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

by Liel Leibovitz

  To the extent that the mainstream music press cared about Leonard Cohen in 1974, the record was well received, with nearly all critics noting the change in tone and texture. But once again,Cohen was a man out of sync with his time: Two artistic forces were busy being born that year, and none had much room for a singer-songwriter with heavenly obsessions.

  The first was punk. On March 30, in New York City, the Ramones, then still a trio, took the stage for the very first time. Their set was short and declarative; the songs all had titles like “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” “I Don’t Like Nobody That Don’t Like Me,” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” If the lyrics did not suffice to convey the spirit of the new genre, the music did—a few chords, played fast and furiously, the words howled, the sound dirty. A few months later, in June, Patti Smith recorded her first single, a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” Blondie, the Talking Heads, and the Stranglers all formed in 1974.

  On the other end of the musical divide were the maximalists. In April, Queen played its first North American gig. It was supported by its first big American hit, “Killer Queen,” a lush and symphonic arrangement that offered a candy store’s worth of vocal harmonies, études, and other beautiful sonorities. David Bowie was still performing as Ziggy Stardust, his face-painted cult-leader alter ego. And slightly to the right, their sound harder but their gestalt every bit as glamorous and showy, were new acts like Kiss, Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and Alice Cooper. As the seventies hurtled toward its end, these trends intensified: To succeed, artists had to sound either very big or very small.

  Cohen, as usual, was in the middle. And his manager, Martin Machat, was painfully aware of that fact. His artist, Machat believed, was long overdue for a breakout hit, a record that would put him up there with Elton John, Billy Joel, and the decade’s other rising stars. It was time, Machat believed, to stop working with kids like Lissauer, young and artistically minded. If Cohen wanted a hit, he had to collaborate with someone who knew how to make one.

  Someone like Phil Spector. The legendary record producer, another one of Machat’s clients, had started off the decade well. After a brief reclusive period in the late 1960s, he reemerged to assert his claim on the sound of pop, producing Let It Be for the Beatles, Imagine for John Lennon, and George Harrison’s masterpiece, All Things Must Pass. In March 1974, however, he crashed his car in Hollywood, flew through the windshield, hit the ground, and was so badly hurt he required nearly a thousand stitches to his head and face. To cover his disfigurement, he began wearing wigs. To cope with the trauma, his behavior became more erratic than ever. When he first invited Leonard Cohen and Suzanne for dinner in his house, he flew into a rage when the couple, tired after a long meal, got up to leave, and ordered his servants to lock the doors.9 The Cohens remained seated, surrounded by Spector’s armed guards, imprisoned in the producer’s dimly lit mansion. They were freed only in the morning.

  Spector’s insanity aside, there were many other plausible reasons why Cohen should not have collaborated with him. The latter was, in Tom Wolfe’s memorable phrase, “the first tycoon of teen,” the man who piled up the ooh-las to create scores of hits for the young and the restless; the former was the sort of artist who sought inspiration in liturgy. And Cohen’s albums, his most recent being the exception, were spare, while Spector’s approach to record production was known as the Wall of Sound, in which brigades of musicians battled in the studio and delighted in hearing their notes bleed into one another to create an overwhelming musical totality. Cohen and Spector, however, shared not only a manager but also an infatuation with popular music in all its varieties, and an obsession with the intricacies of the songwriting process. To that end a partnership was proposed: Cohen would write the words, Spector the music. Each man would be relieved of his weakness and allowed to concentrate on his true passion.

  The two began working in earnest, often spending entire nights in Spector’s home. Cohen noted the eccentricities of his new partner—it was impossible not to—but enjoyed the process nonetheless. “He really is a magnificent eccentric,” he said of Spector in an interview some years later. “And to work with him just by himself is a real delight. We wrote some songs for an album over a space of a few months. When I visited him we’d have really good times and work till late in the morning. But when he got into the studio he moved into a different gear, he became very exhibitionist and very mad.”10

  His madness was evident at first sight. As Cohen entered the studio in January 1977 to begin recording the new album, he saw “a room crammed with people, instruments and microphone stands. There was barely space to move. He counted forty musicians, including two drummers, assorted percussionists, half a dozen guitarists, a horn section, a handful of female backing singers and a flock of keyboard players.”11

  Orchestrating this cacophony was Spector, standing behind his console, screaming, ordering people to do exactly as he said. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, who were brought in to sing background vocals on “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard On,” weren’t spared. Listening to his playback, Spector played the music so loudly that he caused the speakers to explode and had to relocate the entire session to another studio. He was perpetually drunk and never unarmed; others in the studio, including the bodyguards Spector insisted he needed, were similarly liberal about mixing drugs and weaponry. “With Phil,” Cohen recalled years later, “especially in the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns, I mean that’s really what was going on, was guns. The music was subsidiary, an enterprise, you know people were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere. Phil was beyond control. I remember the violin player in the song ‘Fingerprints,’ Phil didn’t like the way he was playing, walked out into the studio, and pulled a gun on the guy. Now this was, he was a country boy, and he knew a lot about guns. He just put his fiddle in his case and walked out. That was the last we’d seen of him.”12

  Cohen himself was not exempt from feeling the barrel. One night, at around four in the morning, as another session cascaded to an end, Spector stumbled out of his booth and into the studio. In one hand, he held a .45 revolver, in the other, a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz sweet kosher wine. He put his arm around Cohen’s shoulder and shoved the revolver into the singer’s neck. “Leonard,” he said, “I love you.” Not missing a beat, Cohen replied, “I hope you do, Phil.”13

  But Spector’s eccentricity in the studio wasn’t the real problem. Each day, accompanied by his armed goons, he would take the master tapes to his car and whisk them away to his house. He had done the same thing with Let It Be. He would mix the album as he saw fit, and present it to Cohen as a fait accompli. It was not an arrangement any artist would gladly accept, especially when there were signs suggesting that somewhere amid the fog of booze and bullets, Spector lost track of any vision he might have had for the album. “I’ll tell you something, Larry,” he wrote in a note he scribbled on the master tapes to his longtime engineer, Larry Levine. “We’ve done worse with better, and better with worse!”14

  Cohen’s fans, as well as some of the critics who reviewed the album upon its release, saw it as a farce. Here was Cohen’s delicate poetry drowned by sound, his voice barely audible on some of the tracks. They were right, but for all the wrong reasons. Musically the album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, is a marvel. “Memories,” for example, is a grand doo-wop anthem, as well as a disquisition on pop history; it ends with a snippet from the Shields’ 1958 hit “You Cheated, You Lied,” which it closely resembles, and hearing the newer song melt into the older one delivers a brutal jolt of emotion. Here is doo-wop, two decades later, its promise all soured. It is sung now not by sweet-voiced youths but by a raspy-sounding middle-aged man. The melody, too, is louder and more frayed, almost hysterical. The Shields’ song conveyed
the genteel sadness of brokenhearted teenagers who grieved for an affair gone bad. They sensed, however unconsciously, that they had their entire lives ahead of them to fall in love all over again. Working with more or less the same tune, Cohen sounded desperate as he sang about walking up to the tallest and the blondest girl and asking to see her naked body. He cast himself as the same doo-wop crooner, twenty years older, realizing that heartbreak wasn’t a sweet and passing sorrow but a permanent state of being, seeking now sex rather than romance.

  This, then, was the real problem with Death of a Ladies’ Man, not its musical styling but its spiritual message. Spector hadn’t just made Cohen sound different; he made him sound crass. Cohen himself admitted as much: Playing “Memories” a few years later in Tel Aviv, he introduced the song with an apology. “Unfortunately,” he said, “for my last song, I must offend your deepest sensibilities with an entirely irrelevant and vulgar ditty that I wrote some time ago with another Jew in Hollywood, where there are many. This is a song in which I have placed my most irrelevant and banal adolescent recollections. I humbly ask you for your indulgence. As I look back to the red acne of my adolescence, to the unmanageable desire of my early teens, to that time when every woman shone like the eternal light above the altar place and I myself was always on my knees before some altar, unimaginably more quiescent, potent, powerful and relevant than anything I could ever command.”15

  It was a real regression for an artist who had thought and written more intelligently about sex than most in the second half of the twentieth century. Carnal pleasures have always informed Cohen’s work, even when they were conspicuously—and strangely—missing from the cultural landscape in which he moved. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll was only two parts true: For all the genre’s lustful aura, it is hard to think of many rock songs that speak openly and candidly about copulation. It is hard to think of a Cohen song that does not: the sisters of mercy sweetening a fellow’s night, Joplin giving head at the Chelsea, the lover moaning in midcoitus in Death of a Ladies’ Man’s “Paper Thin Hotel.” But the body is always only just a vessel for the soul; in “Paper Thin Hotel,” for example, Cohen addresses his unfaithful lover by saying, “you are the naked woman in my heart / you are the angel with her legs apart.”

  Cohen’s most eloquent statement on the connection between the spirit and the flesh, one of his most prominent and persistent preoccupations, was not musical but visual. For the cover of New Skin for the Old Ceremony, he had chosen an illustration taken from a sixteenth-century treatise on alchemy entitled Rosarium Philosophorum. One of ten drawings representing the cycle of life, the image Cohen had selected shows a naked man and woman in a sexual embrace. The text had great influence on Carl Gustav Jung, who used it as a basis for his theory of transference. The first stages, Jung wrote, in which the man and the woman stood separately, each in his or her own solitude, represented the “pluralistic state of the man who has not yet attained inner unity, hence the state of bondage and disunion, of disintegration, and of being torn in different directions—an agonizing, unredeemed state which longs for union, reconciliation, redemption, healing and wholeness.”16 Only when the man and the woman shed their clothes and become entwined does the healing start—theirs is a union of opposites that represents the relaxed chaos from which rebirth could now begin. “The unified male/female figure,” as one scholar eloquently put it, “is a symbol of the union of the masculine consciousness with the feminine unconscious, indicating that just as the projected contents of the personal unconscious have to be integrated, so too must the projections emanating from the collective unconscious. The successful reclamation of these projected images gives birth to a new, enlarged psychic condition, which Jung calls the self. But rather than describing the self as a point midway between the conscious and the unconscious, here the self—as the term for the union of all opposites—reaches out beyond the individual to the world at large. It is not that the psyche has been displaced as the locus of ultimacy but that the self has taken on cosmic dimensions.”17 Put simply, copulation places each of its participants in a context larger then themselves, projects them onto the universe, frees them of their solipsistic shackles. Copulation is the gateway to redemption; when Spector reduced it to hard-ons and lechery, he bruised the part of Cohen’s work that was most vital and tender. The Rosarium itself, after all, is famous for stating that Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi, “Our gold is not the gold of the vulgar.”

  Trying to recapture his sense of sanctity, Cohen published a book shortly after the Spector album. It was called Death of a Lady’s Man, and consisted mainly of poetry juxtaposed with commentary and criticism, turning the collection into a little, self-contained Talmud. “I am almost 90,” declares the book’s final poem. “Everyone I know has died off / except Leonard / He can still be seen / hobbling with his love.”18

  And hobble on he did. Now the father of two children—his daughter, Lorca, named after his poetic idol, was born in 1974—he tried to reconcile with Suzanne but found the union too tense. Hers, he noted, were “Miami consumer habits. My only luxuries are airplane tickets to go anywhere at any time. All I need is a table, chair and bed.”19 In 1978, shortly after Cohen’s mother, Masha, passed away, he and Suzanne separated. “I believed in him,” she told an interviewer. “He had moved people in the right direction, toward gentleness. But then I became very alone—the proof of the poetry just wasn’t there.”20 Nor, for very long, was Suzanne: Later that year she took her children, now aged seven and four, and moved to Avignon, France.

  Crushed, Cohen folded himself into his suitcase. He wan

  dered from Greece to New York to Los Angeles. He was forty-four years old, with a string of tepidly received albums to his name and, he confessed, “almost no personal life.”21 All he could do was write and arrange and record. The fruit of his efforts appeared the following year, in the fall of 1979; it was called Recent Songs.

  If the album proved anything, it proved that Cohen had learned how to be sad in a fuller way. Songs like “I Came So Far for Beauty” and “Our Lady of Solitude” were paeans to failure, sung softly and without bitterness or malice. The kid who, decades earlier, thundered in the Jewish Library in Montreal and declared that loneliness was the only path to the divine was now a man who had lived long enough to realize that he had been right. Sex may take us beyond ourselves and make us of the world, but solitude made us of the heavens. It was not without its beauty, and not really opposed to living with others. It was merely a practice, a ritual human beings had to master before they could form more perfect unions.

  The album’s best expression of this elusive idea is a song that, on first hearing, sounds like a joke. The mariachi band that launches “Un Canadien Errant” does little to prepare listeners for Cohen’s nasal French, and even less to explain why a lament about never again seeing Canada is delivered in the style of Mexico. But Cohen himself may have solved the riddle when he later said that Canada “has an experimental side to it. We are free from the blood myth, the soil myth, so we could start over somewhere else. We could purchase a set of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean. Or we could disperse throughout the cosmos and establish a mental Canada in which we communicate through fax machines.”22 It was more or less the same thing he had said in his 1964 speech about the prophets and the priests: You had to make your own loneliness if you had any hope of ever communicating again.

  It’s a difficult notion to comprehend, and yet it is one of the central tenets of Cohen’s thought. Whatever else he may be he is also, perhaps first and foremost, the poet of loneliness. In his 1984 poetry collection, Book of Mercy, he wrote: “Blessed are you who has given each man a shield of loneliness so that he cannot forget you. You are the truth of loneliness, and only your name addresses it. Strengthen my loneliness that I may be healed in your name, which is beyond all consolations that are uttered on this earth. Only in your name can I stand in the rush of time, only when this loneliness is yours can I lift my sins toward your mercy.”2
3

  Others have mused about loneliness before, but seldom quite in this way. In recent decades we had Elliott Smith and the Smiths to listen to if we wanted to hear sensitive artists muse about the solitary life. But their worldview is modern, as it laments alienation and longs for connection. They seek whatever companionship they can find because they know, as the Smiths so eloquently put it, that when one is lonely, “life is very long.”24 Cohen’s approach is more timeless and far more profound. Loneliness, he knows, is not a condition one can cure, but the essence of all being. It’s the same position argued by John Milton: As God and Adam converse at one point in Paradise Lost, the first man complains that all of the newly created world’s wonders are charmless when enjoyed alone. The Almighty, “not displeased,” makes a short speech, a wonder in a book dense with wonders:

  A nice and subtle happiness I see

  Thou to thyself proposest, in the choice

  Of thy Associates, Adam, and wilt taste

  No pleasure, though in pleasure, solitary.

  What think’st thou then of mee, and this my State,

  Seem I to thee sufficiently possesed

  Of happiness, or not? who am alone