The Stranger Music of Leonard Cohen

by William Ruhlmann

Among the great watersheds in the history of popular music, Bob Dylan's fusion of a rock 'n' roll sound with his already established brand of thoughtful folk lyrics in 1965 must stand among the most profound -- in more ways than one. Dylan had been revered in folk and left wing political circles prior to 1965, but it wasn't until he strapped on an electric guitar and recorded his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, and his first hit single, "Like A Rolling Stone," that he became a national pop star.

In the process of taking on the musical trappings of rock, however, Dylan continued to explore his own unique lyrical concerns, and of course he continued to sing in his pinched, nasal, oddly accented and (to be honest) usually flat voice. That such words sung in such a voice could find popular success provided enormous incentive to a whole range of people to try their hand at pop music and, just as important, to many record companies to sign those people up.

Twenty-seven years later, when many of Dylan's heirs stood on the stage of Madison Square Garden and paid tribute to him on the occasion of his 30th anniversary as a recording artist, one couldn't help looking at them -- from Neil Young to Eric Clapton, from Tom Petty to Lou Reed -- and wondering how many would have dared to try their hand at singing if Dylan hadn't done it first.

It wasn't just the singing, of course, but what Dylan was singing about that so influenced people. Would Jim Morrison have thought about setting his poetry to rock music without Dylan? Would the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have deepened their art with more mature concerns than holding hands and getting satisfaction?

While all these matters remain speculative, it seems undeniable that, if Bob Dylan hadn't become a folk-rock star in 1965, a celebrated, but obscure and nearly destitute poet and novelist from Montreal named Leonard Cohen would never have become a celebrated, moderately famous and comfortably off singer-songwriter starting in 1966, when his song "Suzanne" was first recorded by Judy Collins and was signed to Dylan's label, Columbia Records.

By July 1967, though he had made few public appearances and his debut album was still five months away from release, Cohen went to the Newport Folk Festival to be lionized, just as Dylan had been years before. But he did so with some trepidation. "I said to my lawyer, I remember, when we were going to Newport, 'Marty, I really don't know how to sing,'" Cohen recalls more than 25 years later, "and he said, 'None of you guys know how to sing.' He said, 'When I want to hear singers, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.'"

But he sang well enough. And if Dylan had opened a door by singing lyrics unusual to pop music, Cohen, whose sophisticated lyrical ability had already been displayed in four books of poetry and two novels by the end of 1966, went through that door and explored the world beyond it. He brought with him a poetic sensibility steeped in literary and religious references, influenced by the Beat writers and by the environment of Montreal, plus an appreciation for the erotic and the violent (often in combination) that could be disturbing.

And having been given his opportunity, Cohen built a career over the next quarter century that included nine studio albums (plus a live record and a greatest hits collection) and three more books of poetry, plus occasional concert tours. He established a faithful audience, especially in Europe, and gained the respect of rock critics, even if their notices sometimes indicated they were intimidated by his work and not sure it really was pop music.

But many pop musicians had no trouble embracing Cohen, as exemplified by such bands as the Sisters of Mercy, who took their name from one his songs, and the 1991 tribute album I'm Your Fan, on which such performers as R.E.M. paid homage by recording his music.

At the age of 58, with his newest album, The Future, selling well (including Top 10 status in Sweden), he has been busy compiling an anthology for Alfred Knopf to be called Stranger Music that will include both his songs and poetry, and the publisher also is planning to bring his novels back into print in the U.S. He describes this renewed attention as "agreeable."

He was born Leonard Norman Cohen on September 21, 1934, in Montreal, Canada. His parents were wealthy merchants who owned their own clothing factory. Cohen grew up on Belmont Avenue in the Westmount section of the city, attending the Roslyn School and Westmount High School. He graduated from the latter in 1951 at the age of 16. (Canadian secondary education stopped at the 11th grade.)

Cohen continued his education at prestigious McGill University, but he also countered his academic interests with a musical one, forming a country-and-western square-dance band with his childhood friend Mike Doddman, who played harmonica, and a friend of Doddman's who Cohen knew only as Terry and who played bucket bass. Cohen played guitar.

"Curiously enough, we found we all had buckskin jackets," he recalls. "Then it was on the basis of that mutual discovery that we named the group [The Buckskin Boys]. Mine I inherited from my father. Pretty beautiful jacket, it must be over a hundred years old." (The group is pictured, jackets and all, in the songbook Songs of Leonard Cohen, Collier Books, 1969.)

"There was a convention in Montreal in those days where a lot of barn-dancing -- square dancing -- was done as a social activity," Cohen explains. "So, we played in church basements and high school auditoria, and we played conventional songs like 'Turkey In The Straw' that Terry would call to. You know, 'do-se-do.' I was playing rhythm guitar and Mike Doddman was playing harmonica, and we had these instruments amplified. So, we were doing just the appropriate square dance material."

The group seems to have continued off and on through 1954, while its members went to college. Meanwhile, Cohen had become "a popular figure at [McGill] and had made a reputation as a writer," according to Michael Gnarowski in his introduction to Leonard Cohen: The Artist & His Critics (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976). He graduated at 20 in 1955 with a degree in literature. One of Cohen's professors had been the poet Louis Dudek, and following his graduation, Dudek persuaded the university to start publishing books of poetry under the heading of the McGill Poetry Series. The first book published, in the spring of 1956, was Cohen's Let Us Compare Mythologies (Contact Press, Toronto), which contained poems he had written between the ages of 15 and 20.

"We took subscriptions for it," Cohen says, "and on the basis of those subscriptions, we printed, I think, 400 copies and advertised them in the McGill Daily and sold them in Montreal." The book won the McGill Literary Award.

In 1957, Cohen was heard reading some of the poems from Let Us Compare Mythologies on the album Six Montreal Poets. "Sam Gesser was the producer of that album," he notes, "a man who became a very benign and generous figure in the musical circles of Montreal, who became an impresario and brought in people like Pete Seeger and the Weavers and acts that might not have found their way into the city. He made sure that they came. Very nice guy, and he gathered a group of us called 'Six Montreal Poets' and we made that. I guess I was invited to participate in that project on the basis of that recent publication, which would have made me the youngest poet, I think, on the album at the time."

Indeed, Cohen is by far the youngest of the poets, the rest of whom, among them his mentor Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and F.R. Scott, are a generation older. The album demonstrates clearly that Cohen was seen as the most important young poet in Montreal, a city Scott (who is credited as "editor" of the descriptive notes) calls "the most active centre of poetic writing and publication in the country."

In the biographical blurb describing him, Cohen is said to be the author of two other books, a second book of poetry called The Spice-Box Of Earth and a novel called A Ballet Of Lepers. In fact, neither had been published at the time, and the novel never would be.

(When asked whether A Ballet Of Lepers was an early version of his first published novel, The Favorite Game, Cohen replies, "No. That was probably a better novel, but it never saw the light. I sent it to Ace Pocketbooks at a certain moment, and they were considering [it] seriously, but it was never published. It's just in the archives of the University of Toronto now.")

Despite the release of a book and a record, Cohen was not making a living as a poet. He spent time working in the family clothing business and briefly did graduate work at Columbia University in New York. It may have been at that time that he attended Jack Kerouac's poetry readings over jazz music at the Village Vanguard, which inspired him to do the same thing back in Canada.

"I don't think there were too many people doing it at the time," he says. "I was working with a pianist and an arranger, Maury Kay. I did a few weeks with him. We worked together at a place called Dunn's Birdland, which was a room on top of Dunn's delicatessen on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. He used to write big band arrangements. He had about a 12- or 15-piece band and this little stage, and it was his gig. I'd come on at midnight, and I kind of improvised while he played. Sometimes he was playing the piano by himself and sometimes doing parts of arrangements or tunes played in a somewhat subdued way while I took my own riffs. Or sometimes I'd do set pieces, like a poem from Let Us Compare Mythologies. We did that off and on for a month, and then I worked with a great jazz guitarist from Winnipeg by the name of Lenny Breau. So, I was doing that in those years, I guess it was '57, '58." (Contrary to previous accounts, Cohen says he never gave any of these performances in the U.S.)

In addition to jazz, Cohen was listening to folk music. "I was always playing by myself," he says, "and learning folk songs, listening to records, picking them up. There was an embryonic folk music, which eventually blossomed into that folk renaissance that we all know about, that has been so influential. But I guess these were the early expressions, and there were people like Ed McCurdy in Montreal, and the Weavers, Pete Seeger, the work by [John and Alan] Lomax.

"All that was known, mostly, in Leftist circles. The sponsorship seemed to be Leftist, although I can't say with any accuracy that the actual singers and performers had any real ideological basis except some notion that the People were right. The People were good, and the People were right, and solutions, salvation, would come from the People. Not a bad idea. Called democracy."

"So, I was very much in touch with those circles, and our evenings were that. My friends and I would drink and play music every night. That's what we did, that's what we lived to do. The evenings would start in somebody's place or in a cafe. There were some cafes that were hospitable to this kind of free-form singing. So, an evening would start at seven or eight and would go on, and you'd run through your whole repertoire of folk music you'd acquired and your own stuff too, and those were the evenings in Montreal in the late '50s."

Cohen denies biographical accounts that he was writing and trying to sell songs at this point. "I never tried to sell any songs," he says. "I was doing the occasional lyric. People would ask me to do lyrics for a movie or translate a song from French into English. I was doing programs for the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Company] as a journalist, trying to make a living that way. I don't remember writing any songs to sell. I was mostly interested in verse."

Cohen's life changed in 1959. "I was working in a factory in Montreal at the time and writing," he recalls, "having these wonderful evenings that would go late, and then I had to be at work at seven. It was a good hour drive, so [I was] sleeping very, very little and playing all night and working all day. Then I applied for and was awarded a grant by the Canada Council. A very generous grant at the time, it was about three grand, which was worth a lot in '59, and also a ticket to visit the ancient capitals, because on the basis of Let Us Compare Mythologies, I said I wanted to visit Rome, Athens, Jerusalem. So, I had a round-trip ticket from Montreal to Tel Aviv.

"I went to England first, and I wrote the first draft of The Favorite Game, and I finished the book which later became Spice-Box Of Earth, and then I went to Greece with my guitar, and I finished another draft or two of The Favorite Game. Then I locked into this living style that would carry me through the next seven or eight years."

Cohen found he could live cheaply in Greece, for about $1,100 a year, in fact, renting a house on the island of Hydra for $14 a month. "I'd live as long as I could, and then I'd come back to Canada and do a few jobs and put together a couple of grand," he explains. "You could get a freighter from Montreal to Genoa or sometimes Piraeus for a couple of hundred dollars. So, you just worked that amount of time, and then you had a couple of grand, then you'd go and live another year and come back. That was the way I did it. I got a lot of writing done that way. The alternative was university or a dismal, grim kind of job, which I already knew something about. So, that was a good way to live."

And that way Cohen did live for the next seven years. In 1961, he published his second book of poetry, The Spice Box Of Earth. This was followed in 1963 by his first novel, The Favorite Game, a coming-of-age story of a young man in Montreal. Nineteen sixty-four saw the publication of his third book of poetry, Flowers For Hitler, which was seen as a more provocative, more political collection than the more romantic poetry he had previously written. Cohen had visited Cuba around the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and though his reaction was not clear-cut, he came away somewhat politicized, emphasizing more, for instance, the nationalistic elements in his verse and his obsession with the Holocaust.

The back cover of Flowers For Hitler contained something of a warning from the author. "This book moves me from the world of golden boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line writer," he wrote. "I didn't plan it that way. I loved the tender notices Spice Box got but they embarrassed me a little. Hitler won't get the same hospitality from the papers. My sounds are too new, therefore people will say: this is derivative, this is slight, his power has failed. Well, I say that there has never been a book like this, prose or poetry, written in Canada. All I ask is that you put it in the hands of my generation and it will be recognized."

Asked whether Flowers For Hitler represented a real change in his work, Cohen now says, "I think I was one of the people that promoted that notion, because I think I was trying to get my publisher revved up about it. I got into the habit of writing him these highly charged self-promotional letters about how important a writer I was, and he used one of them. I would have to be deeply bored to examine this question carefully. But, yeah, I guess it did represent a certain change from what was perceived as a neo-romantic lyric sensibility. It had always existed, I never felt it was too radical, although I helped promote the notion that a new Cohen had exploded onto the scene."

The explosion, Cohen cautions, was a modest one in any case: "The sales that we're talking are three figures." Nevertheless, the poet was mistaken in saying that his book would be heavily criticized. Flowers For Hitler won the Quebec Literary Award and prompted critic Milton Wilson, in the July 1965 issue of the Toronto Quarterly, to write, "Cohen is potentially the most important writer that Canadian poetry has produced since 1950 -- not merely the most talented, but also, I would guess, the most professionally committed to making the most of his talent."

(One of the poems in the book was "Queen Victoria And Me" which, with minimal musical accompaniment, would turn up on Cohen's Live Songs album in 1973.)

Cohen spent the years 1964 and 1965 working on Beautiful Losers, his second novel. One of the more fascinating works of fiction of the decade, it was the story, as Robert Arn puts it in his article "Obscenity And Pornography" in the December 2, 1967, issue of the Cambridge Review "of a Canadian academic, his wife, a radical Member of Parliament, and an Iroquouis virgin saint. Only the academic remains alive, seeking the meaning of his wife's suicide, his friend's death from venereal disease, and his connection with the long-dead saint -- the subject of his historical researches -- in a tirade of obscene poetry."

Whether or not Beautiful Losers was obscene, it was certainly sexually provocative, though no more so than many other contemporary works thought to have literary merit. And its critical reception when it was published in early 1966 vaulted Cohen into the ranks of the major new novelists of the '60s -- Ken Kesey, Richard Farina, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Thomas Pynchon and others. It was seriously reviewed in such publications as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, and its sexy reputation tempted potential readers and kept it from seeming too highbrow.

You'd have thought, then, that after 10 years of publishing, it would have launched Cohen on a career as a successful novelist. Instead, its reception prompted him to decide to change professions.

"The reviews [were] very generous," he admits. "There was very serious attention given to it." But it didn't sell. "It did no business at all when it first came out in hardcover," Cohen says. "I don't think the combined sales [in Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain] were more than two or three thousand copies. It later sold over 800,000 copies in paperback, went into about 11 printings in paperback. But that was quite a while later." And it was directly attributable to Cohen's fame as a singer, not a novelist.

"I [was] living in Montreal, and it [became] quite clear to me that I couldn't make a living as a writer without going to the university or something like that," Cohen says, "and that was a kind of revelation, because I [had] thought, 'How wonderful, I'm getting published, and as the night follows the day, everything's going to work out.' I've never had a clear sense of career. I just felt that the work was going to establish me in some kind of economic reality that would allow me to pay my bills. But it didn't happen that way. In hindsight, it sounds absurd."

As a result, Leonard Cohen decided the time had come to switch jobs and become...a country music musician. There was, of course, his experience as an adolescent with the Buckskin Boys. And when he was living in Greece, every morning he had listened to a long country music show on Armed Forces Radio. "In hindsight, it seems like a very foolish strategy," Cohen admits, "but I [said] to myself, 'I am a country musician, and I will go down to Nashville, and I'll get work down there, either as a player or a singer, or, I have songs, and this is the way I'm going to address the economic crisis.' It seems mad.

"So, I borrowed some money from my friend Robert Hershorn. On my way to Nashville, I stopped off in New York, and I sort of got ambushed. I first of all went to the Penn Terminal Hotel on 34th Street. Then I moved to the Hudson Hotel on 57th Street, and they had a great swimming pool, one of the reasons I liked it there. And then I found out about the Chelsea Hotel. I don't know how that emerged. Once I hit the Chelsea Hotel, there was no turning back. [The Chelsea Hotel, a home to everyone from Dylan Thomas to Sid Vicious, is a legendary, if not infamous haven for artists of various stripes. Cohen would stay there frequently during his trips to New York.]

"I was on speed, I weighed about 116 pounds. It was a very crazy time. That's when I found out about everything that was going on in New York."

Through Hershorn, Cohen was introduced to Mary Martin (not the Broadway star), a Canadian-born assistant to Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. It was Martin, in fact, who had been instrumental in getting the Hawks (most of whom were Canadian) hired to be Dylan's backup band when he turned to rock. The Hawks later became the Band.

Cohen played to Martin the songs he had intended to try selling in Nashville. Martin, who would become his manager, made some of the key introductions in his career. She introduced him to Judy Collins, and then to John Hammond.

In her autobiography, Trust Your Heart (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), Collins describes the meeting, saying that Cohen sang her his songs "Suzanne" and "Dress Rehearsal Rag," that she was taken with them and "became immediately devoted to him." Cohen remembers things somewhat differently.

"The first time I came down [to New York in 1966] I met Judy Collins," he says. "Mary took me to Judy Collins's house, where I met Earl Robinson [the songwriter known for his "Ballad For Americans," among other compositions]. He happened to be there that afternoon, a man I admired enormously, and after he left, I sang Judy a few songs. 'Tonight Will Be Fine' and a couple of other songs. She said she loved the stuff, there wasn't anything there [for her], but if I ever did anything else, would I keep in touch with her."

Cohen returned to Montreal, where he was working on his next book of poetry, which would be called Parasites Of Heaven. He was also writing songs, but not making much distinction between the two. "I was moving from being a writer into being a songwriter at that time," he notes, "and the delineation wasn't really quite clear. I didn't see the difference between the work at that particular moment."

Nevertheless, he did have the music to a song he was working on. "I knew I was onto something because I thought the guitar pattern was very good," he says, "and curiously enough, long before the song was finished I knew I had a good song. I remember saying to Sam Gesser, 'I'm really in the middle of writing a wonderful song,' and I never have said that before or since to anybody. I just knew. It just sounded like Montreal. It sounded like the waterfront. It sounded like the harbor. It sounded like the church down there, sounded right. And I was moving around with it in one way or another, different directions, when Suzanne took me down to her place near the river!"

Cohen emphasizes that the song is not to be taken literally, however. "Suzanne was a woman not necessarily...," he begins. "I mean, she gave me her name for the song, but she was the wife of Armand Vaillancourt, who is a very well known Quebecois sculptor, and they were a marvelous couple on the Montreal scene in the '50s and the early '60s. They danced together and were physically very beautiful people. She was a professional dancer, he was a sculptor, but a magnificent creature, probably the first guy I met who had hair down to his biceps. Amazing looking man.

"So, at a certain point, she took me down to her place near the river, St. Marks, in what would be called a loft today, just warehouse space, where she was living. I don't want to get too much into the documentary evidence of the song."

Perhaps then, the interviewer suggests, we can talk about the inspiration rather than the evidence. "Much of the song had been written," Cohen continues, "but the focus was missing until Suzanne brought me to this warehouse where she was living, then a lot of the imagery came together. I found a focus for it because I love that part of the city. There's the sailors' church, that's a Montreal feeling, a Montreal landscape, and when I got the fact that it was she who brought me down there, I was able to find a spine for the song.

"Then the second verse -- 'Jesus was a sailor' -- people feel Montreal is the Jerusalem of the north. People who were brought up there have this sense of a holy city, a city that means a lot to us. So, I was able to find a place for that second verse between those two verses about Suzanne and to give it that religious quality that the song has, which is the quality of Montreal."

c[It's worth noting that Suzanne who lent her name to the song is not the same woman as the one identified as Suzanne in the cover photograph of Cohen's 1977 album Death Of A Ladies Man. That Suzanne is the woman who was Cohen's wife during the '70s.]

Having finished what would become his most famous song, Cohen called Judy Collins. "I remember the moment when I phone Judy Collins from my mother's house," he says, "and I sang her the song over the phone, and she loved it and said, 'I will definitely do this song immediately. Get me the lyrics and the lead sheet.' Shortly after that, John Hammond was ready to see me."

John Hammond, the noted Columbia Records executive, already had an enormous reputation for discovering and nurturing talent, from Billie Holiday to Count Basie to Bob Dylan, whom he signed to Columbia in 1962. Hammond also wrote an autobiography, John Hammond On Record (with Irving Townsend, Ridge Press/Summit Books, 1977), and his account of his dealings with Cohen differ markedly from Cohen's recollection.

Parts of Hammond's version are clearly mistaken. For one thing, he gives the impression that Cohen came to his attention in September 1964, after he returned from a six-month leave due to a heart attack he suffered in March 1964. Clearly, however he is talking about September 1966. He writes that he decided to sign Cohen after going to the New York office of the CBC and viewing the 1965 Canadian National Film Board documentary Ladies And Gentlemen -- Mr. Leonard Cohen, which showed Cohen reading his poetry, on the advice of a TV executive named Bob Bach, and after talking to Mary Martin.

Hammond says that the signing was opposed by Bill Gallagher, the acting head of the record division of CBS (Goddard Lieberson having moved to a new job and Clive Davis having not yet taken over) on the grounds that Cohen was a 32-year-old poet and "besides, he wants a lot of money."

Hammond says he then met with Tom Guinzberg of Viking Press, who told him that Cohen's last book of poetry had sold 540 copies. Guinzberg then acknowledged that Beautiful Losers, due to its "sexual imagery" had sold 600,000 copies in paperback. This, Hammond says, made him believe that Cohen had something, and he persisted until Cohen was signed.

But Bantam Books' paperback edition of Beautiful Losers was not published until 1967. And the book's massive paperback sale didn't come until Cohen was already a recording star.

Nowhere does Hammond mention knowing that Judy Collins was recording "Suzanne" and "Dress Rehearsal Rag" for her next album, In My Life, which was released in November, though doubtless he would have known this either by talking to Mary Martin or otherwise. And nowhere does he mention actually meeting Leonard Cohen before he signed. But Cohen remembers the meeting well.

"He took me to lunch at this restaurant on 23rd Street [the same street on which the Chelsea Hotel is located] that is no longer there. Then we went back to my room at the Chelsea and I played him these songs, and he said, 'You've got it,' and he signed me."

The two accounts of the recording of Leonard Cohen's first album differ even more.

One of the recurring themes of John Hammond's autobiography is that many of the artists he discovered and worked with in the studio were at their best in simple, unadorned musical surroundings, but that, for commercial reasons, they or others chose to use more elaborate instrumentation and production, thus obscuring their talent.

This theme is applied to Leonard Cohen, too. Having signed Cohen, Hammond began to produce his first album, probably in early 1967. "In the recording studio he got the jitters," Hammond writes of Cohen. "He could not conceive of his voice being commercial enough to sell records, and was worried about the quality of his guitar playing. Simplicity was his great asset and we told him so. It was not what he wanted to hear."

Hammond says that he managed to round up some musicians who instilled confidence in Cohen, but that when the artist heard the finished result, he decided the album was "not commercial. I was overruled and another producer brought in. He added strings and assorted pillows of sound for Cohen's voice to rest on."

Hammond says that when he heard the new tracks, he knew they were wrong and managed to convince Cohen of this. But removing "the sweetening" (presumably from a four-track master tape) "was like trying to take the sugar back out of the coffee."

Before quoting Cohen's diametrically opposed version of this story, it's worth noting that, at least to a certain extent, listening to Songs Of Leonard Cohen bears out Hammond's remarks about adding and removing sweetening. While Cohen's voice and acoustic guitar dominate the tracks, many contain such elements as strings and horns, though those sounds are far off in the background. That very mix gives the album much of its haunting appeal, but it would certainly be unusual to deliberately write and record string and horn charts and then turn them down so low.

In any case, Cohen denies much of Hammond's story, though he acknowledges that the record had a troubled history. "[Hammond] began producing me, and then he got sick again," Cohen says "[and] because he couldn't go on producing me, he assigned me to John Simon." Hammond says nothing about getting sick.

Asked specifically about disagreements in the studio with Hammond, Cohen replies, "I don't recall him absenting himself from the project on an aesthetic basis. That I certainly have no recollection on. I don't think it's accurate. It was something in his personal life. Either he or his wife got sick and he just couldn't do it, and he got me John Simon. There was never an aesthetic discussion. But he did have a certain approach, which I liked, but which wasn't working either, where he'd just bring in a band, and that really wasn't working. Then we tried another way, where I'd just sing with guitar and maybe a bass player, Willard Brown, I think it was. So, I'm not sure about that." (Hammond cites Willie Ruff as the bass player; the album does not list musician credits.)

Cohen even speaks favorably, if perhaps facetiously, of the producer's notorious habit of reading the paper while overseeing a take. "I never minded," he says. "I found him an inspiring figure in the studio. I very much admired his haircut [Hammond sported a crewcut.] I thought that was a charitable gesture, reading the newspaper. It kind of took the pressure off you."

But Cohen does remember disagreements with John Simon (who went from this project to produce the Band's Music From Big Pink.) "John Simon and I had words about the arrangements," Cohen recalls, "and he said, 'Look, Leonard, this is as far as I'm going to work on the record. I'm going on Christmas vacation,' he said, and he said, 'You finish it.'"

"So, there are several songs on which there was a dispute. One of the songs was 'Suzanne.' He had piano on it. I didn't want drums, but he said, 'There's got to be something that syncopates it,' and he put piano, a very good piano player, and I removed the piano. I thought it should be linear, should be smooth. The other one was 'So Long, Marianne,' which he stopped. There was a kind of a device, a conceit, of the period of the middle '60s where you would stop a song and then it would start again, and he did that with 'So Long, Marianne.'" I said, 'No, it doesn't work. You can't just stop the song and start it again. What for? Just to make it hip?' So, I changed that in the mix. The arrangements are all his. I didn't change the arrangements, but I did change the mix."

As Cohen prepared his debut album, his reputation was soaring. Judy Collins's In My Life, released in November 1966, reached #46 in the charts and stayed in the bestseller lists 34 weeks, making it her most popular album yet. (Four years after its released, it would be certified gold.) Though "Suzanne" did not become a hit single for Collins, it clearly was the album's stand-out track, and it began to do for Leonard Cohen something of what Peter, Paul and Mary's recording of "Blowin' In The Wind" had done for Bob Dylan in 1963.

Cohen, meanwhile, published his fourth book of poetry in the fall of 1966, Parasites Of Heaven. The book contained material dating back to the late '50s and not previously collected. It also contained poems that had served or would serve as song lyrics: "Suzanne Take You Down," "Teachers," "I Believe You Heard Your Master Sing," "Give Me Back My Fingerprints" and "I Fell Into An Avalanche."

In a review published in Canadian Literature in its issue for Summer 1967, critic George Bowering referred to "the Leonard Cohen boom," noting that Cohen's Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, had printed or reprinted five of his six books in the last year. Parasites Of Heaven, Bowering felt, was Cohen's least important book, but his review is more important for indicating a turning in critical notices for Cohen, at least form the academic/publishing world. Henceforward, literary critics would begin to assail Cohen's status as a pop star much as folk purists decried Dylan's metamorphosis as a rock star. Some, notably Desmond Pacey in the Autumn 1967 issue of Canadian Literature, would express this antipathy in the form of effusive praise for Cohen's fictional output while ignoring his music.

But then, in fairness, as Cohen's star was rising during 1967, those critics had precious little to hear of that music other than the two songs on Judy Collins's album. On April, 30, 1967, Collins, in a gesture echoing Joan Baez's sponsorship of Bob Dylan, brought Cohen out onstage at an anti-Vietnam War benefit concert she gave at Town Hall in New York.

In Trust Your Heart, Collins recalls that Cohen was reluctant to appear and that, when she introduced him he only got through half of the first verse of "Suzanne" before stopping and heading offstage. But audience approval drew him back and he finished the song. (Other accounts suggest that this occurred not at Town Hall but at Collins's appearance at the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park in the summer of 1967.)

"I didn't really know much about singing in public, and it was generally a frightening experience." Cohen says of the period now. "I didn't really know what was at stake, either. I didn't really realize that careers were being made at this point and alliances with companies were being forged. I had a rather naive, self-concerned approach to the whole thing."

Cohen performed on a few other occasions during 1967 while trying to finish his album. As noted, he appeared at Newport. He also sang at Canada's Expo '67 world's fair. And he was a guest at the Big Sur Festival in California. In December 1967, Cohen was featured on CBS-TV's Sunday morning cultural affairs program Camera Three, an appearance that elicited "the greatest audience response in the show's 14 year history," according to the New York Times.

In October, a single recording of "Suzanne" by actor Noel Harrison scaled the charts, reaching #56. In November, Judy Collins released Wildflowers, her follow-up to "In My Life," and it contained three Cohen compositions: "Sisters of Mercy," "Priests" and "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye." Buoyed by the Top 10 singles success of another of its songs, Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," Wildflowers would become Collins's biggest LP ever, reaching #5, staying in the charts 75 weeks and achieving gold certification early in 1969.

The stage was thus set for the release, on December 26, 1967, of Songs Of Leonard Cohen. The album featured a black-bordered cover picture of the artist taken by "machine" (i.e., by one of those coin-operated photo machines found in railroad stations and five-and-ten stores), and the back was a color painting of Joan of Arc as she went up in flames.

The album contained a lyric sheet that led music critics to make the same remarks literary critics had about Cohen's interest in religious, sexual and violent imagery. When asked about those concerns today, Cohen relates them to his specific environment, resurrecting early Canadian reviews of him as a Montreal poet.

"I've always felt myself more as a journalist and a reporter from this particular landscape that I find myself on and trying to be as precise as possible about it," he says. "Montreal is that landscape. Montreal is a very romantic and religious and political and intriguing and conspiratorial kind of mental environment. As somebody observed, everybody feels like a minority there, the French because they're a minority in Canada, the English because they're a minority in Quebec and the Jews because they're a minority everywhere. There is this bastion, this fortress sensibility, but it's a very possible mutual accommodation, at least it was until quite recently.

"But nevertheless, that symbolism is powerful, and that is the landscape. There's a cross on Mount Royal, and there's the shrines and the churches on every corner and the Hassidim and the Protestant businesses, and one tends to see things racially in that city, and romantically, and that whole blood and soil and destiny--all those ideas operate forcefully in that environment. So, that is the landscape I grew up in, and it's very natural to me. I didn't have to reach for it."

Equally natural, Cohen notes, is the language he employs, steeped, on his first album and afterwards, in Biblical references. It is a language deliberately chosen in an attempt to be universally appreciated. "When you search around for something that everybody understands," Cohen explains, "you can really say, 'David and Goliath,' you can say, "Jesus on the cross,' you can say, 'Moses in the bullrushes' and they're the last few fragments of another culture. We have our own commonality now, which is mostly television. But from the old world, from the ancient world, these are the images that have survived. So, it's absolutely natural for me. It doesn't involve any conceit, any device for me to use that kind of imagery."

Songs Of Leonard Cohen was a modest hit in the spring of 1968. It reached #83 in the U.S. Columbia issued Cohen's version of "Suzanne" as a single, but it didn't chart. Later, at the end of the summer, the album soared to #13 in the U.K., staying in the charts 71 weeks. From then on, Cohen's European success would dwarf his sales in North America.

Still unsure of his performing ability, Cohen did not embark on a concert tour to support the album. But he did turn up in other ways during the year. He scored and appeared in the Canadian National Film Board movie The Ernie Game, in April. He appeared in New York at the 92nd Street YMCA's poetry series with Irving Layton, ending his reading by taking out his guitar and singing "The Stranger Song." And in June, he published his Selected Poems 1956-1968, which Time magazine reported had sold 20,000 copies by September 13, 10 times the sales of an average collection.

If Cohen was being favorably mentioned in such mainstream publications as Time, however, his previously high reputation as a literary figure was dropping. "If Cohen were not the kind of poet he is, he would never have started on the path of becoming a pop singer," sneered George Woodcock in his book Odysseus Ever Returning, which was published in 1970 by Cohen's own publisher, McClelland and Stewart, "and becoming a pop singer has deleteriously affected his recent development as a poet."

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