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...I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, |
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The following article and photograph appeared in
First Avenue In-House Magazine, January 13-26, 1999.
The article is reprinted with permission.
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by Bill Van Dyk
Leonard Cohen's first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in 1967, the same year that the Beatles, at the height of their popularity, released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cohen sounded nothing like the Beatles, or any other pop/rock act of the day. The arrangements were sparse, even severe, consisting largely of classical acoustic guitar, mandolin, and violin. Cohen's voice was equally sparse, and deep, and dark, and brooding. One of the first lyrics I heard included these striking lines: And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
I was completely absorbed by him, but I never even tried to play him for my friends. Cohen was a private indulgence, whom I listened to late at night with the lights out; the mirror, I thought, of my deepest soul -- the part you did not expose to even your best friend when you are 15 and think you might actually like girls. I sought out his books of poetry: Parasites of Heaven, Flowers for Hitler, Let Us Compare Mythologies. And before I was out of high school I read the brilliant, obscene, and intoxicating novel Beautiful Losers, a gush of orgasmic narrative that forever demolished every remaining conception I had of love as a delicate waltz of chivalric gestures and sentimental aphorisms. From Beautiful Losers I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality. I remember first listening to New Skin for the Old Ceremony on the day of a huge blizzard in Chicago. I was up in my dorm room on the third floor, alone, with a glass of wine and a candle, watching the wet, thick snow form a cavernous lip over the edge of the roof above my window when I first heard what might well be Cohen's most definitive song "Who by Fire." The lyrics are simple, direct, but as unforgiving as granite: how can one approach God? Through drugs? Through suffering? Through power? By "his lady's command?" And the unforgiving, insistent response: "Who shall I say is calling?" Minutes later, he was wailing about singing songs and telling lies "to lie between your matchless thighs." Nobody but nobody brought the carnal and the spiritual together like Cohen. We had been brought up to believe that sex was an embarrassing bodily function, at best, or a degrading act of indecent self-indulgence at worst. Even the most progressive-minded of my friends could approve of sex only as an expression of emotional intimacy, an accessory to a defined social relationship. Cohen introduced me to the idea that sex could be a conduit of grace and beauty with which one could balance upon the chaos of the universe. It was the conventional and corrosive habits of so-called "civilization" that were the real enemies of the soul. The only meaningful connection to reality was through the beauty of desire, the glimpse of a woman's naked back, the mercy of her graciousness, the ecstasy of abandonment to passion. Sometimes I miss those days when hardly anybody had heard of him, when he was like a wonderful, well-kept secret, but millions of listeners are grateful that Cohen has finally begun to receive the recognition he so richly deserves. Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk |
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Many thanks to Bill Van Dyk for
"nailing" it
and then sharing it with all of us.
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I was an adolescent at the time, and I was certainly
drowning. I was confronted with millions of intense desires and not a single
possibility of gratification. And here's this song about a man on a lonely
tower, watching me drown. It meant something.
