The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  In different tellings, Cale has said that Cohen faxed him fifteen verses or, truer to the author’s account of the song’s initial length, fifteen pages full of verses. “Some of them, I couldn’t sing myself,” said Cale. “Some of them are about Yahweh, about religion, and reflecting Leonard’s background. So I took the cheeky verses.”

  Whatever he was initially working with, Cale’s solution was quite simple. Whether he realized it or not, he began his edit with the first two verses of the Various Positions version, the verses that begin “I’ve heard there was a secret chord,” and “Your faith was strong but you needed proof,” and then added the three verses that started the arrangement documented on the Cohen Live album. For the final verse, Cale chose something very different from Cohen’s more spiritual conclusion:

  Maybe there’s a God above

  all I ever learned from love

  is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.

  And it’s not a cry you can hear at night,

  it’s not somebody who’s seen the light—

  it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!

  Despite his implication that he avoided the spiritual dimension of the song, Cale sensed the elemental power of the biblical stories and languages, and returned them to the position of the song’s entry point, but then undercut them with the lyrics focused on sexual longing and tragic romance.

  The juxtaposition of the Samson story (“she broke your throne, she cut your hair”) followed by the assertion that “love is not a victory march” is a particularly inspired bit of soldering by Cale. The shift in perspective that resulted from this edit is also intriguing—clearly the “you” who was overthrown by her beauty and the moonlight is not the same “you” who the singer “moved in.” Like a Cubist painting, the lyric now surrounds the listener from multiple points of view.

  Most notably, the conclusion was completely transformed. On Cohen Live, Cohen held on to the notion of the transcendent hallelujah “even though it all went wrong,” retaining those final lines even as he jettisoned the rest of the lyrics. Cale, instead, ends his “Hallelujah” with the idea that “maybe there’s a God above,” but that the “cold and broken” hallelujah is “not a cry you can hear at night / it’s not somebody who’s seen the light.” It is bleaker and more despondent, a hallelujah purged of joy.

  A few subtle but significant alterations to the lyric—where Cohen sang, “it’s not a complaint,” Cale said, “it’s not a cry”; Cohen’s “lonely Hallelujah” is replaced by a “broken Hallelujah”—only reinforce this sense of desolation. Cale has kept a backdrop of spirituality, with the David and Samson stories and the “holy dove,” but has turned it into a lover’s lament. If the song started its life by making a sacred concept into something tangible and physical, Cale now turned it on its head and made sex sacred.

  This edit would prove to be a pivot point for the song’s embrace by the next generation, even if that didn’t happen through Cale’s own recording. Amanda Palmer—make it “Amanda Fucking Palmer,” as her fans would call her—is a powerful performer given to wearing corsets and combat boots onstage. Palmer began singing “Hallelujah” as an encore with her band the Dresden Dolls and retained it as a highlight of her set when she felt the occasion called for something special—like one of her spontaneous “ninja gigs” in Australia in 2011, when she led a DIY bicycle gang through the streets and ended her set with a sing-along to the song in a driving rainstorm.

  Palmer explained why she thinks Cale’s restructuring truly cracked the code of the song, and it has to do with the emotional momentum that he created. For Palmer, the line “all I ever learned from love / is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you” always leads to tears. “And then,” she said, “if it’s an especially heated environment, or a perfect night, or I’m really feeling it, or if the room is really on fire—smolderingly, quietly, on fire—that emotion will stick, will plateau right through the last verse.”

  Just as significant, Cale’s musical accompaniment replaced Cohen’s choir-and-synthesizers with stark piano arpeggios, sped up from the pace of the original; it was, as writer John S. W. MacDonald put it in the Jewish webzine Tablet, “an arrangement that perfectly suited the song’s tale of human frailty.” The Welsh-born Cale’s clipped, steady delivery gave the song an edge that stripped away any excessive sentiment. “Cale’s version has menace in it,” noted Bill Flanagan. “What for Leonard was resignation, in Cale is kind of like a drunk call at 2 a.m. to the ex-wife—there’s a certain amount of ‘Remember this? Remember this? Remember when I moved in you?’ ”

  Cale created a more perfect union out of Cohen’s unnerving marriage of the divine and the damaged, but it came at the cost of a spiritual payoff. Between the reassembled lyrics and the simple arrangement, he truly humanized the song, arguably flattening out the emotional ambiguity but allowing it to retain the mystery and majesty of its imagery. NME called Cale’s recording “a thing of wondrous, savage beauty.”

  Cale’s selection of “Hallelujah” and the stripped-down presentation he gave to it also seem meaningful in light of his own work at the time: Following a solo career marked by music that was often abrasive and brutal, he had taken a few years away from music after his daughter was born. This recording was part of a period of gentler and more reflective work, including a collaboration with Lou Reed, his estranged former cofounder of the Velvet Underground, and even a brief Velvets reunion in 1993.

  Cale’s “Hallelujah,” which was the final track on the I’m Your Fan album, forever altered the possibilities for this strange, elusive song. Cohen himself began to base his live performances of the song on the lyrics as Cale had edited them—though crucially, he never let go of the redemptive final verse. The tribute record, a provocative but very mixed bag creatively, was hardly a commercial blockbuster, but John Cale’s performance planted the seeds for the “Hallelujah” explosion that would follow.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It’s a little hard to describe Hal Willner. He’s a record producer who has worked with such iconoclasts as Lou Reed (including on Reed’s widely reviled 2011 collaboration with Metallica, Lulu) and Marianne Faithfull. He is a longtime staffer at Saturday Night Live, where he oversees all of the incidental music used in the show’s sketches. Mostly, though, Willner assembles things—over the years, he has put together surprising and enlightening tribute records showcasing the music of Nino Rota, Charles Mingus (on which Leonard Cohen appears), Kurt Weill, and the songs from Walt Disney films, and assembled concerts celebrating such artists as Neil Young, Randy Newman, and Cohen. As a producer of the short-lived, long-lamented Night Music, he was the one who matched Cohen with jazz titan Sonny Rollins on national television.

  The same year that I’m Your Fan was released, Willner organized a concert commemorating the late, singular singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. The event, held on April 26, 1991, at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights, brought together more than twenty musicians to perform Buckley’s genre-defying, free-form songs. (In 1989, St. Ann’s had been the site of John Cale’s reunion with Lou Reed; they performed Songs for Drella, their song cycle about Andy Warhol, who had brought them together in the Velvet Underground.)

  Leonard Cohen had known Tim Buckley in the 1960s—both were loosely grouped with the revolutionary new generation of folksingers, but where Cohen was pushing the boundaries of poetry and lyric sophistication within a musical setting, Buckley was exploring the possibilities for the place where folk, pop, and jazz all meet. After Buckley died of a drug overdose at age twenty-eight in 1975, a small but fervent cult solidified around his music.

  It was the avant-garde side of Buckley’s work that was highlighted at the “Greetings from Tim Buckley” show. Performers included the punk pioneer Richard Hell, the charmingly oddball singer Syd Straw, and groupings of as many as five guitarists at a time. But the guest everyone walked away from the show talking about was a young man identified as “Jeff Scott Buckley”—the singer’s then twenty-f
our-year-old son, who had actually met his late father only once. In his New York Times review of the evening, Stephen Holden wrote that the younger Buckley “delivered his first public performances of several of his father’s songs in a high droning voice that echoed his father’s keening timbre.”

  Jeff Buckley had grown up in Southern California, raised by his mother and known as Scotty Moorhead, after his stepfather, Ron Moorhead. His musical ambitions mostly revolved around his guitar playing—he had taken classes at the Musicians Institute, learning music theory and flashy heavy metal licks. He had been kicking around in various bands, playing on recording sessions, rooming at one point with Chris Dowd of the funk-punk band Fishbone. He had already tried moving to New York once, but had gone back to Los Angeles to record a demo tape, when Willner invited him to the St. Ann’s show—a star-making moment about which Buckley later expressed ambivalence.

  “When my father died, I was not invited to the funeral, and that kind of gnawed at me,” he would tell Ray Rogers of Interview magazine. “I figured that if I went to this tribute, sang, and paid my respects, I could be done with it. I didn’t want my appearance to be misconstrued, so I said, ‘I don’t want to be billed; I just want to walk on. I don’t want to get anywhere for doing this. It’s something really private to me.’ ”

  Though he actually sang four of his father’s songs at the tribute, including a memorable performance of “Once I Was” that closed the show, he only talked to Rogers about one of them. “I sang Tim’s song ‘I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,’ ” he said. “It was about him having to take the gypsy life over a regular one. I’m mentioned in the song, as is his girlfriend at the time—my mom. It’s a beautiful song. I both admired it and hated it, so that’s what I sang.

  “There are all of these expectations that come with this ‘ ’60s offspring’ bullshit, but I can’t tell you how little he had to do with my music. I met him one time when I was eight; other than that, there was nothing.”

  Yet former Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas—who met Jeff at the St. Ann’s show, and who would become his partner in a band called Gods and Monsters—noted that the elder Buckley played a much stronger role in Jeff’s music than he allowed. “Tim Buckley was the major influence on Jeff,” he said, “and, in fact, he knew his father’s catalog backwards and forwards and could sing any of the songs just like his dad if he wanted.”

  After the St. Ann’s show, Jeff Buckley went back to Los Angeles. But he didn’t stay there for long. Working as a roadie and guitar tech for Glen Hansard, who would become a star fifteen years later with the indie film phenomenon Once, he found a job that took him on the road with a rock and roll band—or at least a cinematic re-creation of one.

  Hansard got his first big break when he was cast in The Commitments. Playing the role of Outspan Foster, the guitarist in a hardscrabble band with dreams of bringing real soul music to Dublin, Hansard got to see the world. The 1991 movie may not have won him the accolades that Once did—“Falling Slowly” was honored with the Academy Award for Best Song, and the film led to a Broadway musical that won eight Tony Awards—but it did win the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and the soundtrack album reached Number Eight on the U.S. charts.

  To promote the film, after each media screening in the States, the Commitments played a set at a party. This mini-tour started in L.A., where a young aspiring musician signed on for work as a roadie and guitar tech. Hansard befriended the kid. “We shared amps and guitars, fixed each other’s gear, went to record shops,” he recalled. “We were both big Dylan fans, so we connected on that level.” One night in a Chicago hotel room, Hansard sang Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was” and his friend said, “You know he was my dad, right?” Hansard had no idea.

  When they got to New York, all that Hansard and Buckley wanted to do was knock around Greenwich Village and retrace Bob Dylan’s footsteps. After returning to his midtown hotel, Hansard got a call from an old friend from Ireland named Shane Doyle, who had opened a café bar in the East Village called Sin-é (which translates from the Gaelic as “that’s it”). He asked the guitarist if he could persuade the Commitments to come down and play; Hansard said he didn’t know where everyone was, but he and his friend Jeff would love to stop by. Doyle penciled them in for a midnight set, and they were thrilled to have an actual gig in the Village.

  “I remember singing ‘Sweet Thing’ by Van Morrison,” said Hansard, “and Jeff came up and started singing the second verse. He got really into it and just started going—the café was packed, people were stopping and looking in through the windows from the street to see what was happening. He was instantly a star in that moment.”

  It was Buckley’s first visit to Sin-é, a place that would assume mythic proportions in his legend. Sin-é had no more than a couple dozen scattered tables, and no real stage, just a small cleared space where a couple of musicians or poets could set up. As the name indicated, the bar, which Doyle and Karl Geary opened in 1989, was initially a haven for New York’s young Irish community; U2 and Gabriel Byrne were known to visit, and Sinéad O’Connor, at the height of her fame, could sometimes be found cleaning things up behind the bar.

  Hansard recalled that after the set Buckley “stayed and hung out at Sin-é, washing dishes—he always liked the idea of doing that before he went on, he felt like it grounded him before going onstage.” He told Hansard that he wasn’t going to continue with the Commitments tour—that this time he wanted to stay in New York.

  Buckley was twenty-five years old, strikingly handsome, and eager for experience. He threw himself fully and immediately into the city and its music community. He played and wrote with Lucas, but by early 1992, he was stepping out on his own, performing solo shows with an electric guitar at such downtown clubs as the Knitting Factory and Cornelia Street Café. Most notably, he was given a regular Monday night slot at Sin-é.

  Intimate but low-key, the club was an ideal place for an emerging artist to work. As Buckley began meeting more people, discovering and exploring music from numerous, disparate sources, his Sin-é performances often seemed more like public rehearsals, with the singer trying out material by a lengthy and far-reaching list of artists—Van Morrison, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bad Brains, Nina Simone, Robert Johnson—and revealing an astonishing vocal range. The two-disc, expanded version of the live EP recorded at the club documents the boundless energy and rapid-fire, free-associating humor that defined his Monday night shows.

  “He was trying songs all the time,” said Hal Willner. “Certain Dylan tunes, Edith Piaf—he did ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa’ one night. He just became an amoeba, a jellyfish; he was like a Tex Avery character all of a sudden. He swallowed everything—he was enthusiastic about everything. Mine was one of the record collections that he had access to, and it was great because he was just so hungry at that particular time to listen.”

  The two women who ran the arts series at St. Ann’s, artistic director Susan Feldman and program director Janine Nichols, became very close to Buckley. “On the deepest level, Jeff was like a little brother to me,” said Nichols, who preceded Willner in the SNL job and now performs as a jazz singer. “Susan and I took him under our wing, to the extent that he would allow it. At the very beginning, Jeff was the most unboundaried person I ever met—he trusted everyone. It was pure luck that we were trustworthy people, and off he went into the world.”

  At one point, Nichols and her family went out of town for a few days, and Buckley stayed at their apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to take care of their cat. While he was there, he pulled the I’m Your Fan record from her shelves, and apparently for the first time, heard a song called “Hallelujah.”

  Nichols also lent Buckley the Fender Telecaster guitar that became his signature instrument; on the credits to his Live at Sin-é EP, he thanked “Janine Nichols for her guitar, and Susan Feldman for everything.” Looking back, she said, “I’m kind of knocked out by this influence I had on his musical life, with absolutely no int
ent to do so.”

  Soon, Buckley began adding “Hallelujah” to his repertoire. Steve Berkowitz was an A&R executive at Columbia Records in 1992 when he ran into Hal Willner on the street one night; Willner was on his way to see Buckley at Sin-é, and Berkowitz joined him.

  “When I first saw Jeff, he was already doing the song,” he said. “From that very first time I heard his version, it was basically as we know it now, fully formed in the way he would deliver it—this tempo, this pace, and, like most songs he did, it was his immediately, not a copy of anybody’s version.”

  Yet Berkowitz added that Buckley was always striving to get even further inside the song, that he wasn’t just satisfied by finding an approach that worked and sticking with it. “I thought of Jeff kind of like a jazz musician. Each performance was unique, according to his feelings that day. He’d play with a different pitch, in a different key. He would play a song with a slide one night, and then maybe never do it again. Feel, performance, emotion is what he was tinkering with. So he kept adding, shaping, reworking ‘Hallelujah.’ ”

  “I remember the first time I heard Jeff sing it,” said Bill Flanagan, who at the time was the editor of Musician magazine. “It might have been at Sin-é, or it might have been at the Knitting Factory or someplace—but the first time I heard him sing it, I remember saying to him afterwards, ‘Hey, you did the Leonard Cohen song, that was a good call.’ And he said, ‘I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version. I know it by John Cale.’

  “I think a lot of people didn’t know the song, and just assumed Jeff had written it. And then it very quickly became the real high point in Jeff’s show; it became his signature pretty early. It was the perfect song for him—because of his voice, but also because of how he looked singing it. It’s a song that begins with King David, and Jeff kind of looked like Michelangelo’s David. And when he sang it, it was as if a Renaissance painting had come to life.”