But his distinct style wasn’t what soon put him on a collision course with Simon. An astute and experienced producer, Simon believed that Cohen’s songs needed sweetening. They were spare, almost harsh, and needed “strings and assorted pillows of sound for Cohen’s voice to rest on.”34 To save “Suzanne” from droning, Simon suggested drums; Cohen objected. Simon tried for a different sort of syncopation, and brought in a piano player. Cohen insisted that the piano be removed. The song, he said, “should be linear, should be smooth.”35 With “So Long, Marianne” Simon thought the song would benefit from the treatment, popular at the time, of stopping it for a moment and then launching back into the chorus. Cohen hated the effect and removed it in the final mix. “It doesn’t work,” he said. “You can’t just stop the song and start it again. What for? Just to make it hip?”36 Someone—it’s unclear who—suggested that female voices be used in lieu of instruments, which only underscored the flatness of Cohen’s own vocals. Finally Simon gave up. “Look, Leonard,” he said, “this is as far as I’m going to work on the record. I’m going on Christmas vacation. You finish it.”37
Removing Simon’s sweetening from the four-track master tape “was like trying to take the sugar back out of the coffee.”38 The result was haunting. Listening to the album, you can hear strings, cymbals, a whole menagerie of instruments, all playing softly, faintly, in the background, lacerated by Cohen’s guitar.
The disjointed production, however, was plagued by much more than artistic differences or the jitters of a first-time singer. At its heart was a metaphysical problem: the problem of taking a spiritual vision and translating it into words and chords so that others listening would instantly understand its meaning.
The difficulty started with the lyrics. Ever since he had started writing songs, Cohen’s method involved coming up with an avalanche of verses, then removing the unsalvageable ones and smoothing the ones he decided to keep. It took months, even years, and it was more than a mere editing job: As he pruned his verses, Cohen transformed them from personal confessions to universal invocations.
There’s no clearer example of this, perhaps, than “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” one of his more autobiographical works, which Cohen has revealed—having since regretted his indiscretion—was about his dalliance with Janis Joplin. Before there was a “No. 2,” however, there was a “No. 1,” written sometime in the spring of 1972. It begins as we now know it, with Joplin talking brave and sweet and giving Cohen head on the unmade bed. Then there’s a slow refrain, about Joplin making her “sweet little sounds.” Then comes the confession: “I remember you well / In the Chelsea Hotel / In the winter of ’67 / My friends of that year / They were all getting queer / And me, I was just getting even.” And on it goes, with Cohen singing about going down to Tennessee and spending time with local legend Willie York and feeding peafowl and watching the stream. There’s one more refrain, and Cohen admits that he’s tired and signs off with “Guess I got nothing more to say to you, baby.”39
By the time Cohen entered the studio to record the song for his fourth album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, in the winter of 1974, Willie York and the peafowl and all those treacherous friends and the vindictive Leonard were all gone. Cohen kept the same premise—he and Joplin entwined on a bed at the Chelsea—but managed to distill the song to its purest essence. “And clenching your fist for the ones like us / Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,” go the final lyrics, “You fixed yourself, you said, ‘Well never mind / We are ugly, but we have the music.’” What began as a biographical sketch turned into a mantra that the arty, dreamy kids infatuated with Cohen—never the libidinous hordes who bobbed to the Beatles or swayed to the Stones—could recite when times got dark: “We are ugly, but we have the music.” Perhaps no line of Cohen’s better captures the essence of his vision. He is telling his listeners what prophetically inclined rabbis had been telling theirs for thousands of years, namely that the world is a place of suffering, that no celestial cataclysm could ever change that, but that there are things here on this earth—art, love, friendship, kindness, music, sex—that have the power to redeem us.
When John Simon first met Leonard Cohen, the exact nature of the singer’s work was lost on the young producer. Dylan, he said, was “the flavor of the year at that time, introspective songs that weren’t necessarily about jilted lovers and those things.” At first glance Cohen’s words seemed to him squarely Dylanesque, lyrics that “were so clouded and obfuscated you really didn’t know what the hidden meaning is. I wasn’t inclined to dig too deeply.”40 The comparison between Cohen and Dylan is instructive, and it reveals how radically different they are in their approach to text. Dylan, crudely speaking, has three modes of delivery. He is most famous for being gnomic—“met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow”41—and equally as famous for refusing to parse the meaning of his verse. Then there’s Dylan the balladeer: “When they were singing years ago,” Dylan told an interviewer in 1969, “it would be as entertainment … a fellow could sit down and sing a song for a half hour, and everybody could listen, and you could form opinions. You’d be waiting to see how it ended, what happened to this person or that person. It would be like going to a movie. But now we have movies, so why does someone want to sit around for a half hour listening to a ballad? Unless the story was of such a nature that you couldn’t find it in a movie. And after you heard it, it would have to be good enough so that you could sing it again tomorrow night, and people would be listening to hear the story again. It’s because they want to hear the story, not because they want to check out the singer’s pants. Because they would have conscious knowledge of how the story felt and they would be a part of that feeling … like they would want to feel it again, so to speak.”42 That’s how “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” or “Hurricane” work—they’re stories engineered to produce immediate and fierce emotion. Anyone who hears about Hattie Carroll cleaning the table she’ll never get to eat off of can’t help but feel anything but rage. Finally there’s Dylan the moralizer, a position that made the young singer popular and that the older singer abandoned, to the chagrin of many of his fans. In songs like “With God on Our Side” and “Masters of War,” Dylan’s message is as powerful as it is unambiguous.
Whatever mode Dylan was writing in, however, he was still being Dylan, which meant being a vessel to thoughts and ideas that swirled around him. He didn’t like reading, he told an interviewer in the late 1960s; “I tried to read,” he said, “but I usually would lay the book down. I never have been a fast reader. My thoughts weren’t about reading, no … they were just about that feeling that was in the air.”43 Dylan was sharp and fast enough to trap these thoughts on the page. Talking about writing “Like a Rolling Stone,” for example, he said, “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long, and out of it I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do.”44 “Vomit” is a vulgar but effective metaphor; Dylan’s words just streamed out. In the late 1980s, he met Leonard Cohen backstage after Cohen performed in Paris, and praised “Hallelujah,” asking Cohen how long it had taken to write. It had taken Cohen years, but not wishing to come off as the tortured and exacting artist, he lied and told Dylan it had taken a year or two. Then it was Cohen’s turn to praise one of his favorite Dylan songs, “I and I,” and ask how long it had taken to write. Dylan replied it had taken fifteen minutes.45
The comparison with Dylan is even more instructive when we think about Leonard Cohen’s sound. Dylan was as freewheeling with his music as he was with his words. He had Muddy Waters and Odetta and Woody Guthrie and a whole gallery of musicians he considered authentically American to draw on, which gave him a natural sound no matter how playful or poetic he was being. He has made that point in song—as much, that is, as one can refer to what an artist, especially Bob Dylan, does as argumentation—when
he crooned, in his 2009 album Together Through Life, that he had “the blood of the land” in his voice.46 “For more than half a century,” Sean Wilentz poignantly writes about him, “Bob Dylan had been absorbing, transmuting, and renewing and improving American art forms long thought to be trapped in formal conventions. He not only ‘put folk into bed with rock,’ as Al Santos still announces before each concert; he took traditional folk music, the blues, rock and roll, country and western, black gospel, Tin Pan Alley, Tex-Mex borderlands music, Irish outlaw ballads, and more and bent them to his own poetic muse.”47
Cohen, too, grew up absorbing a wide array of musical styles, listening to Ray Charles and Hank Williams and his mother’s Russian lullabies and Jacques Brel, but he was no Dylan. When he entered the studio he had no interest in playing with forms. Instead he sought to fashion the form that would best serve his words. And that form was always austere.
In the studio, recording Songs of Leonard Cohen, John Simon found the songs as Cohen played them depressing. He was in awe of Cohen—having invited the singer to spend the weekend at his parents’ house in Connecticut, Simon woke up in the morning to discover that Cohen had stayed up all night browsing the books in the home’s vast library—and believed philosophically that a producer must always defer to the artist. But he still wanted “to try and dress him up a little bit, to put a little icing on the cake.”48 Icing, he thought, was all the cake needed: the songs were sad, but they were also beautiful, and their beauty had to be accentuated. Simon brought in the singer Nancy Priddy to sing background vocals. “They were poignant songs,” he recalled, “but to have harmony makes it more universal, people identify with that.”49
But that wasn’t enough for Simon. He listened to the songs and tried to glean their meaning. Operating on the assumption that Cohen, like Dylan, had incoherent visions that needed much interpreting, he let his imagination run wild. “Sisters of Mercy,” for example, evoked “the sense of nuns, the sense of the Red Cross, some healing operation that was pulling in, some mobile healing operation that was pulling into town.”50 To capture this mental image of kindly nurses riding in an ethereal ambulance, Simon wheeled a hurdy-gurdy into the studio; its sound, he hoped, would convey a sense of motion, of carnival, of streets.
Cohen wanted it all taken out, and, as it couldn’t be altogether removed, relegated it to the background. The hurdy-gurdy is still faintly audible, but Cohen’s cut had no room for imaginative interpretations. The song didn’t need them. The song was not, as Dylan once said of his compositions, “a commercial item” akin to “boats and brooms,”51 something that people bought and sold and therefore something that needed to be produced and marketed to listeners. The song was an invocation of the duende, and as such needed nothing but those repeated eighth-note triplets on the guitar and Cohen’s voice slowly reciting the words: “You who must leave everything that you cannot control / It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul / Well, I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned / When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.” It’s the kind of message—not immediately uplifting, not immediately understood—that needs the lightest musical accompaniment. Whatever else Cohen was uncertain of in Studio E, of that he was sure.
Others were less convinced. When the album came out, the New York Times titled its review “Alienated Young Man Creates Some Sad Music.” Cohen, wrote the esteemed critic Donal Henahan, “sounds like a sad man cashing in on self-pity and adolescent loneliness,” selling “Weltschmerz and soft rock” that placed him “somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan” on the alienation scale. But whereas Dylan “is alienated from society and mad about it, Mr. Cohen is alienated and merely sad about it,” a troubadour “smooth of voice and bland of meaning.”52 Surprisingly, Cohen’s actual voice appealed to another harsh critic, Rolling Stone’s Arthur Schmidt: “It is a strange voice,” Schmidt wrote, “he hits every note, but between each note he recedes to an atonal place—his songs are thus given a sorely needed additional rhythm.”53 Still, Schmidt captured the critical consensus when he judged the album a very mixed bag. “I don’t think I could ever tolerate all of it,” he wrote. “There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits.”54 The reader is invited to guess which is which.
The reviews seem to have left Cohen in a somber state of mind. When a New York Times reporter came over for a profile piece, Cohen stood by his window at the Chelsea and pretended to contemplate jumping.55 He brought up suicide again when Richard Goldstein showed up to interview him for the Village Voice. “Today he faces me across a hotel room with the sun shining second hand in the windows down the block,” Goldstein wrote of Cohen. “The drapes are as florid as his verse.”56 Cohen himself must have sensed his interrogator’s disdain, as he spent most of the conversation recounting failures real and imagined, before offering a morbid coda. “Around 30 or 35 is the traditional age for the suicide of the poet,” he said. “That’s the age when you finally understand that the universe does not succumb to your command.”57
The universe abided, leaving Cohen, at thirty-four, with a small coterie of devoted fans and modest commercial success but no cataclysmic sense of transformation. He was a singer now, but few people listened. Worse, it was the Age of Aquarius, and in art and politics alike, the prophetic undertaking seemed to be somewhat of a national pastime. Among the lithe and the loud who sought a musical path to transcendence, what chance did an older and timorous and slight stranger really have?
CHAPTER SIX
Waiting for the Sun
* * *
In 1969 Leonard Cohen met Bob Dylan for the first time. Curious about the young Canadian singer, Dylan summoned Cohen to the Kettle of Fish, the MacDougal Street joint where he spent many evenings drinking. No record survives, but it is reasonable to assume that pleasantries were uttered and mutual admirations exchanged. Six years later things were very different.
By 1975 Dylan was a man once again transformed. He was separating from his wife, Sara, was warring with both his manager and his record label, and was feeling as if he was going “down, down, down … I was convinced I wasn’t going to do anything else.”1 It was like a sudden attack of amnesia, he said; “I couldn’t learn what I had been able to do naturally—like Highway 61 Revisited. I mean, you can’t sit down and write that consciously because it has to do with the break-up of time.”2 He wanted to do something to shake off the doldrums; the only thing he could think of was a circus.
It hit the road in late October, calling itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan wore whiteface makeup, and sometimes a mask. Joan Baez was invited to sing along—appearing onstage with Dylan for the first time in years—as was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Woody Guthrie’s disciple and musical scion. Mick Ronson, David Bowie’s ace guitarist, was there, too, as was Scarlet Rivera, an unknown violinist Dylan had discovered when he saw her walking down the street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Sam Shepard was appointed the tour’s official documentarian, Allen Ginsberg its lyrical rabbi. The old folkies and the new glam rockers, the celebrated and the unknown—this was Dylan’s idea of a big tent. He made sure the music was just as carnivalesque: Whereas with the Band he had delivered straight-up rock and roll, the Revue crew inspired mischief, taking “It Ain’t Me, Babe” a step away from reggae or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” into a cheery, fast-paced, hard-edged blues riff.
The Revue had many charms, but it was, as much as anything else, a sweet surrender. Dylan remained—remains—as blessed as ever, consistently producing superb albums, but by the time he mounted his musical circus, it was hard not to feel as if the man taking the stage was more committed to interpretation than to invention. Like those Western towns that popped up with the gold rush and were abandoned when the shiny mineral failed to materialize or was fully harvested, Dylan’s music, having once promised great spiritual riches to those brave enough to mine it, was now a historical
curiosity, a tourist attraction, a good place to visit for a while before driving back home and forgetting all about it the following day.
As the first leg of the Revue neared its end, in December 1975, Dylan et al. rolled into Montreal, and the ringmaster ordered Larry “Ratso” Sloman, a journalist who tagged along for the ride, to call Cohen and ask him to join the festivities. Sloman did, but Cohen sounded weary. “Is it going to be crowded?” he asked.
“You won’t have to deal with the crowds,” Sloman assured him. “We’ll zip in the stage door, Leonard.”
Listening to the conversation, Dylan grew restless. He grabbed the receiver from Sloman and asked Cohen how he was doing. Cohen replied that he couldn’t complain.
“Can’t complain, huh,” Dylan said. “Well I could but I won’t. You wanna come to the show?” Cohen said he did. Dylan asked if he would join the band onstage and play a few songs. Cohen said something elusive. Dylan didn’t press. Later that evening Sloman was sent to pick Cohen up from his apartment; he was riding in a cab with Sara, Dylan’s wife, and asked the driver to wait a moment while he ran up to get Cohen. Entering Cohen’s apartment, however, he found the singer surrounded by friends, playing the harmonica, stomping his feet, and bellowing a French chanson. Sloman urged Cohen to hurry. Cohen responded by sipping wine. Then more song, more banter. When Cohen finally made his way into the car, Sara asked him if he was going to sing. “No,” he responded. “Are you?”
By the time the car pulled into the Montreal Forum, Sloman had pleaded with Cohen three more times, and Cohen cheerfully responded by bursting into another French ditty. Backstage, Joni Mitchell, having just finished her set, ran up to Cohen and hugged him, followed shortly by Dylan himself. With the master of ceremonies now present, Sloman tried one more time.
A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Page 11