Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  “As a freelance writer and in the decades since as a photographer, I have worked with a great many artists and performers but I still think fondly of the afternoon spent with Leonard Cohen.” —Ed.

  Pat Harbron: How can you best classify your music? Some would have it as folk music.

  Leonard Cohen: Let’s hope it becomes folk music.

  PH: Why?

  LC: Well, it would be nice if it stuck around long enough to become folk music. But that’s as good a term as any.

  PH: Your music seems somber and laid-back, personality wise. Is there any reason for it?

  LC: I don’t know the reason for it. I think what you say is true.

  PH: It is a reflection of your personality?

  LC: That’s just the way my voice comes out. I don’t think too much about the way I do it. That’s the way. That’s the voice. That’s the sound.

  PH: “So Long, Marianne” came about as a commercial hit, in that it was very popular with a large number of people who, perhaps, were not aware that Leonard Cohen did it. It’s just a song that they enjoyed. When you wrote that song, were you thinking in terms of commerciality?

  LC: Well, one hopes that a song will find favor. But it wasn’t planned. First of all, it’s too long to really be considered a commercial song. It was written for the occasion itself, with the length that it ran … not with any plan. I never plan things that way. It’s nice when it happens.

  PH: Is there an aim that you’re trying to stress to your audience through your music?

  LC: None that I can speak about. You try to make the song as good as you can.

  PH: Is the music an extension of your mood or a separate part of your thought?

  LC: It takes in everything you know. And feel.

  PH: How much of your music is imagination and how much of it is taken from real-life situations?

  LC: I’d say it’s all from real situations. The experience is real but one tries to treat the experience imaginatively.

  PH: Does your environment influence your work?

  LC: Oh yeah. It influences.

  PH: In what way, in your case?

  LC: It’s hard to say exactly but the places I’ve lived in generally have a very strong presence and it finds its way into the music.

  PH: Does the French and English culture difference make a difference to you?

  LC: Well, although I’ve been to Toronto a lot of the time and traveled through Canada, I’ve never really lived anywhere but French Canada. My experience is quite limited. I know Montreal and that’s about all.

  PH: When you started to write did you have a culture in mind?

  LC: No, I don’t have any culture in mind.

  PH: How important is the instrumental part of your music?

  LC: I’ve tried different things, some of them more successful than others. Right now I’m thinking of something very much barer than my last couple of records. Just guitar and voice.

  PH: On your latest album [Live Songs] the instrumentation is kept simple. Also, there is no percussion.

  LC: I’d like to try using a drum. No, I haven’t used it, except on one or two songs. That’s because when I start to play guitar, my rhythm, my time, is very loose. And I like to keep it that way. And when you’re working with a drummer, generally, you have to have something steady and driving behind you, whereas I want to keep the time very loose.

  PH: How do you express feeling through a song?

  LC: It’s nothing you can command. You either express it or you don’t. If you don’t, you can throw the song away.

  PH: Do you know, yourself, you have expressed yourself properly, without an audience?

  LC: I can generally tell when it’s any good. I like to deceive myself from time to time because one needs to throw away things. But, if I’m in an honest frame of mind I can generally tell.

  PH: Do you try to reach an audience or let them come to you?

  LC: I don’t think you can pursue an audience any more than you can pursue a person.

  PH: You have a choice of playing for yourself, just the audience, or both.

  LC: Well, I don’t like to exclude anyone, including myself or whoever’s listening. But that’s different from going after them. No, you can’t.

  PH: Do you think there’s an age group that goes in for your material?

  LC: I am not very aware of who buys the records, but I see at concerts there are people of all ages.

  PH: Do you try to express more than one emotion in a song?

  LC: Those are not really the considerations that you have when you’re working. You know you’re trying to manifest an experience. And experience, by its nature, is complex and involves many different kinds of things. So you don’t stop with the idea of one or many. You start with the idea of manifesting an experience.

  PH: Is there a reason for keeping your music as basic as it is?

  LC: There are lots of reasons. One is that I don’t really have the skill to make my music too complex. And two, my tastes are very simple. I like to keep it very elementary.

  PH: Is music the most important medium you work with?

  LC: I never think of it that way. I’ve always played the guitar and sang. It’s just natural. I attempt to do the things mostly that only take one man. So I haven’t worked in theater very much because it’s a collective effort. I don’t work in movies ’cause it’s a collective effort. Same with television. The things I do alone, I do. That is writing and music.

  PH: Is there any particular reason you work alone?

  LC: It’s just easier for me.

  PH: Do you write with the intention of being successful?

  LC: I think that I’m motivated by the same ambition—greed—as everybody else, and one likes to be successful. But on the other hand that’s not the only factor. One likes to get one’s work to the people.

  PH: Is your idea of success simply financial?

  LC: No. It’s good to make a living. It’s essential that a man makes a living, and I always like to get paid for what I do, but I don’t like to do it for pay.

  PH: What have you been trying to accomplish through your music?

  LC: I’m unaware of any long-term goals. From the questions you ask, you feel that the whole activity is much more deliberate than it is for me. It’s something I’ve always done and something that I will always do, as long as I have the capacity to do it. I don’t have any places I’m aiming at, or any large long-term conspiracy in mind in terms of what to reach, where it’s going, or what it has to do.

  PH: But you have ambition?

  LC: The only ambition I have is to survive and to keep alive and not to let the spirit die. [Pauses.] And to make a million dollars.

  PH: Why do you do so few concerts?

  LC: It’s not really my field. I guess I could put together concerts and things but I don’t like to have to go out when I have new songs or new treatments of songs. And I don’t like the feeling that I’m on the boards and that it’s just a career. I do it when I feel I’m ready for the road. I want to meet people and sing new songs. That only happens every couple of years.

  PH: Do you prefer the music to your poetry?

  LC: I don’t have too many preferences.

  PH: What is love by your description?

  LC: Wow. I don’t know. I don’t really have an idea about it.

  PH: Surely you must have thoughts on it.

  LC: I don’t think too much. I never think, to tell you the truth. My own personal life is chaotic. Anybody who looks at my own personal life will come to the conclusion, rapidly, that I don’t think at all. There’s a kind of interior urgency about all things, as I see it. And I respond to it. I generally respond to it, in real life, in exactly the wrong way of doing things. As a friend of mine once said, “Now Leonard, are you sure you’re doing the wrong thing?” I hardly have a thought in my head. Something happens and I have to answer it with a poem or a song or my own work. I don’t know a thing about love.

  DEPRESSING? W
HO? ME?

  STEVE TURNER | June 29, 1974, New Musical Express (UK)

  On August 11, 1974, Columbia Records released Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, his first album of all-new material since 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate. The album did not sell as well as its predecessors but it featured such atmospheric tracks as “Who by Fire” and the classic “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” Over time, it helped to further cement Cohen’s reputation as one of the musical greats of his generation.

  Shortly before the album’s release, he talked with British journalist Steve Turner, who had already been a fan for seven years. “I came across Leonard Cohen in early 1968, when tracks from Songs of Leonard Cohen began to be played in London boutiques and on the playlists of Britain’s pirate radio ships,” Turner told me. “He was of particular interest to me because he straddled the world of literature and popular music, of books and records. Uniquely, he was a published poet who’d turned to songs rather than a successful lyricist who fancied himself as a poet.

  “I don’t remember a lot about the interview,” Turner continued, “except that the room was small and that I was accompanied by NME photographer Pennie Smith, who would go on to make her name during the punk era, especially with her dramatic photo of the Clash that later graced the cover of London Calling.

  “In hindsight, I regret that I kept pushing him with questions about depression, heroism, and suicide, because I’m sure he had a lot to say about sunnier subjects. If I’d quizzed him about ecstatic moments, comedy, and the good things in life, this would have been a very different piece. But in 1974 Cohen was regarded as the poet of gloom and that was the line I pursued.

  “The reason for the meeting was Bird on a Wire, the ninety-minute documentary by British filmmaker Tony Palmer that was due for its world premiere at the Rainbow Theatre in London in July. ‘I would probably prefer it to represent me glamorously with all the shots calculated to make me seem attractive and good looking,’ Cohen said at one point. ‘I guess I would like it to advertise what a good fellow I am and what a sensitive artist. It doesn’t do those things but it is accurate from a certain point of view as to the songs and some of the emotions.’”

  The interview included a brief discussion about Canadian poet Irving Layton and Charisma Books. “This was pertinent to me because in 1972 the publisher had picked up my first poetry collection,” Turner said. “Cohen was aware that I was about to become a Charisma author and seemed familiar with my book, but I was never quite sure why he loosened his attachment to the company. During the interview, he spoke to me of wanting to get Charisma to publish the work of Daphne Richardson—the girl whose prose was printed on the back of Live Songs and who had killed herself in 1972 by jumping off the roof of the BBC’s headquarters in central London.” —Ed.

  Leonard Cohen doesn’t give interviews. What he does do is to arrange for you to meet him in his hotel room where, over a period of up to two hours, he’ll supply you with carefully worded statements on a number of matters.

  He’s a careful man. Careful that nothing too shallow or pretentious is attributed to his output. After all, we are dealing with a man of letters here and not merely a singer/songwriter. Words are this man’s business. He has a past that already consists of two novels, five volumes of poetry, thirty-three recorded songs, and a play. And, what’s more, the songs were the latest addition. Cohen is no rock star turned novelist, turned poet, turned playwright.

  Also, there’s all that trouble he had with the journalist [Roy Hollingworth] he confided in two years ago, the result of which was a headline story, “Cohen Quits?” As Cohen tells it, this wasn’t the substance of an interview but more the reflection of a mood that happened to be upon him that day, and one that he was assured would be taken as “off the record.”

  “I didn’t expect to see that casual conversation appear in a headline,” he says. “I had been speaking as anybody who was tired at the moment would speak and said that I really wouldn’t like to read an article in which this conversation was described as a manifesto or an ultimatum or anything like that. And then of course it did appear.

  “It caused a lot of mischief in the actual mechanics of my life because people couldn’t seriously consider continuing contracts and that sort of thing if I had quit. But I’d no more quit than I’d quit anything. I had a moment where I indulged myself in the luxury of feeling betrayed.”

  So, beware of the wicked journalist who appears to be unarmed but possesses a healthy memory or a notepad in the loo. Still, Cohen’s attitude toward men of my profession doesn’t seem to be a recent development. “I prefer interviewers to take the same risks that I do,” he told Jack Hafferkamp, who was profiling him for the New York Times back in 1971. “In other words, not to make a question-and-answer type of scene.” [This quote actually appeared in Hafferkamp’s Rolling Stone article. See page 18. —Ed.]

  I take the risk at four o’clock one Wednesday afternoon and visit him at his Chelsea hotel. His room is small, large-cupboard size, and most of the space is taken up with two single beds. Cohen also seems small and an accurate reproduction of what I’d expected to see after eight years of sullen photographs. In person, though, he laughs. It’s a short, sharp schoolboy laugh full of suction and comes out of the left of his mouth. It’s good to see that he laughs.

  He is in London, it seems, to help in the promotion of the documentary film of his 1972 tour Bird on a Wire, and also to encourage the sales of Collected Poems by Irving Layton, a Canadian poet who has been a close friend of his for twenty-five years.

  In fact, Charisma Books, which is publishing Layton’s work, was set up as a result of a joint idea between Tony Stratton-Smith and Cohen, the main purpose of the company being to encourage young so-far-unpublished writers. However, for reasons that he doesn’t care to divulge, Cohen is no longer playing a creative role in the project.

  “We’re close friends,” he says of Layton, “and I have a tremendous admiration for him as a writer and as a man. I didn’t sit at his feet or anything like that, but I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him because I’ve had the opportunity of a close friend who is a generation older than me, and so in a very effortless way I was able to see how he got through his years.”

  The film, though, is obviously the main purpose of Cohen’s visit, and it’s a film that over the past two years has come to cause him some grief. In his last British interview he seemed despondent about it ever coming out. He spoke of it being “totally unacceptable” and how it had put him in a “financial crisis” by absorbing $125,000 of his money. However, what consequently happened was that the whole film was reedited—there were over ninety hours of material to pull from—and it’s this second version that will be premiered at the Rainbow on July 5.

  “They shouldn’t have showed it to me at all,” says Cohen about version one. “I was close to the tour, I remembered all the good moments and I didn’t think they were there.” Version two he finds more pleasing, mainly because other people seem to like it. “I’ll tell you what I think the strengths and weaknesses are,” he says. “It has some music in it … and that’s quite good. It also has some of the conditions under which the music was produced, which is quite good.

  “Then it has one or two pieces which I think are a little pretentious— calculated to indicate the sensitivity of the chap. I’d say there are five or ten minutes of that here and there that I don’t think are good and find embarrassing.

  “There are certain extended sequences of concerts where real emotional intensity was captured and I think that eventually, taking it on the balance, the better parts prevail over the weaker parts and you are left with something that is quite interesting.

  “I think it is quite a good study of someone on tour. In my secret heart of vanity, I would have liked it to be a really tremendous description of myself but it isn’t that. It shows some grave weaknesses of character. That’s nobody’s fault—that’s true.”

  Besides the activity surrounding the film, Cohen i
s also back at work in the studio, recording an album that he hopes will be released during September [New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which as noted earlier, came out August 11, 1974. —Ed.]. The songs have been written over the past two years and he feels that they’re somewhat different from his past work. He can’t say in what way because it lies in the song itself, not in the description.

  Most people have come to regard Leonard Cohen as the poet of despair. He knows this and when I ask him about it he plays games with definitions. “You’re asking me to make an evaluation about something which I can’t compare to someone else’s,” he replies when I ask whether he has a depressing outlook on things. “I only have my own window to look out of.”

  So I tell him about Janie, a friend twice removed, who used to suffer from acute depression and who used a darkened room and his albums to plunge her even deeper into despair, until the pain could become almost enjoyable. Then I ask him about the reports that he’d played in various mental hospitals in Canada.

  “Yes, I have played for mental … audiences,” he replies. I ask him what the attraction was and he pauses for at least twenty seconds before giving his reason. “It was the feeling that … experience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work.”

  “Well worded, Leonard,” I thought, “but what do you mean?” The questions and answers go on for another five minutes without an explanation of any depth until I have to say: “You have a way of not really telling me what I want to know.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you something,” rejoinders Cohen, “and this is the truth—I’m not trying to obscure anything from you and I’m trying to answer as accurately and as sufficiently as I can.”

  And then, as if by accident, he spills his reasons out. “In a sense, when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed, he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat,” he says. “To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs.”