by Jeff Burger
Once you’re an adult you realize that there is no power in this world, that it’s all weakness, sickness, and suffering, that it is all failure. So what were the young trying to get from us? That’s what we look at when we see the young criticizing us and the young trying to take away our authority. Our lives are failures and our days are filled with suffering and envy and disaster, so that’s why we shrug our shoulders when we see the young trying to take our world away. We would be happy to give them our world.
AM: “Soldier of life,” “prophet of the heart.” With which of these two titles do you feel more comfortable?
LC: My friend Irving Layton says that all these archetypes are finished. He says the poet is finished. There is no poet, there is no warrior, there is no priest. These descriptions are helpful to the young, because the young are trying to find out who to be. The young are looking for a job—unemployment is a very serious question—but as you get older these categories no longer have the charm or the urgency. You have to develop original strategies and original identifications to survive. Even these categories are not useful.
AM: Why have you included two songs that are not yours on this album? I can’t recall you have ever done that.
LC: I thought they were successful enough to be kept. For instance, “Always” was a wonderful recording session. I prepared my cocktail of Red Needle—tequila, cranberry juice, and fruit—and I gave it to all the musicians and we couldn’t stop playing this song, and the version that I have on the record just happens to be the shortest version. All the other ones were twenty-five minutes, and nobody would stop playing, and several of the musicians told me afterward that it was the happiest recording session they’d ever been to. And the point where the solo guitar comes in, in the second verse, that’s where I fell down; I couldn’t sing anymore, and I had to lie down beside the microphone for a few moments, so it was an extravagant, wonderful occasion and I kept the song because I felt it had that good quality to it. I thought “Be for Real” was a really good song that I discovered. People didn’t know about it and I started playing it over and over. I think that both those songs will gather resonances around them in the future. I think in five or ten years those songs will really sound good.
AM: Who is Frederick Knight?
LC: Frederick Knight was a black singer and composer who had some hits around the middle seventies. His version of the song is the definitive version. It’s falsetto. Very, very beautiful.
AM: Why didn’t you play yourself the instrumental piece “Tacoma Trailer” on the album?
LC: I played it with my synthesizer and my expander string section, and I played the whole thing just like that, and then I couldn’t play it again. So I asked Bill Ginn to transcribe it and play it because I thought it had something great, very sweet, to it. I couldn’t possibly play it again. I just played it once. I played all those parts at once. I was setting up different kinds of rhythms and pulses and string movements.
AM: Some of the lines in the text of “Anthem” have been taken from the song “The Bells,” which you wrote as the finishing touch for Lewis Furey’s film, Night Magic, but the music is different.
LC: Some lines, yes. Some lines were taken. It was originally my own song. I had written the lyrics and the tune. But, yes, Lewis needed something to end Night Magic. It was a point of contention between Lewis and I, because I had originally given him some Spenserian stanzas for a song cycle that he wanted to do for a record, and he liked the stuff I gave him so much that he first of all decided to turn it into a ballet, which I thought was OK, and then he expanded this very modest song cycle into a movie, which I thought was not successful at all. And he started needing all kinds of material once he had gotten into this huge form of the movie. So I was raping my work and pillaging through things just to finish the movie for him; so I gave him this incomplete lyric, and I didn’t give him my melody because he was doing the music. But I’d always been trying to record this song. I’ve been trying to record that song for Various Positions—several versions that didn’t work. I prepared a version for I’m Your Man, complete with overdubs and strings and choirs, that I couldn’t use in the end because some words were wrong, the feeling was wrong, the time was wrong. Finally in this record I tried it several times. I tried one with Don Was, I tried one with Steve Lindsay, I did one myself. Finally I played it myself and then substituted strings for the parts that I had played.
AM: There is another old song on the album, “Waiting for the Miracle,” cowritten with Sharon Robinson. On one occasion you told me it was a mix between “Everybody Knows” and another unedited song, “I’ve Cried Enough for You.”
LC: I’ve been writing that song since the early eighties, maybe late seventies. I have versions of “Waiting for the Miracle” way before Various Positions. I recorded a full version with Sharon. Then I tried one with Don Was, I tried one with Steve Lindsay … and then finally I played it myself on the synthesizer and added strings and drums, changed some chords. I hope Sharon likes it because I’ve changed it some. But Sharon and I have been writing songs together for a long time. We wrote our first song together actually on tour. It was a song called “Summertime” and it was just recorded by Diana Ross. So eight years later we recorded what we’d written on the ‘80 tour. We wrote another song called “Lucky” and we’ve written a few other songs together.
AM: What was your collaboration on the homage record to Charles Min-gus like?
LC: Hal Willner was the producer. I’d met him when he was producing a television show called Night Music. When he put me together with Sonny Rollins and he asked me to read a poem of Charlie Mingus’s, I couldn’t understand it. So I just read the first line for Hal Willner and a few other lines too. Long poem. But I just did it because Hal Willner asked me to do it. The Harry Partch instruments are wonderful. I’m very interested in him too, [composer] Harry Partch. I’m trying to find his early recordings. He invented these instruments. They’re incredible. Have you seen any pictures of them?
AM: I saw some photos of those instruments in an encyclopaedia of the history of rock. They are colorful, beautiful.
LC: They are fantastic.
AM: And what about your participation in the record of Are You Okay?, by Was (Not Was)?
LC: At that television show that Hal Willner produced I met Don Was and David Was and Sweet Pea and Lord Harry, the singers, and his band and we became friendly. So it became a personal thing and Don Was asked me to read this poem about Elvis that David had created. I gave it a try and they liked it. I really don’t like collaborating with anybody else, but I force myself to from time to time.
AM: What do you think of this project in which I am working with Enrique Morente, to bring flamenco to some of your songs?
LC: I would love to be involved with a flamenco song once in my life. I would love just to have some connection with that expression because I love the music. If I could find some way of collaborating with a great artist like Morente it would be wonderful. I hope I can find the right song for it. To me it would be like Ray Charles would sing one of my songs. Or Aaron Neville—he’s one of my favorite singers—he’s doing two more of my songs. He’s doing “If It Be Your Will” and maybe “Anthem” on his next record. To hear my songs translated into this genre is a wonderful thing for me. If my songs were to be translated into the flamenco genre I would be really touched.
RADIO INTERVIEW
VIN SCELSA | June 13, 1993, Idiot’s Delight, WXRK-FM (New York)
Vin Scelsa, a longtime fixture on New York-area radio and a pioneer of freeform FM programming, is known for his eclectic and frequently surprising playlists but also for his incisive interviews. This conversation with Cohen—whose music Scelsa has loved since his teen years-helps to explain why. Some of the turf it covers has been addressed elsewhere, but there are lots of fascinating little details that you’re not likely to read in other interviews. Stay tuned to find out, for example, Cohen’s choice for the most underrated pop singer as we
ll as how he met Jack Kerouac and why he got into a fight with Joan Baez. —Ed.
Vin Scelsa: Leonard Cohen is my guest here on Idiot’s Delight tonight … and I’ve always wanted to ask you, Leonard Cohen, about that song “First We Take Manhattan,” about the sort of guerrilla military attack thing that’s going on there. What is that all about?
Leonard Cohen: Well, it became clear a while ago that all the energy had moved out of the center, that the center could no longer hold, that the rational positions were losing a sense of justification and that all the energy, all the fun, was going to the edges. So you are in a period now where the extremist position, the oversimplified position, is the one that captures hearts. And this was a kind of geopolitical investigation into that frame of mind, which I felt was about to manifest and which has manifested so stridently over the past few years. I think you’re quite right—it is the guerrilla sensibility. That is, there’s no justice so that things have to be overturned in our own terms. We have to crack the mold and fashion one closer to our hearts. It’s a very dangerous situation. I meant to indicate that kind of mad, logical, extremist, terrorist, guerrilla position that has seized the hearts and minds of most of the activists in the world today.
VS: And there’s an element of revenge in there as well.
LC: Everybody feels that they’ve been wronged, everybody has become an injustice collector, everybody wants their situation to be corrected as deliciously and as viciously as possible.
VS: What do we do with that, if everybody wants that and everybody’s got their own selfish thing?
LC: The advice I give now, especially when young people ask me what to do … I say, “Duck!” [Scelsa laughs.] The excrement is about to hit the ventilator.
VC: Really. Well, that’s what The Future is all about really, isn’t it? The new album of yours.
LC: That’s what it’s about. Also, the terrorist position is so seductive that everybody has embraced it. The governments have embraced it, the lovers have embraced it. The same politics of the bedroom and the living room and of the legislative assemblies of the world … it is the terrorist position. Reduce everything to confrontation, to revenge.
VS: Do you think the media plays a big part in all that?
LC: It’s way beyond that. It’s all lost. My friend [Irving] Layton described it as nail polish. Our culture, our civilization, all this beautiful stuff from Mozart to [writer Charles] Bukowski, as exalted or as funky as it gets, it’s just nail polish on the claws and the nail polish has begun to crack and flake and the claws are showing through. And that’s what we’re living with—a world in which the claws have been exposed. And it’s only been a tiny brief moment when they were covered with nail polish and now the nail polish is coming off.
VS: The future looks pretty grim.
LC: It is grim. It always has been grim. But if I’d just nailed this up as a manifesto on the church door, it would be quite a grim document but it’s married to a happy little dance track.
VS: Yeah! And there is an element of humor that runs through it as well.
LC: It’s quite funny. “I am the little Jew who wrote the Bible … all the poets trying to sound like Charlie Manson.” There are a couple of laughs in it. But the lyric in any case melts into the music and the music melts into the lyric and you get a kind of refreshment, a kind of breath of fresh air. To hear these matters examined in this kind of way I think produces oxygen.
VS: You write a lot of lyrics for your songs and will frequently change the song in performance. Why is that?
LC: I don’t know. It just takes me a long time to figure out what a song is about and all the easy versions come first: the alibis, the slogans, the correct positions—even if they’re not, even if they’re adventurous. The quick fix comes first. And we live our life on that basis and we’re not expected to dredge up the most profound things in conversation. There is a kind of lightness to our ordinary life.
But I find I don’t want that feel in the song. I want to know what’s really underneath my opinions. I find my opinions incredibly boring. My mind, my heart, my life is so far ahead of my opinions. The opinions, you refine them, you trot them out at the appropriate moments and you can even get behind them sometimes and argue them but basically they are incredibly dull and boring—mine and almost everybody else’s I come across.
So there’s something else that’s sitting under the opinions and that’s what I like to get to in the song. And that’s a line: What is the position of the guy in the future? Is he left? Is he right? Is he a lunatic? Is he sane? Has he turned his back on it? Has he embraced it? It is the real inner life that I’m trying to manifest in the songs.
VS: So you’ll literally live with these songs for a long period of time.
LC: Yeah, and keep peeling them away. But before I can throw a verse away, I have to write it with exactly the kind of diligence and care and effort that it would take to write the one that I’m going to keep. Because it’s in the putting your ass on the line in the writing of it, in the commitment to the rhyme, to the rhythm … it’s exactly that process that produces the material that is not boring, that is not the slogan, that is not the alibi. So before you can discard the verse, you have to write it with the same kind of effort as the one you would keep.
VS: When John Cale visited us nine, ten, eleven months ago, when he put out a live performance album that has your song on it, “Hallelujah”—
LC: Oh, yes. Wonderful performance.
VS: Cale talked about how he had to gather together several people here in New York to track down all the lyrics to the song including “Ratso,” Larry Sloman, because there are so many lyrics and while you had recorded a version, there are verses and verses and verses extant that were not on your recorded version. I think you must be unique in that regard.
LC: I don’t know. It just seems to me that … as [poet Robert] Browning said, “the first fine careless frenzy.” There is something wonderful about just laying it out and it being beautiful and limpid and lying there or hanging there or twisting there. You know that first-thought, best-thought promotional activity of the writing Jewish Buddhists. This idea that it’s all just there, just say it. That’s never worked for me. My first thoughts are dull, are prejudiced, are poisonous. I find last thought, best thought.
VS: Is it because those first thoughts are so spontaneous and visceral and the last thought is the deep?
LC: I suppose they are spontaneous and visceral if you are a spontaneous and visceral kind of chap. I’m not. I’m very formal, uptight, and agonized most of the time. It takes me a long time to get to the spontaneous, visceral quality that is every human’s heritage. I have to do a lot of undressing, a lot of stripping, a lot of sweating. I have to go into the sauna to really sweat it out and then it gets spontaneous and visceral, like six months down the road. At the beginning it’s just formal. I can fake visceral and spontaneous. In fact, most of the things that go down for visceral and spontaneous are fake. You can hear when you hear it. But very few things that you love are spontaneous and visceral. First thought, best thought and spontaneous and visceral are highly overrated qualities. I think right now what the age seems to demand is a much more modest approach to our psyches. Let us not assume that everything we come up with, just ’cause it’s fast, is good.
VS: So you wouldn’t have necessarily gotten along with Jack Kerouac on a literary level.
LC: I did get along with him.
VS: But do you appreciate his work?
LC: I appreciate his work very much. And he was a certain kind of genius who was able to spin it out that way, like some great glistening spider. Everything that he produced had this silver shining quality that was connected, one thing to the other. The sense of connection in Kerouac, the way that he can unify his own vision moment after moment so things don’t just hang. His embrace is so wide that he does not need these Roman nails. I’m not so generous an individual. I don’t have that kind of gift. That kind of gift destroys the generati
on of writers that comes after him. Just like Dylan’s did. That kind of gift is wonderful in the genius that comes up with it. Then you have everybody not writing but typing, as one of our other writers observed.
VS: Truman Capote said that.
LC: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” Well, it wasn’t typing with Kerouac, it was really spinning the great tale of America.
VS: When and where did your paths cross?
LC: I think the first time I saw Jack Kerouac was at the [Village] Vanguard [in New York].
VS: Saw him reading? With like a jazz group or a pianist behind him?
LC: Yeah. I think that was the first time. And then I bumped into him at a party that I think Ginsberg kindly invited me to. I saw him a couple of times thereafter.
VS: Now, when you were coming of age in Montreal, there was a community of artists, writers, musicians who were in a way similar to what was happening in New York and San Francisco in the Beat era. Or were they different?
LC: There were a group of poets, some of whom have distinguished themselves in Canada. There were really just a half a dozen or a dozen of us who had a very high investment in this activity. And there were no prizes or grants or awards. There weren’t even any girls. There was just the work. And we Xeroxed—not even Xeroxed, we mimeographed—those first books and put them out. But the thing that distinguished that activity was a savage integrity. We would gather several times a week in cafes or in rented rooms and we would read each other our verses. And you had to defend your verse, your poem, because every word was scrutinized and attacked by the others.
