The Holy or the Broken

by Alan Light

  “A lot of musicians talk about it, but there really is something to a magic performance—it’s a rare thing,” said Patrick Stump of the pop-punk band Fall Out Boy, who would later incorporate part of “Hallelujah” into a song of their own titled “Hum Hallelujah,” which would in turn become a favorite of their own fans. “The thing about the Jeff Buckley version of ‘Hallelujah’ that gave it another life was that it was just a magical performance. There really are very few of those in music history, recordings that are just dead-on—something like Otis Redding’s ‘These Arms of Mine.’

  “Jeff Buckley had that quality, and even he couldn’t have performed the song that same way again. [Cohen’s] original was so produced, and Buckley’s is so small, just a guy and his guitar, and he makes it so personal. . . . He was able to find so many different things in that lyric—sex, passion, darkness, beauty are all in his voice. In the end it lends itself to Jeff Buckley’s legacy as much as Leonard Cohen’s.”

  “Hallelujah” has become an unexpected staple in the live act of heavy metal band Alter Bridge, initially an offshoot of the mega-selling hard rock band Creed. (Coincidentally, on my way to meet up with Alter Bridge singer Myles Kennedy prior to a concert by his band, a cellist was playing “Hallelujah” in the Union Square subway station.)

  In a downstairs lounge under the Best Buy Theater, in the heart of Times Square, Kennedy (who also sings in a band led by guitarist Slash, and filled in for Axl Rose when Guns N’ Roses were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012) recalled the first time he heard Buckley’s recording of the song, saying, “It was one of those life-changing moments. I was in my house in Spokane, Washington, I think it was January of ’95. I had just gotten the Grace record and sat down and was listening to it, and that song came on and I was completely dumbfounded. Then I got to see him perform it about five months later in Seattle.

  “The thing about Jeff’s interpretation is that there’s a certain melancholy, a certain longing. What I got out of it was the idea of surrendering, just total surrender to this thing called love. The vibe I get in reading that lyric, or in singing it, is that it’s not necessarily perfect; it’s painful. But surrendering nonetheless. And it’s beautiful.”

  Amanda Palmer, who has often performed “Hallelujah” live, takes a bit of a contrary view (as she does with most things); she said that she appreciates Buckley’s interpretation more than she loves it, and finds his reading more calculated than truly organic. “I think Jeff Buckley was brilliant, but his version of the song always struck me as too technical,” she said. “But I get totally why that version hooked people, because he also knows what you can’t do with that song, which is that you can’t get so overwrought that you lose the plot. You’ve got to deliver it just right, and he’s got this angelic, fantastic, otherworldly voice.

  “I think the other important part of that song is you don’t fucking over-orchestrate it. You don’t put swelling strings and a symphony behind it. That song works best when it’s just stripped down.”

  Jeff Buckley’s following may not have been as big as Columbia Records had hoped for, but it was certainly fervent. And as these listeners discovered Buckley, some of them were also being introduced to the older Canadian gentleman who had a songwriting credit on the album. While Buckley didn’t know Cohen’s work when he first started performing “Hallelujah,” by the time Grace was released, he had become a student of the man’s music.

  “He developed a tremendous respect and reverence for all things Leonard,” said Steve Berkowitz. “Like Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis, James Brown—they were all of the highest order to Jeff.” Buckley was photographed holding a banana in tribute to the cover of Cohen’s I’m Your Man, and in the booklet for the expanded reissue of Grace, there’s a shot of him holding a copy of the Various Positions LP.

  “The reason I did ‘Hallelujah’ was because of the song, and not because of Leonard,” he told MTV’s 120 Minutes alternative video show. “But you can’t help but admire him.”

  When Norah Jones first heard “Hallelujah,” she didn’t know that it was a cover. “Then I also realized Leonard Cohen wrote ‘Everybody Knows,’ which I knew from Concrete Blonde doing it on the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack,” she said. “I also used to listen to Nina Simone’s version of ‘Suzanne,’ so then I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

  • • •

  If Leonard Cohen was the author of “Hallelujah” and John Cale was its editor, Jeff Buckley was the song’s ultimate performer. A decade after its original recording, the song had found its defining voice, and the Grace recording would essentially become the version against which future versions would be measured.

  To this new generation of cool kids, “Hallelujah” belonged to Jeff Buckley. Having honed his performance of the song in tiny Manhattan clubs, he was ready to take it out to the world with complete confidence. Often even a famous artist will offer deference or defensiveness when covering someone else’s composition, but not Jeff Buckley. (“Jeff was never intimidated by a song,” said Glen Hansard. “That’s kind of what made him great.”) He was delivering “Hallelujah” with an intensity that was almost mystic, and a very different manifestation of the ecstatic, “holy hallelujah” in Cohen’s original.

  Just how much he had taken on a new and specific meaning for his “Hallelujah” was evident in the razor-edged, street-romantic way Buckley introduced the song onstage in Germany in 1995. “It’s not the bottle,” he said. “It’s not the pills. It’s not the face of strangers who will offer you their lines and hot needles. It’s not the time you were together in their place—so perfect, like a second home. And it’s not from the Bible. It’s not from angels. Not from preachers who are chaste and understanding of nothing that is human in this world. It’s for people who are lovers. It’s for people who have been lovers. You are at last somewhere. Until then it’s hallelujah.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The same year that Grace was released, Leonard Cohen disappeared. In 1992, his ninth album, The Future, came out. Released following the riots in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict—Cohen could see the fires from his house—the record expressed some of his bleakest sentiments; “I’ve seen the future, baby: / it is murder,” he sneered on the title track, and “Give me crack and anal sex / Take the only tree that’s left / and stuff it up the hole / in your culture.”

  The album was more scriptural, more apocalyptic, even by Cohen’s standards. But it also contained some of his most profound struggling for hope—in one of his most celebrated lines, on “Anthem,” he sang, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

  “I write the songs when I get to the place where I can’t be dishonest about what I’m doing,” Cohen told Anthony DeCurtis in Rolling Stone. “The record is there for keeps. There’s flesh and blood attached to it. I did what was necessary, and I sit here kind of wrecked.”

  Most of the interviews he did around the album’s release still did not mention “Hallelujah,” even within lists of his best-known compositions. (In fact, even a Cohen biography published in 1996 with the title Various Positions did not include a single reference to the song.) In 1993, Cohen published a collection of his lyrics and poetry titled Stranger Music, which he had spent several years assembling. “Hallelujah” was included with the four verses as recorded on Various Positions, and then the other lyrics from the Cale/Buckley version listed as “additional verses.”

  The Future gave Cohen his greatest commercial success in years—it went double platinum in Canada and reached the Top 40 in the UK—though it still did not chart in the U.S. Following a 1993 tour, he withdrew from the public eye and began a period during which he spent years in isolated study at a Zen monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Los Angeles.

  According to its website, the Mt. Baldy Zen Center, founded in a former Boy Scout camp by Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi (who is still the center’s teacher today, at age 105), “enables ordained p
riests and lay students to train together in a formal, but rustic setting—designed to help us realize fundamental insights into our nature, and to manifest these insights in everyday life.” For the remainder of the 1990s, as he turned sixty and beyond, the Canadian Jew mostly stayed 6,500 feet up Mt. Baldy, learning from the elderly Zen master, whom he had first met in 1969. This grandson of a rabbi, who has said that he has explored spiritual directions “from Scientology to delusions of [himself] as the High Priest rebuilding the Temple,” was embracing a life of intensive reflection: Cohen performed ritual tasks, spoke little, and wrote only for himself. In time, he would be ordained a Rinzai Buddhist monk and given the name “Jikan,” meaning “Ordinary Silence.”

  “There was no sense of dissatisfaction with my career,” Cohen later said to writer Mikal Gilmore of his time at the monastery. “On the contrary. If anything, it was like, ‘Well, so this is what it’s like to succeed.’ I had the respect of my peers and another generation or two, and people were writing kindly about me.” He said that when he decided to study with Roshi, it was “with the feeling of, ‘If this works, I’ll stay.’ I didn’t put a limit on it, but I knew I was going to be there for a while.”

  In the absence of any new recordings, Columbia Records spent the rest of the 1990s exploring Cohen’s back catalogue. In 1994, Cohen Live came out—a compilation of concert performances over the years, including the Austin City Limits version of “Hallelujah” from 1988. That same year, Trent Reznor, the front man of Nine Inch Nails, assembled the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers, and included three Cohen songs (two on the soundtrack album)—an endorsement of Cohen’s eternal cool by two new-school rebels that introduced him to yet another audience. (This came on the heels of the shout-out to Cohen by Nirvana, then perhaps the biggest band in the world, on the 1993 song “Pennyroyal Tea.”)

  More tribute albums were recorded in Cohen’s honor, in the Czech Republic and Spain. In an interview with KCRW’s Chris Douridas, Cohen said that when these records “landed in the mailbox,” he was “very impressed by the performances and the treatment, and I thought, ‘Who can I turn to, to let people hear this?’ ” He and his team decided to help assemble a tribute project of their own.

  Titled Tower of Song, the 1995 collection reflected the fact that Cohen’s star had risen considerably in a few years; it featured bigger names than the indie rockers on I’m Your Fan, including Elton John, Sting, and Peter Gabriel. The subject himself told Douridas that “whenever I hear anybody do one of my songs my critical judgments go into immediate suspended animation. I’m just knocked out when anybody does a cover of mine. . . . First of all, I am happy that someone has heard the song and is moved to cover it. Second of all, it gives me a completely fresh take on the song and I can then enter it into my own judgmental process.” He singled out Billy Joel’s version of “Light as a Breeze” as a particular favorite: “I think it’s a much, much better version of the one I came up with.”

  On Tower of Song, “Hallelujah” was interpreted by one of the biggest names of all—that onetime teenage Leonard Cohen fan who goes by the name Bono, in a very rare solo foray away from the rest of U2.

  Bill Flanagan remembers playing Cohen’s version of “Hallelujah” for Bono on a homemade cassette during a drive in New Zealand in the fall of 1993, while he was on tour with the band reporting what would become the book U2: At the End of the World. As he mentions in the book, when the song reached the lines “You say I took the Name in vain; / I don’t even know the name,” Bono cracked up.

  “His admiration for Leonard is tremendous,” said Flanagan. “He sees him as a standard to shoot for, and one he still feels he hasn’t matched.”

  “He’s an extraordinary talent, and anyone who’s interested in music has got to be interested in him,” Bono would later tell MTV regarding Cohen. “Anyone who’s interested in words needs to be interested in him. He’s the original rapper, you know, if you’re interested in hip-hop. He’s a sexy man who made sexy music, who made music asking questions about God and girls and everything. Any question that I’ve wanted to ask, I’ve found in his mouth first.”

  In the film that ran as part of Cohen’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the U2 front man said, “I’ve been humbled and humiliated as a fan of Leonard Cohen’s, particularly by the song ‘Hallelujah.’ ”

  Bono’s “Hallelujah” on the Tower of Song album includes lyrics from both the Various Positions version of the song and the Cale/Buckley edit—five verses in all, reshuffled so that the “even though it all went wrong, / I’ll stand before the Lord of Song” lines come in the middle and the “cold and broken Hallelujah” serves as the conclusion. It’s an interesting sleight of hand, offering up a sense of hope and then snatching it away.

  That alone might have made for a compelling take on the song—if it weren’t for the fact that Bono’s “Hallelujah” is, unfortunately, just awful. While there might seem to be no singer as well equipped to handle the song’s balance of the earthly and the spiritual—whose own lyrics have frequently grappled with the same issues—for this recording, Bono opted for a lumbering trip-hop arrangement, produced by noted Scottish remixer Howie B. The singer mutters the verses over a limp beat (perhaps in tribute to his notion of Cohen as the “original rapper”) and a darting trombone, with his voice leaping into a falsetto for the chorus that feels forced and passionless.

  When Bono called from his home in Dublin to talk about “Hallelujah,” his first words to me were, “I wasn’t sure why I agreed to do this interview, but then I remembered that I needed to apologize to the world—I didn’t just let myself down, or my parents, I let the whole school down.

  “The lyric explains it best. There’s the holy and the broken hallelujah, and mine was definitely the broken one. It was one of those moments—desperate, even wretched, and I was in desperate need of these words, and that’s the only excuse. If you’re that desperate to hear it, you sing it. It was a snapshot, a Polaroid, of a place I was in, but you really shouldn’t go putting these things out when they’re done in such a private way. Intimacy was the currency of the occasion.”

  U2 had been galvanized by the alternative and industrial rock movements of the early ’90s, resulting in some of the band’s finest work (the 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby and the resultant Zoo TV tour) and some of its more daring but least convincing (the rapidly recorded follow-up Zooropa in 1993 and the Original Soundtracks ambient side project with producer Brian Eno, for which they billed themselves as the Passengers). Bono’s rendition of “Hallelujah” seems very much of its moment, looking to electronic accompaniment for hip credibility and novelty rather than for what best served the song.

  The generous reading is that at least Bono was trying for something different and challenging. It was too soon to compete with Buckley’s version—Bono was an active champion of the young artist, once telling Mojo magazine that “Jeff Buckley was a pure drop in an ocean of noise”—and this reading, however flawed, does at least acknowledge the layered complexity of the song’s images.

  “I don’t really remember being conscious of the Jeff Buckley version at the time, though maybe that’s why I did the whisper,” said Bono. “If you can’t take true flight and do his kind of Sufi singing, maybe stick to recitation. So I did it as beat poetry, with my fat-lady voice coming in in falsetto—it’s remarkable I could even get up to that at the time.

  “I think trip-hop was an interesting approach,” he continued. “People would never think of Leonard Cohen in that way, even if it was more trip than hop, or we were tripping over the hop. I just remember wanting to fit in as much of the text as possible, really making it about the text. And I think it was reverent in all the right ways.”

  So let’s be kind—where better to risk an experiment than on an overly sincere, second-time-around tribute album, anyway?

  Around the release of the Tower of Song album, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Cohen in his roo
m at Mt. Baldy. “I stay here and do my work and help look after Roshi, who is the old teacher,” Cohen said. “He’s eighty-eight, and three or four of us are charged with doing that. Cooking is my contribution.”

  “The sixty-one-year-old songwriter and poet hasn’t turned his back on the world,” wrote Hilburn. “He frequently heads down the mountain to Los Angeles in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, either to visit an affiliated Zen center, to visit his daughter in the Mid-Wilshire area or meet with Kelley Lynch, his manager.

  “Cohen has plenty of time here to devote to his writing. At present, he’s working on an illustrated book of poems and songs for a future album. His workroom contains a primitive Macintosh computer and a synthesizer, tools for his music and his graphic art. There is also a radio in the room, but no CD or cassette player. He has to go out to his vehicle to play a CD.”

  Leonard Cohen might have removed himself from society, but even on the quiet mountaintop, he hadn’t stopped working.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, Jeff Buckley spent much of 1995 and 1996 touring the world—making an endless loop around the United States, Europe, Australia, and Japan, from which various shows were recorded that have been released as albums and DVDs over the years. “Hallelujah” was his regular closing song, the emotional climax of his set every night, reducing his audiences to silence at the conclusion of an often frenzied evening.

  Patti Smith invited Buckley to guest on her Gone Again album. During those sessions, he met guitarist Tom Verlaine, cofounder of the pioneering punk band Television, and asked Verlaine if he would produce his next album, which Buckley had decided would be called My Sweetheart the Drunk. In the middle of 1996, Buckley and his band started recording with Verlaine in New York, but the singer wasn’t satisfied with the results they were getting.