RPM: Bruce Cockburn's Inner City Front

Bruce Cockburn is the featured artist in part three of Revolutions Per Minute: Indispensable Canadian Albums, which you can hear this weekend -- broadcast details at end of post.

Host Kevin Courrier (who has written books about Zappa and Randy Newman) focuses on Cockburn's 1981 recording, Inner City Front. It was a pivotal recording in Cockburn's career -- until 1980, he was pretty much viewed as a folk musician.

In part it reflected some dramatic changes in his personal life, moving from rural Ontario to Toronto, and changes in his musical thinking -- it was a full-on electric album with a band, not Cockburn with guitar. Musically it was a hybrid of rock, jazz, electronica and reggae, and today's show makes a case for the album signaling a seismic shift in Cockburn's life and art. (It also was an indication of the political direction he’d move in throughout the eighties.)

re: that country to city transition -- in a 1981 interview Cockburn is quoted as saying:

"I spent a long time holding up nature as a source of opposition to the things that confront most of us in our daily lives. Two things. One, I kinda said all I had to say about that at the time, and also I found that people tended to make too big an issue of the nature part of it. They were missing the point, because not everybody... people thought I was writing about nature... So it just seemed like the two things together made me want to go for something closer to most people's experience, including my own, 'cause I grew up in the city..."

Interviews on this weekend's episode include Bruce Cockburn himself, music writer Nicholas Jennings and violinist (and long time Cockburn collaborator) Hugh Marsh.

You can hear the series on Inside The Music on Saturday on Radio Two at 12 noon in Ontario, Quebec, Central, Mountain and Pacific; 1 p.m. in Maritimes; 1:30 p.m. in Nfld.

If you miss the Saturday broadcast, there's a repeat on Sunday on Radio One at 8 p.m. in Ontario, Quebec, Central, Mountain and Pacific; 9 p.m. in Maritimes; 9:30 p.m. in Nfld.