I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  In July, Leonard took a monthlong break from the studio; it felt like he’d been released from jail. So much had happened while he was in New York, wrapped up in his new music career. There had been a coup d’état in Greece, which was now ruled by a military junta, and in Israel there had been the Six-Day War. His friend Irving Layton had gone to the Israeli consulate to offer his services in the army. They were declined.21 Leonard’s duties, and the reason for the break, were a series of concerts he had to perform.

  The first, on July 16, was at the famous Newport Folk Festival, for which once again he had Judy Collins to thank. Collins was on the festival’s board of directors and, two years after Bob Dylan had been booed for going electric, was still fighting the traditionalists to acknowledge the new direction folk music, including hers, was taking, Collins wanted to stage a singer-songwriter workshop, and finally she got her way. Topping her list of participants were Leonard and another newcomer, an unsigned singer-songwriter named Joni Mitchell.

  Says Collins, “I came to know Joni through Al Kooper,” a rock musician friend who had played with Dylan in his historic Newport electric set. “He called me up, it was three in the morning, and he was hanging out with this girl who had told him she was a singer and writer, and he went home with her because he thought he could get laid, but he found out when he got to her house that she really could sing and write. He put her on the phone and had her sing me ‘Both Sides Now,’ which of course I had to record.”

  “Judy,” says Danny Fields, “was a fountain of discovery. Leonard first turned up in my consciousness, as with many other people, with the song ‘Suzanne’ on Judy’s 1966 album In My Life. After closing time at the Scene, a club where Hendrix and Tiny Tim became famous, a bunch of us who thought ourselves the cool rock ’n’ roll crowd would go back to the owner Steve Paul’s little house on Eighteenth Street and listen to that album. Then in early 1967 I started working at Elektra and Judy was one of my artists, and then came Leonard. But when I really met him was at Newport. I’d gone to the festival as representative of my record company and, like everybody, stayed at the Viking Hotel. It was beautiful and peaceful and I didn’t have to drive so I took LSD. I was with Judy and Leonard and they said, ‘Let’s go back to Leonard’s room.’ ”

  Fields remembers “sitting on the floor, contemplating the carpet, while they sat on the two beds with their guitars. Leonard was teaching Judy ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,’ and that was the audio track to the universe and the eight dimensions of existence in the shag rug. When I woke up it was just predawn, they were still sitting on the two beds with the guitars, and Judy said, ‘Oh, I think Danny looks as though he could use some fresh air, Leonard, let’s take him for a walk,’ and we went walking around the bay, where up on the cliffs the great robber baron palaces of Newport are, as the sun rose. It was wonderful. And when I flew back to New York, the next night Judy was doing the Central Park concert”—the Rheingold Festival—“and she brought Leonard up onstage with her to perform ‘Suzanne.’ ”

  The New York Times review of Leonard at Newport described him as an “extremely effective singer, building a hypnotic, spellbinding effect.” Still, as he had been at the WBAI benefit, Leonard was terrified. “He told me he was terribly nervous,” recalls Aviva Layton, who was in the audience in Central Park. “It was the middle of summer, the place was packed with people and the sun was setting, and Judy Collins said, ‘I want to introduce to you a singer-songwriter, his name is Leonard Cohen.’ Leonard came out with his guitar strapped on—and some people groaned, because they’d come to see Judy Collins, not this unknown Leonard Cohen. So he had to win over the crowd. He was facing thousands of people, standing packed like sardines, and he just said, very quietly, ‘Tonight my guitar is full of tears and feathers.’ And then he played ‘Suzanne,’ and that was it. Incredible.” Leonard celebrated having made it through the performance, privately, in his Chelsea Hotel room. With him was his new inamorata, a woman he had met at Newport, a twenty-three-year-old, willowy blond singer-songwriter with a voice every bit as unique as Nico’s.

  Joni Mitchell, like Leonard, was from the East Coast of Canada. But their versions of Eastern Canada were vastly different—Leonard’s urban and cosmopolitan, Joni’s vast prairie skies. Joni, the daughter of a Canadian Air Force officer, had been raised in a small town in Saskatchewan. She was a talented painter, and when, as a child, she contracted polio (in the same epidemic in which her fellow small-town East Canadian Neil Young also contracted it), during her long, lonely convalescence she also discovered a talent for music. She taught herself to play the ukulele, then guitar, excelling at the latter and inventing her own sophisticated tunings and style. In 1964 Joni quit art school to be a folksinger, moving to Toronto and the coffeehouses around which the folk scene revolved. In February 1965 she gave birth to a daughter, the result of an affair with a photographer. A few weeks later she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell and gave the baby up for adoption. The marriage did not last. Joni left, taking his name with her, and moved into Greenwich Village, where she was living alone in a small hotel room when she met Leonard.

  It was an intense romance. At the outset Joni played student to Leonard’s teacher. She asked him for a list of books she should read. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly,” she said. “My work seemed very young and naive in comparison.”22 Leonard gave her some suggestions, including Lorca, Camus and the I Ching. But he was quickly aware that Joni needed little help with anything, particularly her songwriting. They each wrote a (very different) song called “Winter Lady”—Joni’s appears to have been written first—and Joni wrote two love songs referencing Leonard’s song “Suzanne”: “Wizard of Is,” with an almost-identical melody and near-quoted lines (“You think that you may love him,” she wrote of the man who speaks “in riddles”) and “Chelsea Morning,” set in a room with candles, incense and oranges, where the sun pours in “like butterscotch” instead of honey.

  Leonard took Joni to Montreal. They stayed in his childhood home on Belmont Avenue. In her song “Rainy Night House” she described the “holy man” sitting up all night, watching her as she slept on his mother’s bed. They painted each other’s portraits. Leonard’s was the face Joni drew on a map of Canada in her song “A Case of You,” in which a man declares himself to be as “constant as a northern star.” When it turned out he wasn’t, Joni wrote about that too, in “That Song About the Midway” and in “The Gallery,” in which a man who describes himself as a saint, and complains of her description of him as heartless, pleads with her to take him to her bed.

  For the first time the tables were turned: Leonard was the muse for a woman. Not just any woman but one whom David Crosby—who also had an intense and short-lived love affair with Joni Mitchell in 1968—calls “the greatest singer-songwriter of our generation.” Within a year Leonard and Joni’s affair was over. Leonard told journalist Mark Ellen, “I remember we were spending some time together in Los Angeles years ago and someone said to me, ‘How do you like living with Beethoven?’ ” How did Leonard like living with Beethoven? “I didn’t like it,” Leonard said, laughing, “because who would? She’s prodigiously gifted. Great painter too.”23 As David Crosby says, “It was very easy to love her, but turbulent. Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer.”

  In later years Mitchell seemed keen to distance herself from Leonard artistically. “I briefly liked Leonard Cohen, though once I read Camus and Lorca I started to realize that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me,” she said in 2005 of the man she had once described as “a mirror to my work,” someone who “showed me how to plumb the depths of my experience.” She would go on to describe him as “in many ways a boudoir poet”24—a grander term than “the Bard of the Bedsit,” one of the nicknames the UK music press would later give him, but reductive nonetheless. Any close inspection of Mitchell’s songs pre-
and post-Leonard would seem to indicate that he had some effect on her work. Over the decades, Leonard and Joni have remained friends.

  On July 22, 1967, Leonard was in Montreal, performing at Expo 67, the world’s fair. It was an important concert. Canada, conscious of the eyes of the world on it, was treating the expo as a celebration of Canadian independence and, in the case of Quebec, harmony. As the Canadian journalist Robert Fulford wrote, its success marked “the end of Little Canada, a country afraid of its own future, frightened of great plans. Despite the spectre of French-Canadian separatism that haunted Canada through the early and middle 1960s, Expo seemed to suggest that we were now entering a new and happier period in our history.”25 Leonard, “poète, chansonnier, écrivain,” as he was described on the bill, would perform at the Youth Pavilion (being two months off thirty-three did not exclude him). It was one of the smaller marquees, set up like a nightclub with chairs and tables, and it was sold out.

  Leonard had been nervous playing in Central Park, but this hometown performance terrified him. His family was there—his mother was in the front row—as were many of his friends. Erica Pomerance was there, along with “a flock of Leonard Cohen aficionados who were half friends, half admirers, basically fans of his poetry.” Leonard had littered the small stage with candles. He told the audience to come forward and fetch a candle for their table so that he could sing. “He was tentative and earnest, very unpolished,” says Montreal music critic Juan Rodriguez. Nancy Bacal concurs. “He was horrified, just frozen. He told me, looking out at these people, how could he just become this other person? How could he become this performer when they knew him, they’d known him all his life? It was just too hard for him.”

  There was one more summer festival for Leonard to play—the Mariposa Folk Festival, at Innis Lake, near Toronto—before going back to New York to continue work on his album. There were two more sessions with Hammond in August and then another three-week break, during which Leonard flew to L.A. Director John Boorman was talking about making a movie based on the song “Suzanne” and having Leonard score it. No one had ever paid his way across the continent before. There were even matchboxes with his name on them waiting for him in his room at the Landmark Hotel. Lighting a cigarette, Leonard sat at the desk and wrote a song called “Nine Years Old,” which would become “The Story of Isaac.” Nothing came of the film. At various times Leonard has said that he “couldn’t relate” to the idea or that it was dropped when it was discovered he did not own the rights to the song. The rights to “Suzanne,” “Master Song” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” he said, had been “pilfered in New York City.”26 Leonard, assisted by his manager, had set up his own publishing company, Stranger Music. An arranger, producer and music publisher named Jeff Chase whom Mary Martin thought might prove helpful was brought in, and somewhere in the process Leonard appeared to have somehow signed over the songs to him.

  Said Leonard, “My mother, who I always thought was kind of naive—she was Russian, her English was imperfect—said to me, ‘Leonard, you be careful of those people down there. They’re not like us.’ And of course, I didn’t say anything to disrespect, she was my mother, but in my mind I thought, ‘Mother, you know, I’m not a child.’ I was 32, I’d been around the block a few times. But she was right. She was right.”*27

  On September 8, in Studio B, Leonard recorded four more songs with Hammond. It would prove to be their last session together. Several reasons have been posited for Hammond’s dropping out. Leonard always said that Hammond became ill, and certainly he had health problems: when he signed Leonard to Columbia it was shortly after he had taken time off following a heart attack, and in subsequent years he would suffer several more. Another reason given was the illness of Hammond’s wife. In his autobiography, Hammond said nothing about illness and implied that there were musical differences. Leonard, he wrote, “got the jitters” at Hammond’s simple production approach and “could not conceive of his voice being commercial enough to sell records. Simplicity was his greatest asset and we told him so. It was not what he wanted to hear. . . . I was overruled and another producer brought in.”28

  Hammond’s recollections about signing Leonard admittedly include several errors, but Larry Cohen, his associate at Columbia, backs up what Hammond said about his production style. “John’s MO, having known him for years, was not to change people or their sound, other than what they normally were, and what he did was bring out the best in people doing what they did. He didn’t give Dylan any directions—Dylan came in with the things that he wanted to do and that’s why John signed him and he let him do what he did.”

  Leonard himself said something once that suggested he wanted something more than just simple voice and guitar. “I was trying to find—I wanted a kind of ‘found sound’ background to a lot of my tunes. What I wanted running through ‘The Stranger Song’ was the sound of a tire on a wet pavement, a kind of harmonic hum. [Hammond] was almost ready to let me take a recording device into a car. He let me do the next best thing. I got in touch with mad scientists around New York who had devices that would create sounds. Unfortunately, he got sick in the middle of this operation.”29 Whatever the explanation, after four arduous months of work on his debut album, nothing came of it. Leonard was back to square one.

  Ten

  The Dust of a Long Sleepless Night

  So much had happened in the year since Leonard played Judy Collins his songs that the world itself seemed to be on speed. But some things had not happened—primarily, Leonard’s album. It seemed to Leonard that this inability to make a record was a problem peculiar to him. Judy Collins had just finished her seventh LP, Wildflowers, which contained three more songs that Leonard had written but that he had not yet recorded himself. There was a second cover of “Suzanne” in the singles charts too, sung by Noel Harrison, an English actor, the same age as Leonard. It must have felt to Leonard that he had lost the rights to his song in more ways than one, and since “Suzanne” was by consensus his signature song, that he was losing himself as well. When the recording sessions stopped, Leonard behaved like a lost man. For a week he stayed shut in his hotel room, smoking a great deal of hashish. He had felt lost in New York once before, when he was attending Columbia University, and on that occasion he had left after a year and gone back home to Montreal and his friends. But with Columbia Records there was unfinished business, and so he stayed, turning to the nearest thing he had in New York to an artists’ community: the Warhol set and the denizens of the Chelsea Hotel.

  Occasionally the two would overlap. Edie Sedgwick, a gamine blond beauty and the most famous of Warhol’s socialite starlets, had moved into the Chelsea, having accidentally burned down the apartment her mother bought for her. Edie had crawled along the floor and escaped with only a burned hand. Her new home at the Chelsea was on the fourth floor, down the hall from Leonard’s room. Her friend Danny Fields, who was visiting Leonard, inquired if he had ever met Edie. Leonard said he had not. “Would you like to?” Fields asked. “She’s a magical person that everyone falls in love with.” Leonard said he would. Fields ran off to Edie’s room. He found her there with Brigid Berlin, another of Warhol’s renegade socialites. Plump and homely, Brigid might not have been blessed with looks but undeniably had personality—when Fields first set eyes on her, Brigid was climbing out of a yellow cab wearing nothing but a sarong around her waist, with a toy doctor’s kit dangling between her naked breasts, and carrying the big fake doctor’s bag that she took with her everywhere. It was filled with vials of “something she’d concocted like a mad scientist,” its ingredients mostly liquid amphetamine and vitamin B. “She’d run around with a syringe, screaming, ‘I’m going to get you!’ and she did, injecting you in the butt right through your pants.” It earned her the name Brigid Polk, as in “poke.” Warhol gave her a starring role in The Chelsea Girls, alongside Edie and Nico.

  When Fields walked into the room, he found the two women “pasting sequins one at a
time in a coloring book,” an activity pursued after the age of seven only if a person is on speed. “Brigid had fallen asleep on a tube of Ready Glue and she was stuck to the floor; she tried to turn around and gave up and was just lying there. There was the remnants of a fire in the fireplace and there were candles in candlesticks that she’d bought at the voodoo store where everybody went to get spells and unguents,” Leonard included. “I said, ‘Edie, Leonard Cohen the famous poet and songwriter is here and he’d like to meet you.’ She said, ‘Oh, bring him over, I’ll just get made up.’ When Edie put on makeup it could take three hours, literally. So I said, ‘He’s a simple guy, and anyway you look beautiful, I’m going to go get him.’ ”

  Fields returned with Leonard. On entering the room, Leonard’s eyes were immediately drawn to Edie’s candles. He headed straight for them and stood there, staring. “The first thing Leonard said to her was, ‘I’m wondering about these candles. Did you put them here in this order?’ ‘Order? Please! It’s just candles.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s a very unfortunate order that you’ve placed them in. It means bad luck or misfortune.’ Edie giggled, and that was it, I left them alone with these candles. But wait. They caught fire soon afterward and the room was burned completely black. Edie got out a second time by crawling across the floor, and when she reached for the door handle, once again she burned her hand.”