Song of the Day 3/31: Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”

Haven’t we all thought this in the past few months? Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn was a folkie who had written just a few political songs before he joined a 1983 trip, sponsored by the international relief organization Oxfam, to Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico. He wrote of the experience,

The refugees were the survivors of terrible atrocities perpetrated by a vicious miliatary government in their homeland. In the fragile shelter of the camps, they were starved, denied medical care, and were still subjected to attacks by the Guatemalan army. The notes for this song were written over tears and a bottle of Bell’s [Scotch] in a tiny hotel room in San Cristobal de las Casas, the nearest town to these camps.

It appeared on his 1984 album “Stealing Fire,” and generated some controversy. Canadian broadcasters censored the final line, “Some son of a bitch would die,” by fading the song before it ended. Yet an accompanying video got some play on MTV, boosting his career in the U.S., where his 1979 single “Wondering Where the Lions Are” made him a one-hit wonder.

The song’s palpable anger was often taken as a call to arms, which Cockburn, a Christian, took pains to clarify over the years. One interviewer asked him, “Would you really not hesitate?”

“If I had a rocket launcher?” he answered. “Well, I guess it depends on the context, you know? If I had a rocket launcher and I was in that refugee camp at the time that I thought of that song, yes, I would use it, but I would hope I never find myself in that situation.”

Years later, he elaborated,

Up to that point, I had not been particularly supportive of the violent overthrow of government and that sort of stuff. But there I was in this refugee camp, hearing these unbelievable stories of the atrocities these people had fled from, stories that were beyond anything the grossest slasher movie could come up with, and in the background was this helicopter going back and forth along the border. The Guatemalan flyers had a recent history of having strafed the camps from the air, even though the camps were in Mexico.

The desperate condition these people were in, and their dignity in the face of that desperation, all this horror made me feel the people in those helicopters had surrendered their humanity long since. I actually had great reservations about recording it. And then I thought once I had recorded it, “The radio people are never going to play that song.” And of course it got a lot of radio play.

Cockburn’s subsequent work addressed political concerns, particularly in the Third World, more frequently after that trip. In 2009, he visited Afghanistan, where his younger brother was serving as a doctor in the Canadian Army. After he sang it for the troops, the Canadian commander presented him with a rocket launcher. He had to give it back, of course.

“I don’t know whether I’m violent or not,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t know if I have the talent for it. I think probably I’m chicken, if anything.”