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Leonard Cohen in Concert
Who is Leonard Cohen?
You know, that's something you should never ask youself. There were certain tribes of Indians in North America and when the white man came, they tried to give them mirrors, but they didn't want them. They said: "Your face is for other people to look at, not for you to look at." So I never ask that question...who is Leonard Cohen?
What aspects of your life continue to be important to you?
 Right now, as I'm sitting in this theatre where I'm going to play tonight, the thing that is most on my mind is the concert. When I'm on tour what I most think about are the concerts, I don't have any plans beyond that.
Life, women, death...are still going on in your work?
I think you've forgotten one more thing -- taxes.
Tell us about your poetical work.
When I was nine years old, my father died; and I went to his closet and took one of his ties. I unsewed it, and I wrote some words and I put them into the tie. Then I buried it in the garden, behind the house. That was the first time that I wrote anything. The first time that I needed to write anything. It's been like that ever since. There are times, somehow, things happen in my life and I have to write something to meet with what has happened to me. It's hard to say in which moment you decide what you become, what we become. Maybe if when my father died I'd decided to climb a mountain, because Montreal
is a city beside a mountain, if I had decided to walk to the top of the mountain, maybe I would have become an explorer, like these men, a mountain climber. But what happened to me was that I needed to write something down on a little piece of paper. I think it's a mystery what it leads us to be, what we are in this moment. If you ask someone on a bus where he is going, he can give you the name of the street, or a place, but he can't give you a description of his life. So, you can ask me what I'm going to do tonight, and I'll say I'm going to try to give a concert, but I can't answer you where I'm really going, because I don't know.
Is Leonard Cohen a good actor?
It's a good question. How much of an actor is a singer? I don't know. I think that an actor... I think that acting is a real profession. I could never determine and plan a kind of personality, so I would never be a good actor, but as a singer I get lost in the song.
How do you remember your return to the USA in 1976, from Hydra, and your first contact with the songs by artists like Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan or Joan Baez?
All those people are alive except Phil Ochs. I remember Phil Ochs very well and the days of the Chelsea Hotel. We had a bowl of soup together maybe two weeks before he died. He was obsessed by delusions that he controled the world. He believed that the Director of the CIA took orders from him. In a certain way he understood this experiment that we called "The Sixties" had collapsed and he was so closely identified with the spirit of "The Sixties" that he collapsed with it. It was not very attractive to see him living in the
streets, his hands scratched from fighting, his face was distorted.
He knew that money had taken over the revolution. He knew that there were powers that this movement could not even face up to and he knew he couldn't live forever as The Hero of the Revolution. And these and many other more complicated reasons broke him. But this sense of something being lost, some glory being lost, I think, moved him over the edge. But I remember him as being very funny, and I'm glad we had that bowl of soup.
The other people you mention, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins...sometimes we meet on the road. Two years ago Bob and I met after his concert in Paris. We talked around a table like this. We talked about professional things. It was a very pleasant afternoon, very good conversation. Sometimes I run into Judy Collins in the streets of New York when I'm there.
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