Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  LC: Actually, the University of Toronto bailed me out of poverty about twelve years ago by buying a bunch of my papers and laundry lists and old napkins and things—

  VG: They really want things like that, don’t they?

  LC: That was a wonderful moment. I have a whole bunch of new stuff. Maybe I can sell it to them again. But a lot of them are in Montreal and Greece and various suitcases here and there where people are holding them for me.

  VG: “Just keep this for me for a couple of years”? Are you a packrat type? Do you keep things?

  LC: Yeah, I tend to keep everything. I keep all the letters I’m going to answer.

  VG: Any minute now. LC: Any minute now.

  VG: I have boxes of them from years and years ago. Some never got answered. But as far as the papers are concerned, apart from bailing you out and giving you something tangible with which to pay the light bill, they’ve got to look at it in a sense of posterity. “This is a guy that is important to us and we need his stuff.” But the point of all this rattling on is I just wonder how you consider yourself historically speaking, how the world will view you in some hundred years.

  LC: You go from very inflated views of yourself to all the way down the other side. Sometimes I feel that those papers are more important than anything else I’ve put out—where they could be looked at not from the point of view of literature or of excellence but just of the point of view of somebody who’s kept a very careful record of their thoughts and experiences. I think it might be useful from that point of view.

  VG: Do you keep a diary?

  LC: Well, in a sense it’s one big diary set to guitar music.

  VG: [Laughs.] Oh, God, you’re such a poet. I’m always terrified of poets. I always think they know something I don’t know, that I won’t understand what they’re writing. I get a book of poetry in the mail and I think, “Oh …”

  LC: I feel the same way about poetry.

  VG: Do you?

  LC: The only thing that comforts me a bit is the thought that most poetry isn’t any good and that the form is so seductive and so many people try it out and really there are only a few here and there who can master it. So with that sense of comfort I pick up a book and if I don’t understand it, which is often the case, I just let it go down.

  VG: Most often I get things that conjure up names of figures from the Grecian past about which I have no information until I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and they could very well be making a great pun or a great observation and it just zooms right over my little head.

  LC: Yes, it’s unpleasant to find a poet that’s better educated than you are.

  VG: [Laughs.] Somehow they like to flaunt it.

  LC: There is that. But that still resides in a lot of poetry, that aspect of elitism where there’s an assumption that there’s a vast common culture and that we all participate in it. Unfortunately, things are a little more fragmented now and most people know Mr. T and things like that.

  VG: You are working on a new record or it’s out?

  LC: I’m just finishing it up now. It should be out in the fall. It’s called Various Positions and it’s coming out on CBS.

  VG: Are you playing guitar?

  LC: Playing guitar on quite a few of them, yeah.

  VG: Do you have a tape with you? Could we play any of it?

  LC: I have some rough mixes here.

  VG: Carrying them around in your pocket? Your rough mixes?

  LC: It’s just a cassette of the rough mixes. I’ve been studying them on the road, because I’m going back to the studio to sweeten them up a bit.

  VG: You carry them around in your pocket. Those are not the masters one would pray, no? Certainly not. Have you ever written anything for kids?

  LC: No. I’ve made up quite a few stories to tell my own children.

  VG: How old are they now?

  LC: Nine and eleven.

  VG: Young still. Do you see them? Do you live with them?

  LC: I don’t live with them but I manage to see them every day.

  VG: Oh, well, that’s lucky. But if you’ve been living in Greece …

  LC: No, I’ve been living mostly in Montreal and New York. Now they’re going to school in New York. They lived in the south of France for a long time. They went to school there. So that’s why I got the trailer, to live nearby.

  VG: Papa comes over for a story reading?

  LC: Yeah, or they love to come over to the caravan.

  VG: I’ll bet they do. It’s fun over there. And it probably rocks.

  LC: Yeah, in the wind. Yeah it does.

  VG: If you jump up and down lots it probably does too. Do you not live on Hydra anymore?

  LC: I haven’t been living in Greece for a while although I have taken the kids there for the summer now and then.

  VG: What about concertizing? What was the last time you did that?

  LC: The last time I went out was with my last record, which was ’79-’80. I did about a hundred concerts in Europe and Australia. And I’ll go out again with this new record in September. I’ll do Europe in the fall and Australia in the winter and hopefully North America in the spring.

  VG: Does that throw you, when you have such a long time in between performances? A weekend almost kills me to come back and try it again.

  LC: I know what you mean. I think that’s why I have a band. Otherwise I’d do the whole thing with my own guitar but the first two or three concerts my fingers won’t work and I’m very nervous.

  VG: Were you nervous when you worked with Phil Spector?

  LC: I was very, very nervous that one of his guns would go off.

  VG: Does he have guns?

  LC: In the recording studio it looked like a small arsenal. He was carrying a gun and three or four bodyguards were carrying guns and there were bullets falling on the floor. And as the evening drew on and the Manischewitz wine was consumed—

  VG: Oh God, how can you drink that stuff?

  LC: I didn’t drink it. And it got very loose. Yeah, things got a bit dangerous.

  VG: This is a fair number of years ago. When was it—’77? LC: Yeah, ’77 I made that record.

  VG: He has all but disappeared, as you know. He is a total recluse.

  LC: Yes, he stays in this big house that he keeps at about thirty-two degrees.

  VG: Fahrenheit?

  LC: Yeah. It’s very, very cold. After you get to know Phil a while, you take a fur coat when you go visit him. And he locks the door. He doesn’t let you out.

  VG: Oh how nice.

  LC: It’s hazardous.

  VG: Did you ask, “How come it’s so cold in here?”

  LC: I don’t know. He really is a magnificent eccentric. To work with him just by himself is really delightful. We wrote those songs together over a few months and when I visited him we’d have really good times and work until eight in the morning. But when he got into the studio, he moved into a different gear, and he became very exhibitionistic and very mad and I lost the handle on the record completely. He would take it away. He would take the tapes away every night under armed guard and then he mixed it in secret. He wouldn’t let me in.

  VG: Did you kick and scream? Beg?

  LC: He disappeared. I couldn’t find him. And I was stuck with the option, after a year’s work, either to say no or just to let it go out as it was, and I thought it was good enough to go out but it wasn’t at all what I thought it could have been. I thought the instinct was good for both of us to work with each other and I think the songs are very, very good but I think the voice is lost in the mix. It was just a matter of turning the right dials.

  VG: Maybe he wanted you to disappear, who knows.

  LC: I think he wanted me to disappear. One time he came over to me about four in the morning with half a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand and a .45 in the other and he put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the nozzle of the .45 into my neck and cocked it and said, “I love you, Leonard.”

  VG: Oh my
God. Were there ever any moments in your life when you thought you could get that mad? Were you ever that much on the edge?

  LC: Well, his madness has a kind of theatrical expression. Mine tends to get very silent.

  VG: Oh, don’t get silent yet. Five more minutes.

  LC: [Chuckles.] OK.

  VG: But have you ever thought you were going mad?

  LC: I think you do have those feelings from time to time, yeah.

  VG: I think you do. You never contemplated ending it all?

  LC: No. I’ve been taught somehow or acquired a notion that it’s not the right thing to do.

  VG: Yes. I think you’re right. Are you afraid to die?

  LC: No.

  VG: That may sound like an asinine question but—

  LC: I think that [Canadian poet Irving] Layton put it very nicely. He has a poem addressed to Sir Mortimer, who is death, and he said, “I don’t mind dying but it’s the preliminaries that I’m worried about.”

  VG: [Laughs.] Do you see Layton a lot?

  LC: I haven’t seen him in the past year and I’ve missed him very much. I’ve tried to make contact but his former wife Betty died when he moved to Montreal, and when I came he was down at the funeral there. But I do want to see him in the next week or two.

  VG: When did you first meet him?

  LC: I was seventeen. I guess it was in my second or third year of college and I was writing poetry and he was one of the lights around the city.

  VG: Did you take him your stuff?

  LC: We never had a student-teacher association. We became friends right off and … we’d show each other poems. That was one of the aspects of his generosity even though he was and probably is a more accomplished writer than I am. There was never the sense that I was bringing my stuff to him.

  VG: At university, were you considered a curiosity even at seventeen and eighteen?

  LC: No, I don’t know, maybe I was. But certainly among my friends and people I knew, there was no attempt of any of us to stand out in any special way. We thought we were sort of living Brideshead Revisited at McGill University.

  VG: Is that so?

  LC: This was before Sputnik…. It was before the university began to get anxious about what they were teaching. It was a very relaxed situation. I think we spent most of the time listening to that Rodrigo guitar concerto and drinking wine and writing poetry and chasing after girls.

  VG: Which you almost could have made a living at. You had quite a reputation. Things have calmed down, I understand.

  LC: I don’t know if it was a living.

  VG: But you have calmed down. You’ve cooled your jets, as youths will say today.

  LC: I guess so.

  VG: Have you?

  LC: Not really.

  VG: Have you not?

  LC: In this respect, you mean? In the respect of womanizing?

  VG: Yeah.

  LC: I still am very excited by women but I guess the activity has declined somewhat.

  VG: [Laughs.] Well, we won’t carry on with that. When you were in university, what did you think you were gonna do with yourself? Did you think, “I’ll make my living as a poet, as a writer” or “I’ll drive a cab” or “I’ll work in my family business” or what?

  LC: I thought I would make it as a writer. There was really never anything else that I considered.

  VG: Did you ever do any real job?

  LC: Oh, yeah. I ran an elevator and I worked in factories and I did counseling at camps. I did a lot of odd jobs. I did radio journalism for a while.

  VG: You did?

  LC: I did just about anything. In the first five or six years, when I went to Greece, I went for a number of reasons. One of them was economic, and I’d come back to Canada and I’d put together six or seven hundred dollars and I’d go back to Greece and I could live for a year on that.

  VG: No kidding.

  LC: I was aiming for twelve hundred dollars a year. So I’d sell a story to Cavalier or something like that and get seven hundred dollars or do a piece for the CBC and get three or four hundred dollars, and that way I was able to live for a number of years and write.

  VG: So you don’t mind the Spartan existence?

  LC: I have always been attracted to the voluptuousness of austerity. I never chose the style of my life because it hurt. It was on the contrary. I feel most comfortable and most abundant when things are very simple and I know where everything is and there’s nothing around that I don’t need.

  VG: You’re not interested in mirrored walls and plush carpets and that kind of thing.

  LC: No, I don’t feel comfortable in those. It’s pleasant to visit a well-appointed house but for my own self I like to have it rather bare.

  VG: What do you do today, for instance? This is work, what you and I are doing.

  LC: Yes, sure.

  VG: But will you work [on music] today? Will you write anything today?

  LC: Maybe on the airplane—that’s always a good time—because I’m going to Winnipeg tonight. That’s quite a long trip.

  VG: What happened to Edmonton and Calgary?

  LC: Yeah, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton. But I have my little Walkman and earphones and there are a couple of lyrics on my record that aren’t finished so I’ll probably work on those.

  VG: You don’t socialize on the plane and chat up everybody?

  LC: No, I find it difficult to talk because of the noise.

  VG: I like to concentrate fully on keeping the plane up.

  LC: Yes, it’s a very good idea.

  VG: I went through quite a few clippings—old ones, new ones—and apart from the review kind of stories that they do about you, saying this is a work of bravery, this isn’t, and all that garbage, people who do feature stories on you always want to say how you’re dressed. Have you noticed that?

  LC: They review my suit.

  VG: Yes, they do. For instance, when you were staying at the King Eddy [Hotel in Toronto] and you were shooting I Am a Hotel, they instantly described what you were wearing and how dignified you were and how things had changed and your hair was cut and shaved and that you were communion-like and every time they saw you, you were different.

  LC: I’ve been wearing the same suit for years.

  VG: You look like you’re from Marseilles, to tell you the truth. [Laughs.] But they like to know what you’re wearing.

  LC: Well, I usually wear a suit. I emerged before blue jeans and I was never very comfortable in that. And I like a slightly formal cast to things. A double-breasted suit I’ve always felt good in.

  VG: You should be wearing a black shirt and a white tie and carrying a small violin case.

  LC: I put on a gray shirt this morning but it didn’t go with the rain.

  VG: It’s a lesson to be learned from living in British Columbia: You should never paint a room gray. Because the sky is gray, the room is gray, the carpet is gray, everything is gray. I made this mistake. [Pauses.] All right: I Am a Hotel. What has become of that?

  LC: It was chosen as Canada’s entry to the Montreux Television Festival. I don’t think it’s very good. I think it’s respectable television but it was the first time I’ve gone into it, and I didn’t really know what I was doing and I kind of lost the handle on the thing.

  VG: That’s the second time you’ve said that.

  LC: Well, these handles are elusive.

  VG: They fall off. You worked on a picture that was shot here, where you did the music for it, for [director Robert] Altman. Was it McCabe & Mrs. Miller?

  LC: Yeah. Bob Altman wrote the film while listening to the record that a lot of those songs were on. He asked me if he could use the music. I was in a studio in Tennessee recording one of my albums and I got a call from Bob Altman. And that afternoon I’d gone to see Brewster McCloud. I’d sat through it twice. He said, “Can I use this music?” I said, “I don’t know what you’ve done.” He said, “Well I did M*A*S*H.” I said, “I heard it was a grand success but I didn’t see it. Is there anyth
ing else I might have seen?” He said, “I did another picture called Brewster McCloud but you wouldn’t have seen it because nobody liked it.” I said, “Take anything.”

  VG: [Laughs.] Take me, I’m yours.

  LC: Yeah, and then I recorded a couple of extra guitar pieces for Warren Beatty’s monologue and a few things like that. But mostly they were just lifted off the record.

  VG: Do you go to movies? Did you when you were a kid? Obviously you’re not a movie fanatic.

  LC: I’m not a fanatic but there’s a great song by Loudon Wainwright [III], “Movies Are a Mother to Me.” It’s a nice place to cool out in.

  VG: It feels safe. Did you do the opera with Lewis Furey?

  LC: Yeah, I wrote the lyrics to an idea that he had. He wrote the book and conceived of the thing and I was doing an experiment in Spenserian stanzas, which is an old form of very tight interlocking lines. So I wrote most of the lyrics in these Spenserian stanzas.

  VG: What status has it now, the opera?

  LC: It seems that it’s going to be a Franco-Canadian television show. I think they’re going to be filming at the end of the summer.

  VG: Why don’t you do a video? That’s what somebody asked me. I was panicking all weekend long thinking of what in heaven’s name I was going to ask you. I made notes on toilet paper, on martini blotters, everywhere, and then last night I thought I’ll write ’em all down and figure out what I’m gonna do with this guy. Are you going to do a video or what? You’d be perfect.

  LC: Well, this little show for the CBC was designed with that in mind. I wanted to make a long piece kind of video. It isn’t too successful but with the new material I’d like to try it again.

  VG: Some of my friends wanted to know [whether] you like Randy Newman.

  LC: Oh he’s very fine, yeah.

  VG: He is, isn’t he?

  LC: Very fine writer and singer and arranger.

  VG: Have you ever met him?

  LC: I think we were recording at A&M studios in Los Angeles once and we shook each other’s hand, but I don’t know him as a man, no.

  VG: He hasn’t broken through to appeal to a great number of people.

  LC: He did have a Top 40 hit—“Short People.”