I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Brigid Polk was an artist. Among her best-known works was her series of “tit paintings,” made by dipping her breasts in paint and pressing them onto paper. She also had a “Cock Book,” a blank-paged book in which she asked people (women as well as men) to do a drawing of their penis. Among the participants were the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the actress Jane Fonda, and Leonard. Leonard, declining to illustrate his privates, wrote on a page, “Let me be the shy one in your book.” He was involved and yet not involved—which described his general dealings with the Warhol set. They were more to his taste than the hippie scene on the West Coast that had begun to infiltrate New York: “There seemed to be something flabby about the hippie movement. They pulled flowers out of public gardens. They put them in guns, but they also left their campsites in a mess. No self-discipline,” he said.1 In addition, Warhol’s Pop Art was an interesting study for Leonard as he made the shift from literature to pop music, from ivory tower to commercial art, and the models and starlets who surrounded Warhol were an interesting diversion and occasional indulgence. He was accidentally captured on film in the company of Warhol starlet Ivy Nicholson in B.O.N.Y. (Boys of New York), made by a Texas film buff named Gregory Barrios, under Warhol’s patronage. But in truth, Leonard was just passing through.*

  He missed Marianne and Hydra. He took to eating alone in a Greek restaurant, drinking retsina, ordering from the menu in Greek, playing Greek records on the jukebox. He sent Marianne a long, tender poem he had written to her. It began,

  This is for you

  it is the book I meant to read to you

  when we were old

  Now I am a shadow

  I am as restless as an empire

  You are the woman

  who released me.

  It ended,

  I long for the boundaries

  of my wandering

  and I move

  with the energy of your prayer

  for you are kneeling

  like a bouquet

  in a cave of bone

  behind my forehead

  and I move towards a love

  you have dreamed for me.2

  At Leonard’s bidding, Marianne flew over to New York with little Axel. Leonard set about introducing Marianne to his life in the city, taking her, she says, to all the “funny little coffeehouses he loved.” She would go and shop at the Puerto Rican magic store that Leonard and Edie frequented, buying candles and perfumed oils that made beautiful patterns on the water in Leonard’s rust-stained hotel bathtub. They lunched at El Quijote, where Leonard introduced her to Buffy Sainte-Marie, whom Marianne liked. He also introduced her to Andy Warhol and to his fellow hotel residents, many of whom she found bizarre. It was “a strange scene,” said Marianne. She couldn’t help but contrast the dark, detached hedonism of his life in New York with their life on Hydra, when they were “barefoot, poor and in love.” But it also became evident that Leonard really did not want her to live with him. While Leonard stayed on at the Chelsea, Marianne moved with Axel, who was now nine years old, into an apartment on Clinton Street, which she shared with Carol Zemel—the wife of Leonard’s friend Henry Zemel—who was studying at Columbia.

  During the daytime, while Axel was at school and Carol Zemel was at the university, Marianne would make little handicrafts, kittens made out of wool and steel. At night, while Carol kept an eye on the child, she sold them on the street outside clubs. It was not the best of neighborhoods, and Leonard asked her to stop, telling her that he worried about her, but she continued. The only time she encountered any trouble was when she was robbed of her earnings at knifepoint after leaving a cinema where she had gone alone to watch a Warhol film. Leonard and Marianne still saw each other; he took her to a Janis Joplin concert and introduced her to Joplin backstage. But the time he spent with Marianne grew less and less. She knew he was seeing other women. Things brightened for Marianne when Steve Sanfield, their friend from Hydra, showed up in New York on a mission to raise funds for Roshi’s new Zen center, giving her someone else to talk to and see. She tried her best to make it work, staying for a year, but ultimately she was not happy in New York. When the school year was over, she went back to Europe.

  Leonard packed his bags and moved out of the Chelsea, and back into the Henry Hudson Hotel, the dive on West Fifty-seventh Street. “It was a forbidding place, a hole and a holdout,” says Danny Fields. “I thought maybe the Chelsea got a little too happy for him and he needed someplace more suitably grim and desolate.”

  Four weeks after Leonard’s album had been put on hold, it was once again back on. Columbia had appointed a new producer. John Simon was twenty-six years old, “just another junior producer among many at Columbia Records—that is, until I made a lot of money for them with ‘Red Rubber Ball.’ ” The song, cowritten by Paul Simon (no relation) and recorded by the Cyrkle, whom John Simon produced, was such a big hit that even Leonard was aware of it. (“I loved it,” said Leonard, “still do.”) As a result John Simon earned “an office with a window and some decent artists to produce,” first Simon & Garfunkel, then Leonard Cohen.

  John Simon knew nothing about Leonard or the album’s troubled history. “Leonard told me that he’d been living in the Chelsea Hotel waiting for John Hammond to schedule a session, and, just as a recording date was approaching, John called him to put off the date for a month. Leonard, as I remember it, asked for a different producer because he was tired of waiting. As far as I know, Hammond was not ill. I visited with John in his office and he had nothing but praise for Leonard.”

  Simon started reading Leonard’s poetry and, in order to get better acquainted, invited him to stay with him at his parents’ empty house in Connecticut, where they could discuss the album in peace. “I think Leonard saw a familiar milieu in that house; both our families were middle-class, intellectual Jews. I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning, I found Leonard poring through my father’s books. He said he had stayed up all night.” Simon listened to the “acoustic, demo-y” recordings that Leonard had done with Hammond, and they set a date to start work, October 11, 1967. This time, when Leonard arrived at Studio B for the first session, there were no musicians waiting for him, just his young producer and the two union-mandated engineers. (“Producers could only talk,” says Simon. “Unless you were in the union, you were strictly forbidden from touching any equipment, mics, mixing board, etc.”)

  Leonard “appeared confident,” says Simon, “and he was singing great—nice quality, great pitch.” There was no full-length mirror this time; Leonard simply sat, played and sang. There were eleven sessions with Simon over the space of two months in Studios B and E. Steve Sanfield was still in town, so Leonard invited him along. “He laid down all of his songs, one after the other, and I was blown away by them,” Sanfield remembers. “The producer seemed blown away too. He said, ‘We’re going to make a great album.’ ”

  Sanfield was staying with a friend who lived in New York, Morton Breier, the author of Masks, Mandalas and Meditation. They had made plans to meet with a group of young Hasidic students—despite his deep involvement with Zen Buddhism, Sanfield had not lost interest in Judaism. Neither had Leonard, who accepted the invitation to go with them. On their way they happened upon a chanting circle—a group of Hare Krishnas, led by Swami Bhaktivedanta, who was on his first visit to the U.S. Allen Ginsberg was there, chanting with them. Leonard told Sanfield he wanted to stay and to go on without him. Sanfield, having found the meeting with the Hasidim unfulfilling, came back just as the chanting circle was breaking up. Leonard had not moved from where he had left him. “What do you think?” Sanfield asked him. Leonard answered, “Nice song.”

  Leonard was similarly unresponsive when Sanfield talked to him about his own teacher, Roshi Sasaki, and the effect he had had on his life. But that night Leonard came to Breier’s apartment to see Sanfield and told him, “I need to tell you a story.�
� Late into the night, says Sanfield, “he told me a long version of the tale of Sabbatai Sevi, the false Messiah. I said, ‘Why did you tell me that?’ He said, ‘Well, I just thought you should hear it.’ I think it was because I was talking in such superlative praise of my Roshi.” Leonard was suspicious of holy men. “They know how to do it,” he would explain three decades later, when he was living in Roshi’s monastery. “They know how to get at people around them, that’s what their gig is.” The reason he understood was, as he said, “because I was able to do it in my own small way. I was a very good hypnotist when I was very young.”3

  It was four in the morning when Leonard and Sanfield left to get breakfast, “and who should come walking down the street,” says Sanfield, “but Bhaktivedanta, in his robes.” When the guru came close, Leonard asked him, “How does that tune go again?” Bhaktivedanta stopped and sang them “Hare Krishna,” “and we picked it up, and continued walking down the streets, singing it ourselves.”

  Leonard was still finding it a struggle in the recording studio, but by the fourth late-night session with Simon he had succeeded in doing three final takes: “You Know Who I Am,” “Winter Lady,” and, after nineteen failed attempts at recording it, “Suzanne.” Three weeks and four sessions later, Leonard nailed “So Long, Marianne,” a song he had recorded more than a dozen times with two producers and with two different titles. In total, since May 1967 Leonard had recorded twenty-five original compositions with John Hammond and John Simon. Ten of these songs made it onto Leonard’s debut album. Four would be revisited on his second and third albums, and two would appear as bonus tracks on the Songs of Leonard Cohen reissue in 2003 (“Store Room” and “Blessed Is the Memory”).

  The other nine songs Leonard recorded—almost enough for a whole other album—were “The Jewels in Your Shoulder,” “Just Two People” (a.k.a. “Anyone Can See”), “In the Middle of the Night,” “The Sun Is My Son,” “Beach of Idios,” “Nobody Calls You But Me,” “Love Is the Item,” “Nancy, Where Have You Been Sleeping” and “Splinters.” As of this writing, all of these songs appear to be unreleased. Leonard played “Jewels in Your Shoulder” at his performance in April 1967 at the university in Buffalo, New York, and somewhere in circulation there’s a very rare acetate of early demos that includes “Love Is the Item.” The rest remain on the shelf.

  When Leonard had finished recording his vocals and guitar, John Simon took over. He came up with string arrangements and added backing vocals, the principal backing singer—uncredited on the album—being Nancy Priddy, Simon’s then girlfriend. Simon also overdubbed other instruments onto Leonard’s track. “What I welcomed, to satisfy my own creative impulse, was Leonard’s allowing me some room with his arrangements,” says Simon. “To this day, I’m real happy with the arrangements I did using women’s voices instead of instruments.” However, when Leonard heard what his producer had done, he was not happy. If he had indeed thought that Hammond’s production was too raw, Simon’s was not raw enough.

  What exactly didn’t you like about it?

  “John Simon wrote some delightful arrangements like the one to ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ still based around my guitar playing. I wanted women’s voices and he came up with some nice choirs of women. We did have a falling out over ‘Suzanne’—he wanted a heavy piano syncopated, and maybe drums. That was my first requirement, that I didn’t want drums on any of my songs, so that was a bone of contention. Also he was ready to substitute this heavy chordal structure under the song to give it forward movement and I didn’t like that, I wanted it to be based on just my picking, and he felt it lacked bottom. And then where we had another falling out was ‘So Long, Marianne,’ in which there were certain tricky conventions of the time where a song would sometimes just stop and start again later, and I thought that interrupted the song. But I do think he’s a really fine producer and he did bring the project to completion. As my friend Leon Wieseltier said, ‘It has the delicious quality of doneness.’ ”

  Particularly delicious by that stage, I would imagine.

  “Well, when John Hammond got sick it kind of threw me for a loop and I felt that I’d lost contact with the songs. I actually went to a hypnotist in New York—I wanted her to return me to the original impulse of the songs. It was a desperate measure but I thought I’d give it a shot. And it didn’t work, I couldn’t go under. [Laughs] The whole episode had a comic quality that I could not escape.”

  The disagreements continued until Simon finally threw up his hands. “He said, ‘You mix it. I’m going on vacation,’ ” said Leonard, “and I did.”4 Leonard worked with the studio engineer, Warren Vincent. When Vincent asked Leonard what the trouble was, he answered that he disliked the arrangements: the orchestration on “Suzanne” was too big, and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” sounded too soft. “I’m not that kind of guy,” Leonard told him. “I don’t believe that tenderness has to be weakness.” Vincent said, “We’ll see what we can do.” “Well, if we can’t,” said Leonard, “I’ll commit suicide.”5

  It happened that Nico was performing in New York that week at Steve Paul’s the Scene, a cellar nightclub that was part cave and part labyrinth and was popular with both the rock crowd and high society. The series of shows was to promote Nico’s solo debut Chelsea Girl, an album that included songs by Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan but ultimately nothing by Leonard. The house band at the Scene was a young West Coast psychedelic folk rock group called the Kaleidoscope; David Lindley, Chris Darrow, Solomon Feldthouse and Chester Crill were musical virtuosos who played a variety of stringed instruments of various ethnicities. It was their first East Coast tour and they were supposed to have been playing a series of shows at the Café Au Go Go, but, after the first night, the owner told them not to come back, that no one liked long-haired California hippies in New York. Steve Paul took pity on them and offered them a three-week residency at his club.

  “The Scene,” says Chris Darrow, “was the heavy club in town at that time, and everybody who was anybody showed up the first night we played: Andy Warhol and all his people, Frank Zappa with the Mothers of Invention, the Cyrkle; Tiny Tim was the emcee. That was the night we met Leonard Cohen. He came up to me after our first set. In that light he looked like the palest human being I had ever met. He was wearing a black leather jacket and he was carrying a black briefcase—I remember this so particularly because he was out of place in terms of what a musician in 1967 looked like. My dad was a college professor and Leonard looked like a college professor—a real academic vibe. He appeared very confident, like he belonged there. He just walked right up to me and said, ‘I’m doing an album for Columbia Records and I think you guys are really great. Would you be interested in playing on my album?’ ”

  After the last set of the night, they met in the Greek hamburger joint above the club. Conversation turned to Greece and how much Leonard liked living there. As Chester Crill recalled, one thing Leonard said he liked about Greece was that he could get Ritalin there—a stimulant widely used for both narcolepsy and hyperactivity—without a prescription. Crill told Leonard that he had stopped taking acid since some of the manufacturers starting cutting it with Ritalin. “Leonard said, ‘Oh, I really loved that.’ He said it was very good for focus.”

  The following afternoon Leonard, carrying a briefcase and a guitar, met with the band at the Albert Hotel, where they shared a room. Sitting on a bed, the only place not taken up with one or another of their instruments, Leonard sang them his songs. “I didn’t really know what to make of them,” says Crill. “It sounded like it was probably an attempt at folk music, but kind of in the pop genre, but then the songs were a little unusual for pop, not your typical A-B, A-B.” David Lindley says, “I liked them. I thought it was kind of an unusual approach, but in those days people did a lot of things that were unusual—every kind of approach. A lot of the words to the songs were great, and he had a real understated way of delivering them. And he really seemed to like us,
so it was good.” They agreed to come to the studio and play on his album. “I thought, ‘Nothing’s going to come of this,’ ” says Crill, “ ‘but we’re starving to death and we’ll get enough money to eat and do our gigs in Boston then go home.’ It really saved our asses.”

  The Kaleidoscope showed up at Studio E laden with stringed instruments, including harp guitar, bass, violin, mandolin and some of Feldtman’s Middle Eastern assortment. Crill and Darrow found themselves sharing the elevator with Arthur Godfrey. “I remember listening to his radio show on the cab ride back with the guys and he was saying, ‘I had to share the elevator with a bunch of those filthy hippies,’ ” recalls Crill. In the candlelit studio, Leonard was deep in discussion with the man behind the control desk, who was saying, “ ‘We’ve spent all the money, it’s already the most expensive album we’ve ever been associated with,’ blah, blah, blah. Then they would play a track for us and the producer would come on the talk-back and say, ‘We only have one track open so we can’t put two instruments in here,’ and a ten-minute argument would begin. Leonard, poor guy, would be, ‘We don’t want the glockenspiel’—because on every one of these tracks it sounded like there was two orchestras and a carousel. It was like a fruitcake, it was so full of stuff. Making the room for us to play on anything took more time than actually having us play, because of the old technology. And to go from a guy who was sitting in your room, just playing a guitar and singing a song in a nice quiet voice, to the Entrance of the Gladiators—Jesus! His songs weren’t the kind that needed all that orchestration and women’s voices to get them across. It sounded like Tiny Tim’s first album. I felt really sorry for the guy.”

  In the studio, Leonard sang the songs as he had originally played them, before the overdubs. “He went through a lot of songs,” says Chris Darrow, “basically trying to figure out if anybody had any ideas. I remember him playing the guitar and having a hard time myself trying to figure out what the groove was, because he had this sort of amorphous guitar style that was very circular. I think one of the problems that he was having was that he wanted something very specific and he understood what it was that he wanted, but I think he was having a hard time at that time either getting producers or other musicians to understand. I never remember him being disparaging about anybody else or anything, but it being his first record and him not being really known as a musician I think there were things he was having a hard time communicating.”