Ellen Sander – “Leonard Cohen…The Man” (1967)
August 1967 Sing Out! article about LC in his early days as a singer-songwriter…
Leonard Cohen, Canadian born author, poet, songwriter, singer, the subject of a film. Leonard Cohen, incredibly handsome, immensely articulate tough-tender young man of our times. Or possibly he is a man of his times, and we are just arriving.
Judy Collins spoke of him at Newport, and put two of his songs in her recent Elektra album. His novel, Beautiful Losers, is making waves as a Bantam paperback. His Columbia album is scheduled for release as this magazine goes into the mails.
His songs, the consummation of his music and his poetry, speak of love and lovers, of aching, tender intimate love, of obscure love, born of that something else we all feel in bittersweet moments, and of reasonable facsimiles thereof. He is also curiously and uniquely preoccupied with orthodox religion.
Although it almost seems irrelevant, there was a beginning for Cohen. He was born in Montreal. He attended school there, and was graduated from McGill University in 1955. His work, which includes in addition to Beautiful Losers another novel, The Favorite Game, and three volumes of verse, has been much anthologized and has appeared in periodicals in Canada and the U.S. He has twice won the Canada Council Award.
Cohen maintains a home on the Greek isle of Hydra, but frequently returns to the States to renew his “neurotic afflictions” and brings more songs and poetry with him. Lately he has been prowling New York, Los Angeles and Montreal folk and rock houses for a taste of the new sounds. In April he gave a reading of his poetry and Beautiful Losers at Buffalo State University, and sang some of his songs. This reading was in conjunction with their Festival of Arts program.
No comparison can be drawn between Leonard Cohen and any other phenomenon. Many will undoubtedly attempt such a comparison, but the result will be, at best, fragmentary. For Cohen is a rarity, if not a scarcity. And though he will always be rare in the true sense of the word, he will be listened to, sung, and read by an ever increasing entourage, those of the new awareness, those seeking artists of sensitivity.
Ellen Sander
Robert Christgau – “Unbeautiful Winner: Leonard Cohen” (2009)
Recent article, from Aug. 17, 2009, from Barnes & Noble Review (on the Barnes & Noble website)…
As someone who admired poet Leonard Cohen’s second and last novel “Beautiful Losers” in 1966, before Cohen was a recording artist or I was a music critic, I followed Cohen’s musical career with admiration from the beginning. But the admiration was always cut with skepticism – a skepticism that the focus and reach and three-hour duration of his February 19 comeback concert at Manhattan’s Beacon Theater blew away. My conversion experience was far from the only one that night, and proved replicable – when Cohen stopped in Seattle two months later, a friend walked in with my level of show-me and left with my level of holy-moley. Having kicked off the U.S. phase of a world tour already nine months old, the Beacon concert was soon followed by Live in London, a double-CD and/or DVD vividly documenting pretty much the same songs and stage business I’d witnessed. It prepared the way for two sold-out May concerts at NYC’s much larger Radio City Music Hall, which will be followed in turn by, holy moley, an October 23 appearance at Madison Square Garden. Tickets begin at $113 and top out at $4,800. Crave a little conversion? Pony up.
Scheduled to turn 75 September 21, Cohen is on a roll that began five years ago, when he found out his money was gone. The somewhat murky story begins in 1994 after his last previous tour, which left him so exhausted that, as is his wont, he decided to transform his life. So he relocated for five years – five years! – to a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy in California, where he assisted his longtime guru Joshu Sasaki Roshi and was ordained a monk in 1996. Cash flow much diminished, he was persuaded by his manager and friend Kelley Lynch to sell his catalogue to Sony in 1997, and once off the mountain set up a foundation to protect his assets from the taxman. In 2004 he learned by happenstance that the foundation had been drained of funds, and although Cohen eventually won a $9.5 million judgment against Lynch, who by 2005 was claiming she was homeless, he hasn’t been able to collect.
Cohen clearly got screwed. But if it’s hard not to sympathize when the creator of a lament as gorgeous and profound as “Bird on the Wire” will never see another penny from it, it’s also hard not to snicker when a tax shelter goes belly up. The just plain sympathetic part came with this tour, as Cohen, having envisioned an old age of comfortable seclusion, transformed himself into a public workhorse. A rabbi’s grandson who still keeps Sabbath yet has always been fascinated by the redemption myths of the Catholics who dominate his primordial Montreal, he was born again by going back to work.
Cohen never intended to shut down altogether. In early 2001 he released Field Commander Cohen, a circa-1979 live CD sprucer than 1994’s Cohen Live!, and then, shortly after September 11, put out his first studio album since 1992’s The Future. In historical context, the brave pessimism and sage metaphysics of Ten New Songs seemed so prophetic that it should have been called The Future II. But Cohen’s unbeautiful voice proved so sere it was swamped by the attendant women on 2004’s Dear Heather, where a Lord Byron cover and “Tennessee Waltz” outshone originals so paltry that not one was deemed worthy of the tour four years later. In 2005, awash in lawsuits, Cohen talked up Blue Alert, his collaboration with jazz singer Anjani Thomas, who happened to be his attorney’s ex- wife as well as his own current consort. But it barely sold, and only the title track belongs in the same sentence with any number of songs Cohen has composed with backup-singer-turned-producer Sharon Robinson. In a long, eloquent 2005 interview for Norwegian radio – the Marianne of “So Long, Marianne” comes from Norway, and he’s a chart-topper there – Cohen reported that he’d begun a new album, which, unsurprisingly, never materialized: “I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. I need ten songs, you know, I have to fill up 50 minutes, and you want it to be good.”
In the same interview, Cohen explained with practiced humility, “I just keep working until something arises that is better than me. . . . Sometimes the songs are really good, sometimes they are okay, I hope.” One hopes that after this tour is over, Cohen will invest his accumulated wealth circumspectly and that by late 2010 the impressive snatches he’s played visitors will add up to a really good album. His voice has revived – exercise has been good for it, and where in the ’90s he was still learning how to sing loud after decades of milking his refined croak for intimacy, now he can declaim in moderation. He’s had more trials not involving the nearness of death than anyone past 70 should bear. And the evidence suggests that he was ordained for cause – that he’s finally achieved equanimity without peacing out.
Rock and roll has produced a surprising bounty of old men with something to say. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Randy Newman – rather than credibly courting eternal youth a la Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, these seniors explore the aging process with an edge that’s been rare in pop music, where nostalgia is such a staple. Cohen fits this paradigm, with two significant differences. The first is that he’s rock and roll only by association. He’s really a Gallic chansonnier, in it for the lyrics rather than the liberating musical intensity even Dylan has made a vocation. The second is that he was always old – older than Elvis and also more sophisticated, the kind of artist you’d look up to at 24 only to find yourself surprisingly, alarmingly entering his age group four decades later.
These disjunctures only strengthen Live in London. Cohen launched his recapitalization armed with a decades-spanning body of really good songs that his cult deserved to hear. Spirit calmed, voice weathered by exposure, arrangements honed by wisdom and practice, he was positioned to revisit this oeuvre without risk of generational grotesquerie, because he’d written from the vantage of maturity to begin with. As always, the DVD provides neither the full social immersion of the concert nor the provocative abstraction of the sound recording, but at least you get to see Cohen trot on stage (at my show, he skipped off), and the worshipful close-ups of concentrating soloists are less banal than usual because the songs reward that kind of attention. The CDs, however, are definitive. There’s more really good Cohen out there, and individual albums going back to 1968’s Songs of Leonard Cohen remain very much worth hearing. But the thoughtfulness of everyone involved renders the new recordings aurally consistent and verbally definitive. Circumstances rarely afford artists the chance to leave a testament. Live in London comes pretty close.
In someone of Cohen’s long-term accomplishment, that’s plenty. But it leaves the content of the bequest open to scrutiny. The standard objections cite Cohen’s bummer quotient – his supposedly terrible voice and his supposedly unremitting pessimism. Me, I’ve always enjoyed his sprechgesang, which he shares to some extent with all the old men on my short list except the goy (who oddly enough is Canadian). True, God gave Dylan, Reed, and arguably Newman more physical voices. But not even the Reed of “Candy Says” has better simulated the one-on-one whisper, and at his most clownish Newman can’t match Cohen’s deft self-mockery. That’s why Cohen’s pessimism has never bummed me. Of course this isn’t party music. But the best of the darker songs are so well-stated they’re bracing too – the poet’s version of Gramsci’s optimism of the will – and in album format they share time with a Jewish-Buddhist fatalist’s spiritually advanced form of gallows humor.
Musical and philosophical questions remain, however. Hardly a master tunesmith, Cohen has nevertheless created, rejiggered, reappropriated, and partnered into existence a body of melody without which his songwriting would mean little. But just as he never aims for rock and roll release, he maintains a distance from that melody – he doesn’t inhabit a song like his beau ideal Hank Williams or his formal counterpart John Prine. Crucial to the distance are the backup girls on whom he so skillfully, respectfully, and obsessively relies. This is limiting, and Cohen knows it: “I ran with Diz and Dante/But I never had their sweep,” shrugs the Zen poet who situates Hank Williams 100 floors above himself in the tower of song. And thematically there are also limits, as Cohen’s female helpmates make manifest.
There are Cohen chroniclers, especially literary ones, who prove how worldly they are by treating his interest in sex as an amusing side issue. But even up against Mick Jagger and Marvin Gaye, Prince and Madonna, Cohen qualifies as a devout erotomane. For its fleeting moment “Beautiful Losers” was radiantly graphic, and I challenge anyone to name another songpoet so fond of the word “naked.” In one of his few stupid public pronouncements, Cohen told the New York Times in 1968 that only after sharing an orgasm with a woman did he believe he’d met her, and at 50 he was still averring that only women kept him sane on the road. At the Beacon, my sense of oneness with my fellow communicants was disrupted by the knowing cheers that greeted two raunchy lines: “giving me head in the unmade bed” and “if you want a doctor I’ll examine every inch of you.”
Now, I think intellectuals underrate sex myself, and to each her or his own. Cohen loves women, and women often love him back – fine. But I sense that many of Cohen’s male fans get a vicarious kick out of his multifarious affairs that doesn’t bring them any closer to the goal articulated by his most crucial backup singer, Jennifer Warnes, whose 1987 tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat helped revive his career: “the place where God and sex and literature meet.” The only friend I’ve ever had who was a major Cohen devotee is also the only friend I’ve ever had to make a play for my wife. That’s not what I mean by to each his or her own. I want to take sex seriously my way, not Leonard Cohen’s way – much less his fanmen’s way.
Striking, isn’t it, that even musician Warnes brings up literature. Granted, her quote arrives via Cohen’s biographer, Canadian English prof Ira B. Nadel, whose valuable if unexpectedly dated 1994 Various Positions could be hipper musically. But I’ve been reading Cohen as well as listening, and it’s been a pleasure except for my second pass through “Beautiful Losers,” which for all its serial orgasms and multivocal texts lacks narrative generosity. “Skip over the parts you don’t like,” Cohen advises readers of the new Chinese translation in 2006’s “Book of Longing,” a self-illustrated miscellany billed as his first poetry collection since 1984 – a delightful profit-taker that includes droll reports on the monastic life; an erotic appreciation of his May-December love object Rebecca de Mornay; a “Thank You Ruler of the World/Thank you for calling me Honey” for a waitress seen in a double mirror; and such epigrams as “oh and one more thing/you aren’t going to like/what comes after America” and “life is a drug that stops working.”
There are also a few lyrics, including a Dear Heather quickie that begins “Because of a few songs/wherein I spoke of their mystery/women have been/exceptionally kind/to my old age,” gets better, and has it all over the recorded version. Due to envy, snobbery, and the devotion to rhyme and scansion that impelled him toward the pop charts, Cohen gets small respect as a poet, but unlike most song lyrics, his do read. Unfortunately, the best proof isn’t for sale in the U.S.: Omnibus Press’s alphabetical Lyrics of Leonard Cohen, 113 all told, and fascinating to down in that arbitrary order. Known masterpieces like “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Anthem,” and “A Thousand Kisses Deep” demand and reward instant rereading. Songs from a Room, Death of a Ladies’ Man, and Dear Heather read as flat as they’d always sounded. Songs from 1984’s Various Positions suggest that maybe Columbia refused that album because the performances didn’t do them justice.
Most interesting, however, was to then read Yeats, who Cohen loves. Yeats smoked him, of course – Yeats smokes everybody. Still, the evolution from the lissome flow of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to the steely reassessment of “Vacillation” certainly paralleled the shifts in tone and line I’d felt as old Cohen lyrics followed hard upon newer ones. Cohen went up the mountain to learn how to cast a cold eye, then came down and found himself compelled to tell us about it. And without losing what had been learned, his eye warmed a little. That’s a long-term accomplishment worth cheering.
Robert Christgau
Mick Brown – “Leonard Cohen: Suffering for Fun and Profit” (1976)
An article written for Sounds magazine, July 3, 1976 – the year before LC came out with his Phil Spector-produced fascinatingly flawed Death of a Ladies’ Man album…
The Return of Leonard Cohen
“I’m too old to die that kind of spectacular
death. For me to commit suicide or O.D. would
be … unbecoming”
I don’t think mankind will be damaged
if I don’t put out a new album or a new book”
The poster outside the Colston Hall, Bristol announced the appearance that evening of ‘The Poet of Rock and Roll.’
Inside a girl takes photographs of the road-crew setting up equipment on stage – for an art-project, she explains. She really wanted to photograph the concert, so she’d scrimped, saved, begged and borrowed enough to buy a couple of tickets. Now she can’t make it on account of the revision she has to do for tomorrow’s exams. She’d sold the tickets to friends in a matter of hours. She’s all of sixteen years old.
Leonard Cohen is clearly bemused by it all. He sits back in his dressing-room, issues a slight smile and says isn’t it amazing that some of these people were only eight years old when he wrote his first song? Cohen is forty-one.
On stage, illuminated by the harsh glare of a single spotlight dividing his face into patches of darkness and light, he looks a curious cross between Lenny Bruce and an Old Testament prophet – the protruding, hawkish nose, the dark eyes, lines etched into his face and forehead.
Backstage he looks strangely vulnerable; a thin, slight figure dressed in pressed slacks and a brown leather jacket, a cigarette burning between his fingers. One has heard that Cohen can be reserved to the point of being difficult. In fact he’s extraordinarily charming, polite, approachable.
It is a rule of the road that he never gives interviews or holds audience before a performance, using those couple of hours before going on stage to summon-up reserves of energy and concentration for the task at hand.
After a performance he will talk, sign photographs and scraps of paper, receive gifts, kisses, handshakes. Gladly. He says he cherishes the attentions of his audience.
In Montreal he lives in an immigrant-worker neighbourhood where he’s kn6wn only as a guy who has two kids and a small house and who never seems to be around very much.
In the small village in Greece where he also spends his “sitting-down time” the people are similarly unconcerned with who he is or what he does. A little bit of attention on the road is, well, reassuring.
Outside his dressing-room young matrons with glasses and wistful expressions hover in droves, thrusting programmes at the road-manager who brings them back signed. In the inner-sanctum Cohen holds court with a tribunal from a local college newspaper, hunched in a chair wreathed in cigarette-smoke, ringed by earnest, enquiring faces; a scatter of papers on the floor – Cohen’s poems, which one of his inquisitors has painstakingly copied by hand.
“What I’d really like to know is why your poetry is so stark, so incredibly blunt – a poem like for instance . . . Cohen takes the proffered sheet, glances at the writing. “Yeah – I like that poem… If it didn’t have the word ‘cunt’ in it I’d probably read it out loud on stage. But I’m not ready to say that word well enough yet. There are some things that are designed to rest on the page and not be spoken…”
“Do you use the same technique then for writing songs and poetry?”
“Yeah – just one word at a time. . .”
“To what extent then should poetry have relevance throughout time, or do you think it should sum up an episode, a moment, and preserve that on paper for forever?”
Cohen blinks at his questioner through the smoke-haze. “I don’t know: forever is a long time…”
Leonard Cohen hasn’t come back. He’s never been away. While other performers tend to move, or even stand still, in a blaze of publicity, Cohen just keeps on toiling away quietly in what he calls his little corner – writing songs, sometimes; poems, sometimes; books, sometimes – all at his own pace.
Travelling . . . He’s always been peripatetic – trace his career from Montreal, to New York, to Nashville, to Greece – but more so in the last six or seven years, “since I could afford the air-fares”. He was in Ethiopia just before the revolution: “I just get to a place, check into a hotel and hit the streets.” The Wandering Jew.
“But to tell you the truth I’m getting a little tired of all that now. A tour’ll cure that for you for a while.” Not that he tours often; he says he needs the nourishment of a private life more than anything touring can give him. But, for whatever reasons, this year he’s been back on the road – a brief round of club dates in the southern American states, and now Europe, where he seems to enjoy a larger and more loyal following than anywhere else.
So far it’s been sold-out houses all the way, and Bristol is no exception – a lot of older faces in the audience, people for whom ‘Songs From A Room’ was no doubt a soundtrack for sorrowful bed-sit dramas all those years ago; a surprisingly large number of younger people who can’t have been aware of Cohen first or second time around, but who’ve tuned into that finely-honed angst somewhere along the way; and a man in elfin boots, long hair and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence which punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out ‘God bless you, Leonard’ to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience which, in short, substantiates the tag ‘The Poet’ more than it does the description ‘Of Rock and Roll…’
The tour publicist says it’s been like this everywhere Cohen has played, and it’ll no doubt be the same tomorrow night when he plays the Albert Hall, even though he’s sure to get negative reviews.
This anticipation of the critical thumbs-down seems strange at first, but thinking about it Cohen has always been more popular with the paying-customer than with the press, who perhaps find the disarming frankness and pessimism of his lyrics and the dark, confidential monotone of his voice too much of an invitation for cynicism to turn down. Actually, says his publicist, it’s more of an inverted snobbery.
The first time Leonard played London the nationals loved him; it’s since he became an institution they changed their minds. And sure enough, the reviews of the Albert Hall concert are marked by a sort of reserve, dwelling on the despairing nature of Cohen’s lyrics and the fact that much of his material was familiar from his albums, not to say previous visits.
Sure enough, it was, but familiarity is an intrinsic part of Cohen’s appeal, and anyway he is hardly the most prolific writer of songs.
His last album, ‘New Skin For The Old Ceremony’ appeared almost two years ago, and free as he is from the normally pressurising demands of a one or two album a year record contract he tends to work at his own pace, which he admits is slow.
“Songs seem to take me a long time,” he says. “I don’t know why; they’re not especially excellent for taking so long. I don’t have any sense or urgency about any of my writing actually. I don’t think mankind will be damaged if I don’t put out a new album or a new book.”
Nonetheless, he has put down five or six tracks for a new album, one of which, ‘Do I Have to Dance All Night’, was hurriedly recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich for release as a single. Cohen says it would be ‘amusing’ to have a hit with it, and the song gets two airings at Bristol – once to close the first half of the show and again during one of the innumerable encores – to help make it happen.
It’s unusually lively for a Cohen song, but it fits the mood of his backing band, who seem to relish the opportunity to rock out – a guitar and pedal-steel player, drums, bass, a keyboards-player with a taste for synthesiser swirls and two strong girl singers who sound mournfully ethereal in all the right places, and who also work slick Lambert/Hendricks/Ross type scat arrangement behind Leonard on ‘I Tried To Leave You’.
Generally, there is not much levity to be found in a Cohen performance, and what there is comes not so much from his songs as his wry, self-mocking introductions and the bitter-sweet poems which he reads over a loose, jazz-tinged instrumental backing.
But levity is not what Cohen’s audience comes for. His concerts tend toward the atmosphere of a public confessional, a knowing, world-weary perambulation around the more painful areas of the human psyche.
Cohen is in the grand tradition of Jewish writers who wear their suffering on their sleeve. Maybe the English, generally tight-assed about their hang-ups, like living it vicariously.
There is certainly a reassurance of sorts to be found in listening to someone who can so clearly and painstakingly articulate the emotional crises we all go through at some time or another. If anybody’s going to make your heart bleed for mankind in general, and for himself in particular, it’s Leonard Cohen. But I for one am happy to thank him for it – at least some of the time.
Cohen agrees that his is very much a relating audience, often as prepared to share their confidence with him as he is with them. “There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems,” he says. “I guess they feel I’m writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don’t usually have much help to give – there isn’t much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises.”
Cohen, one senses, has enough trouble with his own. Not that his personal life is perpetually in shreds. Cohen gives every impression of being quite contented with – or at the very least philosophically resigned to – whatever life has brought his way.
He lives simply enough with his family; he says that because he didn’t taste success until he was in his 30’s he was already too set in his ways to develop expensive tastes. His friends are the guys he grew up with on the same street in Montreal. He smiles more often than you’d expect and seldom frowns.
You get the feeling Cohen has to do more than just wake up in the morning to find all that pathos which permeates his work, and that plumbing the more despondent depths of his soul is a struggle. Some people may say he struggles too hard and that his visions are intimate almost to the point of indecency.
Cohen says he abides by only one maxim in his writing: to always honour the difference between just a cry and a piece of work. “A cry of pain in itself is just that,” he says. “It can affect you or you can turn away from it. But a piece of work that treats the experience that produced the cry of pain is a different matter altogether. The cry is transformed, alchemised, by the work by a certain objectivity which doesn’t surrender the emotion but gives it form. That’s the difference between life and art.”
His books are extensions of the same vision – the gospel of objective self-revelation, autobiographical “because I can only treat the things I know – and I just know a small corner. There are writers who are great visionaries, who can depict huge movements – things like that. They’re the great writers. I’m just the other kind.”
He supposes his writing is therapeutic in the way that any work is. “I feel better when I’m working than when I’m not, but I feel both things – a need to write and a need to quit. The need to write is greater – off and on. Sometimes you get tired of the whole thing; think you’ll get an honest job. Sometimes you know you’re just dealing with the pipes and you think you’d like to get out of the basement. But you recognise your limitations and try to work within them…
He is a perfectionist – his own harshest critic. His first novel ‘The Favourite Game’, went through four drafts before publication. He’s spent the last two years working on another novel, but withdrew it from his publishers at the last moment.
“It isn’t any good,” he says with a faint smile. “But somebody said it’s as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good one, so I guess it’s kept me in shape doing it. In a way it’s too personal; it treats people close to me in a way that is somehow inaccurate, one-sided.”
A cry of pain rather than a piece of work? He laughs. “Yeah – it doesn’t have that objectivity that I think it should have. I try to be truthful in whatever I do in some kind of way – not so much truthful to the fact as truthful to the quality of the experience. The book was true – but it wasn’t fair.”
His publishers wanted it just the same. “They think they can sell it,” says Cohen.
It hasn’t always been like that. Cohen spent his youth in lonely Montreal hotel rooms, struggling to write books which some people liked but nobody would buy. Eventually he started concentrating on writing songs instead, “to pay my grocery bills”. He performed intermittently around Montreal and then moved to New York.
There he met Judy Collins and sang her some of his songs; she recorded one straight off. That led to a meeting with John Hammond – the legendary A&R man who discovered Dylan and Aretha Franklin – and a contract with Columbia Records.
On the way he managed to be duped out of the rights to ‘Suzanne’ and a couple of other songs. “I didn’t really understand American business practises,” he says charitably, “but I heard someone singing ‘Suzanne’ in Corfu not so long ago and it seemed somehow fitting that I didn’t own it.
It was around the time of his first album that he met Janis Joplin, an interlude in his life that prompted a song which is one of the highlights of his stage performance, ‘Chelsea Hotel No.2′. ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/you were talking so brave and so sweet/giving me head on the unmade bed/while the limousines wait in the street’.
“I was saddened by her death,” he says. “Not because someone dies – that in itself isn’t terrible. But I liked her work so much; she was that good that you feel the body of work she left behind is just too brief.
“There are certain kinds of artist that blaze in a very bright light for a very brief time: the Rimbauds, the Shelleys, Tim Buckley – people like that; and Janice was one of them.
“Then there’s the other kind, like Satre or Bernard Shaw who are careful about themselves and what the risks are. You can’t get too safe, but as you get older you learn something about survival. The game is rough from a lot of points of view; because the prizes are big the defeats are big too.
“The life is rigorous, and the invitations to blowing it are numerous and frequent. Me? I’m careful as I can be without it getting too much of a drag. Anyway, I’m too old to die that kind of spectacular death. For me to commit suicide or O.D. would be…,” he pauses for the appropriate word, “… unbecoming …”
Mick Brown
Leonard Cohen – “This Isn’t China” (2002)
Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don’t want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don’t want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don’t want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I’ll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it’s a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I’ll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn’t China
nobody’s going to eat it
It’s just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I’ll create the cosmos
by myself
I’ll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I’ll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly life
Leonard Cohen – “Never Mind” (2005)
The war was lost
The treaty signed
I was not caught
I crossed the line
I had to leave
My life behind
I had a name
But never mind
Your victory
Was so complete
That some among you
Thought to keep
A record of
Our little lives
The clothes we wore
Our pots our knives
The games of luck
Our soldiers played
The stones we cut
The songs we made
Our law of peace
Which understands
A husband leads
A wife commands
And all of this
Expressions of
The High Indifference
Some call Love
The High Indifference
Some call Fate
But we had Names
More intimate
Names so deep
and Names so true
They’re lost to me
And dead to you
There is no need
That this survive
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
There’s truth that lives
And truth that dies
I don’t know which
So never mind
I could not kill
The way you kill
I could not hate
I tried I failed
No man can see
The vast design
Or who will be
Last of his kind
The story’s told
With facts and lies
You own the world
So never mind
Alastair Pirrie – “Cohen Regrets” (1973)
Written for the New Musical Express, March 10, 1973…
Leonard Cohen, Grand Master of Melancholia, slipped quietly in and out of London last month – even CBS, his record company, had difficulty tracking him down – and left behind his intention to quit with the music business.
As displayed in his albums, Cohen is a man of many moods – and CBS, at least, are taking his announcement with a cool attitude of wait and see.
CBS Press officer Lon Goddard confirms that Cohen was depressed by the state of the music business on his return to Canada. “But,” he adds, “I don’t think it’s going to last. When he’s rested for a month or so, he’ll be back.”
Meanwhile, a new Cohen album, completed during his British visit; is expected shortly.
Alistair Pirrie spoke to Leonard Cohen for NME.
If Leonard Cohen sticks to his announced decision to quit the music business; it will come as no surprise to those who know him well.
Among friends, he would often claim that he hated the business of selling his songs to people, and he hated the society that made this necessary.
One night recently he told me why he wanted to quit. “I’m no longer a free man; I’m an exploited man. Once, long ago, my songs were not sold; they found their way to people anyway.
“Then people saw that profit could be made from them; then the profit interested me also. I have to fight too many people on too many levels to have to fight about money as well.”
He paused and took a sip of his wine. “There is much to regret in the system of placing songs at the disposal of others.
“Now the record companies pressure me to force my songs because the stores want them to sell. I will not force my songs for them.”
Cohen was born 35 years ago in Montreal, Canada. He started off his career studying arts at McGill University though later, interested in business, he switched to commerce.
Later still he tried law at Columbia University in New York and, on leaving, took a job in the family clothing factory.
He had started writing at the age of 14 – mostly prayers and poems to get women. Not long after he started in the family business, his first book of poems was published, and any plans he had to run the factory were forgotten.
At the end of the fifties Cohen took off with a woman called Marianne and lived in virtual isolation on the Greek island of Hydra for nearly eight years.
When he left, he suffered a nervous breakdown and it was soon after this that he started putting his poetry to music.
He says that he has no concept of religion in his life but, strangely enough, he sings a song about Joan of Arc on his last LP Songs of Love and Hate.
“It was a strange song indeed; it was out of myself and contained the notion of reverence. When I recorded that song I will admit to having a strong religious feeling. I don’t think it’ll happen again.”
Cohen is a dark, sad man, and, at times, his deep, dead-pan voice falters into a brooding silence.
He doesn’t like Lennon-type protest songs. “I don’t programme the songs I write,” he told me, “I just write what comes.
“If my passion was involved in those daily issues I would write about them. Anyway, I half feel that my songs do protest in their own way.
“I don’t have to have a song called ‘Give Peace a Chance’. I could write a song about conflict and, if I sang it in a peaceful way, then it would have the same message. I don’t like these slogan writers.”
All of his songs and poems are about people and situations which have come into his life.
“Suzanne” on his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, is a description of a spent with a girl of that name. It really did happen, and she did feed him tea and oranges that came all the way from China.
Another of his songs from that same LP was written when he was in Alberta and met two girls in a cafe.
“I was alone,” he intoned gravely, “and I had nowhere to stay that evening. I went with them back to their room and we all slept together. When I awoke I wrote a song about them. I called it ‘Sisters of Mercy’.”
Although Cohen -was always dissatisfied with the record business, he didn’t feel he was working in a void which isolated him from new experiences.
“It’s been my experience that there is no situation which is artificial. There are responses which are artificial or untrue.
“But I mean, here we are sitting and drinking wine. You and I are together here. There is no room for a lie: we’re just two men sitting talking.”
If Cohen had to be remembered by only one of his songs, he would choose “Bird on a Wire.”
“The song is so important to me. It’s that one verse where I say that I swear by this song, and by all that I have done wrong, I’ll make it all up to thee.
“In that verse it’s a vow that I’ll try and redeem everything that’s gone wrong. I think I’ve made it too many times now, but l like to keep renewing it.”
Cohen became more and more dissatisfied with each LP he produced, culminating in almost dejection over his last record Songs of’ Love and Hate.
“I suppose you could call it gimmicky if you were feeling uncharitable towards me. I have certainly felt uncharitable towards me from time to time over that record, and regretted many things. It was over-produced and over elaborated… an experiment that failed.”
During my last conversation with him, Cohen had changed. He smoked my cigarettes almost continuously and appeared much more withdrawn, answering questions vaguely and lapsing into silences much more frequently.
In his song “Bird on a Wire” there is a line in which he says “I have tried in my way to be free”. Perhaps he feels that this latest move will mean a new chance for him to be free. I think for a man as self-explorative as Leonard Cohen, freedom is a great deal further away.
Alastair Pirrie
Leonard Cohen – “I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”
I have not lingered in European monosteries
and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights
who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;
I have not parted the grasses
or purposefully left them thatched.
I have not held my breath
so that I might hear the breathing of God
or tamed my heartbeat with an exercise,
or starved for visions.
Although I have watched him often
I have not become the heron,
leaving my body on the shore,
and I have not become the luminous trout,
leaving my body in the air.
I have not worshipped wounds and relics,
or combs of iron,
or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.
I have not been unhappy for ten thousands years.
During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep.
My favourite cooks prepare my meals,
my body cleans and repairs itself,
and all my work goes well.
Leonard Cohen – “Millenium”
From Flowers for Hitler…
This could be my little
book about love
if I wrote it–
but my good demon said:
‘Lay off documents!’
Everybody was watching me
burn my books–
I swung my liberty torch
happy as a gestapo brute;
the only thing I wanted to save
was a scar
a burn or two–
but my good demon said:
‘Lay off documents!
The fire’s not important!’
The pile was safely blazing
I went home to take a bath
I phoned my grandmother
She is suffering from arthritis
‘Keep well,’ I said, ‘don’t mind the pain’
‘You neither,’ she said
Hours later I wondered
did she mean
don’t mind my pain
or don’t mind her pain?
Whereupon my good demon said:
‘Is that all you can do?’
Well was it?
Was it all I could do?
There was the old lady
eating alone, thinking about
Prince Albert, Flanders Field,
Kishenev, her fingers too sore
for TV knobs;
but how could I get there ?
The books were gone
my address lists–
My good demon said again:
‘Lay off documents!
You know how to get there!’
And suddenly I did!
I remembered it from memory!
I found her
pouring over the royal family tree,
‘Grandma,’
I almost said,
‘you’ve got it upside down–’
‘Take a look,’ she said,
‘it only goes to George V.’
‘That’s far enough
you sweet old blood!’
‘You’re right!’ she sang
and burned the
London Illustrated Souvenir
I did not understand
the day it was
till I looked outside
and saw a fire in every
window on the street
and crowds of humans
crazy to talk
and cats and dogs and birds
smiling at each other!
Leonard Cohen – “S.O.S.” (1999)
Take a long time with your anger,
sleepy head
Don’t waste it in riots
Don’t tangle it with ideas
The Devil won’t let me speak,
will only let me hint
that you are a slave,
your misery a deliberate policy
of those in whose thrall you suffer,
and who are sustained
by your misfortune
The atrocities over there,
the interior paralysis over here–
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down
You are being bred for pain
The Devil ties my tongue
I’m speaking to you,
‘friend of my scribbled life’
You have been conquered by those
who know how to conquer invisibly
The curtains move so beautifully,
lace curtains of some
sweet old intrigue:
the Devil tempting me
to turn away from alarming you
So I must say it quickly
Whoever is in your life,
those who harm you,
those who help you;
those whom you know
and those whom you do not know –
let them off the hook,
help them off the hook
Recognize the hook
You are listening to Radio Resistance.
