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At 61, Bruce Cockburn hasn’t lost any of his activist edge.
In town today to accept the Peace Prayer Day’s annual Peace Award, Cockburn later supports his latest album Life Short Call Now tonight at the National Arts Centre.
The new album, his 29th, was inspired he says, in part, by a fact-finding mission he took to Baghdad in 2004 with three activists, including the auxiliary archbishop of Detroit and the photojournalist Linda Pinetta, when they saw how the average Iraqi was coping with the war on terrorism.
There, he met with Shiite, Suni, Christian activists, former government bureaucrats and medical people.
“My personal agenda was to try to get a fix on how people can live with that stuff,” Cockburn says before a gig in Guelph.
“It was so dangerous we couldn’t leave Baghdad. There was a lot of shooting while we were there and one major car bombing. It’s nothing compared to how it is now, but we still had to keep a low profile.”
When he got back to Canada, he documented his life-changing experiences into This Is Baghdad, the instrumental Jerusalem Poker and Tell the Universe.
“The sad conclusion is that there is no happy ending there,” he says bluntly.
“Not in the short run. Iraqis are very well-educated. While most claimed that they were glad that Saddam Hussein was gone, they all agreed that the war had nothing to do with Iraqi freedom, that it had everything to do with oil and American domestic politics.
“And I would add one more factor. It seems that Bush’s vision of his Republicans is as the leaders of Christiandom and that they are building a Christian hegemony with the U.S. ruling the world. You certainly feel it south of the border.
“The Americans are naive in a way, and very bad at planning. So, the Iraqis said to us that if the Americans didn’t play their cards right, the country would degenerate into civil war, which is exactly what’s happened.”
Leaving the Americans, according to Cockburn, unable to leave the civil war they helped to create.
“If they pull the troops out now, they will leave a vacuum that will be filled with nothing but bloodshed for years to come.”
Cockburn is on the tail end of a tour that started in July with drummer Gary Craig and vocalist and keyboard-player Julie Wolf, who also played on Life Short Call Now with Ani DiFranco, Ron Sexsmith, Hawksley Workman and Damhnait Doyle doing backup vocals.
He’s working hard to ensure that his new CD is as popular as Speechless, his 2005 album of guitar instrumentals.
“I finally shut up and played the guitar,” he laughs, referring to the Cockburn lament that he preaches too much. “Frankly, it’s a relief for me to not have to worry about remembering lyrics.”
Now living in Kingston, Cockburn grew up in the capital, leaving Nepean High School to attend the Berklee School of Music in Boston in the mid-1960s.
Returning to Ottawa, he played the coffee-house circuit with bands such as The Children, The Esquires and 3’s a Crowd with David Wiffen before launching a solo career at Mariposa in 1967 as one of Canadian folk’s best guitarists.
Cockburn didn’t score his first American hit until 1979 with Wondering Where the Lions Are. But in the 1980s, Cockburn’s career took off, becoming more electric and scoring his biggest hits The Trouble With Normal and If I Had A Rocket Launcher. At the same time, he started touring the globe as a political activist.
He’s won many awards over his 35-year career, including the inaugural Humanitarian Award at the 2006 Junos, an Officer of the Order of Canada and as an inductee into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
Cockburn plays tonight at the NAC’s Southam Hall at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $43.50, $49.50, and $55.50, available through the box-office or online at www.nac-cna.ca, by calling Ticketmaster at (613) 755-1111 or through www.ticketmaster.ca.