In Montreal, when the band performed at a hospital there, a young woman patient told Leonard she was not crazy, and that her father had put her there because she had taken drugs. She begged him to help her get out. There was something in her story that brought to mind Nancy, the judge’s daughter about whom Leonard wrote “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” They formulated an escape plan. It did not succeed—fortunately, it seems, since they discovered that she did have a serious mental illness. “There are things that happened that would take your breath away,” says Ron Cornelius. “At one show eight or nine people in wheelchairs all decided that at six o’clock exactly they would all shit their pants. They were marched out with their dirty gowns and they were all crying, because the music was doing something for them that they had never had. One kid stood up with a triangle missing from his skull—you could see the brain beating—and he started screaming at Leonard in the middle of a song, to where we actually ground to a halt. The kid said, ‘Okay, okay, big-time poet, big-time artist, you come in here, you’ve got the band with you, you’ve got the pretty girls with you, you’re singing all these pretty words and everything, well what I want to know, buddy, is what do you think about me?’ And Leonard just left the stage and before you knew it he had the guy in his arms, hugging him.”
On their way to the Isle of Wight, Leonard studied the music magazine that Johnston handed him. It was opened to a full-page ad for his album, which pictured Leonard, dressed in a black polo-neck sweater, gazing off to the left, as if trying to ignore what his record company had written at the back of his head. It said, “Do you ever get the feeling that you want to disengage yourself from life? To withdraw into some kind of solitary contemplation just to think about everything for a while? Everything. You. Her. It. Them. Well that’s how a poet feels, because he’s no different from everyone else. What makes a poet different is that he takes time to put it all down on paper. Beautifully. And what makes Leonard Cohen a very different poet is that he turns his poetry into songs. He did it for Songs of Leonard Cohen. Then came Songs from a Room, the second Leonard Cohen album for the growing number of people who have identified with him. And what he feels. But don’t have that rare poetic vision. There could be millions of Leonard Cohens in the world. You may even,” it ended, “be him yourself.” If Mort had only mass-produced those Leonard masks, they could have made a fortune. A slow, stoned smile grew across Leonard’s face, for which much of the credit went to his drug of choice on this part of the tour. The Army had taken to calling him Captain Mandrax.
The Isle of Wight, a four-mile ferry ride from England’s south coast, is a placid little island, encircled by yachts and popular with retired naval officers and genteel holidaymakers. For five days in the summer of 1970, it was invaded by hundreds of thousands—six times the island’s population—of young music lovers, hippies and militants. From the hill above the festival site in the west, on Afton Down, you could see dust rising from corrugated fences that had been trampled and the smoke rising from trucks and concession stands set on fire. Nicknamed Devastation Hill—for obvious reasons to anyone who was there—it had been taken over by ticketless squatters, some of whom were responsible for the disturbance. Off in the distance, crammed in front of the stage, were thousands of exhausted festivalgoers, who had spent days watching a bill that rivaled Woodstock. The artists who played that year included the Who, the Doors, Miles Davis, Donovan and Ten Years After. Leonard had the slot before last on the fifth and final day, after Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez and before Richie Havens.
Tension had been rising at the festival for days. The promoters had expected a hundred and fifty thousand people but half a million more turned up, many with no intention of paying. Even after the promoters were forced to declare it a free festival, ill will remained. During a set by Kris Kristofferson, bottles were thrown and he was booed offstage. “They were booing everybody,” says Kristofferson. “Except Leonard Cohen.” As the day progressed, things only got worse. Baez offered to go on before Hendrix to try to calm things down; she said, “I knew that my music was a little more difficult to burn fires to.”12 During Hendrix’s set, someone in the crowd threw a flare that set fire to the top of the stage. Flames shot up while Hendrix played on. Leonard and Johnston stood nearby and watched.
“Leonard wasn’t worried,” says Johnston. “Hendrix didn’t care and neither did we. Leonard was always completely oblivious to anything like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they didn’t have a piano or an organ—I don’t know, someone had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage—so I couldn’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trailer taking a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ” He took some Mandrax. It was around two in the morning when they woke Leonard and brought him onstage, in his safari suit, his chin stubbled, hair long, eyes very stoned. As the Army took their places, he stood staring out into the pitch-black night.
Jeff Dexter, a well-known British DJ of that period who was onstage playing records between sets, made the introduction. He saw immediately that Leonard and the band “were totally Mandraxed; they were in such a state I could have fucked them all and they wouldn’t have known it.” He was worried for their safety. So was Murray Lerner, the American documentary filmmaker who was shooting the festival. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a disaster,’ and that what happened to Kristofferson would happen to him,” says Lerner. “But he looked so calm.” Johnston says, “He was calm, because of the Mandrax. That’s what saved that show and saved the festival. It was the middle of the night, all those people had been sitting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hendrix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days”—all the ingredients for turning nasty. “But then Leonard, with the Mandrax in him, started out singing, very slowly—so slowly it took him ten minutes to sing it—‘Like . . . a . . . bird.’ And everybody in that audience was exactly with him. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.” Charlie Daniels says, “If Leonard was in a zone with Mandrax, it certainly didn’t cause any bad musical decisions. Crowds can be kind of funny and it was getting late and he just seemed to feel the mood. He just kind of laid it down, eased it down.”
Before he sang, Leonard talked to the hundreds of thousands of people he could not see as if they were sitting together in a small, dark room. He told them—slowly, calmly—a story that sounded like a parable, worked like hypnotism, and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t much like circuses, but he enjoyed it when a man stood up and asked everyone to light a match so they could locate each other. “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” said Cohen, “so I can see where you all are?” There were few at the beginning, but as the show went on he could see flames flickering through the misty rain.
“He mesmerized them,” says Lerner. “And I got mesmerized also.” For the lovers in the audience, Leonard sang “Suzanne,” saying, “Maybe this is good music to make love to,” and for the fighters he sang “The Partisan,” dedicating it to “Joan Baez and the work she is doing.” Says Johnston, “It was magical. From the first moment to the last. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was just remarkable.” Thirty-nine years later the spellbinding performance was released, along with Lerner’s footage, on the CD/DVD Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970.
A month after the festival, Leonard, Johnston and the Army were back in Nashville’s Columbia Studio A, recording Leonard’s third album, Songs of Love and Hate. Work began on September 22, 1970, four days after Jimi Hendrix died at the age of twenty-seven in London, and continued daily until the twenty-sixth, eight days before Janis Joplin died at the same age in a Los Angeles hotel. The break from recording was to play a handful of U.S. and Canadian shows in November and December. The first was an anti–Vietnam War concert at a university in Madison, Wisconsin; a homemade bomb had gone off there that summer and Leona
rd was offered protection by the White Panthers, which he declined. He began the show with a song he had learned at Socialist summer camp, “Solidarity,” and dedicated “Joan of Arc,” a song written to Nico, to the memory of another muse, Janis.
When they reached Montreal on December 10 for the last show of 1970, the city was under martial law following the kidnappings of a journalist and the British trade commissioner in Leonard’s old neighborhood, Westmount. Canada’s prime minister Pierre Trudeau—Leonard’s old friend from Le Bistro, he of the famous beige raincoat to Leonard’s famous blue one—was on CBC television, angrily telling the reporter, “There’s a lot of bleeding hearts around who don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed.” Meet the new decade, same as the old decade. In their little house in the immigrant quarter, Leonard and Suzanne watched the snow steadily fall and settle on the street, silently, whitewashing everything.
Photo Section
Leonard’s first photo session at four months old. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Nathan Cohen, Leonard’s father (top left, then clockwise); Herbert Vineberg; Leo Livingstone; Horace Cohen, Leonard’s uncle; and Joseph Leavitt: as the original caption read, “Five Montreal officers photographed in Brighton, England, in the fall of 1918 while on leave to observe Yom Kippur.”
Leonard and Esther Cohen, Belmont Avenue, Westmount. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard, Esther and their mother, Masha Cohen, Murray Hill Park.
Leonard and Masha, Montreal. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard Norman Cohen, Students’ Council President and cheerleader, Westmount High School yearbook, 1951. Steve Brewer personal collection
Leonard and Robert Hershorn. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard and Mort Rosengarten. Leonard Cohen personal collection
The Buckskin Boys. From the top: Terry Davis, Mike Doddman and Leonard Cohen, 1952. Sue Sullivan personal collection
On the beach near New York, 1958. Left to right: Leonard, Harry Parnass, Masha Cohen and Georgianna “Anne” Sherman.
Left to right: Aviva Layton, Irving Layton, Anne Sherman and Leonard in the Laurentians, Quebec. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard and Saint Kateri, New York City. Leonard Cohen personal collection
At Mrs. Pullman’s boardinghouse, Hampstead, London, 1960. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Irving Layton on the terrace of Leonard’s house, Hydra, early 1960s. Aviva Layton personal collection
Leonard and Marianne, Hydra. Aviva Layton personal collection
Marianne and Irving Layton, Hydra. Aviva Layton personal collection
With revolutionary soldiers, Cuba, 1961. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Backstage at a Joni Mitchell concert, Wisconsin, 1969. Photo by Joel Bernstein
The difference a year makes. Backstage on the Leonard Cohen tour, 1970. Photo by Joel Bernstein
With his Zen master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard and Willie York, Big East Fork Road, Tennessee, circa 1969. Leonard Cohen personal collection
Leonard and Suzanne. Photo by Danny Fields
Leonard and Suzanne, Miami, 1973. Suzanne Elrod personal collection
On a tour bus, smoking and writing “Song of Bernadette” with Jennifer Warnes, Europe, 1979. Photo by Roscoe Beck
Onstage with Roscoe Beck, Sharon Robinson and the band, 1980. Roscoe Beck personal collection
Dominique Issermann, photographed by Leonard. Photo by Leonard Cohen
Leonard and Nancy Bacal. Leonard Cohen personal collection
With backing singer Perla Batalla, 1993. Photo by Julie Christensen, Perla Batalla personal collection
With Adam Cohen in the hospital, Toronto, 1990. Suzanne Elrod personal collection
Leonard and Rebecca De Mornay backstage on The Future tour. Photo by Perla Batalla
Leonard and the girls (from left to right): Rebecca De Mornay, Lorca Cohen and Perla Batalla. Perla Batalla personal collection
With backing singer Julie Christensen, 1993. Photo by Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen personal collection
In Venice (left to right): Steve Zirkel, Dominique Issermann, Leonard Cohen, Tom McMorran, Julie Christensen. Julie Christensen personal collection
Leonard’s cabin home on Mount Baldy. Photo by Sylvie Simmons
This broken hill: the view from the cabin window. Photo by Sylvie Simmons
With Hal Willner. Photo by Perla Batalla
With Anjani in Leonard’s living room, Los Angeles, 2006. Anjani Thomas personal collection
Chelsea Hotel commemoration. Photo by Linda Straub
At the Albert Hall, 2008. Photo by Eija Arjatsalo
Leonard and the band, Helsinki, 2008. Photo by Jarkko Arjatsalo
Soundcheck, 2009 tour. Photo by Eija Arjatsalo
Poster boy, Venice, 2009. Photo by Eija Arjatsalo
Thirteen
The Veins Stand Out Like Highways
He smiled like a holy fool from the photo in the bottom corner of the album sleeve, which had been shot on tour—eyes ecstatic, face unshaven, his head dissolving into the black background. On the back cover, in place of song titles there was, written in white on black like a message on a madhouse chalkboard,
THEY LOCKED UP A MAN
WHO WANTED TO RULE THE WORLD
THE FOOLS
THEY LOCKED UP THE WRONG MAN
Critics had called Songs from a Room bleak; it wasn’t, it was stark. Songs of Love and Hate was bleak: songs of pain and self-disgust of endless variation, including a hunchback, an immolation, a cuckold, a suicide, an abortion, broken limbs, a broken sky and a washed-up writer—“Last Year’s Man”—who felt unable to move his hand and write the world back into being. Leonard was depressed and wasted. He’d had it. He had been backstage and he knew how they hid the rabbits in the hat. Those reviewers who had seen through the con and called his voice “weak and pitiful” and his songs “self-indulgent” had been right. There had been no victories. The medals were a sham. Almost four years had passed since he had written to Marianne describing his excruciating first stage appearance with Judy Collins and the freedom and beauty he felt from his “total failure.” But now, living in the Tennessee cabin with Suzanne and contemplating a third album he did not want to make, didn’t believe that he could make, but that his record contract required that he make, Leonard felt only “a deep, paralyzing anguish.”1
Love, lust, the Bible Belt and the company of men, musicians, whom he trusted and admired might appear to an outsider to be the ideal Leonard Cohen setup. Then, they might have said the same thing about his life with Marianne in the little house on Hydra. Leonard’s depression begged to differ. Says Suzanne, “Of course, it can feel like a dark room with no doors. It’s a common experience of many people, especially with a creative nature, and the more spiritual the person, the closer to the tendency resembling what the church called acedia”—a sin that encompassed apathy in the practice of virtue and the loss of grace. “Maybe the biggest struggle—what permits the work to shine or lets you shine through the work—is the undressing, being only truly who you are, [and] tailoring the pathos, quieting the daily pettiness and ending the second-guessing, just in action”—knuckling down and getting on with it.
Leonard’s contract with Columbia stipulated two more albums from him. He asked Bob Johnston if they could give the record company two live albums, since they’d recorded most of the shows on the last tour. Johnston said they might be able to get away with one live album, but not until they’d given the label a new studio album. So Leonard knuckled down and got on with it. He took a room in a hotel in Nashville, he swam in the pool at the Y twice a day and for five days straight he went to the studio. The recording was relatively painless at first; there was an
easy familiarity with the road-honed band, the engineers and the studio. Charlie Daniels says, “We’d gotten used to each other and had much more of an idea of where we were going and what to do with his songs.” And there were only eight songs, almost all of which Leonard had previously attempted to record on his first two albums and/or had performed with the band onstage. The version of “Sing Another Song, Boys” that appears on the album was in fact recorded live at the festival outside Aix.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 25