The D-Files: Leonard Cohen
(a transcript of a radio program)

interviewed by David Fanning

David Fanning: What about the differences between European journalists and European audiences as opposed to back home in Canada and down in America? You have been better received in this part of the world, haven't you?

Leonard Cohen: No comparison. In my own country, Canada, it's recently begun to develop in a small number of people and the journalists were always interested, but there wasn't much of an audience at all, not for many years. There is now. In the United States, except for maybe New York and Los Angeles, there was hardly any interest at all.

DF: Do you think there was not that much interest in Leonard Cohen between the years of '72 to '85, like a good decade, more than a decade?

LC: Oh yeah. From about '75 to '85 there wasn't much interest at all. In fact, my name was a kind of joke. When anybody wanted to trot out some idea of despair or melancholy or depression or suicide, they generally associated my name with it.

DF: Did that association annoy you?

LC: I can't say it really annoyed me because I don't really live in that world where these things are going on. It had an effect on my economic situation, which could have been improved, I thought. I have pretty thick skin. I've been putting stuff out since I was 20. I'm 58 now, so I'm pretty impervious to what's being said.

DF: Do you think in some ways it was good for you developing as a person and as a writer to be so late coming into the rock 'n roll world?

LC: Well, that's what they say. You can never tell how anything is going to affect you. It's hard to speak from any point of view but experience. I've seen what early fame and fortune do to a number of people. It seems to wreck them pretty badly and seems to push them around pretty badly. And it seems to give them a kind of odd view of things. It wasn't until I was 35 that I actually began to make any money at anything connected with my writing or my singing.

DF: You went to Nashville, having been a writer, having had books of poetry published, having had novels out, you went to Nashville to become what exactly?

LC: Well, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to become but I knew I had to do something. I had published a couple of novels and a number of collections of poetry and I couldn't make a living. I had gotten glorious reviews from The New York Times and all over the place. In fact, I was hailed, someone said, I think in Boston, 'James Joyce is not dead. He is alive and well and working in Montreal.' They were really glorious reviews, and I couldn't pay any bills. In retrospect it seems the height of folly to address your economic woes by becoming a country singer, especially when you weren't from the country and you didn't have any roots in the whole matter at all. But that's what I had intended to do. I thought I had to do something and that was the only other thing I knew how to do. So, I went down to Nashville.

DF: So you went down to Nashville and you thought you'd pick up a guitar and put some of this stuff that you write to music, is it as simple as that?

LC: No, I'd always played guitar, clarinet, took piano lessons when I was a kid, played clarinet in high school band and dance bands around town. I was part of a country trio called The Buckskin Boys when I was a kid, 16 or 17. So country music was not foreign to me and I loved it. I could always get this Wheeling, West Virginia, radio station which played a lot of country stuff and I used to listen to it a lot. So, it wasn't as though I just decided to pick up a guitar. I'd always played music and I'd always been able to make a couple of bucks as a musician here and there.

DF: Let's talk about the album then, The Future.

LC: Okay.

DF: What was necessarily so great about the '50s and so horrible about the '90s?

LC: I don't know. I never understood this chopping up of time into decades. I suppose it affords journalists and writers and sociologists a grand opportunity for sounding off on their theories. And of course, things change. But I always thought I was on the front line of my own life, just struggling away trying to do one thing or another without any grand strategy, just dodging the shrapnel. It has always seemed the same to me to tell you the truth, of course, things change. But I can't see for a man in his life that that much changes.

DF: You say things on the album, people looking back at some dreadful things, like the Berlin Wall, like Hiroshima, and say, 'Hey, they were the good days'. Is it that bad, the future?

LC: I don't know. I get a lot of resistance to that line, I've seen the future, baby / it is murder. I got a lot of resistance to it in Europe. In the United States the journalists I've spoken to, not a raised eyebrow in the whole bunch. Over here, where there is full-fledged war raging about a half a mile down the road, slaughtering going on all over the place, people being attacked in their homes, shelters being burned down, famine down the street, over here, it's like I've said something that shouldn't be said. The future is here. It is murder.

It is also a certain insanely cheerful tone to the record. If I just nailed that lyric up on the church door like Martin Luther it might sound pretty grim but it is attached to a pretty hot little dance track. So in a way the words dissolve into the music and the music dissolves into the words. You just got energy for that apocalyptic dance. But yeah, I think it is pretty grim. I think somehow the social contract between people has frayed or deteriorated or dissolved. I think there is a return to tribalism. I think that the voices of the extreme have taken the glamour and the allure and the center can no longer defend itself, can't mount a rhetoric that is inspiring. And I think people are more and more willing to defend their turf with homicide.

DF: You mean what is happening in Bosnia and Germany, with this great freedom that was suppose to have come with the world breaking down, as though it was going to happen overnight without realizing the cost over decades that we are going to have to pay. But in America, in another song you have, "Democracy," you say democracy is coming to America which is ironic, but do you say that because of the ethnic and cultural differences in America that it is actually real democracy and it is trying to get itself together?

LC: I think the song transcends the obvious irony of the hook, democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 'What do you mean, there isn't any democracy there?' Well, there isn't any democracy anywhere. America is as good an experiment in democracy as there is any place. Europeans used to look, until very recently, very skeptically on America, a very ironic take on America, a very superior take, I might say, about America. America has been dealing over the past century with problems that the northern European industrial democracy is just starting to confront, the conflict of races, the conflict of cultures. In America the confrontation of men and women is there, the confrontation of sexual orientation, gay against straight, is there. There are all kinds of intense and urgent confrontations that are being faced up to in America that are just at the start of being recognized in Europe. The laboratory of democracy that America really is deserves our good will, our affirmations and our blessings and I think the song gets to that place. But it gets to that place in the style of a big city. A big city is not a Sunday school, people are not continually going around affirming the divinity of man and the divine spark in all human beings and the sanctity of the individual. It's a little more cynical than that. It has the style of big city speech. But it says that it's not coming from above, it's not being imposed, it's not the domain of a particular administration or ideology. This faith we call democracy, that this new faith we call democracy has a chance in America and it's coming from unexpected places, through a crack in the wall, through a hole in the air, imperial, mysterious, in amorous array.

DF: Do you therefore think it is the religion of the West? And is that a bit of a serious put down because we don't actually consider democracy to be what in reality it really is? In other words, it is not necessarily as wonderful as we sometimes try to define it.

LC: It's just a shot at it. I don't presume to have a handle on the whole thing. I don't think anybody can. I think it probably is the religion of the West and probably a great religion because it affirms other religions, which religions don't tend do, and a great culture because it affirms other cultures. I think it's just beginning. I think it is based on faith, based on a real appetite for fraternity and equality and justice. I think we are just on the edge of it. I think we are just working it out. Until very recently we thought democracy meant the masses were going to like Shakespeare and Mozart, that was our idea of democracy. Well it's not going to be that way. It's going to be something we don't know about. It has its own, as I say, imperial, mysterious, and amorous array. It's something that nobody can resist. It's like the Sermon on the Mount, which I don't pretend to understand at all, it's got implications. 'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.' It's coming through a crack in the wall. It's coming from our failures. It's coming from the recognition that human beings fail, that we have been expelled from paradise, that we've got to put this scene together. It implies imperfection, it implies failures. Somehow democracy is a space, a mental space, where sufficient energy is released to confront the imperfection of the human predicament.

DF: You mentioned that a lot of Europeans might have a superior attitude towards how they look at America and the uncultured middle classes. Now, do you think that Europeans maybe have a slight right to do that in terms of American imperialism of Europe, in terms of the "McDonald-ization" of it, the "Mickey Mouse-ization" of it? In other words, the mighty dollar speaks and the mighty dollar has taken its toil over the last 20 years.

LC: There's always been a mighty currency of some kind. There's been a mighty pound that screwed up Africa and India and a mighty ruble that screwed up Eastern Europe. There's always been a might something. In the case of the Americanization of European culture, that's been a very voluntary cooperation between the powers that be in both countries. And people have voted with their francs and with their pounds and with their pesetas. They voted for that American culture. Nobody asked everybody to line up in front of the McDonald's on the Champs Elysees. The French have a pretty distinguished reputation for food. If they didn't want the stuff, they wouldn't line up for it. Incidentally, I think that the American hamburger, even the fast food one, is vastly underrated. It's a pretty good piece of meat, you know? I think it comes from a kind of defensiveness of our own culture. Nobody in America resents buying French wine if they want it, there's good California wine, but nobody puts you down for buying it. It doesn't represent a defeat of American culture the fact that women like French perfume. A lot of it is just an expression of a kind of defensiveness. British rock 'n roll comes to America, American musician don't get up in arms about people taking away their jobs. Rock 'n roll has kind of imperialized the whole world. It's probably behind the whole destruction of the Soviet empire. That's where the ideas came from. In Western Europe, a lot of it is just the defensiveness of people.

DF: Do you think rock 'n roll did something 22 years ago in America, around the time of Kent State University, around the time when you were between albums two and three, when you were right there in the vanguard, in terms of helping to halting the Vietnam War? In other words, it actually was capable of some political "something" that it isn't capable of now?

LC: I don't know. The magic moves around. It goes from music to writing to movies. There doesn't seem to be much of it around anywhere right now. But there's no need for us to throw up our hands in despair. Someone is going to arise with some cultural tool to make the heart manifest. It doesn't seem to be around right now. I think we all played our tiny parts. I resisted the Vietnamese War but I also resisted the rhetoric that was resisting it. I wasn't so fond of that because maybe I just had a feeling that government is a kind of fragile institution and there's no point in throwing out the baby with the bath water. I was kind of fighting everybody at the time. In a poem I guess I wrote around 1970, published in '73 in The Energy of Slaves, I said "I had to contend with all the flabby liars of the Aquarian Age."

DF: Looking back, that's the way it was. And a lot of those went into Wall Street, went into good jobs?

LC: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. You know the so-called revolution of the '60s lasted for about 11 minutes before the hucksters took it over and sold it. That's okay, art and commerce have always gone hand in hand, that's just the way it works. I understand that a lot of psychedelic drugs are around again.

DF: Yeah, in the dance culture and the rav culture.

LC: Yeah, that produces some very very interesting effects and maybe that's what it's all about, what drug the culture is using. Usually the culture is using alcohol, nicotine and caffeine and that seems to produce a certain kind of expression, some of it is great. I don't want to take a side on this matter. Psychedelics produce a very different kind of vision that has a more obvious rapport with the religious vision, just the place it puts you. Even though you got an ideological difference in the shaman for instance, between Terance McKenna's position that drugs should only be used in a ritualistic, investigative situation under guidance or Collins' position that drugs should be used as a recreational sport. However you look at the way psychedelic drugs are used, it's going to have a real affect if the thing takes off. People forget that acid was the real fuel of the '60s. It was that vision that enabled people to summon the energy to crack the whole edifice in their own minds anyway, some of them just cracked their minds and the edifice remained quite in tact.

DF: So you can take it in the controlled way, say as William Hurt in Altered States or if you take it the other way, the recreational way of Timothy Leary, you did that in the late '60s. If you are really out of it on acid, are you trying to tell me that if God fell on your head you'd know He was there? I mean you wouldn't necessarily. Most of the people I know who took it then certainly wouldn't. You don't mean religious so straightforward and obvious?

LC: It is a unifying vision. I don't know if it's any good at all. The good thing about psychedelics is that for a small number of people it will lead to serious investigation into these matters. I know the zendos and the ashrams and the Zen centers where people are really studying themselves with a certain kind of diligence, a lot of those people are old acid heads. They just couldn't get any further on acid. The thing about acid is it binds you to a place. The thing comes fast and furious and there are visionary experiences that are afforded, but there is something very limited about the thing. If you want to go further, you've got to drop the stuff and start sitting alone with yourself with no end, no goal. But acid lead a lot of people to that serious activity. Where it will go with this one, I don't know.

DF: Back to the songs, your first album was the big one in terms of everyone immediately knowing who Leonard Cohen was. In subsequent albums you wrote a lot about love and relationships. A lot of the relationships in your songs all seem to end before their natural end, if you like. If relationships end early, do you think they are more perfect in some ways?

LC: There is that cultural artifact which is very prevalent in our literature and it's been there for a long time of doomed lovers or star-crossed lovers. The thing is intense from beginning to end and it's brief and it's sad. I don't know about all the other cultures because I don't know their literature. But I imagine it's pretty constant, it's a pretty stable human construction. So there is that kind of perfection to love found and lost and deeply experienced for the brief moments in time. Of course, we know there is another kind of association that yields its own nourishment and we call that marriage and that is the real monastery of our times, that is the real spiritual adventure. I think there are very few people suited for it. I certainly have never felt I was eminently suited for it. It's the real cemetery of love, but not the cemetery of true love. But the cemetery of this love that we're speaking of, this intense flame-like, sodium-burning love that fizzles out or is cut off. But that other kind of love that is free from love and free from hate and that transcends personality, that's what we call marriage and that seems to be where the real nourishment is.

DF: What about the love of children? You have two kids. You obviously have no regrets about not getting married, but you are obviously very happy you had two kids.

LC: Well, I never wanted them, to tell you the truth, at the beginning. For a long time I felt I'd been maneuvered into it and probably had been. I didn't like the idea. First of all, kids are the only event that moves you out of center stage, I'm not just talking for a performer, I mean in your own life. It's the only thing that ever happens to you where you stop thinking of yourself as the star of the whole play. The demand and the urgency that kids present is unavoidable. It's the only time in your life that you stop thinking about yourself, so I didn't like it. I didn't like that at all. Of course, you love the kids, goo-goo and everything else, but I really didn't like the maintenance. But I'm sure glad I had them because they are about the best company I have in my life.

DF: Back to music, over the years people have said that the white man can't sing the blues. And on the same level, for great poetry there has to be great suffering.

LC: Well, I'd like to down play that side of it. I think great suffering is available to everybody, not just artists. This is a very self-righteous vision that artists like to present about themselves, that they suffer more than anyone else. This can't be true. Great suffering is available to everybody. I think it should be discounted from the equation. What I think that is forgotten about art, is that it demands work. I think Yeats said it very nicely, "poets, like women, know that we must labor to be beautiful." Of course then as Browning said, you have the "first fine, careless frenzy." You may be able to pick those phrases out of the air, especially at the beginning of the whole affair. But what has been forgotten, I think, is that it's work. Forget the suffering, forget the anguish, forget the agonizing characteristics that have been ascribed to the whole activity. A lot of people have forgotten that this is work. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to forget it because I'm not one of that tribe that does the great song in the cafe or the back of the taxi cab. So suffering, I'd remove that from the equation because everyone has got that. Hard work, almost everyone has got that but artists. So, Irish poets, learn your craft. (Both laugh.)

DF: Well, what about the amount of time it takes you to do something? You are not massively prolific in terms of your recorded work. It's been four years since the 1988 album, and a few years before that. I mean, you take your time.

LC: Yeah, I take my time. I don't put anything out until it's finished. Maybe I'm lazy but I don't have that impression. I have the feeling I'm working pretty hard on this stuff. As I say, I'd like to be one of those guys like Hank Williams who can knock it off in 20 minutes. There is no guarantee of the excellence of a song just because it takes a couple of years to finish. I'm always working on a bunch of songs and it always takes me three or four years to do it.

DF: How important is music to you? Is writing more important? Could we see another book of poetry?

LC: I keep blackening pages, where the lines don't come to the end of the page and I'm going to put one of those books out one of these days. But I seem to have surrendered completely to this activity called songwriting. I've gotten really interested in it. Some kind of lever was thrown in my own personal life, not that it might concern anybody else, but around '82 I got very interested in this whole affair. I thought I was interested before in writing and I was, and I did serious work, I think. But since '82, '83, the past 10 years, I really thought about little else. I've been taking care of my own personal life here and there, but I've surrendered to the activity of songwriting. I mean nothing else is going on for me.

DF: Mapping human emotions then, the song is a good vehicle, is it?

LC: It seems to work for me. The music is real important too. The thing keeps adjusting, one to the other. If you change a line of the lyric, you generally have to change the way the musical line works. If you change a musical line, you have to change the language line too. They are born together. They are born painfully together.

DF: Can I just take one lyric from one song, one of the most famous in the early days, "Suzanne." There is one thing in that song when you say "only drowning men can see him." Are we suppose to take that literally to say, that's when you see Jesus, or something?

LC: Jesus himself said that, he said, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." In other words, we have this idea that there is a triumphant position in life, that we stand here as conquerors, that we claim the universe in some sort of way, but it just don't work that way. It is only when your back's against the wall that you lift up your voice in prayer and supplication. It is only when your back's against the wall that you begin to consider where you are, where you came from and where you're going.

DF: When you finally get a body of work out, be it a book of poetry, a novel, or an album, if you write about love, like "Ain't No Cure For Love", if you can get something written down about it and get into the inner sanctum of it, this inner struggle that you write about love, if you can get into that by getting it out, does it becomes a higher plane than the man down the road?

LC: Nobody can control their lives, I speak for myself and a few people I know, but just for myself. You kind of make a mess of your life. You do the best you can. But you can't really order it too militantly. Things fall where they do. But your work is a different thing. You can really work on your work, you can really organize it, you can really polish it. In that sense, you can locate your self-respect in your work. In terms of the actual significance of the work, I think it is beyond meaning and significance. I use the metaphor of the diamond. What's the diamond for, all a diamond is is something that is cut and polished and amplifies light. It doesn't have a meaning beyond that. That's the way I feel about my verses. It's not about the meaning. It's about the cutting and polishing and the amplification of light.

DF: The idea that you once said that you aspired to being a minor poet years ago, have you been happy with the work, always? Are you always happy with something when it comes out? Do you look back a few years later and say that was a bit naive or whatever?

LC: There are some lines that I would have difficulty standing behind maybe. On the other hand, I've been putting together this compilation of verse and I was looking at stuff that I wrote when I was 15 and 16 and sometimes I think it's been downhill since then. There is some good stuff.

DF: I spoke to Ronnie Spector on the program some time back and she had these really terrible stories about her ex-husband. You did Death of  a Ladies' Man with him. It's an album that a lot of people will talk to you about because they can put a handle on that one where they might miss out on New Skin for the Old Ceremony or Recent Song, but they'll hone in on Death of a Ladies' Man because of the Phil Spector stories that go with it. Do you look upon it as an interesting experiment that sort of gets a thumb sideways as opposed to a thumbs up or a thumbs down? That it could have maybe been better without Phil Spector?

LC: Well, it could have been better without Leonard Cohen.

DF: It was without Leonard Cohen at the end, wasn't it?

LC: More or less, yeah. At a certain point I even suggested to Phil I think, that he sing. He is a good singer, Phil is incidentally, no one knows that. I felt it took a different kind of singer, a more powerful singer. I think I could do it now. I think I could handle it now. I think that record could be a great record without Leonard Cohen. I think if it had had Bill Medley or one of the Righteous Brothers or Aaron Neville today, that kind of voice.

DF: The wall of sound.

LC: Someone who could really climb that wall and walk on it like the China Wall and rejoice on top of that wall, it would have been a grand piece of work. As it was, I don't think I had the chops to meet it.

DF: But at the same time, the circumstances were pretty strange. How crazy was the scene, guns, guns and guns?

LC: It was as crazy as you could possibly imagine. It was crazier than I thought at the time. Looking back on it I see everyone was around the bend. Phil was around the bend. And I was around the bend for being there. My own life was breaking up and God knows what was happening to him because he was over the hill. Everybody was armed. You'd slip on bullets. Your hamburger was full of guns. Everywhere you turned there was a gun. That would have been bad enough but everyone was drunk too. I remember Phil pulled a gun on the fiddle player in the song "Fingerprints". He was country boy and he just stood up and put his fiddle in the case and walked out. Phil approached me with a bottle of Manischewitz red wine. That's a kosher wine, sweet wine. You wouldn't want to drink it. I don't know why Phil was drinking it. And [Phil had] a .45 in the other [hand] and [he] put his arm around my shoulder and nuzzled the gun into my neck and said, "I love you, Leonard" and I said, "I hope you do, Phil." (DF laughs)

DF: One last thing, I really want to know, it's the album I'm Your Fan. For a lot of bands of recent years, bands I play on the program all the time, line them all up and they come out with a Leonard Cohen album. How does it make you feel?

LC: It makes you feel great. There's nothing I can say about it. People ask me what I think about this performance or that performance. Well, I go into immediate critical suspension when I hear someone covering one of my songs. To have a whole album of your songs done by these great bands, well there's nothing you can say about it except thank you.

DF: Well thank you, Leonard.

LC: Thank you for coming over.