Bill Donovan signed on for the second tour, as did Ron Cornelius and Bob Johnston, who put a new band together. Fowler and Daniels were replaced by two Californians, David O’Connor, a flamenco guitarist, and Peter Marshall, a jazz bassist, who was living at that time in Vienna. Johnston was still looking for backing singers as the three weeks of rehearsals began. “There was a redheaded girl who was gorgeous; she said, ‘You’ll be making the biggest mistake in the world if you don’t take me with you,’ and I said, ‘I know it, I haven’t heard anybody better yet.’ Then the next day this girl came in—a horse face, big glasses and ragged from a trip from L.A.” She told him she had sung in the musical Hair and made regular appearances on television in the Smothers Brothers’ show. Johnston listened to her sing. “She was incredible—and she knew every song Leonard did. Though I hated to turn down the redheaded girl I told the horse-faced girl, ‘You’re going.’ ” Her name was Jennifer Warnes. The second female vocalist was another Los Angeleno, Donna Washburn, the daughter of the president of the 7-Up soft drinks company; her musical résumé included singing with Dillard & Clark and Joe Cocker.
Leonard was focusing all his efforts on holding it together and getting in shape for the campaign: yoga, swimming twice a day, fasting. He had a habit of fasting once a week, usually on a Friday if a tour did not get in the way. Brian Cullman recalls that when he and Leonard talked in Switzerland, Leonard spoke more about fasting than he did poetry. “But even his fasting was elegant; while fasting, he would drink white grape juice with lemon and seltzer.” Fasting was important to Leonard and had been ever since he began the task of chiseling away the softness that his old family photographs showed a tendency toward. He needed to keep the edges sharp.
Suzanne flew out to Nashville to join Leonard. She was there when Paul Saltzman interviewed Leonard in their hotel room. He noted how Leonard sat there quietly while Suzanne caressed his foot. Suzanne appeared to dote on Leonard, telling him at one point, “You’ve taught me most everything I know.” They looked “so fine together,” the journalist wrote, “warm and calm and loving.”15 Marty Machat was also working on ways to ease the pain of touring for him: they would take a filmmaker on the road with them, who would shoot and record every show. That way, once this tour was over, if anyone wanted to see Leonard in concert, here he was, on film.
The man Machat had in mind for the job was Tony Palmer, a young Londoner, who had made films on Frank Zappa, Gustav Mahler and the band Cream, all of which had won acclaim. Palmer was also a music critic with the Observer—“the first person,” Palmer claims, “to review Leonard’s first LP, and extremely favorably.” Machat flew him to New York to meet Leonard. “We talked for three hours, Leonard was extremely self-effacing, humble, almost apologetic—he kept asking, did I think the songs were any good?—and he expressed a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the existing recordings, going back to the first album and ‘Suzanne.’ I asked him why and he said that they didn’t really express the emotion that he’d felt when writing the songs; but probably, it was more complicated than that.” He told Palmer “he didn’t like filming, and gave [Palmer] all the reasons why he thought it was a bad idea,” but added, “This will probably be the only tour I will make ever in my life. I’d like a proper record of what happens.” “Then it was just a discussion about how I would do it,” Palmer recalls. He signed a contract that gave him $35,000—“a low budget,” says Palmer, since it had to cover a four-man crew, their travel expenses and their equipment; he paid himself £2,000—but it also gave him free range to shoot what he wanted, be it a butt-naked Leonard in a sauna, Leonard weeping onstage or Leonard taking acid before the show. Machat, Palmer says, told him he was putting up the money for the film himself, “so that Leonard doesn’t have to worry about it.”
“The impression one had was that he was very much a father figure for Leonard, his protective shield, who nursed him and looked after him. It was the same in the day-to-day life on the road: he was very solicitous, he’d always go and check out Leonard’s room in the hotel first to see if it was okay and that Leonard felt comfortable. Leonard never wanted a grand suite on the top floor of the Ritz but he wanted the shower to be working.” Leonard had told Johnston that on this tour, unlike the last, where their hotels were among the grandest in Europe, they were going to stay “in little rooms with a little bed and a table.” He did not get his way. But that seemed to be happening a lot lately. When Leonard left with the band for Dublin, where the tour began on Saint Patrick’s Day 1972, Suzanne was pregnant.
It was an extraordinary tour, all of it recorded by Palmer’s camera, both the incandescent performances and the shambles, when the sound equipment, and on occasion Leonard, broke down. Palmer shot backstage too, and offstage, filming Leonard being interviewed by various European journalists asking much the same questions in different accents. Leonard would answer them patiently, sometimes candidly, more often evasively, or an inseparable mixture of the two. When asked by one reporter if he was a practicing Jew, he said, “I’m always practicing.” He told a German journalist, “I can’t say my childhood was in any way inconvenienced by [World War II but] I did have a sense of empathy for my race.”
The Berlin concert was in the hall where Goebbels made his speech announcing total war. Leonard, echoing the Nazi salute on his last tour, decided to give the same speech. There were some boos and catcalls from the crowd, but mostly they loved him. The connection between Leonard and the audience at many of the concerts, as the film footage shows, was palpable, very physical. In Hamburg, Leonard jumped into the crowd and kissed a young woman—a deep, long kiss. “It just went on and on and on,” Cornelius recalls. “It ended up with Leonard on the floor, and you wondered if they were going to start taking their clothes off now.” Backstage Leonard told Palmer, “I’ve disgraced myself.” The next night, in Frankfurt, he invited the audience onstage, and while the band played on, the fans pulled Leonard to the floor and lay on top of him. “There were people all over him, writhing like a pile of worms,” says Cornelius. “He just lost it; he just got so sexually involved with the crowd that he took it to a new level.”
A procession of women offered themselves. One woman, a beautiful actress, came backstage with her husband and, while her husband watched and Palmer kept filming, hit on Leonard. He turned her down. “There were numerous ladies he took a shine to,” says Palmer. “I had thought at one point he was feeling very close to Jennifer [Warnes]. If they were they were very discreet, but we certainly filmed them looking very happy together.” The camera also caught Leonard in crisis, debating with himself—and with his band, the fans, the media and Palmer—about performance and celebrity and their corruptive nature, the damage that they do to an artist. “One feels a sense of importance in one’s heart that is absolutely fatal to the writing of poetry,” he told an interviewer. “You can’t feel important and write well.”
He spoke of his humiliation at “not having delivered the goods,” meaning the songs; it was always the songs. When Palmer remonstrated that “the audience was absolutely transfixed,” Leonard said, “There’s no point in them being transfixed if I am not conveying my songs to them properly.” At the Manchester concert, Leonard tried to explain to the audience that he was striving for more than “just the observance of a few ‘museum’ songs.” He elaborated, “I wrote the songs to myself and to women several years ago and it is a curious thing to be trapped in that original effort, because here I wanted to tell one person one thing and now I am in a situation where I must repeat them like some parrot chained to his stand, night after night.” He also called himself a “broken-down nightingale.” At several shows he offered to give everyone their money back. Offstage, he recited his prayer-poem from The Energy of Slaves to the cameraman: “Let me be for a moment in this miserable and bewildering wretchedness a happy animal.”
On the plane journey from Paris to Israel, Leonard was quiet. “He liked to sit near the front of an aeropla
ne, usually with me,” says Palmer, “and, because he hated aeroplane food, he always had his little bowl of inexpensive caviar and lemons and a slice of brown bread. He was contemplative.” He was looking forward to playing Israel. He was terrified of playing Israel. The day before he had played to doting crowds and he had gone on a date with Brigitte Bardot—he had invited Bill Donovan to come to lunch with them and meet her, but Donovan had to leave for Israel before the rest of them to make sure everything was set up for the shows.
Their first show, at the Yad Eliyahu Arena, was on the same day that Leonard and the band flew into Tel Aviv. Airport security was slow and grim, guns everywhere, but they arrived at the venue in good time. When they came out onstage though, the floor was completely empty. The audience was packed into the stands around the edges, like they were there to see an invisible basketball game. Security had been told to keep everyone off the floor, which had been newly varnished. When Leonard, disturbed by the distance between them, invited the audience to come down, they were set upon by armed guards in orange boiler suits. “They freaked out and started clubbing everybody, beating kids up,” Donovan remembers. “Leonard jumped off the stage into the crowd and a guy ran up onstage and grabbed Ron’s guitar and I knocked the guy offstage and then somebody hit me from behind and knocked me out. It ended up as sort of a riot.” Peter Marshall says, “I was hiding behind my string bass and there was some guy raising a chair, like it was a movie, and he’s going to hit me in the face, but somebody grabbed the chair from behind.”
The band reconvened backstage. Jennifer Warnes said she was scared. Leonard wondered aloud, “Maybe I pushed it too hard.” Then he led everyone back onstage. “I know you’re trying to do your job, but you don’t have to do it with your fists,” he told the guards, then dedicated a song to them. He urged the audience to sit down and enjoy the concert. “Eventually,” says Marshall, “he got everybody to calm down and he completed that show.” As soon as it was done, they dashed out of the hall and into the tour bus—an Israeli street bus they had hired for the stay. As they drove toward Jerusalem, “the whole band drinking wine, playing music, having a grand old time,” Marshall recalls, “there was this one Israeli soldier hitchhiking way out in the country. We pulled up. This guy thinks he’s just getting on a regular bus and there’s this gigantic party. We took his rifle and gave him whatever was going around”—pot, acid—“and the look on his face, I can still see it. Those guys had a tough life at that time.”
The Binyanei Ha’uma hall in Jerusalem was small and new, with excellent acoustics. The audience were where they ought to be, sitting downstairs near the stage. In the dressing room, Bob Johnston handed around the LSD du tour, Desert Dust. “Think that stuff still works?” asked Leonard. “We’ll be in serious trouble if it works—or it doesn’t work.” Standing at the microphone, looking out at the attentive, adoring crowd, he appeared even more affected than usual. The connection he shared with them was more than just emotional; it encompassed their shared Jewish history and blood. Leonard’s eyes were stoned and bright. He looked both energized and enervated, a tightrope walker who might fall any moment or be taken up out of his body into the sky. The songs sounded beautiful as he sang, and the band seemed to be wired into his nervous system. But Leonard felt that it was not good enough, that he was letting down this precious audience and these precious songs. He tried to explain this to them, but his explanation kept getting more and more complex.
“They become meditations for me and sometimes, you know, I just don’t get high on it, I feel that I am cheating you, so I’ll try it again, okay? If it doesn’t work I’ll stop. There’s no reason why we should mutilate a song to save face. If it doesn’t get any better we’ll just end the concert and I’ll refund your money. Some nights one is raised off the ground and some nights you just can’t get off the ground and there’s no point lying about it, and tonight we just haven’t been getting off the ground. It says in the Kabbalah that if you can’t get off the ground you should stay on the ground. It says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne, and somehow the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight and God does not sit on his throne and this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem. So listen, we’re going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to try to get ourselves back into shape and if we can manage,” Leonard said, “we’ll be back.”16
Backstage, Leonard was having a meltdown. He announced, “I’m splitting.” He said he would give the fans their money back. But the fans didn’t want their money back, they told him, the tickets weren’t expensive, and some people had come two hundred miles for this show. Someone came to the dressing room door and told him that the audience was still out there, waiting, and that they wanted to sing Leonard a song. At first Leonard misunderstood. But then he heard them. They were singing him “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem,” “We Bring You Peace.” Marshall took Leonard aside. “We have to take care of business and finish the show or we might not get out of here in one piece.” Leonard said, “I think what I need is a shave.” That’s what his mother had told him to do when things got bad. There was a mirror and a basin in the dressing room and someone fetched him a razor. Slowly, serenely, while the crowd clapped and sang in the auditorium, Leonard shaved. When he was done, he smiled. They went back onstage. As Leonard sang “So Long, Marianne,” immersing himself in the song he’d written to a woman in a moment in a less complicated time, changing her description from “pretty one” to “beautiful one,” tears began to stream down his face.
Backstage, when the show was over, everyone was crying. It was the last night of the tour; they were going home. Leonard picked up his guitar and started to sing “Bird on the Wire” in the style of a country song. Bob Johnston sang a verse and turned it into a gospel blues, and then the whole band joined in, making instruments with their voices, humming softly in the background, as sweet and comforting as a lullaby.
Adam Cohen was born in Montreal on September 18, 1972—“not an enfant du hasard,” said Suzanne, but “planned.” If Leonard had planned on becoming a father, he did not behave that way. When Steve Sanfield showed up at the house with his wife and son to congratulate his friend on his first child, Suzanne was there, “very solemn,” and Leonard was in New York. He was at the Chelsea, having what might have been a somber, one-man bachelor party. The hotel would have been the perfect setting, the Chelsea scene having become as fractured and dark at times as Leonard’s state of mind.
“There were a lot of factions, a lot of drugs and trauma, a lot of rough stuff going on, a shooting,” says Liberty, the model turned poet and feminist writer who lived in the Chelsea Hotel and who was Leonard’s lover at one time. “I had a room with high ceilings, a fireplace and a wrought-iron balcony, but my next-door neighbors were cocaine dealers and pimps.” If Leonard had gone back there to remind himself of a time when he was free and unencumbered, he did not strike Liberty as “someone [who was] reaching for freedom. . . . In some ways he seemed to carry the vestiges of a privileged middle-class background,” particularly in the context of the early seventies and the Chelsea circle. She remembers him as “sweet and gentle” but “constrained.” Liberty says, “I felt he hadn’t yet gone through the looking glass, had not entered his own ‘house of mystery,’ or hadn’t stayed there long enough—though, of course, Leonard survived. Many of the wild ones did not.”
Even if Leonard were not wild, he clearly felt trapped. At the same time, his upbringing, his patriarchal roots, his sense of duty ensured that he could not shrug off fatherhood. He returned home, but reluctantly and impossibly weary. He was depressed. It was hard work, trying to find a way to keep going and not be pulled off course. Sanfield and his wife returned to the house for dinner. It was a “very uncomfortable” evening. Once they had eaten, says Sanfield, “Leonard said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we got up and went to a couple of clubs. I was thinking, ‘This guy
just had a child; what are you doing, man?’ Leonard said, ‘It’s tough, this life. It’s just tough.’ ”
Later that year, when Sanfield was back in California, Leonard called him. “He said, ‘Would you bring me to your teacher? He’s been on my mind for a long time.’ ” Sanfield asked Leonard where he was. Montreal, he said; he was going to go to Tennessee and pick up his jeep and drive cross-country. It was more than two thousand miles from Tennessee to the Santa Barbara mountains and took several days. The mountain road was thick with snow when Leonard arrived at Sanfield’s house. When they left together for L.A., the jeep got stuck on a back road and they had to hike through deep snow to find a pickup to pull them out. They stopped on the way in Fresno, where they took in an afternoon movie, then set off again for the Zen Center in L.A. “I brought Leonard to Roshi and we sat down and had tea,” said Sanfield. “It was mostly silent. Then Roshi said, ‘You bring friend to Mount Baldy.’ So a couple of days later Leonard and I drove up there in his jeep, and Roshi said to Leonard, ‘Okay, you stay here.’ ”
He stayed, but for barely a week. It was winter, it was Mount Baldy, it was a Buddhist boot camp, grim, with all these broken young people trudging through snow in walking meditation at three o’clock in the morning. Leonard came down from the frozen mountain and flew with Suzanne to Acapulco and the sun.
Fourteen
A Shield Against the Enemy
March 15, 1973: “Thank you for the knife and the good belt. I used them to scratch and choke her a little. While she suffers I have a chance to breathe the free air and look under the flab for my body.” March 17: “Listening to gypsy violins, my jeep rusting in Tennessee, married as usual to the wrong woman. She loves the way I make love to her.” March 19: “Lie down, there’s no one watching you . . . the show is over.”1
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 27