Growing Old Disgracefully
by Ian Pearson
Page Two
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The morning after he received an honorary degree from his alma mater, McGill University, last June, Leonard Cohen, officer of the Order of Canada, newly minted Doctor of Letters, and contributor to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, led me into the small garden in the back of his Montreal home. On nearby boulevard St-Laurent, some South American musicians were practising and their exuberant tunes wafted over Cohen's fence from the open back door of their third-storey apartment. The sound of an Andean flute seemed appropriately soothing for a poet's garden.
Cohen looked up at the source of the music and grunted. Last year, I shot them," he said, pointing to a coat hanging just inside the doorway. "I like to sit out here and write, and the music was getting on my nerves. So I took my BB gun and hit that coat. That shut them up for a while." He laughed and flashed a mischievous grin.
He looked like someone a neighbour wouldn't mess with. Lean and dour in his black T-shirt and black jeans, Cohen had the air of a amiable gangster, a courtly man of experience who might give a greenhorn a few tips at the craps table at Caesars Palace. His strong, handsome features have persisted in age, although sagging jowls and deep lines have added a touch of Golda Meir to his Dustin Hoffman visage. He had been struggling to finish recording The Future and the weariness showed. (His working titled for the album was Busted, perhaps reflective of his overall mood.)
But he relaxed as he started talking and drinking a river of coffee. (This is a man who fills a large Melitta filter to the brim with ground coffee before he pours water over it.) We started by talking about the new informality in his songs. "I read somewhere, I think it was in Time, that as you get older the brain cells associated with anxiety begin to die," Cohen explained. "So regardless of your spiritual disciplines or your programmes for self-betterment, you start to feel better anyways. Maybe that's what is coming through in the songs. Also, there's just a whole lot of stuff you can't buy as you get older. I think crankiness is a very appropriate position for the old. Instead of having patience with all forms of bullshit, you want to hear it laid out in simple terms. It doesn't mean it's not complex, but it's not complicated. You want to hear how somebody loves somebody else, whether it's 'I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill' or 'There ain't no cure for love.'"
It was a simple goal, but the songwriter was having a hellish time fulfilling it. Cohen albums seem to appear about once every four years (and usually in years of presidential elections). The delay is not laziness but perfectionism. An outwardly friendly and contented man, he describes himself as a neurotic monster when he bangs his head against the songwriting process. "Composing hardly begins to describe what the process is," he explained dolefully, as if describing the worst disease afflicting mankind. "It's something like scavenging, something like farming in sand, something like scraping the bottom of the barrel. The process doesn't have any dignity. It is work of extreme poverty."
Cohen writes in longhand in tall ledger books. He can work on a song for years before he is happy with it, adding dozens of new verses until he comes up with a combination that satisfies him. Sitting at his back-yard table, he recounted the story of an encounter with Bob Dylan after a concert in Paris. Dylan praised a Cohen song called "Hallelujah," from the 1984 Various Positions album, which he had been doing in concert. "How long did it take you to write it?" Dylan asked.
"A year or two," replied Cohen, who was embarrassed because it had actually taken much longer than that. They talked further and Cohen mentioned his admiration for a Dylan song called "I and I" and asked the prolific songwriter how long it had taken him.
"About fifteen minutes," Dylan replied.
"So there's nothing to say about the process," Cohen said, "except you're either in that school or in this school. I'd much rather be in that school. If it would take Paradise Lost to say what I want to say, "I'd be ready to start it. But it would be nice to be able to do it with a haiku."
He showed me a recent notebook, a collage of false starts and discarded verses for songs that would end up on The Future. A clever line from "Closing Time" (probably the best song on the recording) -- "I loved you for your beauty / I admit it baby, sue me / you were in it for your beauty too" -- was ditched and became tamer: "I loved you for your beauty / but that doesn't make a fool of me..."
The song that had really terrorized him was called "Democracy Is Coming To The U.S.A.," (later shortened to "Democracy"). He started writing it as an overview of the political shifts in the world. "I wrote about eighty verses to it. I started over four years ago. In these eighty verses I have described the cosmos. Anything that happens, I have a verse for. In it, I touched on what I called the Russian honeymoon, and how it was going to break down. And I touched on the mess, the racial tension in the streets of American cities, that it had to explode. So there was a prophetic quality to the whole thing that was overtaken by events -- the Soviet empire did fragment and there were the uprisings in the cities. I felt a tremendous amount of work was down the drain just because I was a prophet without an alarm clock." Six verses out of the eighty appear in the final version.
At one point when the recording process had become stuck, Cohen fell back on the time-honoured rock tradition of artificial stimulants. He was no stranger to working under the influence. He had used dangerous amounts of speed to help him finish his second novel, Beautiful Losers, in 1965. He'd dropped acid before performing in Israel in 1972. The 1977 sessions for Death of a Ladies' Man were a drunken fiasco. His 1988 European tour to promote I'm Your Man was fuelled by red wine. The solution for his creative problems with the recording of The Future might be a fix of the Red Needle.
Leonard Cohen invented the Red Needle many years ago in the 115-degree heat of Needles, California. It was an ideal hot-weather drink, a lethal mixture of tequila, cranberry juice, fresh fruit, and Sprite. On a sweltering spring night in Los Angeles, the Red Needle seemed just the thing to loosen up the band in the studio.
Cohen was about to record Irving Berlin's "Always." He was fond of the song, and the lyrics seemed a simple distillation of everything Cohen tried to put in his own love songs: "I'll be loving you, always / with a love that's true, always." But he wanted it down and dirty, so he enlisted the help of veteran rhythm-and-blues producer Steve Lindsey, who had worded with the likes of Luther Vandross and Ray Charles. Lindsey considered Cohen a genius, one of the best songwriters of his era, but he also knew his reputation as a "poetic playboy" and for years he had been hearing of his "antics in the studio."
Most notorious were the infamous Phil Spector sessions in 1977, when the crazed producer -- revered for his heavily orchestrated "wall of sound" top-40 hits in the early sixties -- bulldozed over Cohen's folkie sensibility. (The result was the album Death of a Ladies' Man, which Cohen disowned when it was released.) The late songwriter Doc Pomus described the chemistry between Spector and Cohen: "They were really gettin' loaded. They were like two drunks staggerin' around." But through the alcoholic haze, the producer took complete control of the music. Cohen constantly complained about his lack of input into the creation of his own songs. One night Spector, a bottle of Manischewitz wine in one hand and a gun in the other, put his arm around his singer's neck, cocked the gun, and said, "Leonard, I love you."
The entire Spector episode was both "hilarious and unpleasant" to Cohen, a low point in his life and career. But he could still crank up that kind of craziness when he wanted to, and the "Always" session became completely unhinged. "I don't know why, but I don't often come into the studio equipped with several bottles of tequila and cranberry juice," Cohen explains. "But I did, and I started making this cocktail and people started drinking it, and then we started playing."
Lindsey had assembled a crack team of L.A. session musicians and gospel back-up singers. He had worked out a New Orleans-style R & B arrangement for the tune but Cohen wasn't pleased. "It's gotta be sexy," he insisted. So Lindsey slowed down the song and added a strip-club beat to it.
Cohen, to all intents and purposes, became the stripper. He tortured the lyrics, trying for high notes and phrasing that his cracked husk of a voice couldn't possibly achieve. It was the performance of a man going naked with emotion, ignoring all his flaws as he proclaimed "I will understand, always, always, always" in off-key notes as fluid as tar sand.
The band, inspired by Cohen's over-the-top performance and Red Needles, jammed all night. Each version of the song stretched out longer and longer, lasting as long as twenty minutes. The musicians filed out, some raving that it was the most fun they had ever had in a studio.
Cohen stayed on with the production staff to try a couple more vocal dubs while the creative juices (and the Red Needles) were still flowing. He sang one verse and then paused for the instrumental break. In the producer's booth, which didn't have a sightline on the vocal booth, Lindsey waited for Cohen to pick up the cue for the second verse. Nothing happened, just silence. Lindsey walked over to the vocal booth and found Cohen asleep on the floor. "I fell down in the recording booth," Cohen recalls. "I was so far gone I couldn't stand up. I just had to take a little rest." Decades ago, Cohen confounded interviewers (Pierre Berton in particular) by claiming that he was searching for a state of grace. Now he was growing old disgracefully. Gloriously so.
Some listeners to "Always" might wish there was a neighbour with a BB gun to stop the racket. Others will revel in the sheer anarchy of the performance. An executive at A&M Records was so taken with the raunchy feel of the song that he hired Steve Lindsey to produce the next album by Aaron Neville, the majestic New Orleans R & B singer whose solo albums have been hampered by saccharine production. (On his new recording, Neville will sing a duet with Linda Ronstadt of "The Song of Bernadette," composed by Cohen and Jennifer Warnes.)
Leonard Cohen, the hardest-working man in rhythm and blues? When Cohen played a tape of "Always" for me in Montreal last June, he had his doubts about including it on the record. "What do you think, should I put it on?" I ventured that he might release it as a B-side to a single. "Yeah," he replied. "Do people want to pay money to hear me fooling around? I don't know. But the band is so hot, there's something so warm-hearted about it. I'm not convinced it should be on the album. But I don't have anything else. It's all taken so long to do."
At this point, he had completed seven of the nine songs. Two were cover versions -- "Always" and "Be For Real," written by seventies Stax soul singer Frederick Knight -- and one was a piece of chamber music composed for a Ted Allan play called Helen's Song. (The instrumental appears on the album as "Tacoma Trailer.") Cohen was trying to complete songs called "Light as the Breeze," a bathetic hymn to cunnilingus that ranks as one of his weakest compositions, and "If You Could See What's Coming Next," which eventually became the defiant title song "The Future."
This prophecy about the fate of society was so dire that it made the Book of Isaiah look like a forecast for mixed cloud and scattered showers. In the final version, the gruesome chorus ended: "I've seen the future, baby: it is murder." Cohen was having his doubts about unleashing this vision on the public. "It's so grim. I've recorded it twice now, and I've thrown away both versions. I don't know whether I want to say it. I wrote this song a long time ago. I was thinking last night that maybe I've already laid this out in 'Everybody Knows' [from I'm Your Man]. Maybe I don't feel like laying it out again."
"It sounds like a few anxiety cells are holding on," I suggested.
"Yeah," Cohen replied. "But I should feel worse about these things."
As we were talking, there was a scrabbling noise on the bricks beside our feet. We watched as two yellow jackets grappled with each other on the ground. "You'd better avert your hearing aid," Cohen joked, but we both watched the violent coupling with fascination.
"Are they fighting or are they mating?" I asked pop's foremost scribe of sexuality.
Cohen paused, glanced at the wasps, looked back at me, and asked, "Are you married?"
Stability has never been a major component of Cohen's life. He describes the myriad women, the endless chain of hotel rooms, the swings between monasticism and hedonism as "somehow part of the whole dismal enterprise." His womanizing is the stuff of legend. Everyone seems to have a Leonard Cohen story of a fling here, a proposition there. A Toronto actress tells the story of a one-night stand with Cohen in the seventies. She awoke at 4 a.m. to find her paramour putting on his coat and slinking out the door. "Leonard, where are you going?" she inquired sleepily. "Gotta go. Poet. Wandering man," came the reply.
He's documented his indiscretions in his works; anyone looking for an Albert Goldman-type expose of Cohen need look no further than his 1978 book Death of a Lady's Man, a harrowing (and unbearably self-indulgent) account of the disintegration of a long-term relationship. It appears after he had broken up with his longtime companion Suzanne Elrod (not the Suzanne of the song), the mother of his son, Adam, now twenty, and his daughter, Lorca, eighteen.
In fact, breakdowns and Zen meditation have almost become tools for his painful writing process. Before he wrote the songs for I'm Your Man, he suffered a major breakdown and turned to a psychiatrist for antidepressants. "I couldn't get out of bed and couldn't leave the house," Cohen confides. "And that was the best part of it. The drug that he gave me seemed to put a bottom on how low I could go and a ceiling on how high I could go. I felt like I was living in an aquarium full of cotton wool. I seemed to be able to get a little bit of work done, not too much. At a certain moment one night, I just threw away the safety net of the pills. And then I came around. I don't want to emphasize this but the work does tend to break you down. Maybe the work is a bit about breaking down. Somehow when you have broken down, you find a place where you can't lie. Otherwise your defences are so skilful and your bullshit is so abundant that you can come up with something."
In a 1988 interview on CBC Stereo's "Brave New Waves," Cohen blamed his involvement with Zen Buddhism for the breakdown, turning to the microphone and urging, "I warn all you listeners out there to stay away from Zen, it's a very dangerous thing." In light of his continued practice of Zen, he now explains that caution. "Well, it is dangerous if you think it exists as salvation," he says. "Look at it that way, then you're just going to get yourself into a religion that is especially rigorous, while you have perfectly good religions that are not so rigorous and severe, like Judaism and Christianity. You might just as well join the Marines, if you're interested in that kind of life. The joke is that Rinzai Zen are the Marines of the spiritual world. It looks very gung ho. And it is rigorous. But if you're going to go into it for that, forget it. There are better and more fruitful kinds of disciplines around."
His own involvement with Zen revolves around his relationship with his teacher, eighty-five-year-old Joshu Sasaki, whom Cohen calls Roshi. His main reason for spending most of his time in Los Angeles is to be close to Roshi, but he describes it as a friendship, not a religious commitment, similar to his bond with Irving Layton. "I was never interested in Zen," Cohen explains. "As he said to me once, 'Oh Leonard, twenty years I know you, I never try to give you my religion.' It's true. I never heard from him the vaguest invitation to abandon Judaism and embrace Buddhism. That doesn't seem what our friendship is about."
"But Roshi's great. If you have an appetite for that kind of simplification in your life, to hang out with a guy who doesn't really speak good English, whom you like very much, is a good way to discipline your speech or writing. You've got to get very, very clear if you hang out and drink with somebody who doesn't really speak English. So the conversation gets very intuitive and very clear. And to be able to write that way is a great goal."
Apart from his loyalty to Roshi, Cohen does submit to the rigours of Zen. He often arises at 4:30 a.m. and drives the eight minutes from his flat in mid-town L.A. to the zendo (meditation centre) he helped establish with some fellow students a few years ago. He also spends a month each year at a Zen retreat in New Mexico or northern California. A week of that month is spent in a zazen, which involves meditating for fourteen hours a day. "It's good to sit in the fires of your own distress," he says. "It really does seem to burn a whole lot of shit away."
But, forever the blocked writer, Cohen is not above using the experience to solve a song. "I tend to use everything for writing, so consequently I'm a very bad Zen student. Because when I go into the zendo, I go in with a song and I'm working on a rhyme for 'orange' right away. Other people are, I suppose, training for some higher end, but I'm trying to finish a song. It's all I've ever been doing for the past twenty years in the zendo."
The rest of his existence in L.A., Cohen says, has been a relentless routine of writing and recording. His recording pursuits have kept him closeted for the past two years. "I don't know Los Angeles. I don't know a cafe' in L.A., I don't know where anything's happening," he says. "I have my friendship with Jennifer Warnes, but I think I saw Jenny once last year. And there are some of the older students around Roshi that I bump into in a silent sort of way. I really don't have much of a life. You know a sweet moment in my life is every morning when my daughter comes up to my kitchen and we have a coffee together."
Lorca, who finished high school last year and now is working as a production assistant in the recording industry, lives with Cohen in a flat near Crenshaw Boulevard. Adam, described by his father as "a wonderful singer and a wonderful dancer" whose interest in rap and black dance music has rubbed off on his old man, enrolled in the University of Syracuse last September. In 1991, he was in a serious car accident in Guadeloupe and was jet-ambulanced to Toronto with a fractured neck, broken ribs, a smashed pelvis, and collapsed lung. His father suspended all his work and spent four months in a North York hotel, visiting Adam every day. Cohen is eternally grateful for the hospital care that saved his son's life, but considers the whole experience too overwhelming to talk about. "If you're a parent, you don't have to explain these things," he says.
For all his supposed reclusiveness, Cohen has also found time for his relationship with Rebecca De Mornay. He refuses to discuss his current personal life, but he does allow that he met De Mornay years ago through a mutual friend, the director Robert Altman. And he credits her with conceptualizing the sound on two of the new songs. "She's a very good songwriter and has a very good musical sense," he says of the actress who wrote the title song for a kung fu movie when she was fifteen. "When I was writing the song called 'Anthem,' I might have continued writing it for another ten years. I said to her, 'I've lost all perspective on this song, so why don't you produce it? It's like a movie, just take charge. I've been working on it so long and you seem to hear it finished.' So we went back to the studio and she directed the sessions."
De Mornay also served as a muse for many of the new songs. "I find there's usually somebody in my life from whom I'm drawing enormous comfort and nourishment," he says. "You know that famous dedication: 'To so-and-so, without whom this wouldn't be possible.' I always find there is someone in my life whom I can describe, 'Without whom this couldn't have happened.'" The Future is dedicated to De Mornay, and the liner notes quote Genesis 24 about virtuous Rebecca who drew water for Abraham's thirsty servant: "Rebecca came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder; and she went down into the well, and drew water; and I said unto her, Let me drink, I pray thee." For once in his life, Cohen's romantic thirst appears to be slaked.
It's hard to reconcile the different parts of Leonard Cohen: the lonely heart and the ladies' man, the ascetic and the tequila drinker, the depressed writer and the funny and warm person. Irving Layton sees Cohen's contradictions as those of any great artist. "There's a conflict, of course, between the saint and the sinner," says the eighty-year-old poet, who has known Cohen for forty years. "Leonard's always had yearnings for sainthood. And at the same time, there's certainly been a strong streak of hedonism in him, as there is in almost every poet and every artist. It's because the artist is dedicated to pleasure and bringing pleasure to others particularly. And if he takes a little bit himself in giving pleasure to others, so much the better."
At the video shoot of "Closing Time," the joy was starting to flow around 10 p.m., eight hours after the star's arrival. Cohen and his band were on stage, lip-synching the song while the camera pored over their faces. The band was getting giddy. Cohen planted himself as solidly as a tree in centre stage, clenching his fists, mouthing the lyrics, and staring resolutely into the mid-distance. The back-up singers -- Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen -- were vamping outrageously beside Cohen, dancing provocatively and shooting delicious come-hither looks at him every time he glanced their way.
"Oh we're drinking and we're dancing / and there's nothing really happening / the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night," Cohen sang, and Rebecca De Mornay trapped his stare as she danced seductively behind the camera. He continued: "And my very close companion / gets me fumbling gets me laughing / she's a hundred but she's wearing something tight." De Mornay, who was in her early thirties and wearing a tight green sweater and a snug linen skirt, suggestively started toying with her fingers at the edge of her lips. As his very close companion continued to swoon and gyrate, Cohen broke up on stage. "You guys were really beautiful," Cohen said in a lounge-singer homily at the end of the take. Unlike a lounge singer, he really meant it.
The director, Curtis Wehrfritz, was pleased, but he wanted a close-up of Cohen putting a bit more emotion into the song. De Mornay had a plan. She asked for a pair of wooden crates to be placed in front of the stage beside the camera. The camera started rolling and the tape began playing. Cohen started a deadpan delivery of the song, more in his prophet than in his playboy mode. De Mornay and Perla Batalla kicked off their shoes, climbed onto the crates, and started gyrating like go-go dancers. A metre or so away from his face, De Mornay fixed her blue eyes on Cohen and pumped her hips. "The women tear their blouses off / the men they dance on the polka dots.../ it's closing time," sang Cohen, and De Mornay took the words as cue for a mock striptease. She pulled out the front of her sweater from under her skirt and then tantalizingly gestured with her hands in front of her chest.
The singer responded with an intensely erotic gaze. He sang every word to De Mornay, and came up with a true performance under the most artificial of circumstances. The song ended, and De Mornay turned to Wehrfritz and laughed, "We really put a sparkle in his eye."
Cohen climbed off the stage. Ever the gentlemen with Old World manners, he bent down to put on De Mornay's shoes for her. The gloomy-poet-turned-bard-of-the-bedsits looked up at his friends and the crew and pronounced, "That was fun."
