He sang a few more songs and took pleasure in light banter—at one point jokingly thanking the Russians for building such a glamorous stadium for his exclusive use—but he did not wish to let go of his introductory theme:
You know, since I’ve been here many people have asked me what I thought just about everything there is in this vale of tears. I don’t know the answers to anything. I’ve just come here to sing you these songs that have been inspired by something that I hope is deeper and bigger than myself. I have nothing to say about the way that Poland is governed. I have nothing to say about the resistance to the government. The relationship between the people and its government is an intimate thing. It is not for a stranger to comment. I know there is an eye that watches all of us. There is a judgment that weighs everything we do. And before this great force, which is greater than any government, I stand in awe and I kneel in respect and it is to this great judgment that I dedicate the next song.8
The next song was “Hallelujah.”
As Cohen completed his tour and returned stateside, the eye that watches all of us seemed to be watching him more closely. His former backup singer, Jennifer Warnes, released Famous Blue Raincoat, an album of Cohen covers, in January 1987. It was a hit: Warnes’s sweet, earthy American voice was just the coating many listeners needed to swallow Cohen’s complex lyrics. Delivered by the man himself, the song that gave the album its title, for example, is a cool and haunted piece. Even if you didn’t know that the line about going clear was a reference to Scientology—a pursuit Cohen had briefly explored—you could still feel its weight, still intuit that Cohen had something in mind that far transcended a report on a relationship. There was a dynamic of enlightenment in his song. You listened to it with a detached distance, waiting for a big reveal that would explain what it was all about, only to be stung by that final line, “Sincerely, L. Cohen,” that announced that the sermon was over and your only shot at comprehension was to listen to it again. Jennifer Warnes’s version, however, requires no second listening. It is immediately comprehensible. It replaces Cohen’s spiritual intricacies with an emphasis, just as potent and no less sublime, on emotional urgency. To hear Warnes sing it, “Famous Blue Raincoat” is the sort of melancholic reflection one has not too long after a painful breakup, when the details are still hazy and the feelings are still raw. Hers was a very different song, and a significantly more popular one.
By all accounts Cohen was thrilled with Warnes’s success, and contributed an illustration to the album’s liner notes, a doodle of one hand passing a torch on to another with the caption “Jenny sings Lenny.” The album also contained a previously unreleased Cohen composition, titled “First We Take Manhattan” and conceived together with a few other songs that were beginning to give a new Cohen album its shape. But Cohen himself was teetering on the verge of darkness, his lifelong struggle with depression entering one of its most jagged stretches. “I couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t leave the house,” Cohen told an interviewer years later. “And that was the best part of it. The drug that [the doctor] gave me seemed to put a bottom on how low I could go and a ceiling on how high I could go. I felt like I was living in an aquarium full of cotton wool. I seemed to be able to get a little bit of work done, not too much. At a certain moment one night, I just threw away the safety net of the pills. And then I came around. I don’t want to emphasize this but the work does tend to break you down. Maybe the work is a bit about breaking down. Somehow when you have broken down, you find a place where you can’t lie. Otherwise your defenses are so skillful and your bullshit is so abundant that you can come up with something.”9
The album that emerged was bereft of bullshit. There was a new inflection in his voice that wasn’t there before, an Old Testament type of growl. When he delivered lines like “You loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win / You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline,” or “Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure / The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor / And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong,” Cohen was acknowledging not only that he had some knowledge worth listening to, but that there were mighty forces at play, the forces of a decadent culture, committed to curbing his speech. Finally Cohen had slipped into his Isaiah mode.
Like the prophets of the Old Testament, and unlike Christ, Cohen, in his new designation as parser of eternal truths, warmed up to the realization that any expectation of rapturous redemption was misguided. Having danced around the question of salvation in many of his early songs—all that business about us forgetting to pray for the angels and the angels forgetting to pray for us—Cohen finally found his meaning in the ancient words of the Gemara, a compendium of rabbinical commentaries compiled between 200 and 600 CE, which, addressing the possibility of the messiah, remarked, “Let him come, but let me not see him in my lifetime.” Redemption, the rabbis understood, was terrifying, a vast unknown lying far beyond human comprehension. There was no point in mortals pondering the end-times. All that humans could do was go about life, admit defeat, and try to find beauty in all that remained.
This spirit was reminiscent of Cohen’s Zen awakening; a favorite response to the question of what is Zen held that it was no more than vast emptiness and nothing special. And it was in this spirit that the songs of Cohen’s new album, I’m Your Man, released in February 1988, presented themselves. “Take This Waltz,” Cohen’s translation of a Lorca poem, urged listeners to seize the dance, as “it’s yours now, it’s all that there is.” The lyric is not an invitation to give up hope. As Cohen’s translation of Lorca’s gorgeous poem so clearly demonstrates, one can marvel at the beauty of the world even while admitting that the world is irreparably broken. “You really don’t command the enterprise,” Cohen said in an interview decades later. “Sometimes, when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, somehow, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears is perfectible, that you’re going to get it all straight. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”10
Profoundly un-American as that last sentence may be, it resonated strongly with members of the new generation that came to the cultural fore as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s. Their parents, the former hippies and marchers and shouters and dabblers and optimists of the 1960s, had been, perhaps, the last uncomplicatedly American generation. Even as they protested against their country’s policies or burned its flags, they were exuding the same exuberant spirit that had, throughout the centuries, propelled it to such great heights. They were easily recognizable in Walt Whitman’s celebration of Americans as those young men and women who were perpetually “stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, / One of the great nation, the nation of many nations— / the smallest the same and the largest the same.”11 But as Greil Marcus observed in his book about the Doors, the sixties had left in its aftermath “this almost physical sense of an absence … a silence that ultimately silences all the endlessly programmed Sixties hits, that mocks their flash.”12 Prog rock, punk, and everything else that followed in the two decades since the Doors played their last concert in 1970 were the final spasms of a dying body. By the time the children of the flower children were old enough to look for meaning in music, all they could hear was silence.
This, more or less, is the premise of the 1990 cult film Pump Up the Volume. Its protagonist, Mark Hunter, is an awkward high school student in a suburb of Phoenix, played with perfect pubescent angst by Christian Slater. At night, however, the shy guy blooms to life as he operates a pirate radio station out of his bedroom, calling himself Happy Harry Hard-On and ranting about the pointlessness of it all. “Did you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?” asks one typical oration. “You know that feeling that the whole cou
ntry is like one inch away from saying ‘That’s it, forget it.’ You think about it. Everything is polluted. The environment, the government, the schools, you name it.”13 Happy Harry’s only path to salvation, the only way of escaping from the rubble of shattered promises left behind by his parents and their generation, is to listen to music that is good and true and that knows something about the world. The film’s sound track, the alt-rock Rosetta stone of the 1990s, featured a wide gallery of young musicians with unimpeachable indie credentials—Cowboy Junkies, Henry Rollins, Peter Murphy. But when Happy Harry had to choose a theme song for his broadcast, he turned to Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.”
It was a perfectly placed bit of cultural shorthand. By 1990 Cohen had become the slim, aging guru to a generation of artists working to redefine what they considered to be a musical scene corrupted by too much money, too little integrity, and no good ideas. They were supported by a fan base culled from the best-educated generation of Americans in history—college attendance rates, hovering at 45.1 percent in 1959, shot past the 60 percent mark by the late 1980s—and relied on a network of campus radio stations to carry their music directly to its target audience.
And they believed neither in the excesses of glam and prog rock nor in the ideological and aesthetic deprivations of punk. Instead, like so many artists working in postmodernism’s shadow, they were obsessed with the notion of authenticity, and believed that their music’s chief yardstick was its ability to convey emotions without compromise. When these artists—an imperfect chronology would probably begin with R.E.M. and end with Nirvana—looked backward for inspiration, they found few forefathers more worthy than Cohen.
One of these fans—a young Dubliner who had tired of the endless guitar solos that seemed to encumber every song in the early 1970s, started his own high school band to play covers of the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones, and then began playing original music, changing the band’s name from the Hype to U2 and his own from Paul David Hewson to Bono—captured Cohen’s appeal eloquently. “He has you at any stage in your life,” Bono said in a 2005 interview. “He has your youthful idealism. He has you when your relationship is splitting up, he has you when you can’t face the world and you’re looking for something higher to get through. He has you at all stages.”14 For a boy like Bono, who was fourteen when he lost his mother to an aneurysm, and belonged to a street gang of intellectual, surrealist-minded friends, the past was thick with madmen and fakers. The former, men like Jim Morrison, were more cautionary tales than role models; the latter merited no further thought. But Cohen seemed to offer a worldview that was as interested in what went on above as it did in what happened below: “Real spirituality,” Cohen once told an interviewer, “has its feet in the mud and its heart in heaven.”15 It was a very Irish sensibility, but also one that embodied the new style of music, lean and truthful, that clever and disillusioned young men and women wanted to make in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Years later, and perhaps the world’s biggest rock star, Bono would cover “Hallelujah” in concert, often using it, shrewdly and elegantly, as an invocation of sorts and singing a bar or two before proceeding into one of his own compositions.16 Cohen’s song, he said, was “so surprising because as well as bringing you to your knees, [Cohen] makes you laugh. And that’s the shock. You see, lots of people, lots of writers, have dared to walk up to the edge of reason and stare into that great chasm, into the abyss. Very few people have got there and laughed out loud at what they saw. It’s the divine comedy.” It’s hard not to think of James Joyce, whom both Cohen and Bono revere,17 sitting in his study, staring past the edge of reason as he was writing Finnegans Wake, and laughing heartily through the night, night after night.
Like Joyce, Cohen’s career was met first by befuddlement and scorn and only later—in both cases thanks to the intervention of contemporary tastemakers—by universal admiration. Looking at him in the early 1990s, Cohen seemed very much a man in full. Inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1991, he no longer seemed conflicted, as he had been decades before, about being the recipient of his nation’s most rarified honors, and accepted his laurels with a smile. “If I had been given this attention when I was 26,” he said, “it would have turned my head. At 36 it might have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At 46 it would have rubbed my nose in my failing powers and have prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at 56—hell, I’m just hitting my stride and it doesn’t hurt at all.”18
The following year he accompanied his new girlfriend, the actress Rebecca De Mornay, to the Academy Awards ceremony; the tabloids were delighted with the odd pairing, happy to assign Cohen to the same coterie of aging rock stars who were cashing in on their cool by dating young and ravishing women. Cohen and De Mornay had even become engaged, a first for Cohen despite a life rich with long, committed relationships. He seemed ready to plunge into matrimony, into committed couplehood. He seemed, as a Los Angeles Times headline put it, “pain free.”19
He was not. His particular surge of renown had defined him out of existence, turning him into a largely meaningless icon, an easy target for accolades. By the time he got around to shooting a music video for “Closing Time,” he was so famous that even his own crew had no idea who he was. The song was a country-and-western tune, all about whiskey and dancing and the devil, and the shoot was booked at a Toronto club called the Matador. It was winter, and dozens of men and women—extras, assistants, musicians, hangers-on—were packed on the club’s floor, hemmed in by two large Greek-style columns. To keep the place in order, the production had set up two tables, one at each end of the room. One was marked “Crew Only” and was loaded with nuts, vegetables, dips, and other goods; the other, marked “Extras Only,” offered more humble refreshments like chips and Cheesies. Dressed in a dark-gray striped double-breasted suit and a black T-shirt, Cohen moseyed over to the crew’s table, selected a celery stick, and took a bite.
Immediately a production assistant pounced. “Excuse me,” the man demanded officiously. “Are you an extra?”
“Yeah,” Cohen said. “I’m an extra.”
“Well,” said the production assistant, “would you please get your food from the extras’ tray.”20
Cohen obeyed. And he wasn’t being coy—or not only. He truly felt superfluous: Now in his midfifties, he’d reached that most uncanny of plateaus for rock stars—no longer a vibrant youth, not yet a dignified elder. His songs, too, were in limbo: Interviewed about his craft, he admitted that his work, always a painstaking and prolonged process, now trickled even slower. New songs took him a decade to write. “Closing Time,” for example, had begun life as “a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it. There wasn’t anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because it’s always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me. So I went to work again.”21 That lack of urgency was more than mere artistic malaise: It was existential.
“I used to be able to write songs on the run,” he said, not letting on that the opposite was true and that each song took him a short eternity to complete. “I used to work hard but I didn’t really begin slaving over them till 1983. I always used to work hard. But I had no idea what hard work was until something changed in my mind.” That something, he continued, was a sense “that this whole enterprise is limited, that there was an end in sight.… That you were really truly mortal. I don’t know what it was exactly, I’m just speculating. But at a certain moment I found myself engaged in songwriting in the same way that I had been engaged in novel writing when I was very young. In other words, it’s something you do every day and you can’t get too far from it, otherwise you forget what it’s about.”22
Even as Cohen was thinking about life’s end and the hard, constant work he
was engaged in, his fandom among fellow musicians continued to swell. A 1991 tribute album, I’m Your Fan, featured Cohen covers by the Pixies, Nick Cave, R.E.M., and James. It was well reviewed. By 1995 Cohen’s allure as a musicians’ musician was so luminous that a second tribute album, Tower of Song, attracted Billy Joel, Elton John, and Sting. It was a hellish match. The album, wrote one critic, capturing the consensus, was “a total train wreck,” showcasing “big-name engines” that “barrel down the track, horns blaring, with no regard for such warning signals as color, shade, contrast, tone, definition. A complete derailment, because what they’ve all missed is the poetry of Cohen’s lyrics.”23
In 1992 Cohen released The Future. A decade of rewrites had paid off: The songs were sharp and unafraid of loudly declaring their preoccupations. “You don’t know me from the wind,” declares the track that lends the album its name, “You never will, you never did / I’m the little Jew who wrote the Bible / I’ve seen the nations rise and fall / I’ve heard their stories, heard them all / But love’s the only engine of survival.” Another song, “Anthem,” was even more bluntly prophetic: “Ring the bells that still can ring,” it declared, “Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Cohen was channeling millennia of Jewish thought—the crack is a favorite kabbalistic metaphor—and composing an anthem that celebrated what most anthems dared not acknowledge, namely the irreparable condition of human life. “The light,” he told an interviewer, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it’s only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”24
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 18
