He's our man
Montreal Gazette - March 07, 2008 by Juan Rodriguez
(Photo: Gazette file photo)
"Show me slowly what I only know the limits of / Dance me to the end of love."
- Leonard Cohen, 1984
"They're not gonna get us! They're not gonna get us!" growled Cohen when I bumped into him on his beloved St. Laurent Blvd., arm in arm with his musical muse and mate Anjani Thomas, two years ago.
His smile was as charmingly crooked as ever, but there was a wildness in his eyes I hadn't previously recognized. The source of his urgent tone was money: His manager in L.A. had ripped him off to the tune of $5 million, largely while he was holed up in a Zen retreat in Mount Baldy, California, leaving him with $150,000. He had returned to Montreal, if not to renew what early in his career he called "neurotic affiliations," at least to regroup and start all over again. "What can I do? I had to go to work," Cohen told Maclean's in August 2005. "I have no money left. I'm not saying it's bad; I have enough of an understanding of the way the world works to understand that these things happen."
These days good things are happening for the poet-singer, whose early meditations (Suzanne, Bird on a Wire) have touched generations and whose later songs (First We Take Manhattan, The Future) have been prescient in so-called postmodern times. This Monday at a ceremony in New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Cohen will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the first Montrealer so honoured.
And in May, at 72, he embarks on his first tour in 15 years. This time it's at least partially about making a few shekels towards the proverbial nest egg. A cruel twist of fate has forced him to work for his supper when by all rights he should be enjoying the rewards of a richly creative life. Complaints have rarely been part of Cohen's nature, but word has it he's anxious about a tour that has a lot more riding on it than his reputation for writing mystic songs laden with spirituality and sensuality.
That the old man engaging in the young man's tour game is as much about practicality as anything else echoes something he said 24 years ago: "I don't think there is any other consideration but practical. I've never been able to disassociate the spiritual from the practical. I think that what we call the spirit or spirituality is the most intense form of the practical."
The ransacking of his financial assets has put his recent output in relief. There was the long-awaited publication of Book of Longing - a work so long in coming that friends called it Book of Prolonging, which nevertheless became the first volume of poetry to top the Canadian best-seller list, in 2006. There was Blue Alert, an album of his songs sung by Anjani, and the adoring tribute-documentary I'm Your Man, in which he performed a song backed by U2. There's even his recitation of Joni Mitchell's song The Jungle Line that ends Herbie Hancock's Grammy-winning album of the year. And there is a new album on the way; not for nothing did he walk away with some 200 works-in-progress from Mount Baldy.
And, as he said in 1984, "I know I have to go on a tour or nobody will know about the record, and if nobody knows about the record, it defeats the idea of the song moving from lip to lip, and it also makes it impossible for me to support my family."
His attitude towards money, from a man whose early literary career was helped by a trust fund from his father, has always been as ironic as his line "I was born with the gift of a golden voice" in the Tower of Song. (His seemingly limited voice has always been the bane of his existence.)
Cohen was unhesitatingly upfront when asked in a CBC-TV interview in 1966 - the year he started getting serious about singing - what writing a pop song gave him that writing a poem or a novel didn't: "Well, the money's better." Nearly 30 years later he told the New York Times: "I have been able to satisfy a certain principle, which was that I didn't want to work for pay, but I wanted to be paid for my work." And when he became a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk - taking the Dharma name Jikhan (meaning silent one) at the retreat he inhabited on Mount Baldy, California - it was because his guru Joshu Roshi, whom he served as a personal assistant and drinking partner, "wanted me to do it for tax purposes."
As for appearing like someone who is in control, he smiled in 1966: "I thank you for buying my cover story of someone who has their act together." Indeed, no sooner had he brought out his first album in 1967 than he signed away rights for early classics like Suzanne, only recovering them a few years ago.
Then again, the songs he called "the European blues" have had limited currency on the pop charts in the U.S. "I've been lucky. Nobody's twisted my arm," he told Crawdaddy magazine founder Paul Williams in 1975. "Perhaps because nobody ever saw any great profits to be made from my work." In fact, in 1984 Columbia Records refused to release his album Various Positions in the U.S. When he made his comeback with I'm Your Man in 1988, he cracked: "I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work." While I'm Your Man spent 17 weeks atop Norway's charts, it took 34 years for Songs of Leonard Cohen to go gold in the U.S.
In a certain stage in your life, Cohen told London's Observer in 2001, "it becomes very clear that your time is not unlimited. Tennessee Williams said: 'Life is a fairly well-written play, except for the third act.' I'm maybe at the third act, where you have the benefit of the experience of the first two acts. But how it ends is nobody's business and is generally accompanied by some disagreeable circumstances."
He uttered those words while manager Kelley Lynch was in the midst of skimming his retirement funds and telling the world she worked on Cohen time: "You really can't tell with Leonard. He doesn't like deadlines. We're keeping it loose." But after leaving Mount Baldy in 1999, he decided to travel: "Our little road man felt like going for a good long drive," said Lynch, who has disappeared from view after Cohen won a civil suit against her.
The poet claimed not to be angry over the embezzlement, telling CTV (in February 2006): "There's something amusing about it, too. I think because the wipe-out was so astonishingly thorough, you know." The artist who claimed he never looked at a financial statement put things in perspective: "I don't feel deprived in any sense. I like a room with just a table and a chair and a bed ... that's my idea of beauty. I think simplicity is really voluptuous." A few months later he told the Washington Post: "It hasn't hit me yet, and I hope it never will. But talk about getting back into the world with a vengeance."
Born in Westmount in 1934, money was not something Cohen had to worry about while he was growing up. His father was in the clothing business, and the son favoured sharply-cut suits. Like other Jews named Cohen, Katz, Kagan, etc., the family claimed to be descended from the Kohanim.
"I had a very Messianic childhood. I was told I was a descendent of Aaron, the high priest," he said in 1967. (Or, as he sang in 1992's The Future: "I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible.") His high school yearbook lists his ambition as "world-famous orator," and when he enrolled at McGill in 1951 he became president of the debating union. He fell in with poets like Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, who published his first book Let Us Compare Mythologies in 1956. Although as a teenager he sang in a country music trio, The Buckskin Boys, his voice - dour and grave beyond its years - lent itself to poetry readings. Poetry, he said, was a way to meet young women.
Thus he's been described as the "Lord Byron of rock 'n' roll," "the bard of the boudoir," "the high priest of pathos," "the poet laureate of pessimism," "the grocer of despair," "the godfather of gloom," "the prince of bummers."
Mod star Paul Weller said Cohen's work was "music to slit your wrists by," and the rep stuck. "I got a lot of that over the years," he said. "Google despair and melancholy, and my name comes up!"
Then Curt Cobain sang the Nirvana song Pennyroyal Tea: "Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally."
He was 32 when he started peddling his songs around New York City. Agents asked him: "Aren't you a little old for this game?" In 1988 he told Musician magazine: "As you get older, you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality." And in 2001 he said: "It's wonderful to hear a 20-year-old speaking about love. As the Talmud says, there's good wine in every generation. But I love to hear an old singer lay it out. And I'd like to be one of them."
Today there are 1,364 cover versions of his songs worldwide, according to the definitive fan site LeonardCohenFiles.com run by Jarkko Arjatsalo of Finland since 1995.
He once said he wasn't interested in posterity, telling the CBC's Adrienne Clarkson in 1966: "I'm not interested in an insurance plan for my work," and soon followed up by refusing the Governor-General's Award, not through any anti-Canadianism but because it seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. By 1993 he had learned to laugh at his voice and his country, accepting a Juno Award: "Only in a country like Canada could I get the best male vocalist of the year." In 2003 he was made a Companion to the Order of Canada by now Governor-General Clarkson.
"The Canadians are like the Jews," Cohen told Paul Williams in 1975. "They're continually examining their identity. We're on the edge of a great empire - Canadians have always understood that we have to go along with the United States to a certain extent. But even though article after article (in the Canadian press) threatens us with the extinction of our identity, I don't think anybody in Canada seriously believes that we're going to become Americans."
And to the extent that Montrealers are ultra-sensitive about identity - within North America, Canada and Quebec - listening to Cohen's earnest youthful tones on his first album and the savvy baritone in later years is to oscillate between Montreal past and present (from near Neanderthal to cutting-edge postmodern). It's an era when Cohen's mythic omnipresence has set the city's history in relief, which is perhaps why either Songs of Leonard Cohen or I'm Your Man perennially wind up near the top of local lists of best Québécois albums.
"I live in Montreal, which is a French city, in Quebec, which is a French country," he told Williams in '75. "I live as a minority writer, almost in exile. These are very special Canadian problems which to me form the Canadian character, because we're very much involved in this notion of what is minority and what is majority; and yet while these questions are in the air, it seems that everybody has space.
"So in a sense I live like a foreigner in my own city, cut off by the fact that I don't speak French that well. I can get by, but it's not a tongue I could ever move around in a way that would satisfy the appetites of the mind or the heart."
Politesse and modesty go a long way in Cohen's book. "What the real high calling behind any life is," he told Robert Sward in 1984, "is very difficult for me to determine. It goes all the way from thinking that nothing any of us do is terribly important to feeling that every person has a divine spark and is here to fulfill a special mission. So between those two positions, there's lots of space."
Asked point blank by Paul Williams in 1975 what he was trying to achieve in song, Cohen replied: "To create a vapour and a mist, to make oneself attractive, to master it, to keep busy and avoid the poolroom and try to get good at what you're doing. Most of the time you're just scraping the bottom of the barrel to find any kind of voice at all. It could be a few words, a tone of voice, two chords together - it's a rag-picker's trade as I practice it; I don't stand on the mountain and receive tablets."
"Sometimes I can't stand the sound of my voice," he told British magazine Q in 1991. "The first and second records it sounded right. Then I stopped being able to find the right voice for the songs. The songs were good and the intention was good but the voice wasn't really up to it. I lost it for a while. When I did Various Positions (1984) it was coming back, and when I got to I'm Your Man (1988) I was in full stride." That left 15 years when his voice didn't feel right, said Q, to which the poet who battled depression for a chunk of his life cracked: "What the hell. Some guys never get it right."
The creative process, he told Pico Iyer in 1998, is "more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey-cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it. And it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful, and yet there's something inevitable about it."
He's always held the song "in high regard, because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events." Yet sometimes he'll allow himself to think: "These songs are really good. And it's really wonderful that they have been written, and more wonderful that they should have found a place in the heart. And sometimes I'll hear my voice, and I think: This guy has got to be the great comedian of his generation. These are hilarious: hilariously inept, hilariously solemn and out of keeping with the times; hilariously inappropriate."
It's no use getting a swelled head in this game, he said in 1994: "You're not just talking about Randy Newman, who's fine, or Bob Dylan, who's sublime, you're talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you're talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don't think it's particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet. I really do feel the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write.
"But I don't fool myself, I know the game I'm in. When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song,' it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime - and I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."
He was plugging Book of Longing when he told the PBS News Hour in 2006: "You know, you scribble away for one reason or another. You're touched by something that you read. You want to number yourself among these illustrious spirits for one advantage or another, some social, some spiritual. It's just ambition that tricks you into the enterprise, and then you discover whether you have any actual aptitude for it or not. So I've always thought that I, you know, do my job OK."
Then Cohen chose to read a short piece called Thousands, that he said, "speaks to the point."
"Out of the thousands who are known or who want to be known as poets, maybe one or two are genuine and the rest are fakes, hanging around the sacred precincts, trying to look like the real thing. Needless to say, I am one of the fakes, and this is my story."
Yet this is the man who wrote: "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."
And that's where Leonard Cohen, our man, has always been standing.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
Check out The Gazette's Gallery: Cohen's life in pictures.
Thanks to Michael Lutomski and Dick Straub
for the heads up on this article.
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