A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen

by Liel Leibovitz

  Smiling broadly, Farr marched out to the field and headed straight for the fence. There, as he’d expected, were hundreds of the hill people, pushing against the fence and provoking the guards. Farr introduced himself. Immediately, the yelling began: Pig! Let us in! Music is free! Shouting to overcome the din of the crowd, Farr addressed a few dozen men who seemed to be the mob’s most vociferous leaders, asking them to step aside and chat with him for a minute. When they did, he pulled out a crumpled wad of tickets and made them a simple offer. The fence, he said, was there only to guarantee everyone’s safety, not to keep anyone out. That being the case, it should be painted in bright colors to reflect its true, peaceful mission. He promised the men free festival tickets if they collected a few of their friends, picked up some brushes, and redecorated the same sheets of metal they had spent the better part of the day trying to tear down. They accepted on the spot, and Farr dispatched an assistant to bring three hundred brushes and two hundred gallons of paint. He shook hands with each of his new hires and marched back to his tent, whistling happily. More bees with honey, he thought. It was going to be all right. Cactus, the American supergroup, gave a searing set, shredding the strings of their guitars, but Farr was exhausted. He collapsed on a cot in his tent and went to sleep.

  He was awakened a few hours later by someone loudly shouting, “Fuckers!” Lazily Farr walked out to inspect. It was early in the morning. Most of the audience was sleeping. The hill people seemed to have ascended quietly to the top of their area. The festival grounds seemed as peaceful as they had been a few days prior, before hordes of barbarians knocked at its gates. But then a quick glance at the fence revealed everything. In bright colors, in big letters, slogans and symbols covered every inch of it: Entrance is everywhere. Don’t buy. Fuck the guards. Commune Free. Farr’s own name next to a swastika. The gambit that was designed to contain the troublemakers ended up giving them yards and yards of space to advertise their nonsense. Even worse, the artful vandals had all been given free tickets, and were now free to roam every corner of the grounds and dream up new mayhem.

  Just what kind of mayhem they had in mind soon became evident. Joni Mitchell took the stage around noon and barely finished her third song when a shirtless gentleman leaped onstage, wrestled the microphone away from the stunned singer, introduced himself as Yogi Joe, and began his speech.

  “Power to the people, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “I’ve been to Woodstock, and I dug it very much. I’ve been to about ten fucking festivals, and I love music. I just think one thing: this festival business is becoming a psychedelic concentration camp, where people are being exploited! And there’s enough of that! What is all that peace and love shit when you have police dogs out there! What about that? That reminds me of a lot of bad things, you know? I don’t like police dogs!”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but Farr and Joni Mitchell’s manager both jumped onstage and dragged him away. A roar of boos shook the air. A hundred bottles shot up like fireworks and made their way toward the stage. Mitchell looked stricken. “Listen a minute, will you?” she pleaded, sounding like a jilted lover begging for a second chance. “Will you listen a minute? Now listen! A lot of people who get up here and sing, I know it’s fun, it’s a lot of fun, it’s fun for me, I get my feelings off through my music, but listen, you got your life wrapped up in it, and it’s very difficult to come out here and lay something down when people …”

  For a few moments, she appeared lost in her own reveries, but then found her confidence once more. “It’s like last Sunday,” she said. “I went to a Hopi ceremonial dance in the desert, and there were a lot of people there, and there were tour

  ists, and there were tourists who were getting into it like Indians, and there were Indians who were getting into it like tourists, and I think that you’re acting like tourists, man! Give us some respect!” She played a few more songs. The booing softened some but continued nonetheless.

  It might have been the ruckus onstage, or the tantalizing messages on the fences, or the mere physics of so many bodies under pressure, but by the time Mitchell waved her curt good-byes and trotted backstage, the fences had begun to collapse. By the midafternoon, with Miles Davis’s furious blows providing the perfect sound track to anarchy, Farr had received reports that there were now nearly six hundred thousand people crammed into East Afton Farm. There was no point in ordering more toilets now, an assistant said ruefully; no number of commodes the production could reasonably procure would satisfy the demand. The same was true for trash cans, security guards, water troughs. The only thing to do now, the assistant concluded, was hope for peace.

  But Farr was raging. With just over 10 percent of the audience having purchased a ticket, he had no way of paying anyone he had engaged, from artists to electricians. Even if the festival concluded without further eruptions, he would still face years of lawsuits, and, most likely, bankruptcy. He waited for Tiny Tim to conclude his strange act—it ended with a ghostly rendition of “There’ll Always Be an England” belted out through a megaphone—stomped onto the stage, and made an announcement.

  “There’s a nonintelligent element that seems to think that they could have a fun little game and cause trouble and make a name for themselves,” he bellowed. “They will be treated with the contempt they deserve, and if they try to get in through the mud they’ll go out through the mud, but on their chins.” With this he introduced Kris Kristofferson.

  The country singer, wearing a black turtleneck, took the microphone slowly. The festival had been a bad trip. Since his first aborted performance three days earlier, Kristofferson had spent time hanging around backstage and talking to the other artists. Increasingly they were reporting that the crowd was turning unruly. Booing was only the beginning. Objects were now being hurled at anyone who dared step onto the stage. And, with nothing to do with their waste, the audience quickly took to setting it on fire, which meant that flaming rubbish was being thrown at the musicians as well. Since they had assailed the energetic Emerson, Lake & Palmer, how would the audience receive Kristofferson’s soft country songs?

  He started playing. A bottle came whirring by, hitting him on the shoulder. He stopped for a moment, then started again. Some cans rained down on his band. And then there was the shouting. And the smell of burning garbage. “We’re going to do two more in spite of everything except rifle fire,” Kristofferson said, not trying to hide the disdain in his voice. “I think they’re going to shoot us.” He decided to try his most famous song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Maybe that would soothe the mob. By the time he got to the part about freedom being “just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” the boos were too loud to ignore. Kristofferson stopped playing, gave the crowd the finger, and stalked offstage. Farr, slouching at stage left, did nothing to stop him. He walked slowly to the microphone. Kristofferson’s musicians were still playing “Bobby McGee.”

  “That was Kris Kristofferson,” Farr said when the music finally died down. “Now I just want you to hang on one minute. I want you to hear something, and I want you to hear it fucking good! There are some good people out here, and you are insulting their intelligence! And if you come to this country at our invitation, and we have to charge you, through no choice of our own, three pounds, if you don’t want to pay it, don’t fucking well come!”

  Nothing but boos. The Who took the stage.

  Somewhere in the audience, Mick Farren, having returned to the Isle of Wight, was looking on at the spectacle of contempt, amazed. Like most of the excitable young men in his political circles, he thought a lot about revolution and very little about its aftermath. He was thrilled when hundreds of thousands stormed down Desolation Hill and crashed the festival, but shocked when he saw them attacking the artists, shouting at one another, and setting their own feces on fire. Somewhere on the grass he’d seen a young man feed his toddler a few drops of acid. He tried talking to him but was called an “oppressive fascist pig.” Nobody listened. Everybody shoved.

 
With no one in control of the crowd, the artists themselves stepped up. Sly and the Family Stone tried to appeal to their fans and ask for quiet, but they were soon rebuked by another militant jumping onstage and speechifying and by another downpour of bottles and cans. Mungo Jerry refused to leave his trailer and canceled his set. The Doors took the stage but, fearing projectiles, instructed their roadies to turn off all the lights. They played in the dark for nearly two hours, and their sepulchral music, emanating from the black emptiness onstage, drove the mob into a frenzy. The audience wanted to see Jim Morrison, so they tried to burn down the stage.

  By the time Jimi Hendrix came on, they succeeded. It was after midnight, and Hendrix was wearing tight orange pants and a pink-and-yellow tie-dye shirt, looking like a flame himself. Something, probably a makeshift Molotov cocktail, had hit the scaffolding above his head, and soon it caught on fire. This seemed to amuse Hendrix. He held his Stratocaster guitar as if it were a machine gun, pointed it at the crowd, and fretted fast. The riffs were high-pitched, difficult to take. A few security guards rushed onto the stage to try and put out the fire, and their walkie-talkies interfered with the amplifier’s frequency. The howling of Hendrix’s guitar flickered, sounding otherworldly. In three weeks’ time, the musician—ravaged by stress and sleeping pills—would asphyxiate on his own vomit in a friend’s basement flat in Notting Hill, but that night on Wight he seemed more exuberant than he’d been in months. He played faster and faster, and anyone in the audience who was in possession of a lighter flicked his thumb on the flint and went searching for something to burn.

  Leaning back against a loudspeaker, Rikki Farr watched Hendrix play. He made no effort to stop the fire or calm the crowd. He was paralyzed. He had given all the speeches he could give, tried all the tricks he knew, done everything in his power to get everyone to settle down and everything under control. Earlier that evening he had taken the microphone one last time, told the audience exactly how much the festival had cost and how much money he still needed to raise, and pleaded with them to pay whatever they could to help him cover his expenses. No one did. Walking aimlessly backstage, Farr felt many things. He felt angry with the hooligans who took two days to destroy a festival he’d spent a year putting together. He was devastated to see so many of his peers swept by the deluge of violence and squalor. He was distraught because he realized that there would never again be another festival like the one on Wight. But mainly, he told a filmmaker who happened to be interviewing him at that moment, he just felt a lot older. He shuffled off to his tent and went to sleep.

  But the festival wasn’t over yet. There were still a few more hours, and still one more act: Leonard Cohen. One of Farr’s assistants went to look for Cohen, and found him sleeping in his trailer. He woke him up and asked him to take the stage as soon as possible. As he watched Cohen get dressed, producer Bob Johnston was nervous. Having Cohen play Wight had been his idea. He’d produced for Elvis and Cash and Dylan, and he thought he knew a good opportunity when he saw one, but watching the fire and the fury unleashed on the English island made him doubt his judgment. He had hoped this would be Leonard Cohen’s breakout concert, his first show in front of a truly huge audience; now Johnston just prayed that Cohen would survive it unharmed. It almost seemed unlikely: Ever since the two of them left New York for a brief European tour, backed by an eclectic band of musicians, violence struck at every turn. In Paris some fans got a bit too close. In Berlin someone pulled a gun. At some point along the rowdy tour, Cohen had dubbed his ragtag band the Army.

  He, however, was not much of a warrior. A decade older than most of the other musicians at the festival, he shared none of their affectations or appetites. Some in his entourage wondered why he bothered at all with the whole rock-and-roll lifestyle. Judy Collins, who came backstage to say hello, told a few embarrassing stories about him, like a mother showing nude baby photos of her now-grown child. A few years back, she said, she had invited Cohen up onstage to sing “Suzanne,” the hit song he’d written for her. He made it halfway through before turning his back to the audience and sprinting offstage. He had to be cajoled back and begged to finish his song. Johnston told a similar story. Recording his first album three years earlier, Cohen engaged the producer John Simon, impressed with the work Simon had done with the Band. The two, Johnston recalled, soon fought bitterly—Simon was so frustrated with Cohen’s refusal to use a rhythm section that he abandoned the production and allowed Cohen to finish it as he saw fit. Which wasn’t much solace to Cohen: Well aware that most of the musicians engaged to accompany him mocked his lack of experience and felt no love for his gloomy melodies, he preferred to record his own tracks alone in the studio, singing and playing guitar by himself and allowing the sound engineers to retroactively wed his work to that of the other musicians. The members of the Army had no trouble believing the stories: Cohen was polite but aloof, professional but inscrutable. He almost never hung out, and when he did there was little in common to talk about. While most of his musicians had spent the decade searching for the next gig, the next fix, the next fuck, Cohen had been in self-imposed exile in a two-story beachfront cottage on the Greek island of Hydra, writing poetry. When the stage at Wight was set ablaze, members of the Army joined the other artists backstage in feverish discussions of the potential threat to their well-being. Cohen just turned to Bob Johnston, and—with what the producer thought was the beginning of a smile—said, “Wake me up when it’s time, Bob. I’m going to take a nap over there, by the fire.”

  Now, watching Cohen get dressed, Johnston felt a pulsating fear thudding inside him. He peeked out of the trailer and saw Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins lounging backstage, waiting for their friend to play his show. Cohen, Johnston thought, was nowhere near as tough as Kristofferson, not as determined as Baez, not as well respected as Collins, and if the three of them were pelted with bottles and booed offstage, what chance did Cohen have? But Cohen himself showed no sign of concern. He put on a black T-shirt and a safari jacket, and—unshaved, hair unkempt—walked up onto the stage. He said nothing to the members of the Army. His face, some of them thought, was blank.

  “Greetings,” Cohen said into the microphone, “greetings.” His tone was casual, his voice soft. He continued, “When I was seven years old,” he said in that same mellow way, “my father used to take me to the circus. He had a black mustache, and a great vest, and a pansy in his lapel, and he liked the circus better than I did.”

  Sitting a few feet behind Cohen, Charlie Daniels, a young fiddler Bob Johnston had brought along from Nashville, was amused. Years later, recalling how he felt at that moment, he said he just couldn’t believe Cohen was trying to tell six hundred thousand people a goddamn bedtime story. But, in a near-monotone, Cohen continued.

  “There was one thing at the circus that happened that I always used to wait for,” he said. “I don’t want to impose on you, this isn’t like a sing-along, but there was one moment when a man would stand up and say, would everybody light a match so we could locate one another? And could I ask you, each person, to light a match, so that I could see where you all are? Could each of you light a match, so that you’ll sparkle like fireflies, each at your different heights? I would love to see those matches flare.”

  The audience obeyed. For five days the men and women onstage—organizers, artists, or anarchists—had been talking at them. Cohen was talking to them. He seemed like one of them. He seemed to care. Slowly they took out matches and lighters, and instead of setting things on fire they waved their arms in the air, emitting light and heat. Cohen smiled. “Oh, yeah!” he said softly. “Oh, yeah. Now I know that you know why you’re lighting them.” He strummed a few chords on the guitar, and continued his speech, half singing: “It’s good to be here alone in front of six hundred thousand people. It’s a large nation but it’s still weak. Still very weak. It needs to get a lot stronger before it can claim a right to land.”

  These were heavy words for two in the morning, but they
seemed to permeate. Cohen wasn’t just telling the audience to stop rioting; he was about to give them an alternative. Playing as slowly as he could, Cohen began with one of his most famous songs: “Like … a … bird … on … the … wire.…” Whoever was still standing now sat down on the grass and listened.

  When the song ended the audience clapped. Not thunderously, but still. A handful, still hopped up on the adrenaline of the afternoon, booed, but they were soon subdued. The six hundred thousand wanted to hear what Cohen had to say.

  What he had to say was poetry. He had started out as a poet, and his first public performances consisted of reciting verse in small, smoky Montreal coffeehouses. He might as well have been in one when he stared into the distance (in the way that poets sometimes do when they’re reading out loud) and began his soliloquy.

  “I wrote this in a peeling room in the Chelsea Hotel, before I was rich and famous and they gave me well-painted rooms,” he said. “I was coming off of amphetamines, and I was pursuing a blond lady whom I met in a Nazi poster. And I was doing many things to attract her attention. I was lighting wax candles in the form of men and women. I was marrying the smoke of two cones of sandalwood.” Then he started playing another of his songs, “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

  To Murray Lerner, a middle-aged filmmaker from New York whose camera crews had documented every moment of the festival, the effect was hypnotic. Throughout five days of performances, he’d been too busy shouting out orders to stop and listen to the music. But Cohen’s words made him put down his camera and look up at the man onstage. Cohen, Lerner thought, looked like someone who might do your taxes, not like someone who could stir your soul. Two hours earlier Lerner had been packing up his equipment, certain that the fires and the violence would lead to a massive stampede. He had been ready to run for shelter. But now everything was still, and Lerner had no idea how Leonard Cohen had pulled it off. Standing beside Lerner, Joan Baez was equally baffled. “People say that a song needs to make sense,” she told the filmmaker. “Leonard proves otherwise. It doesn’t necessarily make sense at all, it just comes from so deep inside of him, it somehow touches deep down inside other people. I’m not sure how it works, but I know that it works.” Lerner nodded in agreement as he listened. It reminded him of something he’d once read T. S. Eliot say of Dante—that the genius of poetry was that it communicated before it was understood.