by Jeff Burger
He stood up and went over to the desk, picked up his brown leather pouch and held the thick sheaf of papers, each containing carefully handwritten poems, put them down on his bed and started looking through them. I remembered another time in Montreal when he had read some poems to me and had said that for years he had developed his craft so that he could write beautifully, but that now he was not interested in writing for beauty but only for truth.
“I am interested,” he went on, “in this book’s reception. I’m interested in how it will be received almost more than any other book, because I have the feeling that by making it public I may be making a mistake. I hope that I will find that this gnawing feeling is wrong or that I have misread it.”
“Don’t you think your work might bring people to a greater awareness?”
He thought about it for a moment, and looking at me spoke with sincere warmth: “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. The most important thing I can say to you really is that you don’t learn by talking. Those who know don’t talk and those who talk don’t know. There’s some truth to that, you know. You don’t find any of the great, enlightened masters sitting around rapping. You just don’t learn that way.”
At that moment I went to turn off the tape machine and noticed that it had stopped, new batteries and all. We laughed about it and Leonard rolled onto his back saying, “It’s very significant that probably the most important thing that we have said between us tonight was not recorded.”
About ten-thirty, Suzanne phones from Miami. Although Leonard says love is for the birds, his face sure lit up when Suzanne was on the other end of the phone. He said, “Hello, Little One” with such intimacy that I felt drawn directly out of the room onto the balcony.
It’s all coming down to the wire now. Home to roost. It’s Tuesday night and this is the first rehearsal with Jenny [Warnes] and Donna [Washburn], the two new singers, who’ve just got in from L.A. The excitement is so strong in here you can touch it. The tour begins in two days. The lights are low and the garbage can is stuffed with ice, wine, and champagne. These girls have got to work.
Jenny is tall, with straight blond hair down to her shoulders. She stands holding her body straight but easy, a feeling of calm to her. She came from playing the lead in Hair in Los Angeles. Donna is a bit shorter, with a fuller, more sexual body, long light blond hair falling in natural curls over her shoulders. She’s less calm than Jenny, more in need of reassurance.
The singing is going well. The first song. If it’s going to come together, it’s got to be now. Leonard is looking truly adolescent. Worn brown sneakers, favorite black slacks, old favorite gray sweater hanging loosely from his shoulders. He’s listening to the girls and smiling as he sings. Standing at the mike, shoulders in their slight hunch, feet together, tapping, swaying slowly from side to side. “Oh you are really such a pretty little one / I see you’ve gone and changed your name again.” Peter, on electric bass, is tapping away smiling, David looks happy, too. “Just as I’ve climbed this whole mountainside / To wash my eyelids in the rain.”
The music takes off. Ron starts smiling, Bob too. “Oh so long Marianne / It’s time that we began / To laugh and cry and cry and laugh / About it all again.”
The new girls respond beautifully and they sing the last refrain again. The song finished, Leonard turns to the girls. He’s smiling, delighted. “Fabulous … fabulous … just fabulous.” He can’t get over how well the song went. He’s shaking the girls’ hands saying, “Congratulations.” He’s just like a kid, he’s so happy. People break to get some drink, but Leonard is too excited. “Com’on, let’s keep going. Hey, seriously, that was fabulous. I’m so excited I’ve lost the capo from my guitar.” He is stumbling around through the mike booms and chairs, looking on the floor and table and chairs for his capo. “Hey, anyone seen my capo?” The girls are giggling they’re so happy it’s come together. Leonard is still stumbling around: “Those sounds were so beautiful I couldn’t sing, like music to my ears …. I’m so happy there are voices out there, the voices came.” He’s standing still now, overcome.
They get back together, Leonard saying, “Let’s do ‘Thin Green Candle’ [A reference to “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.” —Ed.] … no, no, let’s do ‘Joan of Arc.’” They begin and suddenly in midverse Leonard stops: “I’m sorry. We might as well cool this right now. I can’t sing. It’s too beautiful.” They look at each other. “The reason I need girls to sing with me is that my voice depresses me.” Donna protests. “No … no,” but Leonard goes on. “No, seriously, that’s the truth. I need your voices to sweeten mine. No really, that’s the truth. So please try to sing something simple in harmony with my voice.” And they swing back into another song … and it works.
It’s around midnight the next day and we’re all packing up to leave the studio for the last time. What I’ve realized after this time with Leonard is that he’s searching for the matter of which he is made. And I don’t mean that in any sci-fi sense. It simply means that there are many parts of Leonard Cohen that Leonard doesn’t like, even hates. Once when we were talking I asked him if he liked himself. He thought for a moment and said: “I like my true self.” I took that to mean that like most of us he had made for himself a number of selves, public facades, heroic images, romantic possibilities but was now in the process of stripping them away to become his true self. Somewhere back there, perhaps in his twenties when he began replacing the slobby body with this one, he began a long uphill battle to bring himself together.
Quieting the internal strife frees the spirit. Leonard is constantly refining his techniques for getting high. Drugs don’t work anymore. Neither does public acclaim or the music industry or Scientology (which he once was into), but yoga, fasting, and his writing help. So does Suzanne. The process is ongoing and more profound as the years pass. You can see it on his face. Refining. Always refining. And that’s why I search out Leonard. Why I love the man. Leonard knows a lot about searching, and I’m trying to become better at it myself. He turned me onto it. My brother crystallized it when he took me aside one day and said: “You don’t like yourself very much. That’s why you run around. You’re afraid if you slow down you’ll find out there’s nothing to you … but there is.”
I say so long to everyone in the studio and walk over to Leonard. We shake hands and say a cool good-bye. Like the first time we ever said hello. Just recognition. Another encounter. Moments shared. Nothing promised.
COHEN CLIP
On Reaching for a Wider Audience
“There have been moments when I’ve felt that I’ve betrayed myself but I think I would have felt that from the other side too if I hadn’t reached a wide audience. I would then have felt that I should have put more effort into reaching people. And sometimes, I feel I should have put more effort into reaching fewer people.”
—from “The Strange, Sad, and Beautiful World of Leonard Cohen,” by Andrew Furnival, Petticoat (UK), December 30, 1972
COHEN CLIP
On Ostensibly Leaving the Music Scene
“I’m leaving now … my interests are in other places now. At one time I really thought music had some sort of social import—now it’s just music…. I like to listen to music myself, but, well, I don’t feel I want to have the same involvement with it. It’s over … I wish everybody well on the ‘rock scene’ … but I don’t wanna be in it…. I’ve found myself not writing at all. I don’t know whether I want to write. It’s reached that state … so I’ve decided to screw it. And go. Maybe the other life won’t have many good moments either … but I know this one, and I don’t want it…. I just feel like I want to shut up. Just shut up.”
—from “Cohen, Cohen, Gone,” by Roy Hollingworth, Melody Maker (UK), February 24, 1973
COHEN REGRETS
ALASTAIR PIRRIE | March 1973, interview | March 10, 1973, New Musical Express (UK)
On April 1, 1973, Columbia Records released Live Songs, a collection of tracks culled from Cohen’s 1970 and 1972 concerts in London
, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, the Isle of Wight, and Tennessee. Some of the tracks, including “Bird on the Wire” and “Story of Isaac,” had appeared in studio versions; others, such as “Passing Through” and “Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace),” had not.
Cohen probably hoped to promote the record when he met shortly before its release with fledgling journalist Alastair Pirrie. But Pirrie wanted to address some other topics—including the fact that Cohen had just told Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth that he was “leaving … the rock scene.”
“I had briefly met Cohen before this interview,” Pirrie told me. “It must have been a gig I was taken to. I spoke to him but he would never have remembered me. I was a face in a crowd, but I was mesmerized.
“Then suddenly I was fifteen or sixteen,” Pirrie continued, “a freelance wannabe writer/ producer, and this piece turned out to be my first published sale. I was paid seven pounds for it, and I remember having to hang around the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle upon Tyne for an age, all the time being told that Leonard Cohen was giving no interviews. I boldly booked a room at the hotel and luckily walked into an elevator to find Cohen chatting to a girl. She was pretty—beautiful, really. I was too polite to listen to their quiet argument, but they plainly knew each other.
“I had sneaked out of school and had a tape recorder held together with sticky tape,” Pirrie recalled. “I had bought batteries for it, and that and the hotel room had consumed all my saved-up cash from some intern work I had done at the BBC. Spending every penny of my money was a triumph of hope over zero experience. Anyway, the lovely girl got out of the elevator and, as it continued to descend, I nervously asked Cohen for an interview. He gave me a look and then said, ‘Sure’ and led me into the public bar. He bought me wine and sat with me for a while, chatting to the tape recorder, reading me a new poem….
“I rang the New Musical Express and told them I had the interview and they said it was impossible; Cohen was giving no interviews. I mailed them the piece on BBC stationery to earn a little credibility and the NME published it the same week. I was thrilled. That random act of kindness from Cohen to a nerdy kid got me some attention, and I went on to produce hundreds of hours of music TV in the United Kingdom and United States, and nowadays, I write for TV and film.
“It’s weird which interviews and individuals you remember. I was a fan of Cohen before I met him, and I was more impressed after meeting him.”
Pirrie concluded by thanking me for reminding him of his interview with Cohen “and of that clumsy piece in which I try so hard to sound like a grownup writer, and of those long-ago days of tea and oranges.” —Ed.
If Leonard Cohen sticks to his announced decision to quit the music business, it will come as no surprise to those who know him well.
Among friends, he would often claim that he hated the business of selling his songs to people, and he hated the society that made this necessary.
One night recently, he told me why he wanted to quit. “I’m no longer a free man; I’m an exploited man. Once, long ago, my songs were not sold; they found their way to people anyway.
“Then people saw that profit could be made from them; then the profit interested me also. I have to fight too many people on too many levels to have to fight about money as well.”
He paused and took a sip of his wine. “There is much to regret in the system of placing songs at the disposal of others.
“Now the record companies pressure me to force my songs because the stores want them to sell. I will not force my songs for them.”
Cohen was born thirty-five years ago in Montreal, Canada. He started off his career studying arts at McGill University though later, interested in business, he switched to commerce.
Later still he tried law at Columbia University in New York and, on leaving, took a job in the family clothing factory. [Actually, he studied law at McGill and attended the School of General Studies at Columbia. —Ed.]
He had started writing at the age of fourteen—mostly prayers and poems to get women. Not long after he started in the family business, his first book of poems was published, and any plans he had to run the factory were forgotten.
At the end of the fifties Cohen took off with a woman called Marianne [Ihlen] and lived in virtual isolation on the Greek island of Hydra for nearly eight years.
When he left, he suffered a nervous breakdown and it was soon after this that he started putting his poetry to music.
He says that he has no concept of religion in his life but, strangely enough, he sings a song about Joan of Arc on his last LP, Songs of Love and Hate.
“It was a strange song indeed; it was out of myself and contained the notion of reverence. When I recorded that song I will admit to having a strong religious feeling. I don’t think it’ll happen again.”
Cohen is a dark, sad man, and, at times, his deep, deadpan voice falters into a brooding silence.
He doesn’t like Lennon-type protest songs. “I don’t program the songs I write,” he told me. “I just write what comes.
“If my passion was involved in those daily issues I would write about them. Anyway, I half feel that my songs do protest in their own way.
“I don’t have to have a song called ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ I could write a song about conflict and, if I sang it in a peaceful way, then it would have the same message. I don’t like these slogan writers.”
All of his songs and poems are about people and situations that have come into his life.
“Suzanne” on his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, is a description of a time spent with a girl of that name. It really did happen, and she did feed him tea and oranges that came all the way from China.
Another of his songs from that same LP was written when he was in Alberta and met two girls in a café.
“I was alone,” he intoned gravely, “and I had nowhere to stay that evening. I went with them back to their room and we all slept together. When I awoke I wrote a song about them. I called it ‘Sisters of Mercy.’”
Although Cohen was always dissatisfied with the record business, he didn’t feel he was working in a void that isolated him from new experiences.
“It’s been my experience that there is no situation which is artificial. There are responses that are artificial or untrue.
“But I mean, here we are sitting and drinking wine. You and I are together here. There is no room for a lie: we’re just two men sitting talking.”
If Cohen had to be remembered by only one of his songs, he would choose “Bird on a Wire.” “The song is so important to me. It’s that one verse where I say that ‘I swear by this song, and by all that I have done wrong, I’ll make it all up to thee.’
“In that verse it’s a vow that I’ll try and redeem everything that’s gone wrong. I think I’ve made it too many times now, but I like to keep renewing it.”
Cohen became more and more dissatisfied with each LP he produced, culminating in almost dejection over his last record, Songs of Love and Hate.
“I suppose you could call it gimmicky if you were feeling uncharitable toward me. I have certainly felt uncharitable toward me from time to time over that record, and regretted many things. It was overproduced and overelaborated … an experiment that failed.”
During my last conversation with him, Cohen had changed. He smoked my cigarettes almost continuously and appeared much more withdrawn, answering questions vaguely and lapsing into silences much more frequently.
In his song “Bird on a Wire” there is a line in which he says, “I have tried in my way to be free.” Perhaps he feels that this latest move will mean a new chance for him to be free. I think for a man as self-explorative as Leonard Cohen, freedom is a great deal further away.
COHEN CLIP
On a Dip in His Popularity
“I rarely hear praise anymore. I get the feeling that my songs have fallen out of favor. One hears an echo, and the echo I have been getting is not one of wholehearted appreciation. In England, my songs and per
son have been subject to satire. My person has been satirized as being suicidal, melancholy, and self-indulgent.”
—from “I Have Been Satirized as Suicidal and Self-Indulgent,” by Mike Jahn, New York Times Special Features Syndicate, June 1973
LEONARD COHEN
PAT HARBRON | Summer 1973, interview | December 1973, Beetle (Canada)
Like Alastair Pirrie, Pat Harbron told me that he ranks his encounter with Cohen among the best moments from early in his own career. “My assignment to interview Leonard Cohen for Beetle magazine was quite a scoop for a twenty-year-old writer,” recalled Harbron, who is now an acclaimed rock photographer. “It wasn’t my first cover story but it was the best. Canada saw a number of homegrown rock-and-roll magazines come and go after the late sixties. Beetle was the biggest but not the longest lived.
“Cohen was as revered as a singer, poet, and songwriter forty years ago as he is today. I was familiar with his work, mostly his music, but the majority of my assignments had been about the rockers and counterculture comedians of the time. I’ll bet Cohen was unaware of many of these artists and yet they very likely knew of him.
“The interview took place in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a Victorian-style town near the US border, about ninety minutes south of Toronto. Known for the Shaw Festival, NOTL as it was called, was always a hub for theatrical arts.
“There was a lot of buzz in the summer of 1973 for Leonard Cohen because the semiauto-biographical play Sisters of Mercy, based on his songs and musings, was set to open at the new Shaw Festival Theatre before its off-Broadway run. Cohen was warm, confident, and gracious. Though he had an agenda to promote his play and thus sit for an interview, he appeared at ease, even enthusiastic.
