Nice Cohen
By Judith Fitzgerald
This one's for you, Marie! Have a bodacious (LC) birthday /
Judith
On the line from his LA recording studio, Leonard Cohen's incomparable manager Kelley Lynch reports Canada's numero-uno agent of anguish who turned 66 last Thursday has never felt better in his life.
Lynch, the artist's career overseer as well as his longtime friend, takes five to dish details on what Cohen's been doing these past few months, revealing "he's mostly been in the studio working; and, although the new project's still on the front burner, he decided a while back he wanted to do a concert CD from the 1979 European tour. He really enjoyed himself on that tour; the band (including horn-king Paul Ostermeyer, skin-maestro Steve Meador, oudist extraordinaire John Bilezikjian and virtuoso violinist Raffi Hokopian) as well as the backup (Sharon Robinson, Jennifer Warnes)
were phenomenal; and, his mojo was working. So, guess what? It's in the can and," confides Lynch conspiratorially, "Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979, will be released the third week of November. The tracks were recorded at Brighton and Hammersmith Odeon.
There Ain't No Cure for Misery
(or Happy B-Day, Lennie C)
by Judith Fitzgerald
Happy Birthday, Lennie C
Thanks for all the misery
Thanks for the music
Thanks for the words
For the stories about sinners
For the songs about birds
For the way you never falter
For the magic and the moon
For young Isaac and his altar
And that "Hallelujah" tune
Well, now you're turning sixty-six
And I'm sure you've heard the news
The only cure for misery
Is them good ol' Lennie blues :)
© 2000 Marie M. Mazur.
All Rights Reserved.
Used by permission of the author. |
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"But, right now, he's hard at work on the new one. To tell you the truth, I can't even be sure it will be a 2001 release. You really can't tell with Leonard. He doesn't like deadlines. We're keeping it loose. A number of songs are in various stages of completion; several others -- 'My Secret Life,' 'Here It Is,' 'A Thousand Kisses Deep,' e.g. -- are finished."
Before Cohen returned to the studio to complete his pair of recording projects while further polishing his new collection of verse, he'd elected to hit the road for no real reason except, as Lynch playfully explained, "our little Road Man felt like going for a good long drive."
Our little Road Man had been on the loose for less than a month at the time; it was, after all, right around then the ordained Zen-Buddhist monk given the Dharma name of Jikan (Silent One) had opted to come back to the world after five years of solitude and meditation serving his Roshi high above LA at California's Mount Baldy Zen Center. |
"I'd done enough dishes," Cohen jokes affably during our tête-à-tête à telephone, "and, after I left, I lost ten pounds because I wasn't cooking for someone else." He also candidly confesses he quit smoking for three
years; but, after "attending a lecture where one of the members of the audience stood up to tell the author how their book had inspired them to clean up their act -- and, yes, how they'd even quit smoking -- the author replied, 'Well, what's the point of living, then?' Naturally, I went out and bought a pack of smokes right away. And, you know, my voice didn't change one bit when I quit. It was still the same old voice."
That same old voice will again be read and heard by legions of aLCoholics when the troubadour of travail uncorks his brand-new collection of poetry sometime during the next year or so. Previously titled both Blue Coffee and The Book of Longing, the current no-namer "contains over 100 pieces... Some share a kinship with Book of Mercy (1984), others relate to song and still others are simply lyric poems. For some reason, I'm writing a
lot, right now, too -- something I've learned not to question when it's
happening."
The poet who turned down the Governor-General's Award for Selected Poems: 1956-1968 at the age of 34 comes by his learning honestly. "You know," he declares in a tone rumbling between deference and defiance, "Piaf! Je ne regrette rien! At the time, it was considered an unpatriotic act, something that it was never meant to be. It was simply a spontaneous gesture of that time in that place; and, it felt right. I don't regret it; but, I'm sorry it was misinterpreted as an unpatriotic act, because it wasn't. But, I don't
feel badly about it. Not at all."
Nor does he feel badly about ranking third after Glenn Gould and Marshall McLuhan in The Globe and Mail's "Most Influential Canadians in the Arts" millennium poll conducted last year. "It's nice," he says, "these kinds of polls are always nice. It's nice to be recognised and acknowledged as having made a contribution; and, I deeply appreciate the gesture. It's very touching and rather humbling." Cohen pauses, clears his throat and continues sans façon, "polls are nice. Nice. Thanks, Canada!"
It's not too much of a stretch to imagine this impeccably distinguished gentleman punctuating his point with a Cohenesque twist on The Queen Wave downline. After all, when he performs the title-tune from perhaps the finest of his 11 CDs, The Future (1992), he has been known to do a wee little bit of a jiggy dance himself when delivering that zinger about "the white man dancin'," the withering indictment of contemporary existence which tops off
this chilling set of lines:
...There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing
You'll see a woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets coming round
Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin'...
"Yes," allows Cohen, "it was definitely on my mind, definitely a part of The Future's compass, I would say, definitely a question of how one narrates this future and how to organise the work accordingly, to set the record straight. I suppose I might be considered obsessive about form or order or structure or whatever; but, I don't think so. It's part of its attractiveness, for one thing. For another? I think if I weren't, I wouldn't truly be doing -- being really true to whatever it is I am doing -- when
I'm blackening pages. There are these experiments in different things, the Spenserian stanzas, the interweaving, these kinds of things. It's
interesting and always very much on my mind when I'm writing -- when I hear it or find it -- I can tell that it clicks.
"That definitely came to the foreground for me, most acutely, when I was making Various Positions (1984). It was the first time I could really see and intuitively feel what it was I was doing, making or creating in that enterprise. After a long period of barrenness (which beset Field Commander Cohen following the triumph of what many consider The Man's greatest tour, the 1979 European one), it all just seemed to click. Suddenly, I knew these weren't discrete songs I was writing. I could see -- I could sense a unity; Various Positions had its own life, its own narrative -- it was all laid out and all of a sudden it all made sense -- it was almost painfully joyful, if that makes some sense. The pulling and the putting of the pieces together coherently, the being inside of that process and knowing, once I'd done that, it would be finished and I would have to leave it and go back to the world."
...Yes, and here's to the few
Who forgive what you do
And the fewer who don't even care
And the night comes on
It's very calm
I want to cross over, I want to go home
But she says, Go back, go back to the world...
("Night Comes On," Various Positions)
"But," adds the sultan of sorrow in inimitable grittish gravelitude, "I don't want to get all metaphysical about it. Some days I feel better about my work than other days. If there's one thing that I do know, it is that I am definitely not in control. You know, that's the way it goes."
How, then, does it come? What brings the grim grocer of grief -- the guy often accused of writing songs many consider soundtracks to eat a gun by -- joy?
"What brings me joy? Hr-r-m," he muses, "and, that's right, too. Joy can only be brought to one. I'd guess I'd have to say various things, probably none of them very interesting to anyone but me."
"Various things? Various positions?"
"Yeah. Definitely. The more the merrier."
© 2000 Judith Fitzgerald and The Globe and Mail.
All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of the author.
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