I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  After five days in Studio A, the band went their way and Leonard and Johnston took the master tape to London to do overdubs: Leonard’s spoken-word part on “Joan of Arc,” the children’s choir on “Last Year’s Man” and the string arrangements by Paul Buckmaster, a classical cellist and experimental rock bassist who had arranged Elton John’s first two albums. They gave him “a free hand,” Buckmaster said, but “Cohen’s music is almost unarrangeable.” His contribution was to add “little areas of emotional texture and color.”2

  Cornelius remembers, “It started out the way we recorded Songs from a Room but then it grew as things got deeper. ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ kind of matured right before your eyes, and also ‘Avalanche.’ It’s so easy to get too much going on, and yet at the same time without enough horsepower behind it that song would have never had the energy that it has. But it kind of grew into a monster.” Cornelius and Leonard agreed there was something not quite right about the album. Leonard flew him to London. “For a while,” says Cornelius, “with Bob [Johnston] and I, it was flat-out almost fistfights over things going in the record—fighting over wanting it to be the best for Leonard. There was tons of stuff that Buckmaster wrote that Leonard and I would finally just end up putting great big red X’s through, because it would actually have been too much; but if you listen closely there’s a heck of a lot on there.”

  “It was an odd sort of record,” said Leonard.3 There’s barely a trace of Tennessee in it at all, except at a push the skewed back-porch rhythm of “Diamonds in the Mine,” a snarling, screaming sing-along about the nothingness of it all. The album contains some of Leonard’s blackest songs and also some of his most beautiful. The resigned eroticism of “Joan of Arc” and the serene bittersweetness of “Famous Blue Raincoat”—another of Leonard’s triangle songs, this a letter written to a rival or friend or both in the dark hours before dawn—sound almost unbearably lovely alongside the dark, disturbing “Sing Another Song, Boys,” “Dress Rehearsal Rag” (of which Leonard said, “I didn’t write that song, I suffered it”4), and “Avalanche,” the intense, compelling song with which the album opens. It is sung in the character of a hunchback, a grotesque creature with a mountain of gold lusting over women—a Nazi caricature of a Jew. Or from the depths of hell by a tormented man who longs for connection with the Divine. Or by a man who already has the woman but does not want her or the domesticity she offers. And/or it is sung by God—a gentle, New Testament Jesus, with the crumbs of the Last Supper on the table and a wound in his side, who turns out to be as hard and demanding as an Old Testament Jehovah. In these six verses, sung in a minor key, untempered by women’s voices, there are layers upon layers, a whole house of mirrors, but the constants are a sense of loneliness and longing, depression and despair.

  Songs of Love and Hate, along with the first two albums Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room, make up a kind of trilogy wherein killers march alongside suicides, martyrs with soldiers, and gurus with Old Testamentarians, and men who long for love and their lovers march in opposite directions. As in Leonard’s books of poetry, there are recurring themes and motifs, lessons learned and unlearned, joy becoming love becoming pain. Joan of Arc, whose picture was on the back sleeve of Leonard’s first record, is the subject of a song in his third. Marianne Ihlen, pictured on the back of his second album, was the subject of a song on the first. “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” a song written for the first album and recorded for the second, finally made it onto the third, three years after its appearance on the Judy Collins album that effectively launched Leonard’s musical career.

  When Songs of Love and Hate was released in March 1971, an imaginary whistle blew and the U.S. and UK ran to opposite ends of the playground. In Britain the album was a Top 5 hit. In America, despite a promotional campaign, it was an abject failure, not even making it into the Top 100. Canada did not take to it as warmly as to his last album, but Dalhousie University in Halifax was moved to award Leonard an honorary doctorate in the month that it came out. The citation read: “For many young people on both sides of the Atlantic, Leonard Cohen has become a symbol of their own anguish, alienation and uncertainty.” It echoed the Columbia Records ad about there being millions of Leonard Cohens out there, disengaging themselves from life. “People were saying I was ‘depressing a generation,’ ” said Leonard, “and ‘they should give away razor blades with Leonard Cohen albums because it’s music to slit your wrists by.’ ”5 The UK press had taken to calling him “Laughing Len.”

  Spring in Montreal is a wonder. That after such prolonged abuse it still has the will to follow winter seems always little short of a miracle. The sun, no longer slacking on the job, got on with melting the snow. Tables and chairs sprouted outside cafés, where survivors, peeled of their winter armor, sat marveling at the flowers. The darkness had passed, for now. Leonard and Suzanne were installed in their little cottage near the Parc du Portugal. Suzanne had adopted “three adorable but constantly quacking ducklings, until Leonard said, ‘It’s me or the ducks, Suzanne.’ ” Leonard was trying to write. “He was always writing,” says Suzanne, “even when he thought he wasn’t. Continuously.” Suzanne was writing too, a pornographic novel. “It was an innocent ruse, catnip for a blank page, not only to amuse Leonard, but to get him to continue [to try] to write another novel again. I believed—and still do—that he had another novel waiting to be born, that I wished he would consecrate himself to. So I started this book—pornographic, I suppose, for 1969/70, but in today’s market it would be just another modern sardonic/romantic novel—pretending I was having the writer’s block, not him. I asked him if I wrote a paragraph if he would write one, to push me along, and he did, and that’s how it began, playfully,” each writing a page and reading it to the other. “I never imagined I’d actually finish it, but I did”—it took Suzanne around two years. They sent it off to some publishing houses. “We laughed as the rejection letters came in, because along with the regrets they asked to meet me anyway.”

  Leonard completed his novel too, although not until the midseventies. It was accepted by his publisher, but at the proof stage, Leonard withdrew it. One friend to whom Leonard spoke of the book had the impression it was an autobiography, in which Leonard discussed the nature of fame and the sexuality of celebrity—what people expected of him and what they offered him now that they had not offered him before he became a music star. Another friend gathered that it was fiction, largely autobiographical, and that he had written so frankly about his family that he had second thoughts about making it public—curious when Leonard wrote about his family with such candor in The Favorite Game. A 1976 interview with Melody Maker 6 appears to confirm the latter. He had written about his family, Leonard said, but he felt “that it wasn’t honest enough. In other words, it would hurt them but it didn’t have the good side. So I took it back at the last moment. But I feel good because it’s written. Maybe there’d be an appropriate time for it some time. But not for a while,” and not by the time of this book’s publication.

  In the summer a new film appeared in theaters featuring a soundtrack by Leonard Cohen. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller was a Western of sorts, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as a gambler and prostitute who team up to run a bordello. Altman was a great fan of Songs of Leonard Cohen—he played it so often he wore more than one copy out, adding considerably to its U.S. sales. Altman called Leonard to ask if he might use it in his film; Leonard agreed, although given his experiences with directors he was not holding his breath. Then Altman called the production company, Warner Bros., to see if they could procure rights from Columbia. At the time the music department of Warner Bros.’s films division was run by Joe Boyd, an American who had made his name in Britain in the sixties, producing or launching the careers of artists such as Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band. Altman invited Boyd to a screening.

  “The lights went down and onto the screen comes Beatty,” says Boyd, “walking down a hi
ll to the arpeggio guitar intro of ‘The Stranger Song.’ And then a couple of scenes with Julie Christie and Leonard Cohen’s guitar and voice. I thought, ‘Huh? That’s a little wacky’; I didn’t have any great feeling of ‘Oh my god, Leonard Cohen’s music, incredible.’ But when the film finished and the lights came up, everyone else in the room—crew, editors—turned to Robert and said, ‘Oh my God, Bob, that’s so unbelievable, you’re such a genius.’ ” So Boyd phoned Columbia Records. He ended up talking to Bob Johnston and asked him if he knew how they could get hold of the guitar tracks without the vocals. Although Johnston had not recorded that album, he knew that they could not have the guitar tracks, because the performances were recorded live in the studio, “the voice singing at the same time as the guitar was played.” But they did find some instrumental passages that the Kaleidoscope had done without Leonard’s vocals, which did not make it onto the album. Watching the movie in a cinema, Chris Darrow almost jumped out of his seat when he recognized the instrumentation they had improvised to “Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song.” Chester Crill had much the same reaction. “When I heard it I said, ‘That’s the way the album was supposed to be mixed, stripped down, with the instruments actually responding to Leonard’s vocal.’ ”

  That same year “Sisters of Mercy” would also feature five more of Leonard’s songs in the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte—Beware of a Holy Whore. (Fassbinder, an early fan, would go on to employ Leonard’s songs in several films.) Another German film, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana, used “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Others of Leonard’s songs were also keeping busy. Tim Hardin covered “Bird on a Wire” (one of several cover versions to substitute an “a” for Leonard’s “the”), and the ever-faithful Judy Collins included two more Cohen songs on her new album Living, “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Joan of Arc.” A live recording from the Isle of Wight of “Tonight Will Be Fine” turned up on a triple album, a compilation titled The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies: Isle of Wight/Atlanta Pop Festival, released in the summer of ’71. Delighted that so many of his songs were making a living without his having to perform them, Leonard settled down to his writing. He was working on the final edits of a new book of poetry, as well as on what he described to Danny Fields as “a new big chunk of prose.” It was called The Woman Being Born—a title that was also given to an early draft of Leonard’s book Death of a Lady’s Man.

  Leonard had been in Montreal with Suzanne for six months now. It had begun to feel like a very long time. He took a trip to London in August, with the excuse that he was finding a UK publisher for an anthology of Irving Layton’s poems that Leonard wanted to release. The following month, accompanied by a very attractive English girlfriend, an artist, he flew to Switzerland. He was there to meet his friend Henry Zemel, who was making a documentary film about Immanuel Velikovsky, the Russian psychoanalyst and catastrophist. Leonard had first read about Velikovsky in Reader’s Digest; the magazine had been a particular favorite of his father. In later years Leonard explored Velikovsky’s writings on the sexuality of the gods and his theories that evolution, religion and myth were a response to real catastrophes of celestial origin—comets and colliding planets causing the biblical floods and plagues as well as a collective post-traumatic amnesia in mankind.

  Having been dismissed as a kook by the science community, Velikovsky had agreed to take a teaching position at the University of the New World—a utopian educational experiment founded in Switzerland by the American political and behavioral scientist Alfred de Grazia, a former writer of psychological warfare manuals for the CIA. His fellow professors were to include William Burroughs and Ornette Coleman. When would-be student Brian Cullman, a writer and musician from New York, showed up in September 1971, “there was nothing, no campus, no buildings, just fifteen or twenty mostly rich kids who were using this as a way to avoid the draft and avoid college.” Billeted in a resort hotel, they were given a small list of classes, including one on sexuality, which essentially consisted of “a sexy older woman with glasses and a lot of cleavage directing the students in sex games.”

  Then Velikovsky arrived, with Leonard and Zemel, and started giving lectures. Leonard attended them. He wanted, he told Cullman, to ask the professor about the sexuality that generated the first life on Earth. “I was really excited to meet Leonard,” says Cullman, “but most people there, even the university kids, couldn’t care less. One evening I sat around in the hotel lobby with Leonard and Henry, and Leonard had a guitar and played ‘Bird on the Wire’ and songs from Songs of Love and Hate. There were some very beautiful French girls in the lobby who had no idea who he was, and there was this long period of Henry talking Leonard up, Leonard talking himself down, then trying to talk himself back up again: ‘Well have you heard of Charles Aznavour?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you heard of Bob Dylan?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, I’m sort of this, sort of that,’ and they weren’t vaguely interested. He was putting on a show about not being concerned about the French girls, but clearly wounded that they had no idea who he was.”

  Leonard made an appearance in Zemel’s film, near the end, asking Velikovsky questions. What effect would man’s collective amnesia have on the future, what rituals might repeat the trauma and when would the next catastrophe happen? It would not stop happening, Velikovsky answered, while man continued to live “in a role that he created himself, in his arrogance, in his violence, in his misunderstanding of what happened in the past.” The film, Bonds of the Past, was broadcast by CBC in February 1972—a month after the publication of Leonard’s newest volume of poetry.

  “I’ve just written a book called The Energy of Slaves and in there I say that I’m in pain,” Leonard told journalist Paul Saltzman. “I don’t say it in those words because I don’t like those words, they don’t represent the real situation. It took eighty poems to represent the situation of where I am right now. It’s carefully worked on, you know. It’s taken many years to write . . . and it’s there . . . between hard covers. It’s careful and controlled and it’s what we call art.”7 The “real situation” appeared to be as savage and lost as it was on Songs of Love and Hate. He wrote,

  I have no talent left

  I can’t write a poem any more

  You can call me Len or Lennie now

  Like you always wanted 8

  and elsewhere,

  The poems don’t love us anymore

  they don’t want to love us . . .

  Do not summon us, they say

  We can’t help you any longer 9

  He was “one of the slaves,” he wrote; “You are employers.” Everybody wanted something from him that he no longer had the energy to give—the record company, his audience, and “all the flabby liars of the Aquarian age.” 10 Even the women who had always been there for him, even though he was not always there for them, had started to become hard work.

  You are almost always with someone else

  I’m going to burn down your house

  and fuck you in the ass . . .

  Why don’t you come over to my table

  with no pants on

  I’m sick of surprising you 11

  He was a celebrity now and women were his reward:

  The 15 year old girls

  I wanted when I was 15

  I have them now . . .

  I advise you all

  to become rich and famous 12

  The Energy of Slaves

  The review in the Times Literary Supplement sneered, “Teeny-boppers of all ages will have the book on their shelves between the Bhagavad Gita and the unopened copy of the Cantos.”13 Other critics were not much kinder. Stephen Scobie, who was often Leonard’s champion, described it as “blatantly bad . . . deliberately ugly, offensive, bitter, anti-romantic.”14 The last four words are hard to argue with, b
ut Leonard was deliberately no longer writing for beauty, he said, but truth. He had been brutally honest in Songs of Love and Hate bar the one untruth in the song “Last Year’s Man,” in which he wrote that he was unable to write. Clearly he had found the clarity to finish the album.

  The Energy of Slaves has a similar brutal honesty. Revisiting it today, it almost reads like punk poetry. The poem “How We Used to Approach the Book of Changes: 1966” strips all of Leonard’s darkness down to a prayer, one he would return to in the turbulent coming year:

  Good father, since I am broken down, no leader

  of the borning world, no saint for those in pain,

  no singer, no musician, no master of anything, no

  friend to my friends, no lover to those who love me

  only my greed remains to me, biting into every

  minute that has not come with my insane triumph

  show me the way now . . .

  . . . and let me be for a moment in

  this miserable and bewildering wretchedness, a happy

  animal.

  Columbia Records tugged on Leonard’s chain. They needed him to play the places where people were buying his record: seventeen cities across Europe and two in Israel, all within the space of a month. It was nearly two years since his last tour—he must have thought he’d got away with never doing another—and he didn’t have a band; the Army had been decommissioned more than a year before. Charlie Daniels was making a second album of his own and Bubba Fowler had left his wife and kids and run off with Susan Mussmano, one of the backing singers. The pair, who had become lovers on Leonard’s 1970 tour, had no place to go, so Bob Johnston let them live on his boat—a cabin cruiser that had belonged to the country great Hank Snow, before Johnston bought it and paid another country great, though poor and unknown at the time, Kris Kristofferson, to work on it. Says Bill Donovan, “Leonard and I went out there a couple of times and saw them; and then they pulled out of the harbor, said they were going to take it out to the gulf, and we never heard or saw them again.”*