Part Two

Bob Gersztyn for FolkWax: I once read or heard that you played on the same stage with Jimi Hendrix in The [Greenwich] Village. I think that you were in a band?

Bruce Cockburn: Not in The Village. We opened for Hendrix in Montreal actually, in an arena.

FW: Was that with The Children?

BC: No. At that time the band was called Olivus, which is spelled O-L-I-V-U-S, which of course was supposed to sound like "All Of Us," and we thought that it was terribly clever. It's kind of embarrassing to think about it now, but anyway, that was the name of the band and we had a few really cool opening gigs. We opened for Cream in Ottawa and we opened for Wilson Pickett in Toronto and we opened for the Lovin' Spoonful somewhere. That one was The Children. There were some interesting gigs that we had, but they were few and far between. Mostly we rehearsed and didn't have gigs. There was a review in one of the Montreal papers, which somebody showed me in Paris actually, a couple of years ago. I was there doing PR for an album, whatever album had just come out, and the guy from the record company that was driving me around was a big Hendrix fan. I said, you know, I opened a show for him once. He got all excited and his friend who has a Hendrix website came up with a reprint of this review from the Montreal Gazette, I think. There used to be a couple of English papers back then in Montreal, which said that if it had been anybody but Hendrix we would have been the stars of the show. The guy really liked us, which leads me to suspect that he was heavily influenced by LSD at the time.

FW: [Laughter]

BC: I don't think we were very good, but in any case there is a record of that having happened.

FW: Speaking of LSD, I have a question that I wanted to ask you. The line in "Mystery" that goes "I stood before the shaman, saw star-strewn space, behind the eyeholes in his face" sounds to me kind of like a peyote vision. How do you feel about the usage of substances like that for creative purposes?

BC: I think that it's perfectly fine, if it's directed and conscious. A lot of people take those kinds of things just to get stoned. I did my share of LSD back in the day, but not on the occasion that the song refers to. I was totally straight, in the middle of an afternoon. The shaman in question was the guy who painted the painting that we used on the cover of Dancing In the Dragons Jaws. He was the first native painter to come out and actually paint their myths. He became very famous for doing that. He's from the western part of Ontario originally. He may have died, I'm not sure, because he sort of faded into obscurity, but for a while he was really influential and famous as a painter. He influenced a whole generation of other native artists to similarly paint their own myths and spirituality in their own imagery, not in kind of white people's or European imagery. He got a lot of criticism from other native people for that, but he was a shaman. At least he said he was.

We went to his apartment; well, at least to an apartment that he was temporarily staying in, in Toronto. At one point during the conversation with him I had this vivid...I was looking at his face and we were talking about tea or something totally inconsequential, and I'm looking in his face and I had that experience of where his eyes were windows into space and it freaked me right out and I didn't say anything, but he saw me react or something. He saw a look come over my face I guess, and he kind of smiled and didn't say anything. He kind of smiled a knowing smile and that was the extent of it, but it was shocking. I had to assume it was something real because I wasn't stoned. At that point it had been a long time since I did anything like that. I gave up on all that kind of stuff really at the end of the sixties, even before that. So it had been at least ten years since I'd done any of that kind of stuff and there he was. I don't make any of this shit up. People think it's imagination, but it's not. I don't have any imagination, I just report.

"I don't have any imagination, I just report."

FW: I was talking to Peter Bergman from the Firesign Theater and John Sinclair, the manager of the MC5, a couple of years ago and I asked them what benefits the 21st century was reaping from the 1960's counterculture, and they told me that other than helping to stop the Vietnam War, changing music, and allowing liberality in clothing, nothing. What do you think?

BC: I think that there is, but it's hard to access. One of the things that happened in the 1960s was Vatican II, in which Pope John XXIII convened all the bigwigs of the Catholic church to decide what the destiny of the church should be and what role it should play in the modern world. It was decided at that time that the church would be the church of the poor. It was decided that I think because the vibe of the sixties, the kind of philosophy and energy that was flowing around. It flowed through the clerics as much as it flowed through everybody else. I mean it was just in the air. It touched everybody, whether they wore the uniform or not...of the hippie movement I mean. As a result of Vatican II the church began to teach people in Latin America to read. As a result of people in Latin America learning to read they started trying to overthrow the governments that were keeping them poor and malnourished and not getting medical attention and all sorts of stuff. Many church people became supporters of that kind of social change, and we've been living with the result ever since.

There is just one case where the sixties definitely affected current history and is still affecting it, because those revolutions have come and gone and they've been repressed violently in almost every case, but the reason for them being there hasn't gone away so they keep coming back. It was the church deciding to identify itself with the poor that changed that, and I really think that wouldn't have happened in any era other than the sixties, in the same way that it did. We don't still have a Vietnam War because people in the sixties decided that they'd had enough.

I also think that the Civil Rights movement became successful because it had the support of, not just because of this of course, but one of the things that contributed to the success of the Civil Rights movement was the support of White liberals who constituted a voting bloc that politicians had to pay attention to. It wasn't just a sudden humanitarian awakening on the part of the government of the day. Their awakening had to do with pressure from voters and the anticipation of losing elections and stuff like that. That's a little before the hippie movement, but it was still going on, still evolving as it is today, because the need is still there for it to evolve and things are not quite equitable yet. I just see all these trends that are going on. The fashion comes back and the young kids going around looking like hippies today don't have any idea what it meant to be looking like that in 1967. Because people used to hassle you for looking like that back then and now they just think that you're weird.

FW: Five or six years ago I was at a Hot Tuna concert and many of the people were dressed in hippie garb. I mentioned something about the counterculture to a young woman standing next to me and she took offence. "I'm not part of the counterculture," she said, as her boyfriend gave me a dirty look. I thought that it was funny.

BC: Well they're not because they got it out of fashion magazines. It's more than a thing, because the Rainbow Family still exists, right? The Grateful Dead, throughout their life span as an entity, attracted these huge crowds of people of all ages that wanted to carry on that sensibility and a lot of this was for fun, but it was a thing that you identified with for fun. I knew high school kids in the nineties that were Grateful Dead fans, who would go everywhere to their shows and those kids are now adults. They've grown up with that sensibility and identified themselves with it. So I don't see it disappearing and I don't see it being meaningless. The thing you have to remember too is that being a hippie in the sixties was also a fashion statement.

The first time I ever heard the word "hippie" was in 1964, when I went to Europe the first time. Before that people would call us "beatniks" or "hipsters," or whatever. I remember meeting this guy with hair down to his butt and a big, full beard. He was an English guy, but he was hitchhiking back to England after having participated in the blowing up of a statue of Franco in Spain, according to his story anyway. I said something about beatniks and he said, "we're not beatniks, we're hippies." That's the first time I'd heard the word hippie, and I thought it had obviously evolved from hipster and whatever. It was like, okay, well that's a word. But at that point the people that would identify themselves that way were a very conspicuous minority. Bell bottoms weren't fashionable and the hair styles weren't fashionable, they were counterculture, but within a couple of years of that everybody that was coming out of high school had long hair and had bell bottoms. The fact that they identified with a set of values that was not their parents' set of values doesn't make it less of a fashion event. So it never really was a lot more than that. There was more going on. You didn't have to be a hippie to oppose the Vietnam War; it just happened that most of the people who opposed the war were of that generation who came out of high school wearing bell-bottoms and long hair. I think, anyway.

FW: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.