Were these the ramblings of a man in the throes of a midlife crisis? Cohen was thirty-seven, and much of what he said publicly throughout the tour, to his audience or to the press, suggested a disconnect between the man who had written “Suzanne”—first as a poem and then as a song, while living in obscurity, walking the streets of Montreal, or swimming in the Aegean—and the man who was now forced to sing it night after night to tens of thousands of people who bobbed their heads and mouthed all the words reverentially. In Frankfurt, holding up a half-empty glass, he addressed the crowd, his eyelids heavy, his eyes glassy. “I see no reason why the energy has to be concentrated on this broken-down nightingale,” he said, referring to himself. “I return it all to you, and if you could possibly make an evening out of this that is not just the observance and the documentation and the record of a few museum songs. After all, I wrote these songs to myself and to women several years ago, and it is a curious thing to be trapped in that original effort. I wanted to tell one person one thing, and now I am in a situation that I must repeat them like some parrot chained to his stand night after night.” He made the same point more sharply a few days later, in an interview with British radio. “Sometimes you can live in a song,” he said, “and sometimes it is inhospitable and it won’t admit you and you’re left banging at the door and everybody knows it. So it really depends a great deal on the moment, on the kind of shape you’re in, on the kind of, on how straight you are with yourself at the moment, how straight you’ve been with the audience, many factors determine whether you’re going to make the song live. There is another way a song can become inhospitable, in that you lose contact with the emotion of the song after you’ve been singing a song that perhaps you wrote six or seven years ago and you’ve sung it like maybe ten or fifteen times in a row, each night in a different city, you lose contact with the song itself.” The radio reporter nodded politely, and thanked Cohen for his patience. Then, running back the tape to check the sound quality, he realized he’d forgotten to press Record.
But there was more plaguing Cohen than faulty equipment and the vagaries of fame. The documentary filmmaker Tony Palmer accompanied Cohen on the tour and captured a man paralyzed by what seemed to be a case of existential jitters. It’s not difficult to guess why: If the 1970 tour was marred by recurrent interruptions from ideologues seized by the spirit of revolution, the 1972 tour featured mostly content young men and women, enraged only by the feeling of not having gotten their money’s worth on account of the bad speakers. The closest Cohen came to confronting his fans was in Stockholm, when a few bespectacled men slinked backstage, accused Cohen of behaving unprofessionally, and refused to leave until the singer pulled out some crumpled wads of cash from his own pocket and offered them by way of compensation. It was a far cry from the Maoists in Aix or the rowdy bunch on the hill on the Isle of Wight. In the course of just two or three years, it seemed, the youth themselves had changed.
The music had, too. In 1969, for example, Billboard’s top ten chart was dominated by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, by the 5th Dimension announcing a new cosmic age in “Aquarius” and Sly and the Family Stone pleading for racial harmony in “Everyday People.” In 1972, the songs topping the same chart were Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again,” Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” and other sweet confections of sentimental love. Even worse, the baton of serious rock and roll had been passed from the solemn seekers—the Morrisons and Wilsons and Joplins—to the excessive thinkers and tinkerers, men like Keith Emerson and Jon Anderson and Roger Waters, fathers of the new style known as progressive rock.
It is hard to think of rock and imagine a more natural progression than the one that led from the Beach Boys and the Doors to the Nice, Emerson’s first, influential band, or to Anderson’s Yes. All shared the same goal: “discovery of the self and connection with the divine,”2 as Anderson recently put it in an interview. But whereas the rockers of the 1960s cast their gaze Eastward in the hope of finding spiritual inspiration, the rockers of the 1970s looked backward to a past half real and half imagined, evoking a bestiary of mythical creatures in their songs and on their album covers. Curiously, this approach did not translate into similarly pagan sounds. To the contrary: The new cadre of musicians did not so much feel or trip their way into their songs as they thought their music through, which explains the abundance of concept albums rich with movements and themes. The Nice’s second album, for example, was called Ars Longa Vita Brevis. Released in 1968, it was influenced by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, an event that inspired Keith Emerson to have the highly unoriginal thought that gives the album its title. Should the Latin have failed to convey that this was a magnum opus to be consumed with the utmost reverence, and should fans have failed to be awed by the album’s cover—an X-ray of the band’s members that, due to their having ingested radioactive substances, glowed in orange and purple and green—Emerson included a short message on the album’s sleeve: “Newton’s first law of motion states a body will remain at rest or continue with uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by a force,” it begins. “This time the force happened to come from a European source. Ours is an extension of the original Allegro from Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. Yesterday I met someone who changed my life, today we put down a sound that made our aim accurate. Tomorrow is yesterday’s history and art will still be there, even if life terminates.” Peter Sinfield, who wrote most of Emerson’s lyrics when the latter joined with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer, had it just right when he quipped that prog rock was the domain of “small people with big ideas.”3
Whatever else these ideas were about, they were predominantly about sound, and the extent to which instruments could be tortured to produce strange and alarming sounds. If Ray Manzarek squeezed his keyboard in search of a feeling, Emerson stabbed his with a knife for no other reason than to make it cry. After being X-rayed for the cover of Ars Longa, Emerson learned that three of his ribs were broken. “You break ribs playing keyboards?” his doctor wondered. “I wouldn’t have considered it such a hazardous occupation.” Emerson replied that it depended on how one played them.4 Soon enough the equipment eclipsed the musicians, as stories about prog rock icons inevitably began with fawning accounts of the complexity of their machinery. When Emerson, Lake & Palmer played New York in 1973, for example, the New York Times began its report of the upcoming concerts with what read more like a roadie’s checklist than a reporter’s attempt at insight: Emerson, Lake & Palmer, went the article, “is due at Madison Square Garden tomorrow and Tuesday with over 200 separate items of equipment, valued by Customs at just over $100,000. The equipment ranges from the sublime—a brand new prototype Moog synthesizer, one of the 13 keyboard units used by Keith Emerson, who started out, he says, ‘as a laid back piano player’—to Item 107 on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s list, a Persian carpet. The carpet is for bass player Greg Lake to stand on while playing and is reputed to have cost around $5,000.” And then it was on to describing Palmer’s drum set, topped by an old church bell “from the Stepney district of London.”5 Emerson himself was happy to comment on this line of inquiry. Speaking mainly in proper nouns, he extolled the virtues of his Hammond and his Moog and the rest of what he referred to as “rock technology.” Thirteen keyboards, he told the reporter, was about what it took just to get a song across. “It is very hard to get something across to 10,000 people with just a piano, a bass and a set of drums.”6
Leonard Cohen, of course, disagreed. He had gotten more across to more people with much less instrumentation than the big bands were now lugging around. His audience, however, had always been comprised of smart and sensitive young people, and, in 1972, smart and sensitive young people everywhere believed that the proper venue in which to be moved by music was the arena, and that songs approached their apotheosis the lengthier they were and the more they changed time signatures. David Weigel summed up the period elegantly when he explained that “Rick Wa
keman could write a thematic micro-opera about the Knights of the Round Table, and sell 10 million copies. In 14 months, Jethro Tull recorded not one but two albums that consisted of single, 40-minute songs. And they both went platinum.”7
None of Cohen’s albums to that point had sold as well, and he continued his tour, his speakers screeching and his faith shaken. Audiences seemed to baffle him. In Frankfurt he became visibly annoyed by repeated shouts requesting one song or another. It’s a common enough occurrence in a rock concert—the charming and hopeless attempts of many in the crowd to communicate with the musician onstage—but Cohen was unamused. “Would you please appoint a spokesman?” he chastised his audience with uncharacteristic humorlessness. Of course they didn’t, and when the shouting continued Cohen’s tone grew more severe. “Anyone else got anything to say?” he asked curtly, picking nervously at his guitar. “I can stand here for a long time like this. I’m tough, you know. I can take this.” The shouting eventually died down. Cohen smiled. “Nice and quiet now, eh?” he said. Later on that evening, after leaving the stage, he admitted that his behavior had been disgraceful.
It was not, however, uncommon. He played a few notes in Copenhagen, and when the audience applauded he said, smiling but visibly irate, “Now listen, you couldn’t possibly know what song it is.” The audience applauded louder yet. “I start all my songs that way,” Cohen continued. “It’s the only chord I know.” A fan shouted from the floor, “Sing it anyway! They’re all wonderful songs!” Cohen’s expression changed. “Oh, thank you,” he said, looking meek. “Forgive my ingratitude. Really, oh, forgive me. It’s the first day of Passover, and I’m, I’m …” Someone shouted and informed Cohen that it was the holiday’s last day, not the first. “The last one,” Cohen agreed. “You see, that’s how confused I am. It’s the festival of freedom, and I’m trying to break free myself.” And then he started howling an improvised song: “I’m trying to break free myself, you know / Trying to lose my old songs / Trying to start a new life before it is too late / Trying to get along / Trying to get along / Trying to get along.”
On April 19 the tour landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel for two final concerts, one that evening in Tel Aviv and another two days later in Jerusalem. Cohen’s Army had had a turbulent month, and the musicians hoped that a few days in Israel would prove rewarding. Cohen was thrilled to see Jerusalem, subject of so much Jewish prayer, and knew that his songs, with their occasional biblical allusions, were particularly popular in Israel. He entered the Yad Eliyahu sports arena, a gray concrete monstrosity in an impoverished neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv, with high expectations. All, however, were dashed when he learned that the concert’s organizers had set up a security perimeter covering the arena’s entire floor, barring anyone from getting near the stage. Fans were confined to their seats, which were far off to the side and offered compromised vision and sound.
Cohen, infuriated by the setup, called on his audience to come closer. A phalanx of guards in orange shirts tried to keep the fans from approaching the stage. In audio recordings of that evening, fists whiz audibly through the air. Fans rushed the stage, some grabbing instruments. Musicians were hit. True to his designation as the Army’s commander in chief, Cohen ordered retreat. A few minutes later, he marched the band back onstage. “I’d like to sing this song for the men in orange,” he said, nodding at the guards. “I know you guys are doing your work. Why don’t you just sit down and enjoy the concert?” And then he invited the audience to come on down once more, carried on for a few more songs, and then played “Passing Through,” a melancholy country tune in which Jesus, Adam, George Washington, and FDR all make wry remarks on the transient nature of life. The Army’s musicians were standing close together, arranged in a tight circle, looking more like a group of friends huddling for warmth than like a band playing for tens of thousands of fans. The audience, however, was still not calm, and after singing the song’s chorus six or seven times, Cohen realized it was time to leave. “Let’s not go that way,” he said. “Let’s just do our own scene, disperse quietly, and let’s just take off, be together somewhere else. Because this scene isn’t working. So I just want to say good night to you, just passing by, I just want to say good night. There’s no point starting a war right now.”
With such havoc marring their first concert in Israel, the band feared the second would turn out to be just as disastrous. It did. Jerusalem’s Binyanei Ha’Uma convention center offered terrific acoustics, and the audience was giddy, but Cohen himself was under a dark cloud. Earlier that morning, when a reporter asked if he was a practicing Jew, Cohen sounded somber. “I’m always practicing,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel the fear of God. I do feel that fear sometimes. I got to get myself together. I don’t know whether it’s an exclusively Jewish phenomenon, but it’s certainly one that is part of the Jewish strain, to sensitize yourself to that kind of direction.” He sang a few songs, and they were greeted with wild applause, but Cohen felt that his delivery was cold and deadened. “You don’t want to go in front of people unless you feel that you can give them something, and you can return to them the love that they feel to you through your songs,” he said in an interview a few days earlier. “When you don’t feel that you can make it, it’s a terrible feeling. You feel that you are cheating people.”
“If it doesn’t get any better,” he told the audience, “we’ll just end the concert and I’ll refund your money. Some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights you just can’t get off the ground. There’s no point lying about it. And tonight we just haven’t been getting off the ground. It says in the kabbalah that if you can’t get off the ground, you should stay on the ground. It says in the kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. Somehow the male and female parts of me refused to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem. So listen, we’re going to leave the stage now, and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room, to get ourselves back into shape. And if we can manage, we’ll be back.”
Back in the dressing room, Cohen was in a daze. “I can’t make it, man,” he said, smiling nervously. “I don’t like it. I’m splitting.” He got up, but he didn’t go anywhere. He had sent his manager, Martin Machat, to see if the audience would accept refunds, and soon Machat returned and reported that the audience wouldn’t budge. A few young men, he said, had told him that they didn’t even care if Cohen sang or not; they loved him so much, they just wanted him on the stage, and they would sing to him. Many in the audience had the same idea: From the dressing room Cohen could hear the hall rattled by thousands of people singing “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” a popular folk song whose one-line lyric means “We have brought peace upon you.” Cohen calmed down a bit. He sank into a chair, still saying that he didn’t want to go back out. Someone was telling him that maybe some of his Israeli fans didn’t want to be soldiers and shoot people, but that they had to do it anyway, just like he had to reclaim the stage and finish the concert.
Cohen listened silently, his face buried in a bouquet of roses someone had handed him. Suddenly he shot to his feet. “Oh, I know what I have to do,” he said. “I have to shave.” He walked over to the sink, produced a small shaving kit, and turned on the warm water. “What a life,” he said repeatedly as he rid himself of his stubble, “what a life. This is wonderful.” Bob Johnston, Ron Cornelius, and the other members of the Army stood behind him, laughing. Cohen, too, looked like a man emerging from a long and terrifying trip. “Oh, this is really great,” he exclaimed, finishing at the sink. “Oh, this gig ain’t over, oh no.” He brought the razor to his wrist, and made a mock slashing motion. Johnston and Cornelius cracked up. Cohen dried his face, sat down again, and smoked a cigarette. He was still not sure if he wanted to go back out, but his mood was different. “Bombed in Jerusalem,” he quipped, and then, turning serious, leaned in. “I felt this atmosphere once before,” he said. “It was in Montre
al. My entire family was there. Their cousins, aunts, daughters, and nieces. I’m going to ask everybody from Montreal to leave. Just the people from Montreal will get their money back. All close friends of the artist, please leave.”
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 14
