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

by Liel Leibovitz

  “Hey, Leonard, you gonna sing,” he said, less a question than a plea.

  “I’m going to sit out there and watch,” Cohen said.

  “Why not sing?” asked Mitchell.

  “No, no, it’s too obvious,” Cohen replied, and made his way to a line of folding chairs nearby, where he sat down just in time to see Dylan take the stage.3

  Cohen’s refusal to humor the man who had influenced him so greatly is baffling. It is possible, of course, that Cohen, always reluctant to perform, particularly when unaccompanied by his band, felt that the burden of entertaining the tens of thousands of fans who crowded the Forum was just too much. It is also possible that he and Dylan had let their relationship grow cold. They had experienced some awkwardness five years earlier, after Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, decamped to work with Cohen instead. But Cohen’s explanation suggests another, more profound possibility: Taking the stage would have been too obvious, an admission, perhaps, that he, too, subscribed to Dylan’s approach, thought of his own songs as objects no different than brooms and boats, and was ready to repackage them for a rapidly shifting market. That was not the case: By 1975 both Dylan and Cohen had noticed the strong tremors remapping the landscape of rock and roll, and both had understood that their shared sensibility—the one still rooted in folk music and still deeply dedicated to crafting fiery lyrics that attempted an account of human life, in all its frailty and glory—was no longer welcomed. New artists delivered bolder visions, peddling ecstasy whereas Dylan and Cohen promised only reflection. There were new prophets in town, and Dylan’s response was to slather on a thick layer of white face paint, go on tour, and revel in obfuscation; if kids these days want their music loud and psychedelic, you can imagine him reasoning, I’ll show them by forcing all my tender songs to wear grotesque masks.

  But Cohen could not follow suit. In the three albums he’d recorded since his debut, he went the opposite route. His second album, Songs from a Room, recorded in Nashville and released in 1969, was even starker than Songs of Leonard Cohen had been. Bob Johnston, the album’s producer, believed that the best approach to cultivating sound was to intervene as little as possible. When the first recording session ended, Cohen, still concerned that he was not doing his compositions justice, came into the control room and asked Johnston what he wanted to do. Johnston said that he wanted to go get hamburgers and beer. When they came back, Cohen asked the same question, and Johnston said that the only thing he expected the singer to do was sing. Cohen did, and when he was done, he asked, uncertainly, “Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?”

  “Yeah,” Johnston said.4 And he meant it. Songs like “Bird on the Wire” needed no adornment. In the liner notes to the album’s 2007 rerelease, the song is described as being “simultaneously a prayer and an anthem.” It is, but not in the traditional sense. Anthems are heroic and collective, designed to inspire individual hearts to swell with patriotic pride by evoking shared history or extolling common symbols. Prayers, on the other hand, are both intensely personal—they are, after all, designed as a direct, if not reciprocal, conversation between the believer and his God—and entirely generic. The Amidah, for example, the central prayer of Jewish liturgy, contains nineteen blessings, all of which address the welfare of the entire community. Observant Jews pray for God to be forgiving, petition him to hasten the coming of the messiah, and plead with him to bestow peace and kindness on all of his chosen people. The private vagaries of individual souls go unnoticed and unaddressed.

  Not in Cohen’s songs. In “Bird on the Wire,” for example, there’s a verse that describes, in plain language, two different encounters. “I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, / He said to me, ‘You must not ask for so much.’ / And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, / She cried to me, ‘Hey, why not ask for more?’” They’re delivered in the first person, making them feel intimate, as if Cohen was merely recalling something that had happened to him the other day. But, of course, there’s much more to the song than that. It has a little bit of the prayer—“I swear by this song / And by all that I have done wrong / I will make it all up to thee”—and a little bit of the anthem—“I have tried in my way to be free”—but it is neither. It is first and foremost a confession of imperfections—Cohen’s own—and then an exhortation never to lose sight of the beacons of beauty that break through even the thickest darkness. We may, like the song’s narrator, inflict great suffering on ourselves and on others by being ungrateful and unkind, but, like him, too, we are never without our will. We are free to take the hand of the decrepit beggar and urge ourselves to desire less, or we can be seduced by the pretty woman’s cry and allow ourselves to crave for more. Whichever we choose, it is nothing but our own personal path to freedom.

  Rather than abandon his listeners, as Dylan had, to find their own way out of the thicket of his songs, Cohen wanted nothing standing between them and his words, removing all distractions, from ornate arrangements to excessively impenetrable verses. And whereas Dylan reveled in the playful and the surreal, Cohen was sincere and direct. “You who build these altars now, / to sacrifice these children,”—he sang in “The Story of Isaac,” another of the album’s notable songs—“you must not do it anymore.” Dylan was never so heartfelt, even early in his career, when he was singing what some of his fans called protest songs.

  Cohen’s candor appealed—Songs from a Room did better than its predecessor, making his name known in Europe while selling modestly in the United States. But other ideas appealed far more. By 1969 Americans didn’t want redemption negotiated somberly to the tune of a lonely guitar. They wanted it to come in bursts of sound, immediate, orgasmic. Put differently, they didn’t want Leonard Cohen; they wanted Jim Morrison.

  While comparing Cohen to Dylan was obvious and inevitable from the moment the former first became a singer, the affinities between Cohen and Morrison are less obvious but in many ways as illuminating. Like Cohen, Morrison was the son of a military officer, and like Cohen he found solace in poetry. One of his classmates at UCLA remembered5 spending an evening in the library, where Morrison worked, listening to the future front man of the Doors—then a pudgy teen with a bad crew cut—talk endlessly about Oedipus. But whereas Cohen’s transformation took a decade and fashioned him into a poet, an expatriate, and a novelist, Morrison’s came overnight. Eve Babitz, a former girlfriend, recalled in a tribute that Morrison had spent one summer taking so many drugs that he emerged a changed man in the fall, trim and irresistible. She was writing on the occasion of Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, The Doors, and criticized Stone’s choice of lead actor. “According to everyone,” she wrote, “Val Kilmer is supposed to have gotten Jim’s looks exactly right, but what can Val Kilmer know of having been fat all of his life and suddenly one summer taking so much LSD and waking up a prince? Val Kilmer has always been a prince, so he can’t have the glow; when you’ve never been a mud lark it’s just not the same. And people these days, they don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to fuck every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that—back when rock ‘n roll was in flower and movies were hopelessly square.”6

  Morrison’s music subscribed to the same logic of instant transformation. As a young man Morrison had read Arthur Rimbaud, and inherited from him the drug-addled, jagged yearning for bliss that could only be dreamed up from the depths of suffering. In his best-known work, A Season in Hell, Rimbaud cries, in a section dedicated to lamenting lost dreams and shattered hopes, “Let it come, let it come / The time when we fall in love.” Every song by the Doors contains the same cries, embodied in Ray Manzarek’s sepulchral organ. They sound like yelps from the crypt, emitted by some impatient creature eager to get out.

  The Doors situated themselves in a strange place, not only musically but theologically as well. Music and religion both have an affinity for delay. “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us,” C
hrist says in Romans, “for the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.”7 The Old and New Testaments alike are books of waiting; the humans who populate them speak of salvation and cataclysm, but more than anything they linger in anticipation for God to act.

  The same goes for music: The best compositions set up complications and progress by slowly disentangling them. Beethoven’s Fifth is probably the best example: It begins with a monumental blow, its ominous bars throwing us off balance. This, Beethoven told Anton Felix Schindler, his biographer, was the sound of destiny knocking at the door.8 The rest of the symphony resolves the tension created by the first few notes. “What distinguishes superior creative musicians from the mediocre ones of all periods,” the jazz scholar Leroy Ostransky wrote, “is the manner in which they create resolutions, and to create resolutions it is necessary to set up irresolutions.”9

  Without initial irresolutions, music—indeed, all art—loses much of its meaning. So does life: While we often tend to think of tension in negative terms, and are eager to eliminate it whenever it appears, it is a source of nuance and complexity that renders our lives rich. “Well-handled maintenance of tensions is ethically desired,” the philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins argues, and is “essential to living a balanced, happy life.”10 Without it we would either believe that we have supreme powers to bend the world to our will, or succumb to utter hopelessness and abandon all sense of agency. Music, Higgins writes, is instrumental in helping us reach a much-needed equilibrium, as it “presents tension, not as obstructions, but as themselves vehicles to the achievement of resolution.”11 In other words, to enjoy music, and to enjoy life, is to enjoy tension and see it not as a boulder blocking the path to a desirable goal but as the path itself.

  Such insights were lost on Jim Morrison. For him the goal was always, to borrow one of his better-known lyrics, to “break on through to the other side.” The Doors delivered nothing but resolutions. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more audible than in the most famous riff of their most famous song, the long instrumental jam that takes up most of “Light My Fire.” A minute or so in, with Morrison having already sung a couple of verses, the song is handed over to Manzarek, who plays longer, increasingly more confident notes, painting arabesques with his Vox Continental, the scale going ever higher, true to the song’s lyrics, before spiraling down again and into a release. Enter Robby Krieger and his Gibson SG, playing lazily, amusing himself with sliding scales, breaking between notes, throwing in the occasional pizzicato riff. John Densmore, meantime, is keeping the beat except for when he’s not, and when he’s out there pounding furiously, relieving unbearable urges, the rest of the band just plays along as if nothing has happened, waiting for him to rejoin them. This goes on for five minutes. Then they all replay the little phrase, that bit of carnival music, that got the song started, and Morrison joins in, announcing that the time to hesitate is through.

  But Manzarek and Krieger and Densmore weren’t really hesitating. There was no real resolution at the end of their journey, just repetition of the same verses Morrison had already sung. What they were doing was indulging themselves, each of them allowing himself to take his instrument as far as it would go, with little regard for the song as a cohesive unit. When “Light My Fire” came out, many DJs refused to play the song the whole way through. Fans of the Doors accused the DJs of boorishness, but the DJs were right: “Light My Fire” sounded less like a song and more like four guys giving musical monologues, each surrendering to his own excess. Writing about the song, Greil Marcus evoked the painter Manny Farber’s coinage, “termite art,” which Farber explains as art that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.”12 This kind of art, Marcus reasoned, is “art without intent, without thinking, art by desire, appetite, instinct, and impulse, and it can as easily meander in circles as cross borders and leap gaps.”13 It was art with no patience for tension. The fat boy who’d swallowed acid and woken up a rock god who could bed whomever he wanted made music that disdained seduction and concentrated on climax.

  And he was not alone. The group of upstarts who released their debut albums in 1967—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Velvet Underground with Nico, Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick—were similarly committed to challenging the conventions of rock and roll. Bright students of the art form’s history, they’d learned from Chuck Berry that, in Robert Christgau’s memorable phrase, “repetition without tedium is the backbone of rock ‘n’ roll.”14 But Berry—and, following him, most rock musicians up until 1966—kept his instrument in check, and played music that felt simultaneously dangerous (all that libidinal hip shaking!) and safe (all those pretty melodies!). This was the sort of equipoise that Nietzsche had in mind when he described art balanced between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the former concerned with the sterile dictates of aesthetics and the latter with the lustful moans of arousal.

  But the late 1960s were not years of measured response, and the rock stars who emerged to captivate charts and minds reveled, in true termite form, in destruction. Hendrix is the most obvious example: His control of the guitar and the effect pedals was absolute, and added deep layers of color and meaning to each note, but his chief signature was the Hendrix chord, the dominant seven-sharp ninth, which commands so many of his songs, most notably “Purple Haze.” It’s a jazzy chord, all internal friction, and other bands made use of it as well—listen for it in the Beatles’ “Taxman”—but Hendrix electrified it, played it so loud and sure that it burst open and became a universe unto itself. The Hendrix chord, one writer noted, was essentially “the whole blues scale condensed into a single chord.”15 Joplin did something similar with her voice: In “Piece of My Heart,” as the song nears its end, Joplin sings the chorus again and again and again before swallowing it up with a howl that makes it clear that the words are no longer important and that her enormous voice will now communicate solely by primal screams.

  It wasn’t a strategy that had any designs on longevity. Musical breakdowns may have been fascinating and liberating the first time you experienced them, but they posited the difficult question of what came next. If the Doors, say, were all about performance, about Morrison as trapeze artist16 and Krieger, Densmore, and Manzarek as the world’s most intricately porous safety net, what would they do for an encore? Launching into a meandering and aimless jam in “Light My Fire” before returning to the tune and its verses was one thing, but Morrison soon began asking what would happen if he didn’t come back from the precipice, if he just kept on driving. Fueled by whiskey and hallucinogens, he wandered off beyond the songs. After being Maced backstage by a policeman who didn’t recognize him, he took the stage, started singing, stopped, and ranted about the men in blue. A few of them soon came onstage and dragged him off. The crowd went wild. A riot, Morrison realized, is nothing but the best song that the Doors could never record; he made it his business to incite more. It was good for the whole rock-and-roll image, but it probably also felt right to a band that seemed to have come together only to come apart. And soon enough people started attending Doors concerts not as much to hear the music but to see what the wild man would do next.

  Which drove the wild man wilder, first with joy and then with disdain. Whatever else Jim Morrison may have been, he was earnest and serious and believed deeply in his artistic experiment, and here were these people looking at him like an animal in the zoo, expecting him to amuse. During what is arguably the band’s most notorious performance—the March 1, 1969, concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, during which Morrison disrobed and either did or did not expose his penis, and which resulted in considerable legal and financial problems for him and the band—Morrison sang a few verses of “Five to One” and then raged at his fans. “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ idiots,” he bellowed. “Let people tell you what you’re
gonna do. Let people push you around. How long do you think it’s gonna last? How long are you gonna let it go on? How long are you gonna let them push you around? Maybe you like it.

  … Maybe you love getting your face stuck in the shit. You’re all a bunch of slaves.… What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do?”17 And then he went back to singing, as if nothing had happened, before screaming that there were no rules, pretending to fellate Krieger, and setting off the frenzy that would lead to the show’s implosion.

  Two years, four months, and two days later, Morrison was dead. By then so were Joplin and Hendrix. All three died at twenty-seven. When their stories are told—and they are often told together—drugs receive pride of place, but their deaths were caused just as much by failure of the spirit as they were by depredations of the flesh. The three icons of the late 1960s died young because there was no other way for them to live: They piloted their own private cults in which release was paramount and delay, the cornerstone of faith, was rejected. They demanded transcendence without realizing that, attempted here on earth, it could lead only to demise.

  With the culture seized by a death wish, Leonard Cohen grew ever more morose. Although he met the woman who would become the mother of his children, the teenage Suzanne Elrod, his reaction to events unfurling around him consisted of a series of rejections. First, in 1969, he turned down Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award, bestowed upon him for the anthology Selected Poems: 1956–1968. “Much in me strives for this honour,” went his note, “but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.”18 He did show up at a party his publisher, Jack McClelland, threw for the winners at the hotel Château Laurier in Ottawa, where he was cornered by Mordecai Richler. Visibly irate, Richler shoved Cohen into a bathroom. “C’mere,” he snarled. “I want to talk to you.” Then he closed the door, looked at Cohen, and demanded to know why Cohen had rejected the award. Cohen replied that he didn’t know. “Any other answer,” Richler said, “and I would have punched you in the nose.”19