They were hardly alone in their enthusiasm. Everywhere the tour went after its Fredericton debut, it was met by ecstatic crowds. In New York, throngs stood outside the Beacon Theater on an icy afternoon, waiting for hours in the frost for a chance to see their idol rise again. Many of them, bouncing in place to generate some heat and friskily negotiating with ticket scalpers, were too young ever to have seen Cohen play live. They had come to know him through Nick Cave and the Pixies and Bono and the avalanche of Cohen covers that defined much of alt rock in the 1990s. In New Zealand, as in nearly every other place where the tour had touched down, critics wrote of Cohen’s appearances as religious gatherings. “The audience sits hushed as immortal paeans, prayers and odes float from the stage,” wrote one reporter. “It is hard work having to put this concert into words so I’ll just say something I have never said in a review before and will never say again: this was the best show I have ever seen.”1 At the Coachella outdoor music festival in California—one of rock’s most exalted gigs—more than one hundred thousand fans were bathed in golden light as Cohen sang “Hallelujah” for more than seven minutes. They were silent as he sang, and howled when he was done. The other acts who took the stage that day were cool, but Cohen was warm; his fans knew that he’d give them more than an easy and passing thrill.
Which is why nearly fifty thousand Israelis rushed to the nation’s largest football stadium to see Cohen perform. Outside, kiosks selling replicas of the singer’s black fedora did brisk business, amusing Cohen’s ultra-Orthodox fans, many of whom wore such hats as part of their everyday religious garb. Special buses coming from Israel’s north and south unloaded throngs of fans in the parking lot. In a cordoned-off VIP section nearby, government ministers, generals, bankers, TV stars, and athletes sipped mojitos as they waited for the show to start.
This being Israel, however, the celebration wasn’t free of controversy. When he announced that his tour would conclude with a show in Tel Aviv, Cohen approached Amnesty International and asked for its help in setting up the Leonard Cohen Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace, through which all of the show’s proceeds would be awarded to an organization of bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents who had lost their children to acts of violence perpetrated by the other side. At first Amnesty complied, and Cohen set up two shows, one in Tel Aviv and the other in the Palestinian capital of Ramallah. It was not to be. “Ramallah,” declared the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, an umbrella organization of activists dedicated to the isolation of the Jewish state in protest of the West Bank’s occupation, “will not receive Cohen as long as he is intent on whitewashing Israel’s colonial apartheid regime by performing in Israel.” The concert was canceled. Soon thereafter Amnesty succumbed to pressure and withdrew its support as well.
But Cohen was unfazed. He had spent a lifetime resisting the violent currents of politics. He had stared down Maoists and anarchists, people who claimed he was in cahoots with the colonels in Greece, and others who insisted that he was a radical Marxist for visiting Cuba. In life as in music, Cohen was never one for political grandstanding. In one of his favorite passages, an episode from the Bhagavad Gita, the renowned warrior Arjuna faces an army in war and, examining the faces of his opponents, realizes that many of them are his cousins, friends, and teachers. Discouraged, he tells his companion, Lord Krishna, that he doesn’t wish to fight anymore and slay his loved ones. “The wise,” Krishna replies, “grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.” Arjuna, Krishna added, was a warrior, and a warrior had only one duty: war. “You have control over doing your respective duty,” Krishna concluded, “but no control or claim over the result. Fear of failure, from being emotionally attached to the fruit of work, is the greatest impediment to success because it robs efficiency by constantly disturbing the equanimity of mind.”2 With peace on his mind, Cohen addressed his fans in Tel Aviv.
“It was a while ago that I first heard of the work of the Bereaved Parents for Peace,” he said at one point in the concert, “that there was this coalition of Palestinian and Israeli families who had lost so much in the conflict and whose depth of suffering had compelled them to reach across the border into the houses of the enemy. Into the houses of those, to locate them who had suffered as much as they had, and then to stand with them in aching confraternity, a witness to an understanding that is beyond peace and that is beyond confrontation. So, this is not about forgiving and forgetting, this is not about laying down one’s arms in a time of war, this is not even about peace, although, God willing, it could be a beginning. This is about a response to human grief. A radical, unique and holy, holy, holy response to human suffering. Baruch Hashem, thank God, I bow my head in respect to the nobility of this enterprise.” There were those who clapped, but for the most part, the audience remained quiet, not in disagreement or in anger but in gratitude for what was shaping into the highest order of communal gathering, a mass of strangers so firmly united by a sense of purpose that silence seemed like the most profound way to assert their bond. Fluorescent green light sticks were passed around, and by the time Cohen played “Anthem” and then took a brief break, all hands were reaching upward, each hand a point of light. Then, among other songs, came “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah,” then an encore and a second one. Cohen no longer had any qualms about giving the audience what they wanted. The relationship was different now. He had discovered an intimacy greater than the one he had grasped for as a young artist when he urged the audience to come closer. To bring them closer, he now knew, to be one with his fans, he just had to sing.
And so the third encore of the last show of his first tour in fifteen years began with “I Tried to Leave You,” followed by “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” The humor was well received, but Cohen had one more serious matter on his mind. He lined up with his band as the monks do on Mount Baldy, and recited “Whither Thou Goest,” its words taken from the biblical book of Ruth. “Whither thou goest I will go,” he solemnly said. “Whither thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people.”3 It was close to midnight now. He raised his hand and parted his fingers down the middle, the ancient blessing of the Kohanim, the priests of the temple. The prophet was coming full circle now. “May the Lord bless you and guard you,” he recited, in Hebrew, one of Judaism’s oldest benedictions. “May the Lord make His face shed light upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up His face unto you and give you peace.” And with that, skipping offstage like a man decades younger, he was gone.
This might have been an apt ending to the story: The hero, presumed dead, emerges for one more astonishing act of musical resurrection, having finally learned to master his powers. It was just the story needed in 2008, with the shadow of economic doom still looming large. Cohen, wrote the Financial Times with uncharacteristic playfulness, was the cowboy in the white hat, the antithesis to the blustering fools in more expensive suits whose greed and arrogance brought the global marketplace to its knees. “The contrast with the chiefs of then recently fallen investment banks was hard not to notice,” read one op-ed. “Suddenly we understood the fedora. It wasn’t just a fetching fashion statement from a monk out of his monastery, it was a nod to a different kind of masculinity from the machismo that had got us into this mess. As taken aback by his success as the rest of us, Cohen wasn’t trying to be the top dog. Mid-life-crisis proof, he wasn’t even trying to be cool. He was just trying to act his age.”4 Cohen, then, was the ideal man for the job of “post-financial crisis elderly sage,” an archetype the culture sorely needed. “As if by perfect cosmic alignment,” the op-ed concluded, “Cohen descended from Mount Baldy, a destitute poet with the aura of a grandfather, the fame of a proven but not-too-popular rock star, and the mystical promise that perhaps all our pensions might be saved.”5
Cohen’s salvation, however, wasn’t just financial; that was the least of it. Having more than recouped his losses in his wildly successful tour, he returned home to Los Angeles and quic
kly announced another, this time in support of a new album. Released in January 2012, it was titled Old Ideas. It climbed to the third spot on Billboard’s chart, making it by far Cohen’s best-received work in the United States. Like Dear Heather, it, too, was “an autumnal album,”6 dense with the reflections of a seventy-seven-year-old artist who has lived a long and meaningful life and has remained coherent enough to tell about it. But Leonard Cohen was no longer old, no longer timorous, no longer struggling with depression or grasping for drugs or pining for enlightenment of one sort or another. He was thoroughly in the present. Looking within himself now, he saw someone he liked. “I love to speak with Leonard,” went the opening verse of “Going Home,” the first song on the new album. “He’s a sportsman and a shepherd / he’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.” It continued:
He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living with defeat
A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I need him
To complete.
After decades of refusing to listen, of running wild, of trying just about anything for a shot at salvation, that lazy bastard was finally realizing that his master, Leonard Cohen, was commanding him with a bit of hard-earned wisdom, telling him to stop:
I want to make him certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision
That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
Which is to say what I have told him
To repeat.
Permissions
* * *
TEXT CREDITS
Excerpts from “The Future,” “All There Is to Know About Adolph Eichmann,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” “A Singer Must Die,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” “Story of Isaac,” “Avalanche,” “Suzanne,” “Diamonds in the Mine,” “The Wrong Man,” “There Is a War,” “Field Commander Cohen,” “Who by Fire?” “I Tried to Leave You,” “Paper-Thin Hotel,” “Final Examination,” “Blessed Are You,” “I Bury My Girlfriend,” “If It Be Your Will,” “Hallelujah,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “First We Take Manhattan,” “The Tower of Song,” “Take This Waltz,” “Anthem,” “Waiting for the Miracle,” “The Poems Don’t Love Us Anymore.” Excerpted from Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1993 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
Excerpts from “To a Teacher.” Excerpted from The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1961 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
Excerpts from “The New Leader” and “Hitler the Brain-Mole.” Excerpted from Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1964 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
Excerpts from “Early Morning at Mt. Baldy.” Excerpted from Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 2006 by Leonard Cohen. Art copyright 2006 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpts from “Early Morning at Mt. Baldy.” Excerpted from Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 2006 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
Excerpts from “For Wilf and His House” and “The Sparrows.” Excerpted from Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 2007 by Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpts from “For Wilf and His House” and “The Sparrows.” Excerpted from Let Us Compare Mythologies by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © 1969 Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.
Excerpts from “Going Home,” “Last Year’s Man,” “Lover, Lover, Lover,” and “That Don’t Make It Junk” by Leonard Cohen. Copyright © Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Excerpts from unpublished works of Leonard Cohen. Copyright © Leonard Cohen. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS
Frontispiece Leonard Cohen at Isle of Wight: Tony Russell, Redferns.
Chapter One Leonard Cohen blowing smoke rings: © Jim Wigler.
Chapter Two Leonard Cohen at luncheon counter: Roz Kelly, Getty Images.
Chapter Three Leonard Cohen on typewriter: photographer unknown.
Chapter Four Leonard Cohen at Hydra: James Burke, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.
Chapter Five Leonard Cohen with pigeons: Gijsbert Hanekroot, Redferns.
Chapter Six Leonard Cohen with cigarette and turntable: Ian Cook, Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.
Chapter Seven Leonard Cohen with violets: Paul Harris, Getty Images.
Chapter Eight Leonard Cohen at Mount Baldy: © Neal Preston / Corbis.
Chapter Nine Photograph of Leonard Cohen hiding in jacket: Terry O’Neill, Getty Images.
Notes
* * *
PREFACE
1 Leonard Cohen to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, June 12, 1963, Leonard Cohen Archives, University of Toronto Library.
2 The details of Cohen’s first meeting with Marianne have slight variations, depending on the telling. His most exhaustive interview on the subject, from which this version is adapted, is with the Norwegian journalist Kari Hesthamar in So Long, Marianne, a radio documentary for Norway’s NRK radio, September 1, 2005, http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/marianne2006.html.
3 Bruce Headlam, “Life on Mount Baldy,” Saturday Night, December 1997, 72.
4 John Lissauer, interview with author, August 25, 2011.
5 British Broadcasting Corporation, “Hallelujah set for chart trinity,” December 16, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7786171.stm (accessed June 6, 2012).
PRELUDE
1 The Isle of Wight festival was documented extensively by a team of filmmakers led by Murray Lerner. Unless otherwise noted, this chapter is based on Lerner’s footage, as well as on my interview with Lerner in June 2010, on Lerner’s Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (DVD, Sony Music Video, 1997), and on Leonard Cohen Live at the Isle of Wight (DVD, Sony Legacy, 2009).
2 Farren had given several accounts of his conversations with Farr, including in this unsourced video interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Y22Q9JN0f0#at=231 (accessed July 18, 2013).
3 Ibid.
CHAPTER ONE: “LOOKING FOR THE NOTE”
1 Pamela Andriotakis and Richard Oulahan, “The Face May Not Be Familiar, But the Name Should Be: It’s Composer and Cult Hero Leonard Cohen,” People, January 14, 1980, 53.
2 On the matter of Kafka and Rav Nachman, I owe a debt of gratitude to Rodger Kamenetz and his masterful Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka (New York: Nextbook Press, 2010).
3 Leonard Cohen, The Favorite Game (New York: Vintage, 2003), 22. “Spitting blood” appears in the manuscript of Beauty in Close Quarters, an early draft of The Favorite Game. It is quoted in Ira B. Nadel, Various Positions (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 8.
4 Isa. 11:4.
5 Exod. 19:6.
6 For more on this idea, see Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 125.
7 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 572.
8 Quoted in J. David Bleich, ed., With Perfect Faith: The Foundations of Jewish Belief (New York: Ktav, 1983), 289.
9 Nadel, Various Postitions, 13.
10 Isa. 57:2–8.
CHAPTER TWO: THE SOUL OF CANADA
1 Susan Lumsden, “Leonard Cohen Wants the Unconditional Leadership of the World,” Winnipeg Free Press Weekend Magazine, September 12, 1970, 25.
2 Federico García Lorca, “Deep Song,” in In Search of Duende (New York: New Directions, 2010), 3.
3 Ibid., 12.
4 Ibid., 41.
5 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), 4–5.
6 Ibid.
7 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1971), 250.
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” in The Portable Emerson (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 210–11.
9 Irving Layton, “To the Lawyer Handling My Divorce Case,” in The Collected Poems of Irving Layton (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), 15.
10 Leonard Cohen Archives, University of Toronto Library.
11 Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 10.
12 Leonard Cohen, “For Wilf and His House,” in Let Us Compare Mythologies (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), 2.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 37–38.
15 Leonard Cohen, “The Sparrows,” in ibid., 23.
16 Leonard Cohen, “Saint Jig,” unpublished, ms. coll. 122, box 1, Leonard Cohen Archives, University of Toronto Library.
17 Leonard Cohen, “The Juke-Box Heart: Excerpt from a Journal,” unpublished, ms. coll. 122, box 1, Leonard Cohen Archives, University of Toronto Library,.
18 Ruth Wisse, interview with author, March 25, 2011.
19 Quoted in Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, directed by Donald Brittain and Don Owen, National Film Board of Canada, 1965 (DVD released in 1999 by Winstar).
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 20
