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

by Liel Leibovitz

  From all Eternitie, for none I know

  Second to me or like, equal much less.

  How have I then with whom to hold converse

  Save with the Creatures which I made, and those

  To me inferior, infinite descents

  Beneath what other Creatures are to thee?25

  God, then, is the loneliest of us all. His loneliness is essential: By definition there is no one like him, no one who can understand his language, no one who can even see his face. And yet he creates, forging a universe packed with beings he knows to be far inferior to himself. For much of Christian theology, this is the source of grace—God the ever-loving awards the gift of life to us sinful and wretched creatures, forever undeserving of his kindness. For Judaism, however, this is a call to action: Like God, the pious must learn to be in loneliness while striving all the while to create the world around them. It’s a tough undertaking for anyone, but particularly so for artists, whose daily routine involves the forging of new worlds parallel to their own. To cope, Cohen needed a program, a method of shedding light on the world when inside him all was silent and dark. He found it in Rinzai Buddhism.

  Cohen’s involvement with the Japanese sect began in the late 1960s, when a mutual friend introduced him to Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, known as Roshi, or “venerable teacher.” Born on a farm in northern Japan in 1907, Roshi followed the events of World War I with great interest and dreamed of becoming a solider. He idolized Germany, which he imagined to be a mighty nation rendered omnipotent by its warplanes and guns. As the war progressed and descended into senseless bloodshed, and as his brother became ill and died, Roshi changed his mind and decided to apprentice himself to a local Buddhist abbot. As part of his initiation, he was presented with a question: How old is the Buddha? “His ready answer stunned his master and put him on the path to early priesthood,” a newspaper report later described it. “‘Buddha’s age and my age,’” replied the young boy, “‘are the same.’”26 The answer revealed not only an innate wisdom—perceiving of age not as a chronological order but as a state of constant flux in which one is always, like the Buddha, ready to learn and evolve—but also a compatibility with Rinzai’s particular style of teaching. There are numerous subtle differences between Rinzai and the other school of Zen Buddhism, Soto, mainly concerning the manner of practice. While Soto spoke softly, Rinzai shouted, with its earliest teachers often insulting or assaulting students. Soto sought harmony in sitting zazen and contemplating quietly, while Rinzai put more weight on the koan. Just what was the sound of one hand clapping? If you understood this wasn’t a riddle to be solved but a meditation designed to carry you past the strictures of rationality and into real insight, you were on the path to awakening.

  And Cohen understood. He had never abandoned Judaism—this was frequently suggested when his involvement with Roshi became known, and it irked him every time. “My father and mother, of blessed memory,” he wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Reporter in 1993, “would have been disturbed by the Reporter’s description of me as a Buddhist. I am a Jew. For some time now I have been intrigued by the indecipherable ramblings of an old zen monk. Not long ago he said to me, ‘Cohen, I have known you for 23 years and I never tried to give you my religion. I just poured you sake.’ Saying that, he filled my cup with sake. I bowed my head and raised my cup to him crying out, ‘Rabbi, you are surely the Light of the Generation.’”27 He wasn’t being facetious: The lyricist who habitually wrote dozens of verses for each song before eliminating all but the best couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. “Roshi’s great,” Cohen said on another occasion. “If you have an appetite for that kind of simplification in your life, to hang out with a guy who doesn’t really speak good English, whom you like very much, is a good way to discipline your speech or writing. You’ve got to get very, very clear if you hang out and drink with somebody who doesn’t really speak English. So the conversation gets very intuitive and very clear. And to be able to write that way is a great goal.”28

  There was more, however, to his affiliation with Roshi than the satisfaction that came with a life dedicated to the pursuit of clarity. Far from incompatible with Judaism, the old master’s views underscored many of the central mysteries with which Cohen had struggled since being steeped in the old religion as a child, including the question concerning the nature of God. “The moment someone says the truth or God is an object or takes it as an object, that is already a mistake,” Roshi told a newspaper reporter visiting him a few months after his one-hundredth birthday. “God is neither object nor subject. The moment you say any little thing about God, you’re already making an object of God and Buddhism cautions you about that. At that moment you’re making an idiot out of God, you’re making a fool out of God.”29 To think like that is to understand that Judaism’s essential questions—why were the chosen people chosen, to what end, and for how long—were themselves, to some extent, koans. No Jew was expected to interpret the precise nature of divine election just as no Buddhist was expected to decipher the sound of one hand clapping; it was something to ponder, a drawbridge past the moats of reason and into some realm of higher understanding, impossible to describe in words. It’s that realm that so much of Leonard Cohen’s music seeks to explore, not just for Jews but for humankind, and not in the priestly way, by reciting the ancient texts, but prophetically, by following an ever-moving God wherever he went. This is what Cohen’s Jesus is getting at, perhaps, when he declares, in “Suzanne,” that “all men will be sailors then / Until the sea shall free them.” It is also why he sinks beneath our wisdom like a stone: Redemption never was and will never be a business for critical thinkers. “As long as we see things dualistically,” read a line in the official journal of Roshi’s monastery on Mount Baldy, “we shall never see the truth.… In the state of zero, there are no questions.”30 But how to get to a state of zero? For Leonard Cohen, that was what the next two decades were about.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “A Secret Chord”

  * * *

  John Lissauer realized that Leonard Cohen was a changed man as soon as he saw the Casio. It was 1984, and he was intrigued to hear from the singer after almost a decade without word. Lissauer knew about Cohen’s turbulent personal life, and expected to meet a more weathered man, but nothing prepared him for the sight of the troubadour exchanging his guitar for one of those toy gizmos that were hawked in tourist-trap shops all along Broadway and that sounded tinny and flat. Cohen, Lissauer recalled, pressed a button, and the machine spat out a tacky rhythm. Then Cohen played a new song. It was called “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and it sounded very different from Cohen’s earlier work.

  It wasn’t only the change of instrument. There was something more mature about the song. Despite the “me” in the title, it was a different Leonard doing the singing, one who seemed at once more present and almost entirely abstract. Cohen alluded to this transformation in “I Bury My Girlfriend,” one of the poems in Death of a Lady’s Man: “You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard. I eschew the philosopher’s stone. I bury my girlfriend. I remove my personality from the line so that I am permitted to use the first person as often as I wish without offending my appetite for modesty. Then I resign. I do errands for my mother, or someone like her. I eat too much. I blame those closest to me for ruining my talent. Then you come to me. The joyous news is mine.”

  Using the first person, Cohen knew, offended more than just his modesty. It was wounding his sense of purpose as an artist. Again and again he reflected on the oddity of having to share intimate sentiments with arenas packed thick with strangers, singing “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne”—one woman his friend and the other his lover, both songs written with their specific muses in mind—repeatedly as throngs of people who had met neither woman shouted the words back at him from their seats.

  This crisis of intimacy affected other rock stars as well. Some, like Bowie or the Beatles, solved it temporarily by pretending to be oth
er people. “We were fed up with being the Beatles,” Paul McCartney said when asked about the origins of Sgt. Pepper and the Lonely Hearts Club Band. “We really hated that fucking four little Mop-Top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn’t want any more, plus, we’d now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we’d been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists. Then suddenly on the plane I got this idea. I thought, Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know. It would be much more free.”1 Fewer still took Dylan’s approach and came to see songs as consumer goods that could be tweaked at will, rebranded and resold whenever the changing tastes of the market so decreed or the whims of the artist so dictated. When Larry “Ratso” Sloman, for example, learned that Dylan had decided to cut the masterpiece “Blind Willie McTell” from Infidels, he confronted the artist and asked him for a reason. “It’s just an album,” Dylan said. “I’ve made thirty of them.”2

  But Cohen couldn’t play fast and loose with his work, and he couldn’t play dress-up. He had to find some other way to sing without frequently feeling as if he were betraying his material, his audience, or both. The new songs he played for Lissauer in 1984 suggested that he had. If the guitar had been the instrument with which to write songs that played out like diary entries, the Casio was a portal to a higher plane of consciousness. Cohen’s new songs, Dylan noted when he heard them, sounded like prayers. Some more than others: “If It Be Your Will,” for example, perfectly mimicked the cadences and preoccupations of Jewish prayers. “If it be your will,” Cohen sang, “If there is a choice / Let the rivers fill / Let the hills rejoice / Let your mercy spill / On all these burning hearts in hell / If it be your will / To make us well.”

  Cohen had experimented with this mode of writing before. He had described “Bird on the Wire” as being “simultaneously a prayer and an anthem,” and had written several other songs that courted the liturgical. But something always got in the way. No matter where the earlier songs started out, they ended up being confessions, delivered gracefully by the sinner himself, accompanied by strings. The new songs were unencumbered; they did not feel obliged to tell a story or create a mood or do anything but deliver their wisdom. Like real prayers, once written they seemed no longer to belong to their composer but instead to become the property of whoever cared to softly mouth their words. Cohen realized that well; when Q magazine asked him, in 1994, what song he wished he had written, Cohen replied, “’If It Be Your Will.’ And I wrote it.”3

  This new mode of writing echoed not only ancient traditions but distinctly contemporary ones as well, corresponding with the dictates of modernist poetry. “One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express,” T. S. Eliot famously wrote in 1921, “and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.… There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal.’ Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”4 Anyone who wished to remain a poet after the age of twenty-five, Eliot quipped in the same essay, had to realize that the past was always present; he might have added that anyone who wished to remain a rock star after the age of forty-five had to make a similar concession.

  Cohen did. For the first time in his work, the past and the present merged. “Bird on the Wire,” for example, owes much of its power to the stark contrast between the things Cohen confessed to having done—“I have torn everyone who reached out for me”—and the promises he was now making—“But I swear by this song / And by all that I have done wrong / I will make it all up to thee.” And “The Sisters of Mercy” thrills because of its temporal tension between the singer’s recollection of his first and mystical encounter with the women in the song’s title and his admonitions to us who are about to meet them. But “Hallelujah,” one of the new songs Cohen had played for Lissauer, follows a different logic. “I heard there was a secret chord,” Cohen begins, “that David played and it pleased the Lord / But you don’t really care for music, do you?” The transcendent and the earthly intermingling was Cohen’s oldest trick—he’d used it everywhere from his earliest poetry to “Suzanne,” which is both about a friend and her habits and about Christ and his anguish—but he cuts it short. The very next verse does something strange. “Your faith was strong but you needed proof,” it begins, “You saw her bathing on the roof.” From merely singing about the biblical king, Cohen continues by addressing him directly—the bather on the roof, we assume, is Bathsheba—condemning us to spend the rest of the song steeped in confusion. Who is he talking to or about? Himself? Some unnamed lover? King David? Another biblical figure—a later reference to the cutting of hair implies Samson? We never know. He could be talking to anyone, and the song could be taking place anytime and anywhere.

  “I always said, everyone’s going to find a way to do this song,” Lissauer recalled. “The way we tailored the sound was very bizarre. I just wanted Leonard to be the voice. Not necessarily the voice of God, but it’s the voice, and it really does take you places. And we avoided doing the gospel choir thing. It was just a choir of regular people. There were some kids, a couple of friends, and the guys in the band. At one point we did toy with the idea of having a glorious choir, but I said no, let’s make it everyman. So that it wasn’t bigger than life. So that it was everyone’s hallelujah.”5

  Judging by the obscene number of cover versions, the song is everyone’s indeed. But it only takes a passing acquaintance with the other “Hallelujahs” to realize just how towering Cohen’s achievement truly was. A favorite with contestants of televised singing competitions, the song tends to inspire the sort of cascade of crescendos that causes inexperienced and dramatic singers to shut their eyes tightly and clench their fists as they belt out verse after verse. Overcome with emotion, they take the song—as had its best-known interpreter, Jeff Buckley—to be about the hallelujah of the orgasm, the turning loose of emotion T. S. Eliot so rightly disdained. Cohen himself has none of that. He sings it simply and straightforwardly, so that the last verse is strongest: “I did my best, it wasn’t much / I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch / I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you / And even though it all went wrong / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

  It’s a startling end to such a song; we expect a measure of resolution, or at least a concluding statement about love. Instead Cohen ends up all by himself, talking to God, admitting defeat. He couldn’t feel, so he wrote a song, understanding that the Holy Ghost may preside over the occasional copulation, but that if humans were ever to meet their maker—the Lord of Song—the way to do it was through ritual, imperfect and frequently devoid of emotion but ultimately and cosmically effective. When an interviewer told Cohen, years later, that “Hallelujah” conveyed a sense of holiness, it was ritual that Cohen wanted to talk about instead. “I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years,” he said. “Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgot. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bath
water. People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.”6

  Cohen was now committed to the mechanisms. When he took the album on tour, he decided to perform in Poland, becoming one of very few Western artists to visit the Communist nation. Lech Wałesa, the leader of Solidarity, asked to appear onstage with Cohen, but the singer refused. His Polish fans and critics alike argued, with varying degrees of generosity, that he realized an overt political statement would anger the authorities and likely lead to the cancellation of his shows. He did not seem concerned about the authorities, though. Speaking to the massive audience in Warsaw’s palatial Sala Kongresowa on March 22, 1985, Cohen said:

  I come from a country where we do not have the same struggles as you have. I respect your struggles. And it may surprise you, but I respect both sides of this struggle. It seems to me that in Europe there needs to be a left foot and a right foot to move forward. I wish that both feet moved forward and the body moved towards its proper destiny. This is an intense country; the people are heroic, the spirit is independent. It is a difficult country to govern. It needs a strong government and a strong union. When I was a child I went to synagogue every Saturday morning. Once in this country, there were thousands of synagogues, and thousands of Jewish communities which were wiped out in a few months. In the synagogue which I attended there was a prayer for the government. We were happy and we are happy to pray for the welfare of the government. And I would like to say to you, to the leaders of the left, and the leaders of the right, I sing for everyone. My song has no flag, my song has no party. And I say the prayer that we said in our synagogue, I say it for the leader of your union and the leader of your party. May the Lord put a spirit of wisdom and understanding into the hearts of your leaders and into the hearts of all their counselors.7