With Cohen’s renown far greater in Europe than it was stateside, Columbia Records urged him to go on tour for the first time, which struck him as a bad idea; “the risks of humiliation,” he told an interviewer years later, “were too wide.”20 Trying to find a creative way out of the constraint, he responded that he would only agree should Bob Johnston abandon his lucrative production work and join the tour as its manager and keyboard player, both being parts he had little experience playing. Johnston, who had recently terminated his contract with Columbia and was ready for a change of scene, agreed. In May 1970 he collected Cohen, a band of musicians, and copious amounts of hallucinogens, and off on tour they went.
Trouble brewed overnight. The tour’s second performance, a May 4 concert at the Musikhalle in Hamburg, was about to begin when news came of the shootings at Kent State University, which left four dead and nine wounded. Stage fright, Mandrax, and political violence proved a heady cocktail. Cohen took the stage, played a few songs, then goose-stepped and Sieg Heiled. His outstretched arm drove the crowd mad. There was shouting. Some stormed the stage, which Cohen seemed to encourage. Someone thought someone had a gun. The police grew jittery. Peace was barely restored. Members of the band threatened to quit. None did, and Cohen’s entourage, feeling more like a military unit than a band of touring musicians, became known as the Army.
Cohen, its commander, was on the attack. Everywhere he went, he challenged the local police. At the Olympia, Paris’s celebrated concert hall, he urged the thousands in attendance to defy security and join him onstage. In Copenhagen he had them follow him back to his hotel. But if the local security guards were easy to overcome, the critics were less so. In London, Cohen sold out the Royal Albert Hall but failed to win over the press; his concerts, went the consensus, left “deep impressions of a sad and tortured wasteland.”21 New York was even worse: Playing in Forest Hills, Queens, Cohen left Nancy Erlich, a critic for Billboard, feeling disdainful. “He is a nervous and uncomfortable man,” she wrote of the singer, “setting out to use his extraordinary command of language and of other people’s emotions to make the rest of the world equally nervous and uncomfortable.” Cohen’s voice, Erlich wrote, was bloodless, dull, humorless, offering no comfort and no wisdom, expressing only defeat. “His art is oppressive,” she concluded her assessment. “Rather than draw emotions out of his listeners, Cohen imposes his own, forcibly, through the pressure of his personality. There can be no catharsis when the communication does not work both ways.”22
But if Cohen appeared uninterested in communicating with his listeners, his listeners sometimes seemed to return the favor. Everywhere from Venice Beach to Vienna, young men and women huddled together in what organizers billed as music festivals and expected something transcendent to happen. When it didn’t, when nothing but men and women with guitars took the stage and admission fees were charged and sanitation was failing, they often curdled. Rock stars arrived at gig after gig to find themselves booed for being mere performers and not legislators, gurus, or prophets. Sometimes, as was the case on the Isle of Wight, it ended in arson. Sometimes, like the Rolling Stones concert at the free festival in Altamont, it ended in murder. Things were considerably calmer in Aix-en-Provence, but the same rancor was in the air: The naked people in the mud expected a revolution, and all they got was a lousy rock concert.
The Army realized the Aix festival would be trouble from the very drive up: The road leading to the bucolic field where the concert was to be held was blocked by dozens of cars, some having been abandoned by their owners, some occupied by irate and honking youth. It was the perfect visual representation of the festival’s contentious mood, an ongoing skirmish between the organizers and the audience. On one side were Jean-Pierre Rawson, a noted Paris music impresario, and Claude Clément, a French army general who was forced to resign his post because of his association with the Organisation de l’armée secrète, a paramilitary group that opposed France’s withdrawal from Algeria and tried to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. His ultranationalist views aside, Clément was a patron of the arts and a member of the board of Aix-en-Provence’s celebrated opera festival, and he believed that the hippies’ love of music could, if cultivated, cure them of their boorish manners and their disdain for law and order. The local municipality was far from thrilled with the idea of throngs of young people, many of them still in the throes of the radical politics that had seized so many French students two years earlier, descending on the staid country town, but Clément had pull; he and Rawson, he promised, would produce a festival that would be to Woodstock what a fine baguette is to packaged sliced bread. The festival, its two producers announced, would be held on a seventy-five-acre lot of privately owned land, and would feature three open-air stages, twenty-two bands and solo artists, fifty hostesses, two hundred tents, a twenty-line telephone center, and mobile surgical and maternity units. All these amenities were expected to serve 150,000 concertgoers, each paying the steep price of fifty-five francs per ticket.23
Somewhere between seven and thirteen thousand people showed up. Clément’s involvement had turned many cold to the festival, especially when someone started a rumor that the general had hired harkis—native Algerians who had fought on the French side during that country’s war of independence—as security guards. Those who did try to make it to the festival’s grounds were greeted by a massive police force that encircled the venue completely and made access a challenge and traffic unbearable. All this was too much for the young concertgoers to take. The festival, recalled rock critic Paul Alessandrini, felt like a “caricature of all that (and all those) which we refuse: recuperators who carry around with them the fetid odor of commerce, ‘officials’ who ‘understand the problems of youth.’”24 Even more vocal was a band of Maoists who had forced their way onto the grounds and demanded that the organizers forfeit the admission charge and turn the festival into a free public event. Clément refused, and, every bit the general, he stormed the stage and gave a stern speech, saying that the real youth had spoken and what the real youth wanted wasn’t politics but rock and roll. Whether this was the case remained unknown, as the only voices audible throughout the festival’s three-day run belonged to the Maoists, who yelled and did their best to shame the performers into stating support for their revolution.
As these small battles raged on, Leonard Cohen and the Army stood staring at a knot of automobiles. They were still far from the festival’s site, and had heavy equipment with them. Walking was out of the question. A native of Hillsboro, Texas, Bob Johnston suggested horses. Some were procured from a stable nearby, and the Army rode on, stopping only for a prolonged visit to a nearby bar. Now fortified by drink, Cohen decided to take the Western motif as far as it would go and ride onto the stage atop the white stallion he’d been assigned. The horse, angular, its golden mane flowing down to its midsection, looked regal; Cohen, his eyes glassy and his hair unkempt, looked confused.
As soon as Cohen and his steed mounted the stage, the booing began. To the young leftists seething on the grass, the rich Canadian entertainer riding a white horse was a grotesque display of might and arrogance. Those steeped in Cohen’s biography shouted that he was a sympathizer of Greece’s fascist regime—why else would a foreigner maintain a home on Hydra?—while the rest just demanded that he say something about ticket prices and condemn the bourgeoisie. Drunk, and most likely stoned, Cohen addressed the crowd. “I’d like to say something about the link between the festival and money,” he said in his hesitant Québécois French. “When the festivals will be yours, they will not belong to others. If you call me, I will already be there. But the thing is, there is not a revolution. When others talk about the revolution, it is their revolution. Leave the revolution to the owners of the revolution. They are like any other owners. They’re seeking profit.” He was incoherent, but the message got through regardless: Talk of revolution was a sham, a fantasy that concealed the fact that earthly achievements required earthly labor and deserved earthly
rewards, and that the people cultivating this fantasy were themselves, like everybody else, in it for fun and profit. Then he played “Bird on the Wire.” The catcalls went on.
The politics, the police, and the frenzy exhausted Cohen. When the whole world was going mad, where did you go for shelter?
“I want to play mental asylums,” Cohen told Bob Johnston.25 The producer was no stranger to such requests; just two years earlier Johnny Cash had approached him with the task of arranging a gig at Folsom Prison. But Cash had intended for his prison concert to be recorded and released as an album. Cohen seemed drawn to asylums for entirely personal reasons. He never explained them to Johnston or to the other members of his band. Four years later, speaking to a reporter, he recalled his request and suggested that the “experience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.”
In a sense,” he continued, “when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs.”26
On August 28 the Army drove up to the Henderson Hospital, just south of London. “It was all talking therapy,” a former nurse at the hospital told Cohen biographer Sylvie Simmons, “no medication, no ‘zombies.’” Cohen was led up to the institution’s imposing and narrow tower, where his impromptu performance would take place. “Oh boy,” he told Johnston as they made their way in. “I hope they like ‘So Long, Marianne.’” Most of those in attendance were young, and many were Leonard Cohen fans. The band quickly set up, and Cohen took his place at the front of the makeshift stage, underneath one of the “tall, narrow windows that gave the room the feel of a chapel.”27 He looked at the audience. “There was a fellow I spoke to last night,” he said, “a doctor. I told him I was coming out here. He said, ‘They are a tough bunch of young nuts.’” There was some applause, and Cohen started playing “Bird on the Wire.” But then he stopped. “I feel like talking,” he said. “Someone warned me downstairs that all you do here is talk. That’s psychotic, it’s contagious.”
During eighty minutes, he played only eleven songs. The rest of the time he told the audience about his relationship with Marianne and how it had dissipated, about how “You Know Who I Am” was written after taking three hundred acid trips and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” was composed while coming down from amphetamine, about the Chelsea Hotel and life in New York and making love and sharing lovers and feeling inconsolably sad. Each time he finished a song or a speech, the audience applauded rapturously.
And then it was time to leave. “I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we’ve been looking for,” Cohen said as the Army was packing up to go. “I’ve never felt so good playing before people.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“All Close Friends of the Artist, Please Leave”
* * *
A few weeks after returning to the United States—the European tour ended with the August 31 concert on the Isle of Wight—Cohen and the Army stepped into a Nashville studio to record Cohen’s third album. If Songs from a Room was slight and melancholy, Songs of Love and Hate was dark and austere. Most of its songs had been written while on tour, and they captured their author’s mood perfectly. Cohen’s old sensibility—the one that could tell an intimate story that transformed, when you thought about it, into (as a later song lyric so aptly put it) “a manual for living with defeat”—had largely disappeared. With the exception of “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which struck the familiar balance of the hopeful, the elegiac, the intimate, and the eternal, the rest of the tracks are expeditions down drill holes of despair. The opening track, “Avalanche,” begins with an ominous guitar, and then a violin, more ominous still, joins in. Next comes Cohen, his voice flat, low, and devoid of its usual warmth. If you were wondering what kind of an album this was going to be, the first few lines left no doubt: “I stepped into an avalanche / It covered up my soul.”
It’s a strange line. More than any other natural disaster, perhaps, an avalanche occurs rapidly and without warning, trapping everyone in its path, leaving little time or room for escape. But here was Cohen voluntarily walking into one—stepping, nonetheless, slowly and with deliberation—to the detriment of his spiritual well-being. Having lived for the first time the life of an entertainer, no longer privileged merely to release his albums and collect royalties in private, but obliged to meet his fans and their demands, Cohen contemplated the undertaking and found it a catastrophe. “When I am on a pedestal,” he reflected in the same song, “You did not raise me there. / Your laws do not compel me / To kneel grotesque and bare. / I myself am the pedestal / For this ugly hump at which you stare.” And if the trappings of renown were burdensome, they were also fleeting, like the old metaphysical Jewish joke about the food at a certain restaurant being not only bad but served in such small portions. By his third album and his fourth year as a singer, Cohen already felt, as he stated in the title of the album’s second song, like “last year’s man, / That’s a Jew’s harp on the table, that’s a crayon in his hand. / And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled / Far past the stems of thumbtacks that still throw shadows on the wood / And the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend / And all the rain falls down amen / On the works of last year’s man.” The symbolism hardly masks the autobiographical elements: Like the rest of the album, the song is a stark portrait of best-laid plans gone horribly wrong.
Something just as crushing had happened to Cohen’s voice. Never a towering vocalist, he nevertheless managed, in his first two albums, to convey a considerable degree of warmth, his voice rising or dipping at key points in the delivery to create small wells of emotion and empathy. When he sings “Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river,” for example, Cohen breaks the word “down” into two syllables, the first flat and the second low and mournful. But the woes of “Last Year’s Man” receive no such nuanced styling. They’re sung coldly, with little feeling. Two songs later, with “Diamonds in the Mine,” Cohen goes a step further, channeling something that sounds like his inner Dylan: “The woman in blue,” he sings, “she’s asking for revenge, / The man in white (that’s you) says he has no friends. / The river is swollen up with rusty cans / And the trees are burning in your promised land.” The acerbic tone, the gnomic biblical allusions, the convoluted storytelling that conveys the mutterings of strange characters—the master from Hibbing couldn’t have said it better himself. Cohen strains for that signature Dylan diction, stretching each word to its limit, and then lets his voice go growly for the chorus, sounding like a drunk at a hootenanny. A charitable listener could interpret his howls as a cry for help; a more exacting ear might spot something closer to a parody, as if the artist who had already abandoned two art forms was preparing to abandon a third. On the album’s cover was a picture of Cohen’s head, emerging from an otherwise uniformly dense pool of black, smiling, wild-eyed, looking not unlike Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. On the album’s back runs a short poem: “They locked up a man / Who wanted to rule the world. The fools / They locked up the wrong man.”
Songs of Love and Hate was a dismal failure in the United States but was ecstatically received in Europe. In England critics were now calling Cohen “Laughing Len,” and jokes abounded about his music being a sound track to suicide. He nonetheless appealed to large audiences, and Columbia pressured him into another promotional tour. In March 1972, with the Army by his side, Cohen returned to Europe.
For the first few nights things went smoothly.1 The Army fell back into its old habits of drugs and camaraderie, and played Dublin and Glasgow without a hitch. Then something went wrong with the sound sys
tem. Someone argued it had to do with Bob Johnston sticking his earphones in the wrong jack and short-circuiting the entire setup of speakers and amps. Johnston denied it. But from day three of the tour, whenever the band picked up its instruments and started to play, all that many in the audience could hear was a crackle and an undulating pitch, like an alien spaceship attempting communication.
The whirs of the broken-down machines nicely matched Cohen’s state of mind. In Berlin, after infuriating the audience by reciting a bit of a speech by Goebbels, Cohen greeted the noise by strumming on his guitar and breaking into an improvised song. “I don’t know what to do about you, speaker,” he sang to his broken-down equipment. “I suppose there’s a solution, but it seems too drastic for me. But I’m going to be asking for the axe for the gun for the dynamite, and then just like the rest of the scene we’ll just have to wait and see. Come on speaker, won’t you speak to me? Come on speaker, let’s just see what you’ve got to say, today.” The audience laughed; Cohen didn’t. Watching the concert footage, it’s easy to wonder whether he’s singing about a knot of wiring or about himself, a speaker grown weary of speaking.
The rest of the tour was dotted with similar moments, beginning with bursts of levity and ending with something more somber. When he took the stage in Manchester, the tour’s third stop, Cohen had launched into a long digression. “It’s like when Plato said,” Cohen began, with the band playing what sounded like a sweet country ballad in the background. “No it wasn’t,” Jennifer Warnes and Donna Washburn, Cohen’s backup singers, cooed softly. It was a well-timed gag. “It wasn’t Plato,” Cohen corrected himself as the audience giggled, “it was a cat that copied him, Socrates. I mean, Socrates didn’t bother to write it down. But Plato saw he had a good gig writing it down. I’ll write down everything he said, I’ll publish it after he’s dead. But all Socrates ever said was”—and here Cohen broke into song, the ballad finally coming to life—“no it wasn’t any good, there’s no reason why you should remember me.” Speaking again, Cohen went on. “And I tell you, friends,” he said, “you can tell this to your Sunday school teacher when she tells you about sin. This is the appropriate response.” He waited a beat, then dived back into his song: “No it wasn’t any good, there’s no reason why you should remember me.” Then the mood got darker. “You know that every word I say is being recorded and taken down on film,” Cohen said. “And so no doubt, if electricity persists, and there are banks and governments devoted to its continuation, if electricity persists, perhaps our progeny, our grandchildren, in some new form of cool, in some new style of hip, in some new way of expansion, in some new trip on the old wine, perhaps they’ll be able to see me standing here on this stage in Manchester which will then be a ruin—it’s well on its way—and you know I hope the banks follow, and I hope the factories go down too, and I don’t even like the places they live in here, and that’s got nothing to do with the people, that’s part of another scene. But anyhow, you know, I hope these imaginary descendants of mine would be able to look me straight in the screen, and I’ll tell them one by one”—and he burst back into song—“No, it wasn’t any good, there’s no reason why you should remember me.”
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 13
