The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  “The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all—Hallelujah!’ That’s the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.”

  They finished recording the song, and the rest of the Various Positions album. “I said, ‘Man, we’re on top of this, this is really going to do it,’ ” John Lissauer recalled. “ ‘This is gonna be the breakthrough, this record is really going to be important.’ ‘Hallelujah’ just jumped out at you, plus there was a lot of other great stuff on the album.

  “And it went to Walter Yetnikoff, who was the president of CBS Records, and he said, ‘What is this? This isn’t pop music. We’re not releasing it. This is a disaster.’ ”

  • • •

  Famous and infamous, music industry legend Yetnikoff had risen from the label’s legal department to run the company, which he did from 1975 to 1990. His career (which is documented in Fredric Dannen’s definitive study of the record business, Hit Men, and in his own freewheeling autobiography, Howling at the Moon) was marked by such earth-shattering triumphs as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., alongside a litany of accusations and allegations about his shady cohorts and abrasive style.

  As Cohen recounted the story, when Yetnikoff told him that he was rejecting Various Positions, he said, “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”

  Lissauer suggests that perhaps the executives at Columbia (a division of CBS; soon to become part of the Sony Corporation) were expecting something more pop-oriented, based on the early reports from the sessions. “The ’80s was an awful period for real, artistic singer-songwriters,” he said. “The ’70s had everything from Paul Simon’s solo stuff, James Taylor, Joni, even Randy Newman. But the ’80s was all bands and MTV, and Yetnikoff might actually have been looking for a way to weed out the Leonards of the world.”

  Ungar believes that the rejection of the album was less strategic than that. “I think it was the usual reason—they didn’t hear a single.”

  Many years later, in a 2009 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company about the ongoing success of “Hallelujah,” Cohen was sanguine about Columbia’s decision. “There are certain ironic and amusing sidebars,” he said, “because the record that it came from . . . Sony wouldn’t put it out, they didn’t think it was good enough. It had songs like ‘Dance Me to the End of Love,’ ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘If It Be Your Will’—but it wasn’t considered good enough for the American market. So there’s a certain mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart.”

  But without the benefit of hindsight, consider Walter Yetnikoff’s position. In September 1984, Leonard Cohen would turn fifty. Each of his last three albums—covering a time span that reached back a full decade—had sold less than its predecessor, even in the scattered countries around the world where he did have a following. He had never placed an album in the U.S. Top Ten.

  Meanwhile, as Cohen was in the studio recording Various Positions, the summer of 1984 was perhaps the biggest season in the history of the record business. Over the course of a few months, Prince’s Purple Rain, Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and Madonna’s Like a Virgin were all released, and each went on to sell over ten million copies. Michael Jackson’s game-changing Thriller was still riding high on the charts, more than a year after it first came out. Since its launch in 1981, MTV had become the dominant force in pop music marketing, with a reach and an impact unlike anything the industry had seen before, and now the world’s biggest superstars had figured out how to take advantage of the exposure and opportunities that it offered.

  There could be no arguing that record sales had become very big business, and were getting bigger by the day. Stakes were high. And against that backdrop, it’s not hard to imagine that a record company might have had a difficult time knowing what to do with a middle-aged artist, of an elite but very limited stature, at this precise moment in music history. It’s perhaps even more difficult to see a label executive being able to hear clearly enough to believe that the simple song with the Bible stories and the one-word chorus might go on to some success of its own. And, to be honest, while the synthesizer sounds were considered state-of-the-art in 1984, they weren’t edgy enough to win over younger listeners, and they soon sounded somewhat dated.

  Various Positions was released overseas, and two months after CBS passed on it, the independent label PVC Records put it out in the U.S., at the end of 1984. (Columbia would later buy back the rights to the album when it rereleased Cohen’s catalogue on compact disc.) But still, once the album reached the public, hardly anyone seemed to notice “Hallelujah,” the first song on the LP’s second side. Don Shewey’s album review in Rolling Stone didn’t mention the song, though it noted the album’s “surprising country & western flavor” and singled out “John Lissauer’s lucid and beautiful production.”

  Lissauer had never even seen that review until I sent it to him after our interview. In fact, he had no idea that Various Positions had actually been released in the U.S. until four or five years after it happened. When Cohen’s manager at the time, Marty Machat, broke the news to the producer that the record had been turned down, he said that it wasn’t worth bothering to execute their contract—and so, to this day, Lissauer has never seen a single cent in royalties for his work on “Hallelujah,” about which he seems curiously at peace. “I still survive, everything is fine,” he said, “but it would be nice to actually get royalties for an album with the most-recorded song in fifty years on it.”

  The experience essentially ended Lissauer’s producing career. Baffled by the label’s response to a project that he felt so positive about, he switched gears and turned to making music for films, which he feels has all turned out for the best. But he does express regret that the outcome of the Various Positions saga effectively meant the end of his relationship with Cohen.

  “Once they went out on tour and then we got word that the record was a non-record, I didn’t see him for fifteen years,” he said. “I think we were both so embarrassed. I felt horrible. I felt like I’d ruined his career.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  In June 1988, Bob Dylan began his “Never-Ending Tour,” his return to a regular presence on the road after decades of inconsistent touring. He has continued this approach ever since, in one form or another, playing about a hundred shows a year, or more, every year for almost twenty-five years and counting. Besides experimenting with the endless selections from his own catalogue, he has tossed in a mix of covers on occasion, often country or gospel standards but sometimes songs by his peers, including, in two shows that summer—in July in Montreal and in August in Los Angeles—the Leonard Cohen song he had recently praised to its author.

  “The only person who seemed to recognize the song was Dylan,” Cohen has said. Dylan apparently expressed particular admiration for the concluding verse of “Hallelujah,” with its “rather joyous” sensibility. His performances, as heard on bootleg recordings, hew closely to the Various Positions recording—he gets some of the lyrics out of order, he leans into the rhymes more aggressively than does Cohen, with his sly elision, and the swing is a bit leaden, but Dylan’s “Hallelujah” certainly conveys a sense of celebration and praise.

  The interpretation is far from definitive (some, in fact, have listed it among the versions that butcher the song), but it has a clear sense of purpose, with additional resonance coming at the moment of Dylan’s reemergence as a stage performer. And there’s no way to overstate the significance of any song’s first real endorsement coming from Bob Dylan.

  But by the time Dylan took his shot at the song, “Hallelujah” had already begun to change dramatically. Cohen began touring behind Various Positions in 1985, and he soon started reconsidering the song’s lyrics. He experimented with adding back and swapping out some of the verses that he had excised from the original spra
wling manuscript.

  Lissauer wonders if the modifications might have been a result of the album’s rejection and commercial disappointment. “Leonard may well have said, ‘Jeez, why was this not successful? I love this song . . . ’ and started to condense his process,” he said.

  According to Ungar, the lyric revisions are actually not so uncommon for Cohen. “I think he’s toying with verses for years afterward on many songs,” she said. “He was singing different lyrics to ‘Bird on the Wire’ during the 2008–10 tour.”

  By the time the song was recorded in Austin, Texas, on October 31, 1988, as part of a taping for the Austin City Limits public television series (it was not included in the episode, further evidence of its continued obscurity, but the recording was used on 1994’s Cohen Live album), it had been transformed almost completely. It is considerably slower and runs twice as long as the original studio version. Though this appearance came just a few months after Bob Dylan’s performances of “Hallelujah,” only the final verse remains the same as that arrangement; the first three verses are all new, and express something quite different from the experienced wisdom and fortitude of Cohen’s earlier rendition.

  This version of “Hallelujah” has a much darker and more sexual edge. The David and Samson references are gone, replaced by a more caustic depiction of love. The mystery of the “secret chord” is gone; the song now opens:

  Baby, I’ve been here before.

  I know this room, I’ve walked this floor.

  I used to live alone before I knew ya.

  Yeah, I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,

  but this love, love is not some kind of victory march,

  No, it’s a cold and it’s a very broken Hallelujah!

  As a very different kind of hit from the ’80s put it, love is a battlefield: “I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch,” Cohen sings, “but this love, love is not some kind of victory march.” (London’s Marble Arch was initially built as the ceremonial entrance to the courtyard at Buckingham Palace.) And the hallelujah itself is now “cold and very broken.”

  Cohen’s vocals aren’t as low and sermonizing as they were in the studio; there’s more melody to this rendition, a range that moves outside of the singsongy tune. With two backup singers replacing the choir, this “Hallelujah” feels smaller in scale and more intimate, and the arrangement is less theatrical and more human and personal.

  The second and third verses get more carnal, and more bitter. The person he’s addressing no longer shows him “what’s really going on below,” not like she used to. “I remember when I moved in you, / and the holy dove was moving too, / and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!”—sex and salvation are one, but it’s just a memory now.

  Most cynical, in the third verse, he allows that “maybe there’s a God above,” but confesses that “all I ever learned from love / is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.” These aren’t the words of a true believer, not “the laughter of someone who’s claimed to have seen the light,” but of someone who’s been burned and accepted that love is a competition like everything else. The duality of the “holy or the broken” hallelujah on the studio version has been cracked. Here, Cohen sings again of the “cold and lonely” hallelujah.

  After a guitar solo by Bob Metzger, he reaches that fourth and final verse, with lyrics intact from the studio version, and the joyousness that Dylan responded to now feels much more like resignation than triumph. The previous stanzas do indeed make it seem like “it all went wrong,” but what else can ya do? He shakes his head and turns up his palms and says what the hell—“with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

  It’s still a powerful piece of writing, and the slowed-down tempo was an appropriate choice for the retooled sentiment. But this “Hallelujah” is something more straightforward than the original—less ambitious, perhaps, if more precise. If the Various Positions lyrics were about faith as a response to life’s brutality, including the ravages and mysteries of love, this edit foregrounded the pains of sex and romance, offering hope as a more defensive protection against defeat, a backstop to prevent us from giving in to despair. The more accessible, if sometimes more pedestrian arrangement, mirrored this pulling of “Hallelujah” back down to earth.

  Meanwhile, as Cohen was continuing to tinker with this song, his visibility had begun to increase. In 1986, at the urging of his son, Adam, he made a hilarious cameo appearance on an episode of Miami Vice titled “French Twist” in the role of “Francois Zolan,” a senior executive in the French Secret Service engaged in an illegal operation to blow up Greenpeace boats. He filmed a larger part, but his contribution was cut down to two brief scenes, not quite sixty seconds of Cohen murmuring in French into a telephone. The following year, his featured vocalist Jennifer Warnes recorded a gorgeous and critically celebrated album of Cohen covers titled Famous Blue Raincoat (once again, tellingly, “Hallelujah” was not among the songs she recorded).

  Most important, the 1988 release of the I’m Your Man album—which brought him back into the Columbia Records fold, whether because Walter Yetnikoff saw the error of his ways or because he heard something more commercial this time around—was considered a career highlight for Cohen, raising his profile and critical standing following a full decade in which the underachieving Various Positions was his only new music. The synthesizers that Lissauer had introduced were now the foundation of the arrangements, creating a sleeker, sexy Euro-pop sound. I’m Your Man introduced such undeniable classics as “Tower of Song” and “Everybody Knows,” and it became something of a blueprint for the rest of Cohen’s releases to date.

  He embarked on a widely acclaimed tour of the United States, and became more visible in the press. The hour-long Austin City Limits performance was his first major appearance on national television in the U.S., and in 1989, he also performed on NBC’s remarkable, short-lived music program Night Music (including an astonishing duet with saxophonist Sonny Rollins on “Who by Fire”). “Everybody Knows” turned up as the theme song for young rebel Christian Slater’s pirate radio station in the film Pump Up the Volume. In Norway, I’m Your Man topped the charts for seventeen weeks, becoming his first-ever Number One album anywhere in the world.

  It seemed that Leonard Cohen was finding a place in the global pop community in a way that had eluded him for almost twenty years. Still, when Columbia presented him with an award for the international success of the new album, he wryly thanked the label with the comment “I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.”

  • • •

  Reflecting this resurgence, in 1991 the first in what would be a number of Cohen tribute albums was assembled by the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. The punk rejection of Cohen during the 1970s that Bono described had receded, and I’m Your Fan illustrated the impact that Cohen had quietly exerted on the alternative rock movement that had emerged throughout the 1980s and was on the verge of exploding via the grunge revolution. Such bands as R.E.M., the Pixies, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recorded new versions of Cohen songs for this collection.

  “Any attention I get, I’m grateful for,” Cohen told the British music magazine Q. “I never believe anyone when they say that they want to pay tribute to me. Jennifer Warnes was saying for years that she wanted to do an album of my songs and I always took that as an expression of friendship. I never expected her to go ahead and make it. Same with [editor] Christian Fevret, who has put this thing together.

  “He presented me with the idea and we ran through some group names. I didn’t know all of them, but I knew Ian McCulloch, whom I’ve met on several occasions, and R.E.M. and the Pixies and Lloyd Cole and John Cale. It seemed like a really nice thing but I said, ‘Yeah, seems like a great idea. Goodbye and good luck.’ I never thought I’d hear from him again.”

  Listening to the album with writer Adrian Deevoy, Cohen singled out the performances by Nick Cave on “Tower of Song” (“I love that. It’s weird, but it’s a really inte
lligent approach”) and the Pixies doing “I Can’t Forget” (“Hear the conviction in that?”). The version of “Suzanne” by Geoffrey Oryema, a Ugandan musician signed to Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, stopped him cold. “When you hear a guy singing a song like this . . . it gives you a good feeling,” Cohen said.

  But it would be the contribution from John Cale, who came to (a certain sort of) prominence as one of the founding members of the groundbreaking Velvet Underground, that would ultimately make the biggest impact. Cale had begun his career as an avant-garde classical musician, working with such giants as Aaron Copland, John Cage, and La Monte Young. Following his years in the ’60s with the pioneering, proto-punk Velvets, he embarked on a solo career that ranged from more delicate folk-pop to disturbingly intense, confrontational rock, culminating in an infamous gig during which he chopped off the head of a dead chicken with a meat cleaver on stage. He also produced influential albums by the likes of Patti Smith, the Stooges, and the Modern Lovers. Cale was also a longtime Leonard Cohen devotee, and his inclusion on I’m Your Fan, singing “Hallelujah” in a solo piano arrangement, offered a bit of an elder’s blessing to the younger indie rockers on the album.

  Cale has not spoken much about his “Hallelujah” over the years, but in an Australian radio interview in 2010, he explained his selection. “I remember going to see Leonard at the Beacon, in New York, and I hadn’t heard [‘Hallelujah’] before and it just knocked me sideways.”

  Cale said in this same interview that he had not only known Cohen’s music, but also the man himself for a long time: “He’s a droll character . . . amazing.” Yet he was unfamiliar with the recorded “Hallelujah,” further proof of Various Positions’ standing, or lack thereof, even among Cohen’s devoted following. And so, Cale later told the Boston Globe, “I called and asked [Cohen] to send the lyrics. I had one of those old fax machines. I went out to dinner and my floor was covered in paper.”