Marty Machat, who had never heard of Lissauer, was not convinced by Leonard’s choice of producer. He called John Hammond, Leonard’s A & R man and first producer, who booked an afternoon session at Columbia Studio E. On June 14, 1974, Leonard and Lissauer arrived, accompanied by four musicians. Under the watchful eye of Leonard’s doubting manager and Columbia’s most celebrated executive, they recorded demos of “Lover Lover Lover,” “There Is a War” and “Why Don’t You Try.” “I’d put together an Ethiopian, Middle Eastern kind of thing,” says Lissauer. “Leonard had never had rhythm like this on any of his songs and it worked great.” Hammond gave his endorsement: it was going to work, he told Leonard, he didn’t need him there. Machat gave his more grudging assent. “I sensed that Marty didn’t like me and I wasn’t used to this because I’m easygoing and work hard and I get along with everybody. Maybe it was a possessive thing; Leonard was his guy and he was looking to me for stuff. Marty was obsessed with Leonard. Leonard was the only artist he cared about because he thought that by associating with Leonard he got some class and some humanity. I don’t think he ever cheated Leonard—and it’s legendary what a bad guy he was with other artists. But he did the right thing by Leonard. Whatever it was, it was not a comfortable situation.”
Lissauer asked that the studio be closed to everyone—managers, record company, girlfriends—except Leonard, the musicians and himself. Sometimes Machat would come by to listen to the rough mixes, but for the most part Lissauer’s request was granted. So too was his decision to record not in one of the Columbia studios but in a small, intimate studio called Sound Ideas. “It was much more comfortable, the engineers were younger and hipper and not in lab coats, looking things up in reference manuals.” The team included a female engineer—a rarity in the early seventies—named Leanne Ungar; this album marked the beginning of one of Leonard’s most enduring musical associations. “The atmosphere in the studio was really fun and really light” and the recording process “very experimental,” Ungar says. “We tried lots of different instruments and different things.”
Generally these ideas were Lissauer’s. He would take home a simple guitar-vocal demo of the song and “fool with it,” Lissauer remembers, “and then come back and say to Leonard, ‘How about we do it this way?’ I wanted to take him out of the folk world. I wanted the record to take the listener places, give them a little visual, cinematic trip. ‘This is poetry,’ I said to him. ‘When you do a straight-ahead singer-songwriter album like the last two, it becomes easy to stop listening to the poetry and they’re just songs.’ I felt that I was illustrating the poetry with these little touches here and there, these unusual combinations of instruments.” Onto Leonard’s basic guitar and vocal recording he added strings and brass from the New York Philharmonic; woodwinds and piano, which Lissauer played; a viola played by Lewis Furey and a Jew’s harp played by Leonard. There were also banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass and—unusually for a Leonard Cohen album—drums, played respectively by Jeff Layton, John Miller, Roy Markowitz and Barry Lazarowitz. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, who happened to drop by the studio, sang some backing vocals.
On this occasion Leonard, according to Lissauer, showed “no insecurities about his singing. He felt he wasn’t a ‘singer’ singer, that he didn’t have that pop tenor thing, but he knew that he carried musical attention and that he could communicate a story. We never talked about pitch; what we talked about was, ‘Have you kept your line?’ In other words, has the narrative stayed intact? Do we believe this verse? That’s all-important with Leonard. He never hides behind vocal tricks; that’s what you do when you don’t have anything to say. Sometimes he would say, ‘Let me do that again and see if I can get my energy up, see if I can find that line,’ and use his finger to point the way. But for the most part, his vocals were effortless.”
A quite different approach was taken to “Leaving Green Sleeves,” the song that closed the album. Leonard’s interpretation of the sixteenth-century English folk ballad was a live-in-the-studio recording with the band, “the product,” Lissauer says, “of ng ka pay”—a sweet Korean liqueur with 70 percent alcohol content. Reportedly good for rheumatism, it was a favorite of Roshi, who was in the recording studio drinking with Leonard. An exception to the closed-studio rule had been made for him. Lissauer had found a place in Chinatown where ng ka pay could be bought, “and once in a while we would do a run and pick up a bottle. Hence some of the, shall we say, exotic vocals. On ‘Leaving Green Sleeves,’ we almost had to hold Leonard up to sing; he was ng ka pay’ed out of his mind.”
While Leonard sang, his hands held up in front of him as if he were reading an invisible book, Roshi sat on the couch in his tabi socks, saying nothing. Lissauer remembers he was “just beaming and emanating good vibes.”
What was Roshi doing in the studio?
“He was nodding off most of the time; he was already an old man.”
I meant, why was he there at all?
“We had been traveling to Trappist monasteries—at that time there was a rapprochement between Catholicism and Zen under the tutelage of Thomas Merton, who was a Trappist monk who wrote beautiful books—and I would go with Roshi and he would lead these weeks of meditation at various monasteries. We happened to be in New York at the time I was recording. So he came to the studio.”
Since everyone, even Zen masters, secretly want to be music critics, what did Roshi say about the songs and your performance?
“The next morning when we were having breakfast I asked him what he thought and he said that I should sing ‘more sad.’ ”
A lot of Leonard Cohen fans would have bought him a drink and employed him as your musical director. What was your reaction?
“I thought, ‘Not more sad, but you’ve got to go deeper.’ ”
To all appearances you were sad enough during that period. Because of your domestic situation?
“I don’t think that was the case at all. Of course when this kind of condition prevails, it’s almost impossible to sustain friendships.”
When you’re so busy torturing yourself?
“You don’t have time for anybody else. It’s time-consuming. And, although I think everyone lives their life as an emergency, the emergency is acute when you’re just trying to figure out how to get from moment to moment and you don’t know why, and there are no operative circumstances that seem to explain. Of course the circumstances become disagreeable because of the relationships that you can’t sustain, but I don’t think it’s the other way round.”
Did becoming a father make any difference to your depression, distracting it or shifting the focus in some way?
“It didn’t happen in my case, although it’s true that having kids gets you off center stage; you can’t really feel exactly the same way about yourself ever after. But it didn’t seem to mitigate that gloomy condition. I don’t know what the problem was, still don’t. I wish I did. But that was a component of my life and was the engine of most of my investigation into the various things I looked into: women, song, religion.”
In August Leonard was back home in Montreal, doing an interview with an Israeli-Canadian writer and broadcaster named Malka Marom for the CBC program The Entertainers. The interview took place in his garden shed—his new writing room—which was illuminated by candles. Marom recalls, “He was very whimsical. Soon after I set up the recording equipment, Leonard’s hand went right underneath my skirt. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘This is the real dialogue,’ or something to that effect. I said, ‘Well, aside from this physical thing, is there any other dialogue?’ He said, ‘It can only be expressed in poetry.’ So I asked the most mundane things just to see how far the poetry would go, like ‘When do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? Are you happily married?’ and he answered everything with poems that he had not published.”
She also asked him his views on marriage and monogamy, given the imminent arrival
of his second child with Suzanne. “I think marrying is for very, very high-minded people,” he said. “It is a discipline of extreme severity. To really turn your back on all the other possibilities and all the other experiences of love, of passion, of ecstasy, and to determine to find it within one embrace is a high and righteous notion. Marriage today is the monastery; the monastery today is freedom.” He told Marom that he had arrived “at a more realistic vision” of himself. There was no “high purpose” in his activities. “I’m just going,” he said, “so that I don’t have to keep still.”
In September, barely a month after the release of his new album, Suzanne gave birth to Leonard’s second child, a girl. Leonard named his daughter Lorca, for the Spanish poet.
New Skin for the Old Ceremony was the first of Leonard’s five albums not to include the word “songs” in the title, nor to have a picture of him on the sleeve.* Instead there was a drawing of a winged, naked couple copulating above the clouds. It was a woodcut from Rosarium philosophorum—the sixteenth-century alchemical text that had so fascinated Carl Jung—depicting the coniunctio spirituum, the holy union of the male-female principle. But the union described in these songs seems decidedly unholy. Their lyrics are caustic, mordant and black—blackly humorous at times but no less dark and brutal for that. The love he sings about is as violent as the war about which he also sings. His woman is “the whore and the beast of Babylon.” Leonard, her poor beleaguered lover and servicer, is in various songs pierced, hung, lashed, captive and—with a knee in the balls and a fist in the face—sentenced to death.
He was not without self-pity, this “grateful faithful woman’s singing millionaire . . . Working for the Yankee dollar.” His only power was in his contempt and in the brilliant cutting edge of his words. Even in his version of that most courtly of songs “Greensleeves,” when he sees his woman “naked in the early dawn,” he hopes she will be “someone new.” In “A Singer Must Die” he sings a scathing “goodnight” to his “night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.” “Why Don’t You Try” is more vitriolic still:
You know this life is filled with many sweet companions,
many satisfying one-night stands.
Do you want to be the ditch around a tower?
This barb is perfectly cruel in its encompassment of sex and captivity. Although his muse is not mentioned by name, never before had Leonard treated one quite so discourteously. The songs, aware of this, plead their case before courtrooms, his ancestors and his God.
What makes this album so different from its predecessors is that its dark poetry—every bit as dark as on Songs of Love and Hate—is often clad in sophisticated, unexpected musical arrangements, ranging from Afro-percussive to Brecht-Weill, to modern chamber music. Said Leonard, “It’s good. I’m not ashamed of it and I’m ready to stand by it. Rather than think of it as a masterpiece, I prefer to look at it as a little gem.”17 The critical response was also generally favorable. In the UK, Melody Maker found it “more spirited than the past four,”18 while NME described it as “an agreeable blend of vintage Cohen and some new textures. Armageddon has been postponed if only temporarily.”19 In the U.S., Rolling Stone took the middle ground, saying it was “not one of his best” but that it had some songs “which will not easily be forgotten by his admirers.”20
The two most enduring songs on New Skin were quite different from one another. “Chelsea Hotel #2” was one of the album’s most straightforward, singer-songwriter productions. “Who by Fire” had been directly inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement when the Book of Life was opened and the names read aloud of who will die and how. Leonard said he had first heard it in the synagogue when he was five years old, “standing beside my uncles in their black suits.”21 His own liturgy ended with a question that his elders had never answered and whose answer Leonard still sought: what unseen force controls these things and who the hell is in charge?
New Skin for the Old Ceremony had not been a great commercial success outside of Germany and the UK, where it was certified silver. In the U.S. and Canada it completely bypassed the charts. But there was an album, ergo there had to be a tour. In September 1974—the month of Lorca’s birth, Adam’s second birthday and their father’s fortieth—Leonard embarked on his biggest tour to date. Two months of concerts had been booked in Europe, including a performance at a CBS Records conference in Eastbourne, England, followed by two weeks in New York and L.A. in November and December. The first two months of 1975 were also taken up with concerts, bringing him back and forth between Canada, the U.S. and the UK.
As Bob Johnston had done in the past, Leonard’s new producer put together his touring band—a small group of the multi-instrumentalists and singers who had played on the album: John Miller, Jeff Layton, Emily Bindiger and Erin Dickins. Also like Johnston, Lissauer joined him on the road, playing keyboards. It was “very different to his last tour with the country boys,” says Lissauer. “We had a lot of artistic detail.” Leonard’s new band was very young. “We were all kids. I was twenty-two and I had never played a concert before such a big audience, and I’ve never been on tour with a guy who’s revered like he was. In Europe Leonard was bigger than Dylan—all the shows were sold out—and he had the most sincere, devoted, almost nuts following. Serious poetry lovers don’t get violent but, boy, there was some suicide watches going on, on occasion. There were people who Leonard meant life or death to. I’d see girls in the front row”—women outnumbered men three to one in the audiences, by Lissauer’s count—“openly weep for Leonard and they would send back letters and packages. And invitations. We would see people after the show—somebody intriguing or good-looking would get backstage—and they’d say things like, ‘I was suicidal and I put on one of your records and you saved me.’ ”
The Guardian review of the Manchester show described Leonard as having “the inspired and fragile air of a consumptive. He cut a lonely and sensitive-looking figure centre-stage, wrapped around his guitar, plucking away with an ill mustered resolve at what passed for a melody line. Cohen generated an atmosphere of vulnerability and regret, an odd sensation in pop. None of his songs showed a sense of humor, none was bright and breezy. But the whole thing had a gloomy warmth.”22
The tour, particularly when compared with the last two, unfolded largely without incident, apart from the bus breaking down on the way to the Edinburgh show (they divided into pairs and hitchhiked to the venue) and the showdown between Marty Machat and Herbert von Karajan in Berlin when the famed conductor, still rehearsing the Berlin Philharmonic, refused to let them in to do their sound check. “Marty’s ego and von Karajan’s ego—that was quite something,” Lissauer recalls. Among the more memorable performances was the Fête de l’Humanité in Paris. “Half a million people and all these little communist factions had come together for a festival, and they’d given us big limousines to take us there,” Lissauer says. “We dressed down for the occasion in fatigues and had them drop us off half a mile from the site, where we got into a bunch of beat-up little Renaults to drive up there, because we didn’t want to be seen showing up [in the limos] because a lot of the people there were very fired up. There was a lot of very passionate political talk and fatigues and berets and Gauloises. Leonard hung out with them and fit right in.”
When the band arrived in New York for the November shows, Suzanne was there to meet Leonard. He took her along with him to his interview with Danny Fields.* He told Fields he had given up smoking, while elegantly eulogizing the beauty of the cigarette. He was no longer drinking either and tried to give Fields the bottle of vodka that had been given to him by Harry Smith. Fields asked him if his children were being raised as Jews. Leonard answered, “Unless I change my name, I will definitely raise them Jewish.” Meaning yes. The pleas in the song “Lover Lover Lover” to his father/Father to change his name were rhetorical. “I never liked the idea of people changing their names. It’s nice to know w
here you come from.”23
In an interview around the same time with Larry “Ratso” Sloman, for Rolling Stone, Leonard complained, “I think I’m getting old. My nails are crumbling under the assault of the guitar strings. My throat is going. How many years more do I have of this?” But, far from giving up, he said he wanted to keep going “forever.” Every man, he said, “should try to become an elder.”24
In Los Angeles, a residency had been set up for Leonard at the Troubadour, the famous West Hollywood folk club where Tom Waits was discovered on an open mic night and where Joni Mitchell made her L.A. debut. “He did two shows a night, five nights, all sold out,” says Paul Body, the Troubadour doorman. “I was the ticket-taker, so I remember Phil Spector coming in on the Sunday with Lenny Bruce’s daughter, Kitty. Dylan also showed up one night. There were quite a few different celebrities—and tons of beautiful women. The only guy I’ve seen who drew better-looking women than Leonard Cohen was probably Charles Bukowski. These women were all dressed up in seventies style and hanging on Leonard’s every word, during the show and afterwards.” Leonard wore a gray suit—“He reminded me of the French actor Jean Gabin,” says Body—and the band were all dressed in black. “The manager of the Troubadour, Robert Marchese, told me, ‘You’d better check the bathroom for razor blades, because this stuff is real depressing.’ ”
Between sets, journalist Harvey Kubernik asked Leonard about the new album. “For a while I didn’t think there was going to be another album. I pretty much felt that I was washed up as a songwriter because it wasn’t coming any more,” Leonard said. “Now I’ve entered into another phase, which is very new to me. That is, I began to collaborate with John on songs, which is something that I never expected, or intended, to do with anyone. It wasn’t a matter of improvement, it was a matter of sharing the conception, with another man.” His previous album, Live Songs, he said, represented “a very confused and directionless time. The thing I liked about it is that it documents this phase very clearly. I’m very interested in documentation.”25 Leonard was going to visit Dylan at his house in Malibu, he said, mentioning that Dylan had called him one of his favorite poets. Leonard also went to an Allen Ginsberg performance in Los Angeles and to dinner with Joni Mitchell. Kubernik, who accompanied Leonard, recalls a smiling Mitchell telling him off the cuff, “I’m only a groupie for Picasso and Leonard.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 29