A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen

by Liel Leibovitz

  Revolver, the Beatles’ next UK release, came out in August 1966. From the very first track, “Taxman,” the album declared war on everything that had come before. The song’s lyrics, complaining about the steep taxes the band had to pay on its considerable earnings, are sharp and caustic, a far cry from the love-me-dos of 1962. And the guitars are grating, the result of the recording tape having been fed into the recorder and played backward, a new effect the Beatles discovered during the making of Revolver and used giddily and often. “Eleanor Rigby”—a symphonic production for four violins, two violas, and two cellos—was recorded with microphones placed very close to the instruments, giving the song a raw sound. And the album’s last song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is a single C-chord played by George Harrison on a tamboura with a repetitively beating drum and Lennon’s voice routed from the recording console into the studio’s speaker to accommodate the singer’s request that he sound “like the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain top.”16 In other words, Revolver sounded like nothing else.

  And it was hardly alone. 1966 was the year of transforming sound. In May, Dylan was booed as a Judas for taking the stage at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall backed up by the Hawks, electric guitars and all. In July he crashed his Triumph motorcycle near his home in Woodstock and stopped performing for nearly a decade. The Rolling Stones introduced the sitar on “Paint It, Black,” while the 13th Floor Elevators played the electric jug on their influential first album.

  New instruments and new recording techniques were all de rigueur, but new ideas were more important: Staying home as his brothers toured Japan, Brian Wilson, hopped up on acid and Eastern thought, wrote most of Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ masterpiece. With lyrics musing about the fragility of the ego backed up by bass harmonicas and banjos, the album was as much a philosophical triumph as a musical achievement. Together with Revolver it heralded the psychedelic era, declaring that rock was less interested in harmonies and aesthetics than it was in consciousness and its limits, in trance and transcendence.

  There was nothing inherently strange about rock and roll’s heady turn. Art forms, after all, mature like every other living thing, spending their early years learning boundaries before developing a sense of self that ripens with time. But rock seemed to have come of age overnight. One day Lennon was the cheeky boy with the bowl cut and the pretty love songs; the next he was telling Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard that his band and the whole genre he represented were destined to replace other, ancient, more established forms of faith. “Christianity will go,” he said. “It will vanish and sink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.”17 The statement sparked controversy, and Lennon was forced to apologize, but most of his detractors failed to realize just how sincere the Beatle had been. He wasn’t a bored rock star flippantly bragging about his fame; he was stating the unofficial credo of the annus mirabilis of 1966, namely that rock was not entertainment but something closer to religion, a path to salvation paved by bass, guitar, and drums.

  It was hardly an original idea. It informed much of religious life prior to the dawn of Christianity, with cults whose celebrations relied heavily on music as a conduit of ecstasy. The Eleusinian Mysteries ceremonies, held annually for millennia to celebrate Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, included the ingesting of hallucinogenic substances, trancelike dancing, loud music, and lewd behavior, the very elements that were now said to be corrupting the souls of the young. Music’s power did not diminish with the rise of the church: Augustine, despite heeding Plato’s warning about the temptations of poetry, performance, and music, nonetheless found them to be a great spiritual engine. In his Confessions he described a moment of elation that occurred whenever he attended church and heard a moving hymn. “The music surged in my ears,” he wrote, “truth seeped into my heart, and feelings of devotion overflowed.”18 The same sentiment is expressed in Romans, which informs us that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”19 The most seminal Jewish prayer is the Shema (“hear”), which begins “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.”20 Of all the senses at our disposal, it is hearing—rather than vision or touch or smell—that connects us to the divine.

  Theology and musicology both have much to say about this fact, but they agree on two foundational insights. First, music is paramount because, like human existence, it is experienced first and foremost through the passage of time. “Because we live through time,” wrote the American theologian Don E. Saliers, “music is perhaps our most natural medium for coming to terms with time, and attending to the transcendent elements in making sense of our temporality. Our lives, like music, have pitch, tempo, tone, release, dissonance, harmonic convergence, as we move through times of grief, delight, hope, anger, and joy. In short, music has this deep affinity to our spiritual temperament and desire. Our lives, like music, can be understood in remembering the passage through time. The order of sound is comprehended as we remember and re-configure the previously heard in light of the yet-to-be-heard. So, too, the deeper desires and yearnings of the human soul are not understood until a larger pattern emerges.”21 And that larger pattern, in faith and music alike, revolves around tension and resolution. “The word of promise,” the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann observed, “always creates an interval of tension between the uttering and the redeeming of the promise. In so doing it provides man with a peculiar area of freedom to obey or disobey, to be hopeful or resigned.”22 That peculiar area of promise is the one in which the faithful live—the Christian awaiting the return of Christ, the Jew yearning, in the words of the Passover Haggadah, for next year in Jerusalem. But it is also the area in which music is endowed with meaning. Think of the final minute of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” The orchestral crescendos create an unbearable tension; by the time the forty-second-long E-major final chord crashes against our eardrums, we welcome it as redemption.

  And by 1966 redemption—of mind, of soul, of body—was what rock and roll was after. Which might have fitted nicely with the designs of a poet interested in prophecy, but the scene wasn’t kind to Leonard Cohen. He visited agent after agent and was denied. He was too old, his songs too sad. Finally, through a friend, he was referred to a fellow Canadian named Mary Martin, who worked for Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. Martin made the necessary introductions, and by November of that year, two of Cohen’s first compositions were recorded by Judy Collins on her breakthrough album, In My Life. One was called “Dress Rehearsal Rag”; the other was “Suzanne,” an early poem set to music. The album went gold almost immediately, and Cohen could now claim himself a songwriter—the others whose work Collins had covered on In My Life included Dylan, the Beatles, and Randy Newman. Still, he found New York inhospitable.

  “I was looking for the revolutionary expression of the brotherhood of man,” he told Mojo magazine decades later. “I was going to be able to feel tangibly this new world. I’ve always been up for those things. Then I heard that everything was happening in the East Village, so I went there. It seemed a terribly messy, filthy place but I was game. I went into one coffee shop after another and felt frozen out, just like in Montreal.”23 In one place, frustrated and lonely, he scribbled the words “KILL COOL” on a place mat; no one paid him any mind.24

  And why would they? Cohen didn’t look or act like anyone primed to make an impression in New York in 1966. At La Dom, a club on Eighth Street that was lined with silver tinfoil and owned by the silver-haired Warhol, Cohen met Nico, who seemed to him like “the apotheosis of the Nazi earth mother,”25 and a jittery, skinny boy who played in a band Warhol was managing and who had some ideas of his own about the future of rock and roll. When they first met, Lou Reed surprised Cohen by expressing his admiration for Flowers for Hitler. But Reed’s ideas weren’t Leonard Cohen’s: Reed, like everybody else who helped make 1966 the year of rock rapture, wanted to burn everything that had come before. He was gi
ven the chance to express his view in a four-page essay titled “The View from the Bandstand,” printed on pink paper and enclosed in the third volume of the multimedia magazine Aspen. Having already written many of the songs that, a few months later, would appear on The Velvet Underground and Nico and make him rock’s grittiest poet, Reed took to his manifesto with all the roughness characteristic of his work at the time but none of the sublime tenderness that enabled him to come up with lines about a heroin user feeling just like Jesus’s son. He was mainly interested in insults. Cole Porter, he wrote in Aspen, was nothing more than a purveyor of “cheap cocktail sentiment.” Pat Boone made “bullshit music.” Classical music was so simple, “anyone can write it.” Robert Lowell was a bore undeserving of his laurels. And everywhere you looked in American culture, you saw nothing but death. “Writing was dead, movies were dead. Everybody sat like an unpeeled orange.” There was beautiful music before, even some decent rock and roll, but it was fake, “manufactured so it could be taught. It was a myth perpetrated by pedants seeking tenure.” But now rock was finally awakening, with the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Who and the Velvet Underground bringing it all back home. “The music,” Reed concluded, “is sex and drugs and happy.”26

  In other words, the music was cool. But Cohen wasn’t. The songs he was working on in his hotel room, rehearsing in front of a large mirror, had nothing in common with the zeitgeist. Reed was reading Oswald Spengler and reveling in the thought of Western civilization’s inevitable decline; Brian Wilson was reading Arthur Koestler and thinking hard about metaphysics; and Cohen was still the boy who’d listened to Isaiah and written lines about it being hard to hold the hand of anyone who’s reaching to the sky just to surrender, and about us forgetting to pray for the angels and the angels forgetting to pray for us. There was nothing of the Age of Aquarius in Cohen’s lyrics, and even less of it in his tunes, strange and hypnotic melodies that droned on softly. He traveled back and forth between New York and Canada, spending months on each of his songs, getting into his lifelong habit of writing dozens of verses for each one and then slowly trimming them down to their bare essence. He partook in the drug culture, and noted that it failed to do for him what it had done for John Lennon or Brian Wilson or Lou Reed. Frustrated, he wrote barbed bits of poetry. “I am so impatient,” read one, written in March 1967, “I cannot / even read slowly. I never really loved to learn. / I want to live alone / in fellowship with men. / I’m telling you this because / secret agreements bring / misfortune.”27

  Eventually Mary Martin called and asked him out to lunch. They’d be dining, she said, with John Hammond, the man who had discovered Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin and, most important, just six years earlier, Dylan. Martin, Hammond later recalled, had called him up and said, “John, there’s this poet from Canada, who I think you’d be interested in. He plays pretty good guitar, and he’s a wonderful songwriter, but he doesn’t read music, and he’s sort of very strange. I don’t think Columbia would be at all interested in him, but you might be.”28 His curiosity piqued, Hammond went to see Cohen at the Chelsea; he took him to a nearby restaurant, ordered a generous lunch, and made sure to talk about everything but music. Then he looked at Leonard and said, “Let’s go back to the hotel, and maybe you’ll play me some songs.” Back in his room, stealing glances at his mirror as he strummed to help overcome his anxiety, Cohen played “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “Master Song,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

  Hammond was immediately convinced. “I thought he was enchanting,” he recalled. “That’s the only word you can use. He was not like anything I’ve ever heard before. I just feel that I always want a true original, if I can find one, because there are not many in the world. And the young man set his own rules, and he was a really first-class poet, which is most important.”29 When Cohen put down his guitar, Hammond simply said, “You got it,” leaving Cohen to wonder whether it referred to God-given talent or the more earthly reward of a recording contract with Columbia. Hammond had probably meant both, and in August 1967 Cohen entered the studio to record his debut album.

  There was no trace in him of the ebullient young man who’d declared to his fellow Canadian poets that he was off to become the next Dylan. As his fantasy slouched closer to fruition, doubts began to emerge. A few months earlier, on April 30, Judy Collins had invited him to join her onstage at a concert to protest the Vietnam War, held in Town Hall. “Suzanne” was her hit, but backstage Collins told Cohen he should step into the spotlight and sing his song.

  “I can’t do it, Judy,” he replied. “I would die from embarrassment.”

  Collins pleaded, assuring Cohen he was “a great writer and a fine singer” and that people wanted to hear him. Reluctantly, he agreed, and Collins went onstage to introduce her friend. Cohen followed. “He walked onto the stage hesitantly,” Collins remembered, “his guitar slung across his hips, and from the wings I could see his legs shaking inside his trousers.” Cohen started playing, but by the time he got to the bit about the tea and the oranges that come all the way from China he suddenly stopped. “I can’t go on,” he said, and rushed offstage.

  Surprised, the audience remained silent for a few moments, and then responded by clapping loudly and shouting at Cohen that they loved him and that he was great, urging him to come back. Standing backstage, his head resting on Judy Collins’s shoulder, Cohen muttered that he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t go back.

  “He looked about ten years old,” Collins recalled. “His mouth drew down at the sides, he started to untangle himself from his guitar strap. I stopped him, touching him on the shoulder. ‘But you will,’ I said. He shook himself and drew his body up and put his shoulders back, smiled again, and walked back onto the stage. He finished ‘Suzanne,’ and the audience went wild.”30

  It was a strange turn for someone like Cohen, accustomed to hamming it up onstage, reading his verse out loud, and telling stories. Clutching his poetry collections, charming college students, Cohen was confident. With his guitar, alone, he was terrified. Perhaps he truly felt that his songs were, as he often referred to them, a diary set to guitar music, something much too intimate to share. Perhaps performing onstage called on faculties—a pleasant voice, physical prowess—that were not among Cohen’s greatest gifts. Whatever the reason, Cohen’s emergence as a singer was dramatically different from his ascendance as a poet. In his youth he had adopted Layton’s dictum that all a young poet needed to make it was ignorance and an exaggerated sense of self. But as a man in his thirties, he was much too self-aware not to realize that he was playing a game whose rules were deeply foreign.

  Four months after the Town Hall concert, entering Columbia’s studios to record his album, the same anxiety struck again. John Hammond did his best to keep the nervous young artist at ease. The studio he had chosen, Studio E, was small and cozy, and Hammond had it lit by candles and made sure the air was thick with incense. From his spot behind the console, Hammond shouted merrily into the studio’s speaker, “Watch out, Dylan!,” and then unfolded his newspaper and read it as Cohen played. It was a ploy to keep the budding musician at ease; it didn’t succeed. Cohen asked that a full-length mirror be brought to the studio, so he could sing to it as he’d sung to his mirror at the Chelsea, a dilettante amusing himself. A mirror soon materialized. It did little to calm Cohen down.

  The problem was the others in the room. Cohen, his experience playing with others limited to doing bar mitzvahs with the Buckskin Boys, had no idea how to play music with professionals. “When I first went into the studio,” he later recalled, “John Hammond arranged for me to play with four or five dynamite New York studio musicians. Those takes were lively, but I kept listening to what the musicians were doing. It was the first time I had ever played with a really accomplished band, and I was somewhat intimidated by this. I didn’t really know how to sing with a band. I really didn’t know how to sing with really good, professional musicians that were really cooking. And I would te
nd to listen to the musicians, rather than concentrate on what I was doing, because they were doing it so much more proficiently than I was.”31 Someone, then, had to serve as a liaison between Cohen and the band, and Hammond hired Willie Ruff, an Alabama-born bass and French horn player who taught music at Yale. A linguist by training, Ruff appreciated Cohen’s lyrics, and didn’t much mind that he couldn’t read music. He kept the time, and kept Cohen focused on delivering his song.

  And then Hammond left. His other commitments to younger, more commercially appealing artists routinely drew him away from the odd, older musician in Studio E, and Cohen, tired of waiting, demanded a full-time producer. The task was eventually assigned to John Simon, a talented musician who had a number two hit on the Billboard chart in 1966 with “Red Rubber Ball,” a song the young Paul Simon had written for the band the Cyrkle. The first thing John Simon noticed was the way Cohen played guitar. “He wasn’t a guitar player like most of the artists I was working with,” he later recalled. “Most of the artists grew up listening to pop music, so they knew how to play rock ‘n’ roll or something like that. Leonard, apparently, learned how to play classical guitar,”32 which meant that rather than simply strum, as they did in pop, or fingerpick, as they did in folk, he played something closer to the Spanish rasgueado, the rapid and precise style of flamenco that was based on fast little jagged phrases. “Journalists were very cruel to me,” Cohen commented when asked about the general perception that he wasn’t much of a musician. “They said I only knew three chords when I knew five.”33