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5 February 2004

Greetings:

The Cockburn Project received this article from the author to share
with all of you:

Experiences shape Cockburn's sound
Musician saw Iraq first hand
By John W. Barry
Poughkeepsie Journal

Hundreds assemble night after night and scream his name, praising him
for exalting their spirits and thanking him for dicing up their
psyche with guitar strings that slice the soul like barbed wire.
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn moves just beneath the
radar of exalted superstardom by commercial terms. But while he has
never headlined at Madison Square Garden, he claims a following of
fans who are as loyal as Dead Heads.

''Bruce Cockburn for me is the equivalent of a modern-day Dylan,''
said Rick Schneider, a WDST (100.1 FM) radio personality and host of
the ''Woodstock Jams'' radio program each Wednesday from 10 p.m. to
midnight. ''His songwriting is so amazingly strong and his guitar
playing is phenomenal. ... Bruce is there for everyone. The way he
delivers his songs is always with passion and his vocal style is warm
and very ear-friendly.''

Capacity crowd

As Cockburn has done twice before, he will very likely play to a
capacity crowd tonight when he arrives at the Bearsville Theater in
Woodstock to give a concert that is being staged by WDST. He is on
tour with keyboardist Julie Wolf, who has played with Ani DiFranco,
in support of his latest album, ''You've Never Seen Everything.''

His fans come to hear his electric guitar cry. He approaches the
playing of an acoustic guitar as one might pluck a rose petal from a
thicket of thorns, never losing sight of his objective, yet remaining
delicate with his touch throughout.

If you searched them out in the crowd tonight, you would probably
find at least one or two people who would eagerly tell you how
Cockburn, over a career spanning 27 records and thousands of
concerts, changed their lives.

But on a trip that Cockburn took last month to Baghdad, the man who
was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 2001 Juno
Awards (the Canadian equivalent to the Grammys) might have been
viewed by the Iraqis as just another Westerner wandering through a
distant land.

Cockburn has undoubtedly slipped into anonymity many times during
many trips he has taken around the world to countries burning in
political strife. Journeys to Nicaragua, Mozambique and Cambodia have
all fueled songs on Cockburn albums, ''Stealing Fire,'' ''Charity of
Night'' and ''You've Never Seen Everything,'' respectively, serving
as a sort of journal.

''I consider myself lucky if I get a song out of a trip,'' Cockburn
said. ''I can't guarantee it.''

Get personal, too

But while he is drawn to political causes and never shy about sharing
his political thoughts with live audiences, Cockburn is just as
likely to climb over land mines and fumble through foxholes that
surface in human relationships on a personal level as he is to tackle
them in a literal sense.

On his trip to Iraq, he might have stood out a little from other
Westerners he was with because of the guitar he carried. On a trip
coordinated by the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service
Committee, he was traveling with an auxiliary bishop from the
Archdiocese of Detroit, a photojournalist whose pictures of Iraq are
scheduled to be on display tonight at the Bearsville Theater and a
physician's assistant.

Cockburn seems to have looked deep into the personalities of the
Iraqis he met with and witnessed going about their lives after the
war. He gained acute, first-hand insight into a land and a culture
that most only know from the Internet and television news, and he was
able to form the kind of opinions about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
that one can only justify having after visiting the cradle of
civilization and walking its streets.

''It's pretty clear, when you're there, that none of the stated
reasons for going to war have anything to do with reality,'' Cockburn
said last week during a telephone interview from Halifax, Nova
Scotia, where he was scheduled to begin the current leg of his
tour. ''They didn't do it to liberate the Iraqi people. They didn't
do it to stop the weapons programs. The average Iraqi thinks they did
it for the oil.''

According to Cockburn, ''Everyone said they were glad Saddam was
gone.'' But, he added, ''It's like the U.S. is blowing whatever good
will we got from having gotten rid of Saddam. Over and over again, we
heard that from people.''

The Baghdad that Cockburn saw groaned with the sound of generators
while children played in raw sewage that flowed in the streets -- two
circumstances resulting from a lack of electricity to run lights and
power sewage pumps. The air, Cockburn said, stunk of kerosene that
powered the generators.

Daytime temperatures were in the 60s, while at night the mercury
dipped into the 40s. Crime is rampant in Baghdad, Cockburn said, with
widespread kidnappings and carjackings. Also prevalent were nighttime
house raids by the U.S. military.

''They're just afraid,'' Cockburn said of the Iraqi people. ''Very
afraid.''

Regarding Cockburn's views of Iraq, a statement Tuesday from the
White House press office said: ''All of that has been commented on by
the president, (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld, Secretary (of
State Colin) Powell and White House Spokesman Scott McClellan, at
length, ad nausea, on the record. I think those comments hold.''

Fight to stop eviction

Cockburn and his crew met with Iraqi religious leaders and witnessed
a protest launched by 500 homeless Iraqis fighting eviction from the
bombed-out building in which they were squatting.

''I have to think they were relatively recent recruits to the ranks
of the homeless,'' he said. ''Some families obviously got away from
their houses with their furniture. There was a concrete room in a
bombed-out structure with a nice couch. It was really poignant to see
how they were living.''

But as he will likely do tonight, Cockburn seems to have spread some
smiles in the country of more than 24 million that was invaded nearly
a year ago.

''In Iraq, kids are everywhere,'' Cockburn said. ''There was a youth
center that some Iraqi people organized, a drop-in center with
courses in drama, karate, woodworking. I sat in on a music class and
played some guitar. It was really fun to watch them light up. One of
the other places we went was a shelter set up for disabled women.
Some of them were suffering from physical disabilities, others from
mental disabilities. What are they going to do all day but watch TV?
I played some songs. They were having a party because the music
started.''

Tune in to WDST (100.1 FM) on Thursday morning at 8:45 a.m. to hear a
review of the Cockburn show by Journal music writer John W. Barry.

I too had a 'first hand' view last night:

February 4, 2004, Bearsville Theater, just outside of Woodstock, NY
where art and rock live on and on, a tiny theater, standing room only
(not exactly the way one would picture it though, more on that later)
Bruce and Julie calmed the savage beast in us all and brought down
the house. Waiting in line in cold so cold it took your breath away
if you tried to take a deep one, we watched Bruce duck into the
tourbus while we waited for the doors to open at 7. As time ticked
and the doors stayed closed, the waiting fans rocked, and chatted and
did little dances in their places just to keep warm. Once inside
there was the 'dash to the open seating' because Bearsville has a
curious habit of selling waaaay more seats than they have actually
put out for people to sit in. After the crowd got wind of this there
was the commensurate scuffle between the house crew and the fans when
the light dawned that a good 50 percent of the audience, who paid the
same as the people who managed to sit down, would NOT be sitting for
the next couple of hours. Tiny little dramas burst out around the
house as people holding seats for people not yet there argued with
people who were there and had to stand about the ethics of such
practices. Before it got too out of hand some chairs (not nearly
enough) were brought in and some got to sit down the sides. But when
the lights dipped and Bruce and Julie walked out on stage all was
forgiven and the crowd mellowed into an appreciative, responsive
audience who remembered why they were all crammed together in a tiny
theater in Bearsville, NY. Bruce rocked. Bruce crooned. Bruce dug
deep into his repertoire and brought out a representative sample of
his most engaging songs. Julie rocked. Julie crooned. Julie
provided the bass background and trailing accompaniments that filled
in any tiny gap one might have imagined. From haunting harmonies on
Lovers in a Dangerous Time, to the jazz blast on Mighty Trucks of
Midnight, to the toe-tapping Wait No More, to the jazz infused
licks of Trickle Down the audience tripped the light fantastic on
each and every selection they offered. It was an outstanding
performance by an outstanding duo and I think we were all very glad
we'd gotten to share the experience.

Friends of the Earth International (http://www.foei.org) has their
interview with Bruce up now and it's accompanied by the wonderful
photographs of Linda Panetta, really worth the read!

That's it from this issue of The Cockburn News. Please keep those
contributions coming, they are what make The Cockburn Project what it
has become.

Peace,
Suzanne Myers
editor@...