There was no rehearsal. The band improvised, and Leonard told them when he liked something and if he wanted them to add another instrument. The latter would prompt a voice from the control room, over the talk-back, telling Leonard that he could only have one. When Leonard protested, Crill recalls, “he was told, ‘We can’t change it; we’re locked into this.’ It was horrible for him. It wasn’t for us, because every minute we were getting more money for getting out of New York.”
The Kaleidoscope did three Leonard Cohen sessions in all, two long and one short, playing on “So Long, Marianne,” “Teachers,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song.” They were not in the album credits, but neither were any of the other musicians; as Lindley points out, at that time “it was like dancing bears or performing seals”; you just did the job and moved on. John Simon too had moved on; he was now producing the band Blood, Sweat and Tears and, he said, pretty sure that he was not in the studio when Leonard and the Kaleidoscope played. Simon felt that he had done all he could for Leonard, and if Leonard wanted to change what he’d done, yes, he was disappointed—“But,” he said, “it was his album. Plus he was older than I, so I was conditioned to back off graciously.”
Talking to Simon more than forty years later, he still rhapsodizes about the album. “ ‘Suzanne’: fucking gorgeous, I love this track; the strings and the girls together with the rich vocal and guitar make a lush blanket of sound. ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ is another of my favorites—this and ‘Suzanne’ both have a guitar line in thirds with the vocal. I like the girls’ parts a lot—they’re mine—and I love the instrument that sounds like a Brazilian berimbau or a low-pitched Jew’s harp, which must be the Kaleidoscope. The mandolin on ‘Sisters of Mercy’ is probably the Kaleidoscope—talk about elaborate. ‘So Long, Marianne’: I heard somewhere that Leonard specified there be no drums on his album; well, there are drums on this. Incidentally, stereo was so new and strange to me—or to whomever mixed this; who knows at this point?—that I placed the bass and drums fully to one side of the stereo, a no-no. ‘The Stranger Song’ made me think about his lyrics. Although Bob Dylan paved the way for the lyricists who followed him, in that he got an audience to accept lyrics that were more thoughtful, less banal than the average pop lyric, Leonard’s seem to show more finesse. His scansion is stricter, his rhymes truer, as a rule. Whereas Dylan’s language had a connection to ‘the people,’ in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, blues and folk, Leonard’s lyrics reveal a more educated, exposed, literate poet. But Leonard was not just a poet who strummed a little. What a marvel the speed of his finger-picking pattern is. I like the humor in the lyrics of ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,’ they have an undercurrent of ardent young lust, but they’re so funny at the same time. As for the questionable taste of the ending with the recorder, the whistle and Leonard screeching way up high, what can I say? We were young.”
Said Leonard, “I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet, and I think it goes for a young singer, too, or a beginning singer: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.’ It’s only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that conspires to silence everyone.”6
Songs of Leonard Cohen was shipped on December 26, 1967, in the winter of the Summer of Love.* Leonard was thirty-three years old—by sixties standards antediluvian. He made no attempt to disguise his age in the photograph on the album’s front sleeve, a head-shot, taken in a New York subway station photo booth. Sepia-toned and with a funereal black border, it showed a solemn man in a dark jacket and white shirt, unmistakably a grown-up; it might well have been the photo of a dead Spanish poet. Viewed alongside the head-shot on the back of Let Us Compare Mythologies, in which Leonard looked more buttoned-up, less defiant, it appeared that Leonard’s bottomless eyes had seen too much in the eleven years between his first book and first LP. The back cover was taken up with a colorful drawing of a woman in flames—a Mexican saint picture Leonard found at the store where he bought his candles and spells. It was quite unlike any other album sleeve of its time.
Then, Leonard’s album was like nothing of its time—or of any time, really. Its songs sounded both fresh and ancient, sung with the authority of a man used to being listened to, which he was. Their images and themes—war and betrayal, longing and despair, sexual and spiritual yearning, familiar to readers of his poetry—were in keeping with the rock music zeitgeist, but the words in which they were expressed were dense, serious and enigmatic. There is a hypnotic quality to the album—the cumulative effect of the pace and inflection, the circular guitar, Leonard’s unhurried, authoritative voice—through which the songs are absorbed and trusted as much as understood.
There are characters in the songs as cryptic as those in Bob Dylan’s, like the man with the sadism of a Nazi and the golden body of a god with whom the singer shares a lover in “Master Song.” Dylan, in fact, was the name that came up most often in the reviews of Songs of Leonard Cohen, particularly in discussions of the lyrics. “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Leonard’s wryly humorous song, inspired by Nico, about a man battered but unbroken by lust, shared a small patch of common ground with Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” But the poetry of Leonard’s lyrics was more honed and controlled, steeped in literary and rhetorical technique. In liturgy also.
“Suzanne,” the opening song, appears to be a love song, but it is a most mysterious love song, in which the woman inspires a vision of Jesus, first walking on the water, then forsaken by his father, on the Cross. “So Long, Marianne,” likewise, begins as a romance, until we learn that the woman who protects him from loneliness also distracts him from his prayers, thereby robbing him of divine protection. The two women in “Sisters of Mercy,” since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.) Yet, however pure and holy, a sense of romantic possibility remains for a man who in The Favorite Game described the woman making up the hotel bed in which they had just made love as having “the hands of a nun.” There are many lovers in these songs, but also teachers, masters and saviors. In the song titled “Teachers,” the initiate is offered a variety to choose from, including a madman and a holy man who talks in riddles.
Perhaps the most cryptic track on the album is “The Stranger Song,” a masterful, multilayered song about exile and moving on. It was born, Leonard said, “out of a thousand hotel rooms, ten thousand railway stations.”7 The Stranger might be the Jew, exiled by ancestry, perpetually on the run from his murderers and God; the troubadour, rootless by necessity; or the writer, whom domesticity would sap of his will to create. Here love is once again presented as something dangerous. We have Joseph, the good husband and Jew, searching for a place where his wife can give birth to a child who is not his, and whose existence will come to cause more problems for his people. In the “holy game of poker,” it is of no use to sit around and wait in hope for a good hand of cards. The only way to win is to cheat, or to show no emotion, or to make sure to sit close to the exit door.
If Leonard had recorded just this one compelling album and disappeared, as Anthony DeCurtis, the American music critic, wrote in his liner notes to the 2003 reissue, “his stature as one of the most gifted songwriters of our time will still be secure.” On its original release, the U.S. press was considerably more lukewarm. Arthur Schmidt in Rolling Stone wrote, “I don’t think I could ever tolerate all of it. There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits. . . . Whether the man is a poet or not (and he is a brilliant poet) he is not necessarily a songwriter.”8 The New York Times’s Donal Henahan damned it with faint praise: “Mr. Cohen is a fair poet
and a fair novelist, and now he has come through with a fair recording of his own songs.” Leonard sounded “like a sad man cashing in on self-pity and adolescent loneliness,” he wrote, placing him “somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan” on the “alienation scale.”9
In the UK the album was received positively. Tony Palmer praised it in the Observer newspaper.* Melody Maker critic Karl Dallas wrote, “I predict that the talk about him will become deafening. His songs are pretty complex things. No one could accuse him of underestimating his audiences.”10 The album failed to enter the charts in Canada. In America it scraped into the lower reaches of the Top 100, while in the UK it made it to No. 13 on the charts—a division of devotion that would continue throughout much of Leonard’s musical career.
In interviews he gave in 1968 to promote the album, Leonard appeared to be feeling his way through this new pop music world he had entered. He complained to the UK press that New York did not understand him: “[They] kept putting me in an intellectual bag, but that’s not where I’m at. I never thought of myself as a Poet with a capital ‘P,’ I just want to make songs for people because I reckon that they can understand things that I understand. I want to write the sort of songs you hear on the car radio. I don’t want to achieve any sort of virtuosity. I want to write lyrics that no one notices but they find themselves singing over a few days later without remembering where they heard them.”11 But despite his protestations that he wanted to be considered a popular artist, he had turned down “$15,000 worth of concerts,” he said, “because I didn’t want to do them,” adding that “the presence of money in the whole enterprise has been having a sinister magical effect on me.” Although money had been a big motivation for the shift from literature to the music business, he told Melody Maker, he was already thinking of giving music up. “Right now I feel like I did when I finished my novel [Beautiful Losers]. At the end of the book I knew I wouldn’t write another because I’d put everything I had into that one.”12
He talked about going back to Greece. But for now he stayed on the promotional treadmill and continued to try on masks to see how they fit. He described himself in The Beat as an anarchist “unable to throw the bomb.”13 He told the New York Times, “When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have together, then I know we’ve met. I really am for the matriarchy.” He was also for the Cross: “The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance.”14 In a 1968 Playboy article he said, “I had some things in common with the Beatniks and even more things with the hippies. The next thing may be even closer to where I am.”15 The headline of the Playboy article summed it up quite perfectly: RENAISSANCE MENSCH. The photo, shot on Hydra, made the melancholy Canadian New Yorker look curiously like a silent movie actor playing a Florida real estate salesman: wide-brimmed hat, thin mustache and villainous smile.
Leonard’s U.S. record label changed its original advertisement for the album, which included a quote from the Boston Globe review, “James Joyce is not dead . . . ,” to one with a quote from Playboy: “I’ve been on the outlaw scene since I was 15.” They added a rather incongruous photo of a smiling, bestubbled Leonard, dressed in striped pajamas, lying alongside his somber self-portrait on the album sleeve. As part of a more sensible promotional campaign in the UK, CBS released in early 1968 a low-priced sampler album titled The Rock Machine Turns You On. Among tracks from Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Spirit, Tim Rose and Taj Mahal was Leonard, singing “Sisters of Mercy.”
Leonard, meanwhile, was in a dreary room at the Henry Hudson, talking to a journalist from the Montreal Gazette, assuring him that his next album—the album that only weeks ago he was unsure he was going to make—would be a country and western record. As he had planned to do in the first place, he said, he was going to Tennessee.
Eleven
The Tao of Cowboy
He could ride a horse, he knew how to shoot a rifle and, for a man who claimed to have not a sentimental bone in his body, he could sing a Hank Williams song to break your heart. Out of all the thirtysomething urban sophisticates in New York City, the likeliest to survive being dropped from the sky into rural Tennessee was Leonard. But New York was not quite done with him yet. His American publisher, Viking, hitching a ride on the album’s publicity campaign, issued a second edition of Beautiful Losers and was gearing up for the June 1968 release of a new poetry book, Selected Poems 1956–1968.* The first of Leonard’s poetry books to be published in the U.S. offered twenty new poems, including the one he once scrawled to Marita on Le Bistro’s wall, along with a selection from earlier volumes. Many were handpicked by Marianne and the emphasis was on his lyrical and personal poems of love and loss. Although their love affair was all but over, eroded by time and distances and Leonard’s ways in matters of domesticity and survival, there were still ties that bound.
If there were good reasons not to leave New York, there were none to stay in the Henry Hudson Hotel. Leonard checked back into the Chelsea. Not many days passed before he noticed a woman who seemed to share his timetable, wandering the hotel at three in the morning looking for a drink and company. Janis Joplin had moved into the Chelsea while recording her second album with Big Brother & the Holding Company, which John Simon was producing. One night, as Leonard was on the way back to the hotel from the Bronco Burger and Janis from Studio E, they found themselves sharing the elevator, and then an unmade bed. In later years, after Leonard immortalized Janis’s blow job in song—first in “Chelsea Hotel #1,” which he sang live but never released, then “Chelsea Hotel #2,” recorded on 1974’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony—he polished the encounter into a stage anecdote. “She wasn’t looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson; I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot; but we fell into each other’s arms through some process of elimination.”1 His words had the dark humor of both loneliness and honesty. Leonard’s later refinements to the anecdote were less black, more stand-up comedy. He said he asked her who she was looking for and when she told him he quipped, “My dear lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.”2 Either way, she made an exception.
Interestingly, the anecdotes followed a similar pattern to the songs. “Chelsea Hotel #1” was the more open and emotional of the two:
A great surprise, lying with you baby
Making your sweet little sound. . .
See all your tickets
Torn on the ground
All of your clothes and
No piece to cover you
Shining your eyes in
My darkest corner.
The second was more guarded and unsentimental:
I can’t keep track of each fallen robin. . . .
I don’t think of you that often
making the encounter sound humdrum—particularly when compared with the extravagance in his poem “Celebration,” where the orgasm from oral sex felled the protagonist “like those gods on the roof that Samson pulled down.” Leonard expressed regret on several occasions later at having named Joplin as the fellatrix and muse of the song. “She would not have minded,” he said. “My mother would have minded.”3 Quite possibly, but really it was Leonard who minded—not just this rare lack of good manners, but having revealed so much of the mystery, shown how the trick was done. Janis was a one-night stand and, it’s safe to say, not the only woman in the Chelsea to have given him head, yet something about her, or about what happened to her—less than three years later, at the age of twenty-seven, in a hotel room in Los Angeles, Janis Joplin OD’d and died—seemed to have gotten under Leonard’s skin.
David Crosby was in Miami, in the brief hiatus between being fired by the Byrds and cofounding Crosby, Stills & Nash, when he first set eyes on Joni Mitchell. She was singing alone in a coffeehouse and Crosby was “smitten.” He brought her back with him to Los Angeles and she moved in with him. Crosby set about finding his new love a re
cord deal and appointed himself her album producer. “She was magnificent and magical, and though I wasn’t really a producer, I just knew that somebody needed to keep the world from trying to translate what she did into a normal bass, drums and keyboards format, because that would have been a fucking disaster.” Despite his good intentions, making an album with Joni “really wasn’t fun”—working with Beethoven was no easier than living with Beethoven. When it was done, and the blood washed from the walls, Joni surprised Crosby by suggesting that he produce her friend Leonard Cohen’s second album.
Crosby knew nothing about Leonard, other than “Suzanne,” Judy Collins’s version; he thought it “one of the prettiest songs” he’d heard. But Joni was persuasive. Crosby booked two sessions, on May 17 and 18, at Columbia’s Los Angeles studio, a large room in which he had previously worked with the Byrds, and Leonard, who appeared to have no objection to the plans Joni had made for him, flew to L.A. “I don’t remember him saying anything about what he really wanted to have happen,” says Crosby, “he just put himself in my hands. Poor fellow.” On the first day, they recorded one song, “Lady Midnight.” On the second they recorded two, “Bird on the Wire” and “Nothing to One.”
“It really was not a happy experience,” says Crosby. “It’s an embarrassing story for me and a bitter pill to swallow because I could produce him now in a minute, but then I had no idea how to record him. I listened to him sing, and I’m a melodic singer, so I didn’t know what to do with a voice like Leonard’s. The only other singer vaguely like Leonard was Bob Dylan, and I couldn’t have recorded Dylan either. When the Byrds tried to record Dylan songs, we changed them completely, gave them a beat, put harmonies to them, translated them completely from their original form. It was quite obvious that Leonard was one of the best poets and lyricists alive, so I imagined that the way to go about it was to take him in the direction that Dylan had gone and speak the lyrics more than sing them. It did not make him happy.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 20