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

by Liel Leibovitz

  Faced with such vitriol, Cohen was defiant. Back from Hydra, he was sitting in a CBC studio in Toronto, talking to the interviewer Adrienne Clarkson, deflecting any attempt at earnestness. Clarkson asked about his mother, and how she had reacted to her son’s novel being decried as filth. Cohen answered that for his mother, any mention at all was a triumph. Clarkson asked about the censor, and whether or not Cohen was worried that his work, like Joyce’s, may be deemed too indecent for publication. Cohen responded with a joyful and defiant rebuke of censorship. Clarkson tried again, taking the direct approach, asking Cohen how he felt when he read the criticism.

  “I’d feel pretty lousy if I were praised by a lot of the people that have come down pretty heavy on me,” he said. Then, true to his theme, he announced that there was a war raging on. Clarkson, confused, asked what he was talking about. “Well,” Cohen said coyly, “it’s an old, old war and I think I’d join the other side if I tried to describe it too articulately. But I think, you know what I mean, there’s a war on, and I like to, if I have to choose sides, which I don’t generally like to do, but if I have to, then I’d just as well be defined as I have been by the establishment press.”36

  When Cohen first spoke of the war, and of the sides, and of the struggle for Western civilization—most notably in his letter about Cuba to his brother-in-law—he was furious. Sitting in Clarkson’s studio, he was amused. Having spent nearly a decade learning how to be a poet and half a decade unlearning the same thing, having risen up and spiraled down as a novelist in the span of three years, he finally felt he’d found the art form that would allow him to convey his ideas: He would sing. It was more lucrative anyway, and, relying as it did on performance, had a transience to it that neatly matched the main ideas he was trying to convey, ideas that rejected all the glorious tomorrows for one solid today.

  “I’d like the stuff I do to have that kind of horizontal immediacy, rather than something that is going to be around for a long time,” he told Clarkson. “I’m not interested in an insurance plan for my work.”37

  He had meant it: From Toronto Cohen traveled to New York, world capital of horizontal immediacy and seat of the record industry, to take up a room at the Chelsea Hotel and reinvent himself as a writer of songs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “One Big Diary, Set to Guitar Music”

  * * *

  Leonard Cohen’s decision to abandon his modestly successful career as a writer and a poet, at the age of thirty-two, in order to become a singer, is so profoundly strange that attempts to explain it tend to be either banal or fantastic. On the one hand, some of Cohen’s biographers have suggested that he picked up a guitar when he realized that entertainers were far more handsomely compensated than poets. It’s a plausible premise, but it leaves Cohen in the position of being clueless enough to believe that, as an older man—Elvis, born a few months after Cohen, had already become a star and served in the army and made terrible movies and retired from show business by the time Cohen first announced his musical aspirations—with a nasal voice he could simply march down to Manhattan and become a singing sensation. Cohen was always audacious about his career, but he was never naive; money might have played a part in his decision, but it was very likely not the only, or even the central, one. What made him sing? As is the case with all seminal moments in his life, Cohen, when asked, had a fanciful explanation at the ready. He was, he told an interviewer a decade later, in Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. It was the summer of 1965, and he was sitting on the bed and reading a few new poems out loud to a lady friend. The door to the adjoining room was left ajar, and Cohen and his companion could see the couple next door, naked, making love. They could hear them, too: Amused by the spectacle, Cohen began to sync his words with the couple’s moaning and groaning, and was immensely pleased with the result. “I think I’m going to record myself singing my poems,” he told his companion. “Please don’t,” she replied.1

  A much more likely story involves not sex but Dylan. Sometime in 1965 Cohen discovered the young Jewish poet, nearly a decade his junior, and was immensely drawn to Dylan’s cryptic, haunting lyrics. In his interview with Adrienne Clarkson, he took the time, apropos of nothing, to cite the line from Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” about fading into one’s own parade. By the time he attended a drunken gathering of Canada’s poets, one week after New Year’s Day of 1966, Dylan was all he wanted to talk about.

  The party was held at F. R. Scott’s house. It started, at noon, with lunch, progressed with copious drinking, slowed down for dinner, and then rocketed into more drinking and merriment. Layton was there, as were Dudek, Al Purdy, and Ralph Gustafson, the editor of an influential anthology of Canadian poetry. The guests had been summoned by a lyrical invitation, carefully composed by Scott, which playfully worked in the titles of the various literary magazines they had all started. It reflected the evening’s purpose—not merely a party, but a celebration of that rarest bird in Canada’s cultural skies, a cohesive group of poets influencing and enriching one another.

  But Cohen wasn’t in the mood for poetry. At some point he took out his guitar and posed a question: “What are these poets doing,” he asked, “all writing poetry the way they used to? Do you know who the greatest poet in America is?”

  “Who?” asked somebody.

  “Bob Dylan!” Cohen declared.

  No one in the room had any idea who Dylan was.

  “Don’t you know?” Cohen cried out. “He’s already made a million dollars.”

  “Then he can’t be the greatest poet in the world,” somebody else quipped. But Cohen persisted. “Don’t you know his records?” he asked. It was established that no one did, and Scott, ever the gracious host, dashed out to a nearby store with the names of four of Dylan’s albums. Learning they each cost $6.95, he bought two. When he returned, Cohen said that Dylan’s albums contained “very good music, very good poetry. It’s the greatest poetry of the century.” And then the records were placed on the record player and the poets leaned in to listen to the music of the young man from Hibbing, Minnesota.

  They loathed it. The music, Scott later recalled, “began to blare such as never had been heard in these walls before.” Purdy, perhaps the nation’s most celebrated poet, leaped up in the air as if kicked from behind: “It’s an awful bore,” he said. “I can’t listen to any more of this,” and then walked into the kitchen in search of more beer. The others were slightly more polite, but none thought Dylan very good. Cohen, however, was undeterred. He got up and excused himself, saying that an audience awaited him in one of the jazz clubs downtown. He left promising that he’d soon be the new Dylan. No one in the room believed him.2

  It’s not hard to see what may have attracted Cohen to Dylan. Like Cohen, Dylan grew up in a family that was actively involved with its local Jewish community, and with a grandfather who studied the Talmud each afternoon. Both men, when young, attended Zionist summer camps—Cohen’s called Mishmar, Dylan’s Herzl—and were taken with the Jewish folk songs they learned there; in 1961, performing in Greenwich Village, Dylan parodied one such song, “Hava Nagila,” which he claimed jokingly was a strange chant he’d learned in Utah. But, most important, Dylan was on fire. Listening to “With God on Our Side” or “Masters of War,” it was easy enough to imagine that if Isaiah had been born in the 1940s, he’d’ve found his way to the stage at the Gaslight Cafe to sing and preach. Listening to Dylan, Cohen heard the same language he’d heard years before, studying the prophets with his grandfather. Sometimes, the lines came directly from the scriptures: “I and I,” for example, a song from Dylan’s 1984 album Infidels and one of Cohen’s favorites, features the line “no man sees my face and lives.” It was spoken once before, by God, in the book of Exodus.3

  Dylan wasn’t just citing the ancient tradition; he was continuing it. He understood—by most accounts, subconsciously—something profound about the role prophecy played in Jewish life. The rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel described that role wel
l: “In speaking about revelation,” he wrote, “the more descriptive the terms, the less adequate is the description. The words in which the prophets attempted to relate their experiences were not photographs but illustrations, not descriptions but songs.”4 Even as Jews replaced their ecstatic modes of worship with other, more cerebral ones, they nevertheless kept singing their messianic songs: In his study of Dylan’s Jewishness, Seth Rogovoy identified the singer as a modern-day badkhn, or joker, a traditional figure serving as “a pious merrymaker, a chanting moralist, a serious bard who sermonized while he entertained … the sensitive seismograph that faithfully recorded the reactions of the common man to the counsels of despair and to the messianic panaceas.”5 Dylan tried to be a badkhn-as-poet—“I search the depths of my soul for an answer,” he declared in an early college poem, “But there is no answer. / Because there is no question. / And there is no time.”6—before realizing that bards belonged onstage, walking into a coffeehouse called the Ten O’Clock Scholar, introducing himself not as Robert Zimmerman but as Bob Dylan, and securing his first gig.

  By 1966 Leonard Cohen was heading in the same direction. He had played music before—in a high school country-and-western band called the Buckskin Boys, with friends in Montreal, and for Marianne and others on Hydra. But he was always more than a casual strummer: Everything he’s ever written, he later told an interviewer—the poems, the short stories, the novels, the songs—was just “one big diary, set to guitar music.”7 It could be, of course, that Cohen the singer was trying retroactively to reshape his past, to explain away his strange transformation by claiming that the musical drive had always lain dormant inside. But there are reasons to believe that he was being sincere. For one thing, he made similar claims in other interviews, an unlikely consistency for a canny subject who is fond of taking liberties when asked about the intricacies of his personal life. But there are other sources that suggest that Cohen might have truly heard a guitar playing softly even as he wrote verse and entertained no notions of performance. Lorca is one: For the Spaniard all arts were equally efficient vessels for duende, but some were more equal than others. Trained as a classical pianist, Lorca struck an early friendship with the composer Manuel de Falla, who influenced Lorca to conceive of Spanish folk music as the true manifestation of the soul of the people. “The great artists of the south of Spain,” Lorca said in one of his lectures on the duende, “whether Gypsy or Flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, know that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes. They may be able to fool people into thinking they have duende—authors and painters and literary fashionmongers do so every day—but we have only to pay a little attention and not surrender to indifference in order to discover the fraud and chase away their clumsy artifice.”8

  A student of the Bible, Cohen could find similar convictions closer to home. The ancient Hebrew temple, he surely knew, included, in addition to its classes of priests and holy servants, also a phalanx of musicians, the latter considered instrumental in worshipping the Almighty. Again and again, the book of Psalms—which so appealed to Cohen that he later attempted to write his own version of it—instructs its readers to “sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God.”9 It was only a matter of time, then, before a young man who increasingly understood his undertaking as being driven by a spiritual engine found his way to that most potent of all art forms.

  The question of what it is about music that sets it apart from other pursuits and grants it its theological resonance has been left, surprisingly, largely unexplored, but those who have considered it offer ideas that go a long way toward explaining Cohen’s turn to song. Music, wrote the French economist Jacques Attali, “heralds, for it is prophetic. It has always been in its essence a herald of the times to come.”10 Attali carried Lorca’s ideas a step further, arguing that music wasn’t only a receptacle for the true and untamed spirit of the folk, but also the foundation that kept its political edifices erect. In primordial times, Attali argued provocatively, a society dedicated to human sacrifice sought a way to cleanse itself of the violence it understood was likely, if left uncontrolled, to tear it asunder. It settled on music, which it understood as a stand-in for ritual murder. Music, Attali continued, terrified and enchanted our ancestors; rather than communicate directly and immediately, the way words did, music was seen as an interruption, a senseless squeal that released the same sort of emotions previously reserved for the altar and the knife. And with that, civilization was born, music helping it sublimate its fundamental brutalities. It’s a wild notion, but Attali found echoes of it in the story of Ulysses and his sirens, as well as in the works of the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian, who wrote that “the sacrifices and music, the rites and the laws have a single aim; it is through them that the hearts of the people are united, and it is from them that the method of good government arises.”11

  But music, Attali argued, didn’t merely ossify or retreat into the realm of ancient practices, no longer understood. It continued to shape society. The troubadours who roamed Renaissance Europe and understood themselves to be a professional class of musicians, he wrote, provided one of the earliest indications that their society was moving away from a feudal order, rooted in land and blood and tradition, and toward a form of capitalism, which called for well-trained artisans. Finally, when music shifted once again, from the troubadours to the recording artists, from the live performance to the LP, it signaled yet another turn, into a new and predatory order of mechanized production. It was time for a fourth thrust, Attali wrote, never expanding too much on what that new prophetic age might look like or what it might say about society and its direction.

  The question, however, was best left not to theoreticians but to musicians themselves. Dylan said it best when he claimed that “the times” were “a-changin’.” And, to the extent that he explicitly considered his mission, his lyrics suggest that he understood it to be, along the lines of Attali’s ideas, part of an endeavor designed to propel society to higher planes. Cohen wanted to do the same. The less confidence he had in words, the more enthusiastic he was about music. Seeing Dylan search for the hidden face of God with his guitar was all the reassurance he needed to take the same step.

  It wasn’t an easy one. Committed to his new career choice, Cohen left Hydra and moved to New York City. He rented an apartment downtown for Marianne and Axel, but he himself lived in a series of hotels, the last and best known of which was the Chelsea. Never feeling at home at home, he took comfort in hotel life. “You always have the feeling in a hotel room that you’re on the lam, and it’s one of the safe moments in the escape,” he told a documentary crew following him. “It’s a breathing spot. The hotel room is the oasis of the downtown, it’s a kind of a refuge, a sanctuary, a sanctuary of a temporary kind and therefore all the more delicious. But whenever I come into a hotel room, there’s a moment, after the door is shut, and the lights you haven’t turned on illumine a very comfortable, anonymous, subtly hostile environment, and you know that you found a little place in the grass, and the hounds are going to go by for three more hours. You’re going to have a drink, light a cigarette, and take a long time shaving.”12

  There was little such tranquillity at the Chelsea. Run by David Bard and his son Stanley, Hungarian Jews with a talent for tolerance—and blessed with thick walls—it was the perfect haven for the short moment that became New York’s bohemia. Arthur Miller, who lived there for a spell a few years before Cohen arrived, recalled what it was like to live amid the chaos: “It was thrilling to know that Virgil Thomson was writing his nasty music reviews on the top floor, and that those canvases hanging over the lobby were by Larry Rivers, no doubt as rent, and that the hollow-cheeked girl on the elevator was Viva and the hollow-eyed man with her was Warhol and that scent you caught was marijuana.”13

  It was not an auspicious scene for a young poet with a guitar hesitantly taking his first steps as a musician. The world Leonard Cohen had most likely imagined he would inhabit,
echoes of which were audible on Dylan’s early records, was fading, and a new one, white hot, was emerging. There are many ways to explain the change in popular music between 1965, the year Cohen discovered Dylan, and 1966, the year Cohen presented himself in New York to begin his new incarnation as singer, but, as is so often the case when contemplating the history of rock and roll, none is more effective than simply listening to the Beatles. In December 1965 the band, already understood to be rock incarnate, released Rubber Soul. The album has many hits, and each is easy to place within a distinct tradition. The steely guitar lick that launches “Drive My Car” is as showy and exuberant and good-natured as anything by Chuck Berry, whose “Roll Over, Beethoven” the Beatles had covered two years before. “You Won’t See Me,” for all its cantankerous breakup lyrics, “was very Motown-flavored,” Paul McCartney said of the song.14 Listen to the song’s bass line, and you can imagine you’re listening to the Four Tops or the Temptations. Even the intensely intimate and sweetly melancholic “In My Life” was more a traditional composition than a sui generis autobiography. As the band’s biographer Bob Spitz notes, the song began its life as a nostalgic rough draft composed by John Lennon and was then handed over to McCartney, who wrote the melody “based on a Smokey Robinson motif, ‘with the minors and little harmonies’ lifted from Miracles records.”15 All of this, of course, is not to say that the Beatles are somehow less deserving of their eternal glory; it’s only to note that in 1965 they were a monumental band that worked squarely within a musical tradition it knew well and respected. Nine months later, that changed.