Master Tully in Ghostbusters could play Bruce in a biopic, they look so much alike.

No. Really. It was Bruce, he will insist.

As the story goes, my drummer friend, who stands a good 6’6", brought the blunt bottom edge of his closed fist against the man’s shoulder.

All right, he claims to have said. Bruce Cockburn!

He demonstrated on my shoulder how he struck the man waiting for a taxi under the awning outside the Pearson Airport domestic terminal. And it hurt. It was a friendly, east-coast hammer-jab on the shoulder, enough to rattle bones. The man he thought was Cockburn eyed him like a gun barrel was between them.

Sorry, bud, Murphy said or should have said if he didn’t.

Murphy’s not proud when he tells the story. There is a tinge of shame in his laughter over the presumptions of youth. First time in Toronto, the whole city out there, and the first familiar face is Bruce Cockburn’s, or someone who reminds you of Bruce Cockburn, waiting for a taxi, and what do you do? Slug him on the shoulder, of course. After all, it’s Toronto. You’re young.

A sandwich maker at Frog Pond Café in Owen Sound, Ontario, out of still silence, said, I had dinner with Bruce Cockburn.

Oh, yes? I was just tuning my guitar. Hadn’t said a word.

I was volunteering at the Summerfolk Music Festival and helped him carry some equipment. There was no one else around, and he asked if I would join him for dinner. He’s a very nice man.

So I’ve heard, I said.

After a Cockburn show in Woody Point, Newfoundland, a man and his daughter stood in line for an autograph. The girl had climbed on stage to steal the setlist for her father. The man wore khaki shorts and a plaid, collared short-sleeve shirt, almost standard uniform for middle-aged men at Cockburn concerts in the summer. As his turn approached, the man’s shoulders began to heave. By the time he stood at the table, he was weeping, trying to express what Bruce’s music had given him. Bruce looked at him softly, stood, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, It’s okay. I understand. Stay around after the line has dispersed. I’d like to talk with you.

The Naam Restaurant in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood is an ancient wonder. Founded while The Beatles were still a band and two years before the release of Bruce Cockburn’s debut album, The Naam was still going strong into the twenty-first century. When I knew the restaurant in the early 1990s, it was beloved by musicians, partly because of the free meals they gave you for playing. The musician was seated in the centre of the room, with the customers in the round. It was the perfect spot for an instrumentalist, or a singer of gentle songs, for a trained musician. I remember bewildered faces from patient diners the first time I played there, the only time I’ve played there. I wasn’t very good and have no memory of what I played that evening. My songs were extremely weird, and I was an angry strummer. There was nothing else to believe in at the time, only music, and so I went about finding gigs and thrashing out strange songs on a questionably tuned and poorly amplified acoustic guitar as if my soul depended on it. It did.

The manager or owner, whose name I will never remember, a woman maybe in her mid-forties, the sort of beautiful human who refers to themself as an old hippy, seated me at a desk in a small office above the dining room before my set. She brought in the most wonderful vegetarian meal I had ever had and said a curious thing that I remember more than thirty years later. She was talking about the musicians who had played The Naam since 1968, listing off a roll call of amazing acts.

I was already nervous and felt less adequate with each name. Then, after a pause, she said, He sat right there, you know.

I looked at the worn armrests on the wooden chair.

Who? I managed between forkfuls of rice.

Bruce Cockburn, she said. He sat right there.

Neat, I said, finished my meal, went out to that microphone, and stank up the place.

These stories are testament to the effect Bruce Cockburn’s music has had on people, how it has enriched our lives for over half a century. Music is a library of comfort, conflict, and revelation that grows with the listener. It’s a library of emotions and memory. A bottomless lake. An infinite mystery. A gift from the universe.

No Footprints

The first time I interviewed Bruce Cockburn, I asked how he deals with fame. How does he go about doing the laundry knowing that millions of people think of him as a living legend?

He answered, You can be a legend, or you can be present. You don’t get to be both. I don’t think too much about that legend-status thing.

To further explain his thoughts on the matter, he cited the song No Footprints from his 1979 album Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, which encourages the listener to leave No footprint when we go / Only where we’ve been, a faint and fading glow.

What a marvellous way to view a life well-lived: a faint and fading glow.

It is difficult to say how one’s work will be remembered, if at all, by future generations. If people have the leisure time, or access to the necessary technology to listen to recorded music in the coming centuries, will the giants of our day be remembered? And with new young artists and performers emerging daily, how much cultural space will be left for the foundational music of the twentieth century? Once the Boomers are gone, there will be few to tout the glory days of the 1960s. So-called Generation X is the closest the Boomers have had to a cheering squad, and Gen-X is overwhelmed by the crushing demographics before and after it.

If any music survives in the popular consciousness from the first era of great singer-songwriters, it will be by chance or by the design of investors who have bought the classic catalogues of heritage artists. Bob Dylan and Neil Young sold their catalogues — or significant chunks of them — to commodity traders. Maybe this music will stay alive through commercials and soundtracks.

Or, as often happens, perhaps a group of music lovers in the distant future will stumble upon and resurrect classic songs and albums. There is no way to know.

If any of the music from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries survives, I hope Bruce Cockburn’s music is found in the time capsule. The future has always been uncertain. It is good to think that Bruce’s music will be around generations from now to offer comfort to the afflicted, guidance to the confused, and clear-eyed documentation of chaotic times.

Whether he will be remembered in the coming decades and centuries seems to be a concern for fans more than for Cockburn.

Reflecting on these matters, Bruce says, Somebody told me a few years back that I should be thinking about my legacy. Legacy? What the fuck is that? If people are going to think of me at all, of course I would like them to love me and think I was a wonderful presence on the planet, et cetera, but I won’t be upset if they’re not thinking about me because they have other things to think about. Leaving no footprints when we go. To me, that’s better.

The Bruce Effect

When I listen to that first interview now, I am embarrassed by how nervous I was: voice stammering, quavering. It’s clear that Bruce heard it, too, and immediately cut through with a generous dose of humility. Cockburn is easy to talk with. He clearly enjoys people. His wit and intellect are formidable, and he does not hold back. Yet he seems aware that a careless word from him could be devastating. The five documented conversations we’ve had over the past seven years or so, many of which form the basis of this book, were always friendly and, sometimes, relaxed. I say sometimes because often the breadth of the man’s accomplishments as a musician and activist come to mind, and one can’t quite believe he is giving his time so generously. There can be a moment in a conversation with Bruce Cockburn when one’s mind goes to mush, the circuits overload, and everything shuts down. It is nothing that Cockburn does; and for people with an appreciation of his music, it has nothing to do with fame or celebrity. Anyone who understands the significance of the man’s music and activism cannot help but be occasionally overwhelmed.

It’s the Bruce Effect, a dysregulated state brought on by the sudden realization that you are speaking with Bruce Cockburn. It can turn otherwise articulate individuals into fence posts. Symptoms include selective mutism, tears, uncontrollable blathering, inappropriate non sequiturs, blank-eyed staring, rapid blinking, and wandering away mid-sentence while Mr. Cockburn wonders what the heck is wrong with you. It is partially the intensity of the man’s focus, the undiluted presence that can set it off, but mostly it is the memory of all those songs swirling through the brain that can induce a form of paralysis and transport the fan to the moment they first dropped the needle on one of his records.

There are also strange coincidences. One time, knowing that we might have a few minutes to chat backstage, I prepared a list of questions just in case Bruce would agree to a documented interview. In the dressing room with Bruce and a small group of fans, all was going well. The conversation was casual, humorous. Then, out of nowhere, he began talking about the filmmaker and conservationist Bill Mason. One of the questions I had prepared dealt with Bill Mason and the soundtrack Cockburn and Hugh Marsh had recorded for the classic canoe-adventure environmental film Waterwalker. But no questions had been asked. I had just presented Bruce with a gift, a pen made with oak salvaged from a shipwreck on Lake Superior. He inspected the pen, heard the story of its origin, then said, "Shipwreck, eh? Remember in Waterwalker, that scene where Bill Mason almost drowns in Lake Superior and has to fight the current to get back to shore?"

Yes, I said. It’s terrifying.

He just looked at me, holding the pen between us, weighing it in his hand. My God, I thought. Is he sensing the anguish of a shipwreck in the wood of that pen? Does the pen hold the memory of drowned sailors?

It’s an unhinged thought, but what else could he have been getting at? Where I had seen the pen as a symbol of buoyancy and transformation, did he see the tragedy of a shipwreck in the substance? Perhaps it was simply the mention of Lake Superior that brought the scene with Bill Mason to mind? Either way, it is all speculation. However it came to be, the topic was broached, but I had not brought it up. A real journalist with presence of mind might have taken this as an opportunity to ask for an interview: Funny you mention that, Mr. Cockburn. I prepared some questions in case you had interest in doing a short interview. And one of the questions was about Bill Mason. Instead, I just blurted out the question, Did you ever go canoeing with Bill Mason? which was Question 13 on the list. He told a story of canoeing with Bill Mason in the far north, explaining the details to people in the room who were unfamiliar with the Canadian filmmaker. I don’t remember the story. My brain had retired for the evening, leaving in its place a loop of magnificent songs and lyrics that washed away any possibility of an intelligent conversation. The backstage visit ended with me waving meekly and dissolving from the room. I don’t think I even said goodnight or thanked him for a great show.

There is a spectrum to the Bruce Effect. Even people who have worked closely with him and who have been friends for decades report experiencing a similar sense of awe in his presence. In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert writes about meeting one’s hero: We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers. This passage is thought to be one of the origins of the adage, Never meet your heroes. You will be disappointed. The underlying assumption is that seeing one’s hero as a regular human, not a mythic figure, will diminish the respect we have for them. This might be the case with ego-bloated celebrities like many models, pop singers, and Hollywood actors, whose images are mostly constructed by marketers and promoters. But with Bruce Cockburn, his humanity is evident. He is just a guy, his body burdened by time and genetics, missing his family, sitting in the dark dressing room of another ancient theatre, speaking with fans who often harbour unrealistic expectations and assumptions. There is no pretense. The reality distortion is a fan’s response to who he is and what he has done.

So, I walked away from that meeting with a pocketful of unanswered questions and a few new ones.

The last of the five interviews that make up the core of this book began with me telling Bruce to fuck off and the phone going dead. Again, the Bruce Effect had struck me. He had just read part of a very early draft of this manuscript and said he was moved that someone would put so much time and attention into his music. It was a humble statement of gratitude and respect, and my response was to say, fuck off, as in yer kidding, right?

On the recording, silence follows. Then my voice: Bruce? Hello? I didn’t mean that you should f—

It was too late. Silence.

I put the phone on the cradle and began to remove the condenser microphone I had taped to the earpiece to record the conversation.

I sat at the desk for some moments, thinking, He couldn’t have thought I meant it that way.

The phone rang. Hello? Silence. I hung up, and again it rang. Once more, there was silence from the receiver. Was Bruce Cockburn prank calling me?

It turned out an old answering machine into which the landline had been attached expired the moment I told Bruce Cockburn to eff off and would allow the phone to ring but not make a connection.

He called through eight times and then sent an email welcoming a Zoom chat. And I ask: who does that? Most people in his position would have shrugged it off and gone on with their business.

Presence and Motion

It is from being fully where he is that all else is possible. It manifests in uncanny timing and synchronicities that recur throughout his life and career. Of course, one of the benefits of a long life is the ability to discern patterns over time. Yet the alignments of events for Cockburn are striking. He entered the recording industry just as Canadian content rules came into play and during the ascendency of free-format FM radio. The timing couldn’t have been better. The same is true for the humanitarian work in which he has participated. In the 1970s, he’d developed an interest in Nicaragua through his brother Don and from reading the poems of Ernesto Cardenal. He wanted to find a way to go, but not as a tourist, he has said. Within a short time, Oxfam, seemingly through Don Cockburn’s influence, asked him to travel to the country on the verge of revolution. These synchronicities extend to his spiritual life as well. He explains that the pattern is a result of following internal promptings.

I kept running across indications that there was a side to life that is not what we would call physical that needed to be paid attention to, he says. I felt a lot of the time that what was happening was meant to be. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Perhaps the secret is just that: don’t think, live, follow life’s natural flow. Music is the perfect analogy for part of what life requires of us: the ability to move, adapt, and grow while being present. Musicians live in the ever-advancing moment between notes. They anticipate what is to come and invite the influence of what has been to get to the next place. We perceive physical distance and tonal variation with the same mental processes. The same muscle, so to speak. As many Indigenous traditions hold, we live in song, with melody and story forming maps in the brain that interface with landscape. It could be another reason why humans find music so moving.

Why This Book?

This is a book for people who love music. For readers familiar with Bruce Cockburn and his music, only the perspectives are new. Former and current producers, musicians, and activists, people who have known Cockburn personally and professionally through his music and through social interaction, tell some of their stories. Direct quotations by Mr. Cockburn come from five interviews conducted from 2015 to 2021.

The title is taken from a song on the Humans album. The song’s narrator is confronting emotional baggage, perhaps facing the end of a relationship. It’s a dark song that opens with the narrator discovering what the luxury of hate is and how mundane even the most intense emotions can be when numbed by circumstance. A movement of new verses halfway through, structured around the title, functions as an evolving chorus:

You get bigger as you go

No one told me, I just know

Bales of memory like boats in tow

You get bigger as you go

Over four verses, the narrator works through the trying occurrences of a day — redneck children, recalcitrant telephones, revelations about a loved one — toward the possibility of transcendence in the final verse-chorus:

You get bigger as you go

News reruns, dawn comes rainbow

Pain takes shape of grimy window

You get bigger as you go

The pain described in the song, one of Cockburn’s more introspective, becomes a matter of perspective, a grimy window that blurs perception but one that is much more easily cleansed than the nebulous worry that has haunted the narrator to that point.

I borrowed the title because this book is also about growth, evolution, and the ways we, the audience, incorporate art into our lives over time. We grow into the music we love. Sometimes we are not ready for it, but the music waits. It works quiet magic in the background of our lives, each note leading us to the next discovery. Art acts upon us as a mirror. We learn about ourselves through art. The art is static. It does not change. Only the audience evolves.

WHO IS BRUCE

COCKBURN?

In the spring of 1945, the Second World War was ending after nearly six years of sacrifice and loss. German cities fell to the Allied forces throughout April of that year. One by one, concentration camps were liberated and the full monstrous nature of Nazi madness was revealed to the world. The Battle of Berlin, one of the largest engagements during the war, began on April 16 and concluded with Russian forces taking the capital on April 25. Approximately 20,000 Russian troops were killed and another 80,000 wounded liberating Berlin from the Nazis. The primary cause of the trouble, Adolf Hitler, must have read the writing on his bunker wall. He took his own life on the final day of April 1945, and Germany officially surrendered one week later. More than fourteen million Allied soldiers were lost in the war, including 45,000 Canadian and nearly 400,000 American troops.

By May 1945, people around the world were beginning to look up from the long sorrow of the previous six years, assess the damage, and mourn their losses. In the U.S.A., a song by Les Brown and His Orchestra, with Doris Day as vocalist, had been on the charts since March, peaking at the number one spot between May and June. Written by Les Brown, Ben Homer, and Bud Green, Sentimental Journey tells the story of a homecoming. Perhaps it was anticipation of the war’s end and the return of the soldiers, both the living and the dead, that kept the song charting for twenty-three weeks. Exhausted from war and separation, people looked for a return to more innocent times and found it in song.

It’s trickier to determine the most popular song in Ottawa on May 27, 1945, the day Bruce Cockburn’s journey began. No doubt, the Les Brown song had leaked across the border onto Canadian airwaves. Canada at the time was a captive audience for American culture. The Canadian music industry would not start keeping track of record sales until 1964, almost two decades later, when Walt Grealis began publishing RPM magazine. Cockburn’s first single, Going to the Country from his self-titled debut album, would make the top forty in that publication in 1970. But before any of that could happen, young Cockburn would have to discover an old guitar in the attic of his grandparents’ farmhouse, learn to play, and meet Bernie Finkelstein, his career-long manager and an essential architect