by Jeff Burger
Roshi, who came to the United States from Japan in 1962 (“I came to have a good time,” he once said), has been a comfort to and an influence on Cohen in his life and in his music. Some years ago, the two men were in New York, and Cohen felt pelted by criticisms that his music was too gloomy and indulgent. At the time, he was recording his 1984 album, Various Positions. The two men had fortified themselves with a very strong Chinese liqueur called Ng-Ka-Fy, and Roshi was nodding off. “I didn’t think he was paying any attention,” Cohen says. “The next morning, I said, ‘What did you think, Roshi?’ He said, ‘Leonard, you should sing more sad.’ That was a very good piece of advice.”
I ask: Leonard, why so many sad songs?
“I never thought of it that way, as morbidity or sadness,” he says. “We never say of a blues singer that he sounds sad. Of course he sounds sad. If the song is authentically an expression of the person’s suffering, then the suffering is transcended and you don’t get the whine, you don’t get the complaint, even though it may be all about a whine and a complaint. It’s experienced as relief, as comfort, as pleasure.”
Nick Cave, who has turned a dark line or two himself, remembers discovering the pleasures of Cohen at the age of fourteen, in a country town in Australia where he used to drink pilfered beer and listen to Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate, an album his friend’s mother considered unhealthily depressing. “It just changed me,” Cave says. “How sexy his whole way of writing was. It’s been decried as depressing, but he’s one of the funniest writers we have. I can’t think of a lyric that doesn’t have a smile hidden in the lines. There are two things going on all the time: warmth and a wicked wit. I wish I had that.”
It should be said that Leonard Cohen does not write his songs from depression but from conflict, from what he calls “the opposing movements in the mind that produce the need for resolving the chaos and observing order.” There was a time when he felt the curtain of depression, and he sought relief in Prozac, Desyrel, MAO inhibitors, and other armaments of the modern medicine cabinet. “They all made me feel a lot worse,” he says. Then around 1998 or 1999, without warning, his depression lifted on its own, and to the betterment of his writing. The despair never provided him with material, he says. “I didn’t feel it was necessarily the engine of the activity. It’s anguish. It’s a pain in the ass. On the contrary, I find my capacity to concentrate enhanced without that background of horror.”
Pilgrims who have trekked up to Mount Baldy, seeking either enlightenment or Cohen, describe the monastery as Spartan, beautiful, and cold. Cohen occupied a wooden cabin with a narrow bed, dirty carpet, and few amenities, apart from his synthesizer and laptop computer. Mornings began at 2:30 or 3 AM, with chores and meditation; on Friday evenings, Cohen, the grandson of a prominent Canadian rabbi, lit candles to observe the Sabbath. He is not a man of simple faith nor eager to foreclose his options. At any rate, his Judaism did not clash with the Zen teachings at the center. In August 1996, he was ordained as a monk and Roshi gave him the name Jikan, which has been roughly translated as “silent one.” “Since his English is very poor, I never really found out what that means,” Cohen says. “It’s got something to do with silence, but normal silence, not special, holy, righteous, renunciated silence. Just ordinary silence. Or the silence out of which everything evolves, the silence at the center of things.” He told one interviewer on the mountain that Roshi had recommended the ordainment for tax purposes.
He was not, Cohen insists, trying to retire or retreat from the world. “It’s the wrong place to go to if you want to retire, because it’s a very busy kind of place, as monasteries or Zen centers are,” he says. The center had phones and also a steady onus of snow to shovel, dishes to wash. He served as a cook for Roshi and gave occasional interviews. The Rinzai Zen discipline of the center sought rigorous, sweaty engagement with the world, not pious withdrawal.
In his work, Cohen has been scrupulously direct in engaging the world. For all the gloom in his writing, fans are as likely to be drawn to the humor and bite of his boudoir reportage. In other words, the dirty stuff: the bawdy swash of a song like “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” which featured Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg singing sloppy backup, or the well-mannered vitriol of “Everybody Knows”: “Everybody knows that you’ve been discreet / But there were so many people you just had to meet / Without your clothes / And everybody knows.”
Leonard Cohen is less willing to speak so directly in conversation. After three decades of interviews, he knows how to give a little taste and then eloquently retreat, covering his tracks by professing a lack of eloquence. For years he has expressed regret at revealing that his song “Chelsea Hotel,” with its line “Giving me head on the unmade bed,” referred to an affair with Janis Joplin. The lyric, which borders on cruelty, was fine, he says, but he should have let it remain anonymous. Relationships with God, with women, with the world, “are appropriately addressed in one’s work,” he says. “Otherwise it’s just gossip, which is not a particularly exalted activity. A great deal of time and attention has gone into producing the language. To speak casually about the matter is taking the name in vain. There’s a commandment against it.”
That said, he offers me some unpublished writings, which he hopes will answer some of my questions. The descriptive poems from Mount Baldy add meat to the dry bones of the pilgrims’ accounts of the monastery. Besides the meditating and the chores, the robes and the shaved pate, the poems recount three-hundred-dollar bottles of Ballantine’s scotch and the pleasures of lower altitudes. Cohen writes:
I’m loose in the belt and tight in the jowl / Crazy young beauties still covered with the grime / Of shrines and ashrams / Want to examine their imagination / In an old man’s room
He did not go up the mountain to discover the scalding virtues of self-denial.
In the house in Montreal, he taps at his laptop like an archaeologist reconstructing an elusive event. The directories in the computer are labyrinthine inventories of Cohen’s consciousness. Entries for a single song lyric pile up: “Final version #1,” which innocently offers itself as conclusive, is really just a speed bump along the way to “Final version #20” and beyond. “That’s good,” he says, pulling up a poem called “Lovesick Monk” and offering a window on his life on Mount Baldy. It begins, not burying the lead, “It’s dismal here.” Later, a line of verse stretches across a drawing of a woman’s bare backside, offering up a typical mix of portent and self-mockery. Across her ass it reads, “This is the perfection of the great way.”
There is something alluringly incomplete about Leonard Cohen, and I think this is one of the traits that make him so seductive to women. His songs pick repeatedly at the same themes of unfulfillment, circling back over a few gnawing aches. He is not afraid to seek company in his ruin. His best lyrics are reductive, distilling a single yearning to metallic purity, often in language hewed down to monosyllables. He shows me a passage from a song in progress, an embryonic draft that has been through just sixteen revisions but is pure brutal Cohen: “You came to me this morning / And you handled me like meat / You’ve got to be a man to know / How good that feels, how sweet.”
His filmic biographer, Harry Rasky, who directed a documentary called The Song of Leonard Cohen, once described him as “the first great vaginal poet,” a line that means nothing to me or Cohen, except maybe this: His verses, like his conversation, create hollow spaces rather than eager projections. There is room to come inside; there are bruises to handle roughly.
Cohen’s revelation on Mount Baldy, when it came, was the opposite of an epiphany. Instead it was a recognition that there would be no epiphany. It came upon him like medicine, harsh but healing. “One has a sense of a gift,” he explains. “I have a gift for rhyme. I found with a sense of relief that I had no gift for the spiritual life.” What this meant, he says, was that he was free to abandon the quest, without the aroma of disappointment or failure, nor a rejection of the cause. “I didn’t have to seek for anything.
And with the search, the anxieties attendant on that search ended. I don’t know if ‘happiness’ is the word to describe the feeling; maybe ‘applied indifference.’”
When he came down from the mountain in 1999, a few months before his sixty-fifth birthday, he brought a laptop full of songs, ten of which he deemed worthy of use. For a typical song, Cohen might write thirty or forty verses before arriving at five or six he can live with: “Unfortunately, I have to write a whole verse before I can discard it. I’m not sure that it’s not any good until I finish it. Some people write great songs in the backs of taxicabs. I’m not like that.” He ran across a sometime collaborator named Sharon Robinson, who helped him set the songs to music and record them in a backyard studio outside his Los Angeles home. They recorded their vocals late at night and in the early mornings, so as not to pick up the chirping of birds. In the spirit of incompletion, they used Robinson’s demo tracks as the final accompaniment.
The songs are among the gentlest of his career, melancholy but not broken. The images are tautly visual, creating big vistas from a few little words: “The ponies run, the girls are young / The odds are there to beat.”
Lust, which has been a lacerating force in Cohen’s life and consequently in his work, is for the moment diminished. Instead the songs all refer, however obliquely, to the resolution of the time on Mount Baldy. His was not a break with faith; he continues to pursue meaning through Buddhism and Judaism. But this compulsive inquiry, as ever, will require labor-intensive immersion in his work, not deliverance. The new album reflects this acceptance. “As my old teacher says, ‘You can’t live in paradise: there are no toilets or restaurants.’ Regardless of whatever descriptions you have of yourself, you have to keep coming back,” Cohen says, to what he calls, somewhat infelicitously, Boogie Street, “the ordinary landscape of work and desire.”
On a street outside the house in Montreal, the conversation circles inevitably around to work and sex. For a brief period of time, before his musical career took off, Cohen worked as a reporter. He got an assignment to interview the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and was so impressed with the clarity of Gould’s ideas that he did not bother to take notes; the words, he was sure, were burned into his mind. It was the last assignment he ever took. But the experience stayed with him, and even now, he says, “I think of myself as a journalist and my songs as reportage. I draw something as accurately as I can with the evidence available.”
At his courtly insistence, we are on a mission to find Montreal bagels, the slender, heavy ones of which the city is justly proud. Sex and seduction have been recurring causes in his work and life, and so in interviews. I ask if he ever instigated the romantic turmoil in his life to have something to write about. This is not the first time he has considered the question. He says, “Layton once suggested that the poet does it for the poem, screws things up to have something to write about. I don’t know if that’s so. All that speculation suggests that we’re in control, that we’re doing things according to a plan. That runs counter to my understanding of how things work.”
What Cohen will say for his career is that it has largely left him free to work. At an awards ceremony, he once thanked the executives of his record company for not paying too much attention to his work. His brief tastes of celebrity—he was once, for example, mobbed in Norway, where he fleetingly enjoyed a profile to rival that of Britney Spears—relieved any envy of greater stardom. At the same time, the fidelity of his fans has allowed him a working life more literary than pop, neither enslaved by his fans’ needs nor oppressing them with his.
He protests amusement at his rep as a swordsman. “It’s amazingly inaccurate, but it’s interesting to read about,” he says. And it has allowed him into the fraternity, access to the players’ lore. “Because of this fictitious reputation, I have the credentials that permit me to enter into conversation with the Great Ones,” he says. “From what I gather, when it comes to the objects of love that they desire—not the ones that come easily, but the women they want—then the background is anxiety. It has a physical resonance. Nobody masters it.”
So he will continue to plumb the contours of this anxiety, unquenched by either Prozac or Zen, by the examples of Catherine or Roshi. Perhaps because Cohen was always older than the rock crowd, his work has sought deeper purchase in life’s conflict, rather than the rock-and-roll joys of release. This is a key both to his longevity and to his next move. The conflict still beckons. As he sang a decade and a half ago, in bittersweet acknowledgment, there ain’t no cure for love. But for Cohen, at least, there are the annealing self-examinations of the laptop. And for the rest of us, there is the work of Leonard Cohen.
BROTHER OF MERCY
MIKAL GILMORE | Late 2001, interview | March 2002, Spin (US)
Mikal Gilmore—for decades one of America’s leading music journalists—delivers a typically insightful report in the following feature, which describes a meeting with Cohen in 2001 and, as a bonus, also limns a memorable encounter with the singer thirteen years earlier. —Ed.
In 1994, Leonard Cohen disappeared from public life. Cohen happens to be one of the most underappreciated artists in rock-and-roll history. But in the early 1990s, with works like I’m Your Man and The Future, he was enjoying the most successful period of his long career. Younger artists (including Jeff Buckley, Nick Cave, Tori Amos, and R.E.M.) were covering his songs, and filmmakers such as Oliver Stone and Atom Egoyan were featuring his work in their movies. At age fifty-nine, Leonard Cohen seemed, somewhat improbably, at the top of his game.
Then he simply walked away. He left behind his legendary love affairs (affectionately and notoriously documented in many songs), his two-story home in Los Angeles, and, it seemed, his artistic career as well. He took up full-time residence at a retreat led by his longtime Zen master and elderly friend, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, sixty-five hundred feet up Mount Baldy, about an hour northeast of L.A. No one expected to hear anything more of him.
Then, just as quietly, Cohen left the center in 1999 and returned to his previous life. He’s released a new album, Ten New Songs, that is, in many ways, unlike anything he has recorded before. In contrast to the acerbic themes of I’m Your Man and The Future, Cohen’s new album is about the acceptance that comes after suffering and aging. It is not about a fearsome future; rather, it’s about a tolerant present. Like Cohen’s best work, it follows its own rhythms, shapes, and passions. And it hints at answers to two overriding questions. Why did he leave the world behind when the world finally seemed ready for him? And why has he returned with what might be called his bravest vision since his brilliant 1966 novel, Beautiful Losers?
The answer to both is: something happened to Leonard Cohen while he was gone, something he’ll say only so much about. More on that later. Right now, there’s some catching up to do.
1988. It is a pleasant summer evening in Los Angeles, and I am meeting Cohen, currently touring in support of I’m Your Man, at his mid-Wilshire-area home. I have spoken with him on various occasions since 1979. I remember one telephone interview in which we were talking about romantic and sexual love—subjects that have always saturated Cohen’s work.
“People are lonely,” he commented then, “and their attempts at love, in whatever terms they’ve made those attempts, they’ve failed. And so people don’t want to get ripped off again; they get defensive and hard and cunning and suspicious. And of course they can never fall in love under those circumstances. By falling in love, just to be able to surrender, for a moment, your particular point of view, the trance of your own subjectivity, and to accommodate someone else.” He paused. “The situation between men and women,” he declared, “is irredeemable.”
He paused again, then laughed. “Drunk,” he chortled. “Drunk again.”
This evening in 1988, though, drinks aren’t on the menu. Instead, Cohen is making chicken soup. Around the kitchen are a few small religious icons and portraits—some symbols of Cohen’s own religion, Judaism, a few bits of Hindu and Bud
dhist statuary, and a picture of Kateri Tekakwitha, the famed Iroquois Indian who looks over the narrative heart of Beautiful Losers.
Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934 into a family prominent in the Jewish community. But Cohen also found himself fascinated by Catholicism. “I didn’t experience any of the oppressive qualities of it,” he says, salting the soup. “I just saw the child, the mother, the sacrifice, the beauty of the ritual. And when I began to read the New Testament, I found a radical model that touched me very much. Love your enemy: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.’”
His sense of Jewish identity and interest in Christian iconography and redemption would figure prominently in Cohen’s work. “Like the families of many of my friends, my family gave me encouragement to be noble and good. When I was [at Montreal’s McGill University] and I started to write poetry and meet other writers, we had the sense that what we were doing was very important. We weren’t in London or New York—we didn’t have the weight of the literary establishment around to say what was and was not possible. It was completely open-ended. We had the sense of an historic occasion every time we gathered and had a glass of beer.”
Cohen also credits his summer camp experience—where the director was a socialist and a folksinger—as decisive. “He played good guitar,” says Cohen of the director, “and he introduced me to folksinging via unionism and leftwing thought. I found out about a whole leftist position, a resistance position. I’d never known there was anything to resist. I got a guitar, and after the camp season was finished, I started learning songs. I went down to the folksong library at Harvard and listened. I didn’t see much difference between songs and poems, so I didn’t have to make any great leap between writing and singing.”
