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The Stranger Music of Leonard Cohen
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In November 1968, Judy Collins released her next album, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, which featured two more Cohen songs, "Story Of Isaac" and "Bird On The Wire."
Both these songs would appear on Cohen's second album, which he was now recording in Nashville (where he would subsequently move permanently) under the aegis of producer Bob Johnston.
Johnston, a Columbia staff producer who usually handled country artists, but had also produced Bob Dylan's seminal folk-rock masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde and was about to produce Nashville Skyline, has been described and has described himself as a laid-back presence in the studio who did little more than turn the knobs. Cohen disputes this portrait.
"He created a hospitable atmosphere in the studio," Cohen notes. "He is a very forceful and very hospitable man. He wasn't all that naive and all that primitive in terms of what he was doing. Southerners [are] often very deceptive in their personal style. They invite you to think of them as country bumpkins. They're very far from that. Bob Johnston was very sophisticated. His hospitality was extremely refined.
"It wasn't just a matter of turning on the machines. He created an atmosphere in the studio that really invited you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgment, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation. Just the way he'd move while you were singing: He'd dance for you. So, it wasn't all just as laissez-faire as that. Just as art is the concealment of art, laissez-faire is the concealment of tremendous generosity that he was sponsoring in the studio."
Also, Johnston could, when called upon, assist in the musical creation, especially by bringing in expert sidemen. "He found very good musicians," Cohen says. "I mean, you were being accompanied by Charlie Daniels and other great players. He knew the scene very, very well. He found the accordion player for 'Partisan Song' and those three girls to put on the overdub. So, his contribution when requested was really quite thorough."
When Songs From A Room was released on March 17, 1969, careful listeners noted that the lyrics to Cohen's version of "Story Of Isaac" differed from those on Judy Collins's version. The song, a retelling of the Biblical story of God's testing of Abraham by ordering him to kill his son Isaac, connects the story to the current day, admonishing, "You who build the alters now / To sacrifice these children / You must not do it anymore." "When it all comes down to dust," both singers declare in the final verse, "I will kill you if I must / I will help you if I can." Cohen then reverses the sentiment: "When it all comes down to dust / I will help you if I must / I will kill you if I can." But Collins sings entirely different words: "And may I never learn to scorn / The body out of chaos born / The woman and the man."
Cohen is surprised when the interviewer points out the difference and asks if he reshaped the lyric for Collins. "She must have put that in," he says. "That was a kind of an ideological bowdlerizing that was going on at that time. Also, Joan Baez did that with 'Suzanne' when she used to sing it in concert. She wouldn't say, 'Touched her perfect body with your mind.' She had some resistance to the occult or spiritual implications of the thing. Until finally, at the Rolling Thunder concert at the Forum in Montreal [December 4, 1975], she sang the song, and I met her backstage, and she said, 'I finally got it right, Leonard.'"
Collins's alteration of "Story Of Isaac" is disturbing because it alters the meaning of the song as Cohen intended it. The period of 1968-69 was one during which the anti-Vietnam movement had developed for many into a broader anti-military, pacifist movement, and by toning down the song's lyrics, Collins made it seem closer to that sentiment than Cohen intended. When it's point out to him that "Story Of Isaac" has been so interpreted, Cohen demurs. "It's a song that couldn't stand specifically in the anti-war camp," he notes. "It says, 'Man of peace, man of war, the peacock [spreads its fan].' It doesn't matter where you are, it's vanity that's running this show."
Cohen makes a point of saying that he is not, and never was, anti-military, and refers to an interview he did with Danny Fields in the Soho Weekly News in the early 1970s as evidence. Certainly, his performance of such songs as Anna Marly and Hy Zaret's "The Partisan" and even the line from "A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes," "I sing this for the Army" (the name he later gave his backup band), both from the same album, back up this contention.
"People were very concerned with being good and kind," he says of the era, "and so a lyric like 'Story Of Isaac,' which is uncompromising... I mean, it doesn't buy the side of peace, and it doesn't buy the side of war. I think the embrace is wider and the repudiation is wider than Judy Collins was ready to acknowledge at that point."
Indeed, the tendency of female singers such as Collins, Baez and Buffey Sainte-Marie (who cut a musicalized version of a section of "Beautiful Losers," "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" as well as the song "Bells" during this period) to sing and record Cohen's less provocative material or tame the edgy stuff when they did do it, tends to make for a kinder, gentler impression of Cohen's overall work for some people than is really accurate.
This is especially true of Songs From A Room, which, in its way, contains as risky a set of lyrics as any album since the Velvet Underground's debut. Among its best and most striking songs are: "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," whose protagonist commits suicide; "The Butcher," in which the narrator sings, "I found a silver needle / I put it into my arm / It did some good / Did some harm"; and "You Know Who I Am," whose narrator sings, "Sometimes I need you naked / Sometimes I need you wild / I need you to carry my children in / And I need you to kill a child."
The author of these songs remembers them fondly, speaking well of "Nancy" and saying of "You Know Who I Am," "I've always had a secret affection for the song because it's so clear to me and it's so straight. I mean the position and the mechanism it describes is something that my own experience has validated." (At least one commentator, critic Frank Davey, thinks the narrator of "You Know Who I Am," "The one who loves changing from nothing to one," is God. Cohen jokes that the song is about binary computer code.)
Nor has much changed over the years. The man who wrote "Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows" in "The Old Revolution" is the same one who penned the key line from "Anthem" on the new album, The Future: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." And when the subject matter of suicide, shooting drugs and abortion (or is it infanticide?) is brought up, he chuckles and notes. "Anal sex is going to be tricky on this one," referring to the title track of The Future, in which he sings, "Give me crack and anal sex."
Nevertheless, "I generally don't mind," he says of people changing his lyrics. "Maybe because I grew up in that folk song tradition where you understood that there were different versions. It moves from lip to lip, it changes over the generations. I've never had that proprietary interest, anyway, in the work. As long as a version exists that people who are interested can refer to at one point, I don't care if the thing ends up a hundred years later as a song about banal sex."
Indeed, Cohen himself has toyed with his lyrics on occasion, notably altering the words to one of his most famous songs, "Bird On The Wire," which opens Songs From A Room. "I don't feel I've ever finished that song," he says. "I feel it's a really great song that I didn't nail, I didn't finish, and it's the one that bugs me, and almost before every tour, I redesign it. I re-designed it for Aaron Neville in its most recent incarnation [on the Neville Brothers' 1990 Brother's Keeper album]. I don't think I've nailed it yet. I keep trying."
Songs From A Room continued the "Leonard Cohen boom," reaching #63 in the U.S. and going to an astounding #2 in the U.K. As a result, Cohen was encouraged to put together a touring band and make more live appearances, though the band doesn't seem to have actually hit the road until 1970.
"Bob Johnston put that band together for me," Cohen recalls, "and it was a good little band, very modest sound, very modest approach, very nice people. I had a good time. Mostly on Mandrax at this point." The band included Johnston himself on harmonica and guitar, Ron Cornelius on electric guitar, Charlie Daniels on electric bass and fiddle, Elkin Fowler on banjo and guitar, and backup singers Aileen Fowler and Corlynn Hanney.
This group toured Europe in August 1970, a month after choreographer Brian MacDonald and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performed The Shining People Of Leonard Cohen, a ballet featuring recitations of Cohen's poems, to considerable acclaim in Paris.
The Cohen tour played seven European capitals, also stopping at the Isle of Wight Festival before an audience of 100,000 on August 30, and finishing at the Olympia in Paris. The tour then continued in the U.S.
As indicated by two surviving live performances from the tour, a version of "Tonight Will Be Fine" from the Isle of Wight and the nearly 14-minute encore "Please Don't Pass Me By (A Disgrace)," the shy, taciturn Leonard Cohen of 1967 had been replaced onstage by a much more boisterous figure not afraid to sing out, whether he thought he could sing well or not. This new-found extroversion would also find its way onto Cohen's third album, which he began to record after the tour. "I had been out on the road with these Texans and southern boys," Cohen offers as explanation. "Yeah, I was stretching out a bit, having quite a lot of fun out there."
Not that insecurity didn't strike once again in the studio. "That third album also we cut in Nashville," Cohen recalls. "Bob Johnston was the producer on that also. We put the overdubs on in London. Paul Buckmaster did the strings. And between the second and third albums, I again had that feeling that my voice wasn't quite appropriate to the material. I don't know why I thought that or whether it's true or not, but I began to feel that way, that I was disappointing myself very deeply in the work I was doing. Looking back on it, it's pretty good. I do now remember laboring on "Joan Of Arc" a long time. I wrote a lot of it in the Chelsea Hotel. I don't know why I thought so badly of myself in those days. I thought I was failing."
Songs Of Love And Hate, released March 17, 1971, which featured Cohen's touring band, now dubbed the Army, contained among its eight selections two--"Avalanche" and "Dress Rehearsal Rag"--that dated from several years earlier. Another "Love Calls You By Your Name," was a very slight rewrite of an unpublished 1967 song called "Love Tries To Call You By Your Name." Often, the appearance of older, previously unused material on a new album indicates that an artist's relentless schedule and recording commitments are making it difficult to come up with enough new songs. But Cohen says this was not the case with him.
"I never felt any pressure from the authorities," he notes. "I just really started to feel I was in trouble in those days. I don't think the work suffers that much. I feel charitable towards it at this point when I look back. I figure it is what it is, and some of the songs were really good, and some of them have lasted a long time."
Among those really good, long-lasting songs unquestionably is "Joan Of Arc," not a surprising subject for a novelist who had previously used an Iroquois Christian martyr (Catherine Tekakwitha) as a major character, or for a recording artist who had depicted St. Joan on the back cover of his first album. Of course, it would have been an odd choice for a song coming from anyone else, especially since the lyric consists of a romantic dialogue between Joan of Arc and the fire that is consuming her and that it is, well, a love song.
"Joan Of Arc" also employs an unusual recording approach, with overlapping tracks on which Cohen both sings and speaks the lyrics. Enormously effective, the technique has been relatively little used since. One thinks of Patti Smith's 1975 Horses album and John Trudell's 1992 record AKA Grafitti Man, but there are few other examples.
"It was my idea," Cohen says of it, "and I had, as the model, manuscripts that you'd see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It's like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations." The album also contained the remarkable ballad "Famous Blue Raincoat," which retells the romantic triangle of Beautiful Losers in a mere five minutes, and which Jennifer Warnes would take as the title track of her Cohen tribute album 15 years later.
Songs Of Love And Hate, with its frequently uptempo arrangements and sometimes garrulous singing, presented a slightly different approach to what Leonard Cohen fans may have expected. (It can be thought of, in this sense, as akin to his third book of poetry, Flowers For Hitler.) In America, that spelled commercial disappointment, and the album only reached #145. In the U.K., however, Cohen continued to score as the LP got to #4.
About this time, Cohen's back catalog was given a boost when some of his earlier songs were used in Robert Altman's now celebrated (if poorly received at the time) film McCabe And Mrs. Miller. Cohen added some new guitar pieces for the score, but for the most part the music consisted of older recordings like "The Master Song."
"Robert Altman got in touch with me while I was recording Songs Of Love And Hate," Cohen recalls, "and that afternoon I had seen [Altman's most recent film] Brewster McCloud--twice. It had been raining in Nashville, and I had just ducked into a theater and sat through one and a half versions of it. I thought it was an incredibly wonderful picture, and he phoned me that evening, and he said he'd like to use the music, that he'd been writing the script while listening to my songs. I said, 'Is there anything I might know that you've done?' He said, 'I did M.A.S.H.' I said, 'I heard it was a great success, I didn't see it.' Then he said, 'I did...something else. I said, 'Is there anything else?' He said, 'Well, there's a picture you probably wouldn't have seen called Brewster McCloud. I said, 'I just sat through it twice. Use anything you want.'"
The spring of 1971 also brought Cohen an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. In July, Tim Hardin released the album Bird On A Wire, featuring his version of the title song. (Note that, appropriate to a song Cohen himself keeps changing, the song is frequently covered under the title "Bird On A Wire" rather than "Bird On The Wire." Cohen himself consistently uses "the," however.) In September, Columbia Records released a three-record set, The First Great Rock Festivals Of The Seventies: Isle Of Wight / Atlanta Pop Festival, which featured Cohen's performance of "Tonight Will Be Fine." And on November 2, 1971, Judy Collins released her Living album, on which she covered both "Joan Of Arc" and "Famous Blue Raincoat."
In 1972, Cohen and the Army embarked on another tour of North America and Europe. This time, the band included Johnston and Cornelius, plus bassist Peter Marshal and guitarist David O'Connor. The backup singers were Donna Washburn and Jennifer Warren. (Jennifer Warren is probably Jennifer Warnes.) The tour was filmed by Tony Palmer and a movie called Bird On A Wire was released.
Also in 1972, Cohen published the first new poetry he had issued since the few new poems in Selected Poems in 1968, a book titled The Energy Of Slaves. If any confirmation were needed of the depressed state of his mood in this period, the often desperate tone of much of this work provided it. "Each man / Has a way to betray / The revolution," he writes toward the end. "This is mine." The book was subjected to sometimes harsh criticism by reviewers who took at his word a poet who wrote, "I have no talent left / I can't write a poem anymore." He was striving, they said, to be an "anti-poet" who wrote "anti-poetry."
Further, at a time when women's liberation was on the rise, Cohen's long-standing interest in sex began to seem to some to represent sexism. Such defenders as Stephen Scobie (in Leonard Cohen, Douglas & McIntyre, 1978), however, counter that Cohen is not so much a misogynist as an egotist, and that in this book he largely rejects his previous persona and work, his self-loathing even extending to a disgust with sex itself. In any case, The Energy Of Slaves is not an easy read.
"In many ways, I like that book the best of anything I've ever done," Cohen says now. "I think when you take a few of the poems that could be called chaff out of the book that it's one of the strongest pieces that I've ever done. I'm looking at it now because I'm doing this anthology [Stranger Music].
Having already been the subject of a ballet, Cohen found himself the subject of a musical revue when Sisters Of Mercy opened Off-Broadway at the Theatre De Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre) on Christopher Street in New York City in the spring of 1973. According to Cohen, the show was partly funded by Columbia Records, but the company withdrew its support after Clive Davis, a Cohen fan, was ousted as company president over the Memorial Day weekend.
The ouster can't have helped the progress of Cohen's concert album, Live Songs, which had been released on April 27 and which entered the charts for the week ending May 26. The album limped to #156 and was Cohen's last album to reach the U.S. charts.
There were reports, around this time and later, that Cohen was considering abandoning music to return to writing poetry and novels, or even just retiring altogether. Though he acknowledges feeling doubts about his career at many stages (and adds, who doesn't?), Cohen says such reports came more from the imaginations of journalists than any real intention on his part.
In fact, he says, something of the opposite was the case, as he admitted to himself that he was, in essence, a songwriter. "Generally, it was, like, a book, a record, a book, a record," he says of the early days of his recording career. "Then I really got consumed with the songwriting. I really confessed to myself that I was a songwriter living in L.A. [where he moved in the early '70s] and stopped writing books altogether, it seemed."
In 1974, Cohen began working with producer John Lissauer, and their efforts resulted in New Skin For The Old Ceremony, an album that tastefully added individual strings, horns and woodwinds to Cohen's music without overwhelming it. The album also contained some of Cohen's most moving love songs, though it was not devoid of more unusual material that continued many of his old themes. There was, for instance, "Field Commander Cohen", who was "our most important spy," and dealt with "silver bullet suicides...and other forms of boredom advertised as poetry."
There was "A Singer Must Die" (guess who?). And, most notoriously, there was "Chelsea Hotel No.2," which Cohen would later note was dedicated to Janis Joplin and which featured its subject "giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street." Of course, this was the same writer who, in "The Spice-Box Of Earth" had titled a poem about fellatio "Celebration" and compared the resulting orgasm to Samson's destruction of the temple.
As if all that weren't controversial enough, there was also the album cover, which, at least on some copies, depicted a 16th century illustration of a "symbolic representation of the Coniunctio Spirituum, or the spiritual union of the male and female principle," or in more common language, two nude figures with wings and crowns making love--explicitly. Columbia Records replaced the cover with a photo of Cohen, but the album did not chart in the U.S., despite a promotional tour to support it. In the U.K., it got to #24.
After the album's release, Cohen and Lissauer began work on a new album that has never been released. "We did, I'd say, a side and a half," Cohen recalls, "I mean, six or seven songs together. I don't know why I squelched that. It just didn't have the... It had some great tunes on it, and I finally used one of them, "Came So Far From Beauty,' on a record [1979's Recent Songs]. But there were lots of tunes. There was 'Guerrero,' that nobody's ever heard or seen, but we did it on the tour and recorded it. There was an early song called 'Anthem,' no relation to this 'Anthem' [on The Future]. I can't find the thing, I can't find the tapes of it."
In an interview he gave to Roy MacSkimming in the Toronto Star, published January 22, 1975, Cohen said he was writing a massive book that included poems, journal entries and "novelistic passages." It was called The Woman Being Born. The book has never been published.
In February 1976, Columbia issued The Best Of Leonard Cohen with the assistance of the artist (not always the case with compilations). "I put it together in London," Cohen says, "and I wrote the notes for the back. It became my greatest selling record and still is. I should do another one."
Cohen's dropping sales and the appearance of a retrospective collection made some wonder whether his recording contract had ended, and this seemed confirmed when his next album, Death Of A Ladies' Man, appeared on Warner Bros. Records. But Cohen says he never left CBS. "I just got a license fee or probably a release or something like that," he recalls. "I don't know what the arrangement was. There was an arrangement. It came out on CBS International as a CBS record. It is now a CBS record. It was acquired."
Probably, the initial Warner Bros. release came about because legendary producer Phil Spector, who produced it and co-wrote its songs, was contracted to Warners at the time.
The partnership still sounds, to this day, like one of the most unlikely match-ups in musical history. Cohen was introduced to Spector by his long-time lawyer, Marty Machat, who also was Spector's lawyer. "Machat...believed that with strong musical arrangements Cohen could find a broad audience," writes Mark Ribowsky in his biography of Spector, He's A Rebel (E.P. Dutton, 1989).
The writing and recording sessions lived up to Spector's eccentric legend. Songwriter Doc Pomus, whom Ribowsky cites as a source, claimed that Cohen and Spector's bouts of writing were drenched in alcohol, but Cohen at least remembers this part of the process favorably. "[The] songs are good," he says, "and [that] reflects the songwriting period of the album. When Phil and I were writing together one to one, [it] was very agreeable. I was going to his house, suitably dressed because he kept the air conditioning around 35 in the middle of the summer, so you had to come with your long underwear and overcoat, and if you didn't, it was very uncomfortable because he locked the door and wouldn't let you out. [But] I was ready to accept his eccentricities, I was ready to trade that off for his genius, and I thought the songs were excellent. When we got into the studio, it was a different story."
"The Leonard Cohen sessions were typically unpleasant," writes Ribowsky. "Cohen...was pushed aside and ignored. Phil was so paranoid about the tapes that he took them home each night with an armored guard." There was also an incident in the studio during which Spector reportedly pulled a gun on a violinist who had been joking with him.
Even if the sessions had gone well, the combination of Leonard Cohen's singing and lyrics with Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" music and production techniques probably was doomed from the start. The album sounds exactly like anyone familiar with those two styles would expect--a full production sound with strings and horns and female choirs, and, somewhere lost in the mix, the groaning voice of Leonard Cohen going on about sex and despair and salvation.
Cohen was already denouncing the record in the press before it was released in November 1977. He called the mix a "catastrophe" and said Spector had annihilated him.
"I certainly did feel that the album was a catastrophe at the time," Cohen says now. "But there are people who have a certain soft spot toward the record, so I'm not going to criticize it as I usually do."
When his interviewer praises at least the lyrics of certain songs, noting that, for example, "Paper-Thin Hotel," in which the narrator overhears his lover making love to someone else in the next room and, instead of getting jealous, rejoices that love is out of his control, is a characteristic song for Cohen, the songwriter agrees. "I think it has that kind of celebration which is like the other side of 'Waiting For The Miracle,'" he says, referring to a song on The Future. "'Let's do something crazy / Something absolutely wrong / While [we're] waiting / For the miracle,' that idea of a desperate situation liberating you from the terms that have imprisoned you.
"I like that particular song, and there's a few songs there that I've always thought of re-doing. I have the masters of that track, and I've often thought that my voice has come full circle, I think I can sing them all now an octave lower. I think I can do the record, I think it could be interesting. 'Cause I think those are really good songs. 'Memories' and that song. Well, a lot of the songs are good."
Death Of A Ladies' Man didn't have much chance commercially, given that even its nominal maker disowned it, and it failed to chart in the U.S. In the U.K., it reached #35. Despite this performance, Cohen used a nearly identical title for his next book of poetry, which was published in Canada in 1978 and elsewhere in 1979, Death Of A Lady's Man. The title poem printed in the book recreated the lyrics to the album's title song, but otherwise the two works differed considerably. Actually, the book had been announced for publication in the spring of 1977, long before the album, but was withdrawn as Cohen rewrote it.
After the book was announced, but before it was published, Stephen Scobie wrote to Cohen to inquire about the previously promised The Woman Being Born. Cohen replied in July 1977 that Death Of A Lady's Man derived from a longer book called My Life In Art, which he had completed the year before and decided not to publish. The Woman Being Born, he added cryptically, was both "another manuscript" and an alternate title for both Death Of A Lady's Man and My Life In Art.
The hangover from the album's failure probably hurt Death Of A Lady's Man when it finally appeared. Cohen remembers its reception unhappily. "That book really was very coldly received in all circles," he notes, "It got no respect. It was widely reviewed [in Canada] because I'm a Canadian, but it was dismissed almost uniformly, and in America it wasn't reviewed. I think there was one review in Boston, and that was it. That was the end of the book."
Another factor in the book's reception may have been that, by now, Cohen's reputation among literary critics and academics had simply evaporated since he had so long been identified as a songwriter and pop star. The tragedy is that Death Of A Lady's Man is a remarkable book, a series of prose poems that cleverly comment on themselves. Just as Joan Of Arc contrasted singing and recitation, the facing pages of Death Of A Lady's Man provide contrasting versions of given thoughts. Sometimes the second version comments on the first. After the initial version of "The House," the second version of "The Beetle" asks, "Is there a modern reader that can measure up to this page?"
"I decided to jump literature ahead a few years," begins the first version of "I Decided." "Did he...?," asks the second. Maybe he did, and the critics were too far behind. In retrospect, it can also be seen that both the book and the album really did represent the death of "the ladies' man" (in the sense of a man who is promiscuous) and "the lady's man" (a man possessed by a single woman) in Cohen's later work. Whether or not the charge of sexism was true, Cohen seemed to have reacted to it, and his later subject matter in the four record albums and one book of poetry he has published since has been more varied and less self-obsessed.
"I thought it was a very leisurely and delightful kind of performance," Cohen says of Death Of A Lady's Man. I feel very tender about the book, very warm about it. I thought it was funny, and I think the book will be seen as funny one day. Nobody's read it. You're the only other guy I've met who read it. [Laughs] I think it's a really good book, and again, because I'm working on those books again, at least I did to prepare this new anthology, and when you remove the chaff, as I've done in the book that will be called Stranger Music, it really does look good. It really does sound good."
In 1979, Cohen went back into the recording studio with co-producer Henry Lewy and emerged in September with Recent Songs, an album that returned to the largely acoustic style of Songs From A Room and that, employing oud player John Bilezikjian, also brought out Cohen's Near Eastern influences. But it also employed a mariachi band on two cuts, making for an eclectic, but appropriate musical background to a set of largely narrative songs. Jennifer Warnes was featured prominently singing backups and duets.
The album resumed Cohen's affiliation with Columbia Records, an affiliation that deserves at least a brief mention. "I have the most curious contract," Cohen notes, "and I'm trying to simplify it, because my contract is now about that thick [he holds his hands six inches apart], and it is the 1967 contract. Lawyers rejoice. Their eyes light up, when I present them with this contract because it takes, like a week and a half to read the thing. They're delighted. I've been trying to simplify it, and nobody will simplify it. It's such an arcane and clumsy elephant of a contract that lawyers love it. They talk hours about it."
Of his overall relationship with the label, Cohen says, "I've had a very agreeable association, frankly, especially with the international company, and I've always been able to sashays the principle that I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. I've been able to make a reasonable living, I mean, by no means up in the big league, but I've been able to send my kids to school and live a reasonable life and not have to do anything I don't want to do. So, I have really no complaints about the whole thing. But it's been an interesting association, and I think quite satisfactory for both parties, because I never sold enough records to make them dependent on my next record or to make them anxious about it, and on the other hand, I never lost them any money. [The records] seem to sell themselves in modest quantities with very little money necessary for promotion."
Little was heard from Leonard Cohen in the early 1980s, but in 1984, he came back on several fronts. During his absence from the scene, his work began to be embraced by the doom rock bands in England, and, for example, Nick Cave covered the song "Avalanche."
Cohen himself was represented first by a half-hour feature film, I Am A Hotel, which he wrote, scored and directed, and which won first prize at the Festival International de Television de Montreaux.
In September, Villard Books published Book Of Mercy, whose subject matter was listed as "meditations" on the copyright page and as "contemporary psalms" on the dust jacket. One might also call the 50 numbered prose poems "prayers," beatitudes" or even "confessions," as the poet spoke to his god, his love or his muse, seeking mercy. The result is perhaps Cohen's most disciplined and organized work of literature.
The book was followed in late 1984 by a new album, Various Positions, which represented a reunion with producer John Lissauer and again featured Jennifer Warnes as a prominent singer. Prior to its release, the album ran into trouble with the U.S. part of CBS, probably because Cohen's recent albums had not been big sellers.
"I once had a meeting with Mr. Yetnikoff," Cohen explains, referring to then CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff. "First of all, he listened to [one of the songs from the album], and he said, 'I think the bass isn't loud enough.' I said, 'Mr. Yetnikoff, why don't you mix it?' And then he said to me, 'Leonard, we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good.'"
It was a funny line at the time, but what it indicated, though Cohen didn't realize it, was that, amazingly, Columbia Records was not going to release Various Positions. "I was never told that they were going to pass on it," he says. "I was in Europe, and some executive was saying to me, 'I assume that the American album's coming out the same time as ours,' and I said, 'I assume so.' He said, 'Well, just let me check' and he checked through his book, and there was no mention of the record, and that was really the first time I found out."
The album, which reached #52 in the U.K., was finally released in the U.S. on the now-defunct Passport Records label, though Cohen claims the release couldn't have been more invisible. "I don't think they actually ever put it out," he says. "Maybe five or ten thousand records were released. I'm not sure whether it actually ever appeared except in New York City in tiny quantities if at all."
Infuriating as this treatment may be, Cohen has an oddly positive take on it. "It's not at all a disagreeable event when something like that happens," he says. "They don't put out Various Positions? I know that it's a damn good record. It's kind of nice that they don't put it out. It's kind of nice that they're that wrong. It's nice to have that."
Of course, it also meant that many Leonard Cohen fans didn't have the album, although the singer, who had just won a Juno Award in Canada for Best Movie Score for his collaboration with Lewis Furay on the "rock opera" Night Magic, undertook a world tour to promote the album, his first such extensive trip in a decade.
In 1986, Cohen turned actor, appearing on the popular TV show Miami Vice playing the head of Interpol. But his chief work for the year seems to have been his involvement in Jennifer Warnes's tribute album to him Famous Blue Raincoat. The album featured such new material as the ominous "First We Take Manhattan" and the lilting "Song of Bernadette," another paean to a female saint. Released toward the end of the year, the widely praised album reached #72 in the charts, while its single, "Ain't No Cure For Love," landed on both the Country and Adult Contemporary charts.
The record marked the beginning of what many called a "comeback" for Leonard Cohen, and this was continued in March of 1988, when CBS in Europe released I'm Your Man, an album on which Cohen, now singing in a noticeably deeper voice, used elaborate synthesizer backings for one of his best and most accessible collections.
On such songs as "Tower Of Song," the man who had long been cited as the poet of depression revealed a droll sense of humor. "I was born like this, I had no choice," he sang, "I was born with the gift of a golden voice." Actually, the humor had been in his work all along (and was especially apparent to anyone who had seen him in concert), but Cohen acknowledges that he made an effort to make his comic side more apparent on the album.
That didn't keep it from being a gallows humor much of the time, however, and it didn't prevent Cohen from investigating some of his favorite subjects. "Everybody Knows," perhaps the album's best song, is a catalog of social and romantic resignation, for example, that once again touches on infidelity. "Everybody knows that you've been faithful," Cohen sings, "give or take a night or two."
The album reached #52 in the U.K., and his hits collection re-charted as well. Cohen was only able to play three nights in London's Royal Albert Hall on his European tour. But in some parts of Europe, I'm Your Man sold even better. "It was a very strong record," Cohen notes, "and it outsold Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen in certain markets." Columbia Records even deigned to release it in the U.S. where Cohen embarked on an extensive concert tour.
The "comeback" only fueled the interest contemporary alternative rockers already had for Cohen, resulting in the release on November 19, 1991, of the tribute album I'm Your Fan, on which such performers as the Pixies, R.E.M., Lloyd Cole, James, John Cale, Nick Cave, Ian McCulloch and That Petrol Emotion covered Cohen's songs.
Cohen himself was sufficiently pleased with the collection to help with its promotion, though his remarks could be self-deprecatory. "I am touched by the effort," he said. "It's nice to know your songs have lasted that long, as long as a Volvo." And when discussing why his records were less popular in the U.S. than in Europe, he suggested, "Maybe it's because here they understand the lyrics."
Cohen turned in 1992 to his next album, originally titled Be For Real, but released by Columbia on November 24 under the title The Future. For once, his American record company, now run by Don Ienner, seemed to be behind him, though Cohen had been through so many record executives by this time, it was hard to believe.
"[Ienner] said, 'Leonard, you know, we love you more than some groups that sell five million copies,'" he recalls. "I said, 'Please love me less, and sell five million copies.' He set himself up for that one. But he said, 'Your integrity and your artistry is something we cherish very highly.' I said, 'Look, I got that part covered. Just treat me like a commodity. That's what I'm interested in. Whether the stuff is any good or great or not, I wrestle over that material all the time. That's not what I'm here for.'
"I was representing myself at this point. [Cohen took over his own affairs after the death of his lawyer.] That was very refreshing and made them rather uneasy because usually the artists don't come in and negotiate the contract. I started undertaking that function. I found it very invigorating and refreshing. I'll never let a lawyer do that for me again. This is one of the bonuses of the whole enterprise, to actually sit with the guys and talk about how much you're worth."
Clearly, Cohen's worth is starting to be recognized again, after a long time. The best evidence of this is the coming re-publication of the novels and the collection of songs and poems called Stranger Music that will be brought out by Knopf. "It's really happening to me, like, 30 years later," Cohen says.
"Not a single book of mine is in print in this country," he adds. "I couldn't get them to print it. It isn't as though I didn't try, incidentally. And it's very agreeable to have pieces of work that really are of quite respectable standards ignored and condemned. It just fleshes the thing out in an agreeable way. You know what I mean? It's like, you have these little defeats and failures that somehow dignify your own performance. Especially if you've been able to make a living, and you're not really living in some garret, and I really can't complain.
"So, it's very agreeable at 58 to see these books you wrote at 25, 28. I'm delighted. You do have that sense of vindication somehow. You do feel that you're standing in that long tradition of people who were really misunderstood in their time and then re-discovered."
One can't help wondering whether there are also works, like the unpublished novel and the unreleased album to which he's already alluded, that Cohen's fans might also discover for the first time. "Oh," he says, as the publicist for Columbia Records arrives to end this marathon interview, "There's a lot of stuff in the trunk."
Many thanks to Martin Beek for permitting |
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