And with that, it was back out and onto the stage. The audience, still singing “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” sang louder, clapping wildly. Cohen just stood there, his arms folded and resting on his guitar. Then he played “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and “So Long, Marianne,” and the audience applauded more fiercely, more reverentially than Cohen or his musicians had ever heard any audience applaud before. It was overwhelming.
Backstage, Jennifer Warnes and Donna Washburn were weeping, hugging each other for support. Cohen was weeping, too. He told Bob Johnston that he couldn’t go back out there and cry in front of all these people. Johnston said they wouldn’t leave. They needed another encore. But Cohen didn’t have another song in him. He stepped back out and grabbed the microphone with both hands. “Hey listen, people, my band and I are all crying backstage there. We’re too broken up to go on, but I just wanted to tell you thank you, and good night.” Amid the sound of a thousand gasps and yelps, he made his way backstage again, sat down, lit another cigarette. “What an audience,” he said to no one in particular. “Ever see anything like that?” And then, once again, he started to cry.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“There Is a War”
* * *
The war broke out on October 6, 1973. Israelis should have seen it coming: The Egyptians had been moving their troops to the border for days, and there were indications that the Syrians, too, were preparing for battle. King Hussein of Jordan secretly flew to Tel Aviv and told Prime Minister Golda Meir that she had days, maybe less, before an assault began. But too many Israeli officials refused to believe it would happen; Egypt and Syria were just flexing their muscles, they argued, and wouldn’t dare risk another military defeat like the one they were dealt in 1967. It was Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, and most Israelis, secular and religious alike, spent it fasting and praying in the synagogues. It was there that they heard the sirens, and soon after them the roar of military jeeps rushing to the front, or, rather, fronts: Egypt had invaded from the south, Syria from the north, each country fortified by soldiers from a host of other Arab nations. The invaders were met by a smattering of young soldiers, terrified and overwhelmed, desperate for reinforcement. Because almost every Israeli served in the army, and because nearly all continued to serve for a month or two a year in reserve duty until they were well into middle age, the Israeli Defense Forces’ doctrine specified that in case of a surprise attack, all the conscripts had to do was hold the line until the older, more experienced veterans got there. On October 6 that meant that nearly all Israeli men younger than fifty-five were en route to war.
The artists would be on their way, too: In cafés all over Tel Aviv, singers, actors, and musicians gathered in haste to plan impromptu tours of the front lines, eager to provide a few hours of entertainment to the men fighting and dying there. In Pinati, one such café, Oshik Levi, a handsome pop star whose second album had come out earlier that year, presided over one such gathering. With him were Ilana Rovina, a chanteuse and the daughter of the legendary theater actress Hannah Rovina; the singer and actor Pupik Arnon; and a young musician named Mati Caspi, who would soon become one of Israel’s most iconic singer-songwriters but was still, at the time, a quirky kid with sad eyes.1 They were putting together a show they would soon take to various air bases, where wounded soldiers, airlifted from makeshift hospitals up front, were laid on tarmacs before being taken to proper clinics for treatment.
At the other end of the café Levi spotted a thin man sitting by himself. He seemed vaguely familiar, and Levi, half joking, told his friends that the man looked a little bit like Leonard Cohen. “Don’t you wish!” said Rovina. Like most Israelis, they were all fans of Cohen. The odds that the same man who had caused such a sensation in his shows in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem just a year earlier would now be sitting there at their café, unannounced and unaccompanied, in the middle of a war, seemed very slim. Still, they couldn’t look away. A few moments later, Levi spoke again. “I swear on my life,” he said. “It’s Leonard Cohen.” He got up and walked over to the thin stranger. “Are you Leonard Cohen?” he asked. The man said, “I am.”
It was a dreamlike moment for Levi, improbable and a touch surreal. As in a dream, he understood that the situation had its own logic. Coolly he invited Cohen to his table, and there, without thinking about it too much, told Cohen about the upcoming tour and asked him if he’d like to join.
Cohen seemed confused. He had come to Israel just the day before, he said, boarding a boat from Hydra to Athens and then flying into Tel Aviv as soon as he heard news of the attack. He left behind his wife, Suzanne, and a year-old son, Adam, but he couldn’t stay away. He had no idea why, or what he would do once he arrived. Maybe, he told his new friends, he should move to a kibbutz and help out with the crops. Levi said that entertaining the troops would be a much bigger service, and Cohen, intrigued, replied that he would like to but had left in haste and did not bring his guitar. Rushing to a nearby phone, Levi called a senior air force officer and secured a guitar for Cohen. The tour left Tel Aviv that same night, its first stop being the southern air force base in Hatzor.
During the drive Cohen had his doubts; his songs, he told Levi, were sad, hardly the sort of stuff designed to boost the morale of fighting men. Levi replied that it didn’t matter, that just seeing the star there with them in the middle of the war would do wonders for the soldiers’ morale. They arrived at the base, and Levi took the small makeshift stage. He introduced his friends, and then paused for a beat and said that he was happy to announce a very special guest performer, Leonard Cohen. At first no one clapped. No one believed him. The silence persisted when Cohen stepped out, blinking at the bright spotlights flashing in his eyes. Then rapture—a throng of exhausted soldiers howling and clapping wildly.
After years of growing anxiety and creeping despair and songs that got bleaker and more caustic, something in Cohen was transformed. As soon as he stepped off the stage, he took his guitar and wrote a new song, “Lover, Lover, Lover.” He played a version of it in his second performance, later that night. Something about the desert and the instruments of war inspired the song’s rolling beats and lyrics. “And may the spirit of this song,” Cohen sang. “May it rise up pure and free. / May it be a shield for you, / A shield against the enemy.” The same spirit guided Cohen in the days and weeks that followed. In some outposts he played standing up, with a soldier holding a flashlight and making Cohen’s face just barely visible. Often, he, Levi, and the others would simply drive along the front lines, stopping whenever they saw a handful of soldiers and surprising them with a few tunes. It wasn’t uncommon for the soldiers to clap along enthusiastically, wait until the end of the song, load and fire their small cannons at the Egyptian soldiers invisible in the distance, and then sit back down to hear another song. Here, finally, was a dynamic between a performer and an audience that Cohen could tolerate, even embrace. In one concert, in Sinai, performing for paratroopers who were a few hours away from flying into battle, he asked the men to huddle around him, and then started strumming the first bars of “So Long, Marianne.” The song, he told his khaki-clad audience of a few dozen fatigued men, “was meant to be listened to at home, with one hand holding a drink and the other embracing a beloved woman. May you all soon find yourselves in that condition.”2 He kept this regimen, performing four, five, even eight times a day for nearly three months. “War,” he told an interviewer the following year, “is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother. The sense of community and kinship and brotherhood, devotion. There are opportunities to feel things that you simply cannot feel in modern city life. Very impressive.”3
It’s easy to dismiss such statements as the glib pronouncements of a thrill-seeking dilettante, as Cohen’s brother-in-law had done upon the poet’s
return from Cuba. The purity of war, after all, had been a constant theme for many writers with a utopian streak, especially ones who, like Cohen, grew up in households governed by the mystique of military life. But Cohen’s wartime clarity was far greater than his statement let on. He wasn’t just playing at being a Hemingway manqué, a good man seeking solace in some prelapsarian heaven where absolute good fights absolute evil and where men transcend all pettiness to form eternal bonds forged by fire. His vision was far more complex. He expressed it a few years later in an interview with filmmaker Harry Raskay. “Even in the midst,” he said, his words stumbling as he sought to capture the idea, “in the midst of this flood, or catastrophe which we are in, these are the days of the flood, these are the final days, in a sense, all these institutions are and have been swept away. And the ethical question is what is the proper behavior, what is the appropriate behavior in the midst of a catastrophe, in the midst of a flood.”4 This is what the war had given Cohen—removed from fame and expectations, his relationship with the young mother of his child rocky, he experimented in the desert with new ideas about living in a shattered world. He was no longer Laughing Len, recorder of woes, a mood ring getting progressively darker. Being in an actual existential crisis—a nation fighting for its survival—made the metaphorical existential crisis, the one he had grappled with for so long, the one at the heart of the modern experience, that much easier to understand. In the desert Cohen had begun working on his next album, and it would sound nothing like the previous three.
Not that John Lissauer would have known: When he met Cohen, the music producer, then twenty-three, had heard about Montreal’s most famous singing son, but very little of his actual work. Lissauer, a native New Yorker, was in Canada to produce a record for Lewis Furey, a bisexual avant-garde actor and musician. It suited his sensibility as a college-educated composer, jazz musician, and lover of serious challenging music. He associated Cohen with folk music, and thought folk music to be largely uninteresting, the refuge of guitar players who couldn’t really play guitar. But Cohen, who approached him after a Furey concert one night, was exceedingly polite and somewhat well known, and when he asked to come see Lissauer in New York, the young producer happily extended an invitation.
A few weeks later Cohen arrived. Lissauer was living in a loft on Eighteenth Street. He tossed the key out the window for Cohen to let himself in. Walking up the stairs, Cohen came across a pizza delivery man who happened to be headed to the same floor. The singer, always the gentleman, paid for the pizza and carried the box upstairs. He knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall from Lissauer’s, which happened to be occupied by a rabid Cohen fan. Its tenant opened the door, saw her idol holding her lunch, and began to shriek.
Watching all this from his apartment door, Lissauer smiled. By then he had heard Cohen’s previous albums, and was delighted to learn that the artist known for his gloomy music was a warm and playful man. “The guy,” Lissauer recalled observing, “has his twinkly side.”5 Cohen walked in and played Lissauer three songs: “Lover, Lover, Lover,” “Chelsea Hotel,” and “There Is a War.” The last one had its roots in the Sinai Desert, although the war it described wasn’t between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations but between the rich and the poor, the left and the right, the odd and the even, the women and the men. It began with Cohen’s signature style of strumming, rapid and urgent, but levity was soon introduced into both the music and the words. “Why don’t you come on back to the war, don’t be a tourist,” Cohen crooned, his voice going as high as it could, sounding merry and defiant. Then an outright declaration of transformation: “You cannot stand what I’ve become, / You much prefer the gentleman I was before. / I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control, / I didn’t even know there was a war.” This, Lissauer thought, was a departure from Cohen’s earlier, “severely black-suited” stuff. Here was Cohen, amused and defiant, ready for a new sound. Lissauer was ready for one, too.
“I thought pop music was, for the most part, predictable and unexplorative,” Lissauer said. “It didn’t reach out, it didn’t do half of the things I thought it was going to do after the Beatles, after the Stones, when they were really using everything. I said this is great, this is going to open it up, this rather limited rock n’ roll world which is somewhat four-chordish and has very limited instrumentation. The Beatles started stretching out, and then 1970 happened and it was wham, right back to the same seven instruments, guitar, bass, drums, piano, maybe some organ, a little bit of percussion. I wanted it to get colorful.”
When he and Cohen entered the studio, Lissauer borrowed a collection of uncommon instruments from an acquaintance, a musician who played with the New York Philharmonic. “There Is a War” now began with African percussion instruments chasing the guitar into the song, giving the otherwise flat melody a depth that suggested tribal rites and rituals. By the time Cohen hit the refrain about coming back to the war, strings played wryly in the background for short and declarative musical phrases that seemed to egg the singer on, to urge him back into combat. Cohen had recorded more beautiful songs before, and more memorable ones, but they were all delicate creatures supported by the twin frail skeletons of an elemental melody and haunting lyrics. Songs like “Suzanne” or “Sisters of Mercy” were tightly knit creations, almost too perfect to live in this world; they worked as pieces of music because they enchanted listeners away from reality, inviting them to take shelter in the walled gardens of their ethereal beauty. But “There Is a War” was different. It was a song of this world, earthy and funny and angry. The prophet Cohen was coming down from the mountaintop.
The same thing happened on nearly every other song in the album. “Field Commander Cohen,” for example, began with a monotone lament of having abandoned thrills such as “parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties” for the banalities of everyday life, a parade of “silver bullet suicides, / and messianic ocean tides, / and racial roller-coaster rides / and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.” Then comes a tender moment—the singer gently chiding himself by saying that even though life is hard, “many men are falling where you promised to stand guard”—but the song isn’t content to remain mute or solemn. It creeps toward a triumphalist mood, with ever-louder strings surging in the background and Cohen, thawing, referring to himself with a wink as “the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair.” Finally, just in case anyone didn’t get the joke, he riffs on the Andrews Sisters and sings that he’s “working for the Yankee dollar.”6 Even “Who by Fire,” the album’s most somber composition—which Cohen based on the Unettaneh Tokef, a Jewish liturgical poem that is recited on Yom Kippur—was redeemed from its own innate darkness by two elements. First, after paraphrasing the prayer’s recitation of the various ways in which those who have displeased the Lord might find their end—avalanche, barbiturates, hunger—Cohen added the line, “And who shall I say is calling?” The prayer concludes differently: After counting the ways in which the Almighty may smite his subjects, it comforts by reminding us mortals that “repentance, prayer, and charity avert the severe decree.” Cohen, however, remained defiant. Rather than prostrate himself before the Lord—the purpose of the Yom Kippur service in which the prayer is read and in which Jews ask God to forgive them their sins—Cohen coolly reacted to the divine decrees as if they were nothing more than a phone call from a stranger, meriting distance and a hint of suspicion.
He wasn’t just being defiant. He was channeling one of Judaism’s core traditions, which held that despite their divine origin, God’s decrees were not exempt from human scrutiny. A Talmudic tale illustrates this point nicely. It tells of a group of rabbis engaged in a discussion about the meaning of a particular ritual. One of them, Eliezer, holds a divergent view. Eager to demonstrate to the others that he’s in the right, Eliezer calls on a nearby tree to provide proof. Miraculously the tree leaps in the air and lands a few feet away. But the other rabbis aren’t impressed. A tree, they say, doesn’t prove anything.
Frustrated, Eliezer points to a succession of inanimate objects, all of which perform extraordinary feats: Walls tremble, water flows backward, and other natural orders are reversed. Still, the rabbis remain unmoved. Enraged, Eliezer calls on God himself to intervene, and the Lord speaks and states, in a voice loud and clear, that Eliezer was correct and the other rabbis wrong. This, too, fails to move them. The discussion, they tell God, was being held on earth, not in heaven, and his voice, therefore, held no special sway. The story ends with a report that not long after these events took place, one of the men happened upon the prophet Elijah, who reported that when God was rebuked by the rabbis, he laughed with joy and shouted happily, “My children have defeated me!”7
Cohen’s quip, though subtle, showed the same kind of mirthful disregard for divine authority. Before he succumbed to any grim fate, the singer wanted to know just who was doing the judging. To underscore that spirit, Lissauer wanted the song’s arrangement to veer toward the “avant-garde pagan.” As it draws to its end, all those strings and strange percussion tools he’d used throughout the album come in for a short, fierce, and disjointed moment that lasts about half a minute and serves to scrub the song of its liturgical evocations. We can pray for mercy all we want, the song’s final segment tells us, but that won’t change the fact that we are alone and alienated, more likely to condemn one another to death than to support one another in life. The original prayer offers the comfort of community and religion; Cohen’s song took it away and replaced it with the dry, terrifying wit of a single phrase: “Who shall I say is calling?”
The album, however, owed its mordant tone to more than its author’s theological reflections. His relationship with Suzanne was rocky. Despite her being the mother of his son, the two never married, a decision Cohen, speaking to an interviewer decades later, attributed simply to “cowardice”8 on his part. Cohen tried to leave: As he crooned in one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, “I don’t deny / I tried to close the book on us, at least a hundred times. / I’d wake up every morning by your side.” The song neatly captures the sweet sorrow of an impossible relationship that allows neither resolution nor closure. Playing something that sounds like a blues chord slowly melting in the heat, Cohen sings apathetically, his voice like molasses. You needn’t know much about the singer’s personal life to realize that he’s stuck and trying to sing his way out of a stalemate.
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 15
