I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Aside from the New York and L.A. concerts, Leonard’s U.S. tour earned a lukewarm reception at best. In a couple of places, tickets barely sold. “He was almost unknown,” Lissauer says. “Leonard didn’t really want to play the States, he didn’t feel they understood him, and because they weren’t putting out he wasn’t putting out, so he had a nonaudience. This was distracting for me, as a record producer; I wanted to see him be big in the States. But on the Canadian tour he was mobbed, and some of those shows were really fabulous. We recorded a bunch of them.”

  While on the road, Leonard was already planning a new studio album. This time he wanted a full collaboration with Lissauer. “Leonard really liked my melodies, so we decided to write together. It was going really well, we wrote some really strong songs and worked on them on the road”—“Came So Far for Beauty,” “Guerrero,” “I Guess It’s Time,” “Beauty Salon” and “Traitor Song.” They also worked on new and different versions of “Diamonds in the Mine,” “Lover Lover Lover” and “There Is a War.” When the tour was over, the two of them went to New York and straight to work on the album Leonard called Songs for Rebecca.

  Leonard once again moved into the Royalton Hotel. Lissauer would meet him there and Leonard would give him some lyrics, which they discussed, before Lissauer took them home and started coming up with melodies. “Then we would get together at my loft,” Lissauer remembers, “and work at the grand piano. Leonard didn’t bring his guitar because my chord changes weren’t, I think, the kind he naturally gravitated to. I mean, I was trying to write for him in a style that was comfortable—not just write a pop song and have him sing it—but I also lifted the melodies and structures a little out of his zone, which was mostly simple chords, no extended chords or inversions, that kind of thing. Also, he tended not to want to sing leaps, he liked to sing notes close together, almost speak-sing like a French chanteur. But I think he was tired of writing the same kinds of songs and wanted to break out of it, and he trusted me enough.” Lissauer made demos of the songs so that they could evaluate what they had. Leonard seemed happy with where it was going. Then he decided to leave for Greece.

  On Hydra the songs were put to one side. Leonard went back to working on “My Life in Art.” “It was pretty bad ten years ago, before the world knew me, but now it’s a lot worse,” he wrote; he was going to have to “overthrow [his] life with fresh love.”26 There were a number of liaisons. He continued to live with Suzanne, but what he wrote about her was vituperative. Suzanne, by her own account, did not take this personally: “Living with a writer, you feel that it’s all a white page, that it’s all a rehearsal, that the author has the right to pause, erase, repeat, vary and repeat again. So I let him. Leonard found solace, purpose and comfort in the deconstruction and complaint of daily woes. I wanted to be a good audience and company, not just the reactive wife, although the last was inevitable at times of course.”

  When Leonard returned to America in the fall, it was to spend more time with Roshi. In an unpublished piece with the pessimistic title “The End of My Life in Art,” he wrote: “I saw Roshi early this morning. His room was warm and fragrant. . . . Destroy particular self and absolute appears. He spoke to me gently. I waited for the rebuke. It didn’t come. I waited because there is a rebuke in every other voice but his. He rang his bell. I bowed and left. I visited him again after several disagreeable hours in the mirror. . . . I was so hungry for his seriousness after the moronic frivolity and despair of hours in the mirror.”27 Leonard was also hungry for hunger. This domestic life had caused him to put on weight and what he needed was to be empty. As he wrote in Beautiful Losers, “If I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness . . .”—a loneliness deeper than anything that the ongoing presence of a woman and children could relieve.

  Lissauer flew to L.A. to meet Leonard and they resumed work on Songs for Rebecca. “We took a couple of rooms at the Chateau Marmont with an outdoor patio and rented an electric piano. We worked on these songs and got them happening and I taught him some chords for a couple of the songs so he could play his guitar. And then he and Marty said, ‘Let’s go back out on tour.’ ” A week of concerts had been booked in the U.S. Leonard’s American record label was releasing a Best Of album, presumably having figured that New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which failed to even make it into the U.S. Top 200, was a dead horse no longer worth flogging. The compilation album was released under the title Greatest Hits on the other side of the Atlantic, where Leonard actually had hits—New Skin had made it to No. 24 on the UK charts. Leonard picked the songs for the compilation himself and wrote the liner notes.

  For this tour Lissauer put a new band together, which this time included a drummer. They set off on the road in November, taking with them the new cowritten songs, adding them to the regular set. “Leonard was thrilled, I was thrilled, even Marty seemed to be happier than expected given that he didn’t want Leonard to collaborate with me in the first place,” Lissauer says. After the last concert, Leonard and Lissauer went into the studio—first Sound Ideas in New York, then A & M in Los Angeles. They recorded all the new collaboratively written songs and their new version of “Diamonds in the Mine.” “And then the faucet shut off. Leonard disappeared. Marty wouldn’t take my calls, I said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ It just evaporated. Without a word from anyone.”

  It was December 1975 and Leonard had gone home to Montreal. It turned out that Bob Dylan was also in Montreal, on his Rolling Thunder tour—a traveling rock revue whose guests included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakley, Bobby Neuwirth, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg. Dylan was keen to add Leonard to the lineup. Ratso Sloman, who was traveling with the tour as a reporter,* remembers, “Bob was incredibly intent on getting Leonard to come. He was obviously a fan of Leonard’s work, and vice versa. Dylan was proud of what he was doing on Rolling Thunder because those performances were intense and enthralling, and Montreal was Leonard’s town, so it meant a lot to him for Leonard to be there. Bob was hounding me—‘Make sure he comes’—and he dispatched me to Leonard’s house.”

  When the car pulled up outside a “crazy little bungalow” off Saint Dominique Street, Sloman double-checked the address. It did not give the appearance of a celebrity’s house. When Suzanne let him in, Sloman ducked instinctively, the beamed ceiling was so low. The floor sloped and the walls were crammed with shelves filled with books, framed pictures and dusty tchotchkes. It looked like a fairy-tale grandmother’s gingerbread house. Leonard was inside with a bunch of his friends, who were all playing music, Mort Rosengarten playing spoons to Leonard’s harmonica. Suzanne took Sloman upstairs to see the children. “They looked so sweet, these little angels in their cribs in this ramshackle little room, and Suzanne was so patient. It looked like a very tranquil domestic scene.”

  It was hard work persuading Leonard to leave the house and come with him to the Forum. When he finally succeeded, Leonard insisted on taking his friends and his harmonica along with him. Everyone piled into the car and sang old French folk songs along the way. When they pulled up at the venue, Dylan came right out to greet Leonard. He told him that if he wanted to come up and play a couple of songs, it would be fine by him. Ronee Blakley, Bobby Neuwirth, and Ramblin’ Jack came over too, as well as Dylan’s wife Sara and Joni Mitchell. Leonard addressed Mitchell as “my little Joni,” and the two appeared very relaxed around each other. Joni joined Sara in asking Leonard to sing something in the revue, but Leonard declined. “It’s too obvious,” he said. Leonard, Sloman surmised, was “a bit of a control freak, in the sense of controlling his own music, of presenting the songs and the context. He doesn’t strike me as someone who jams with the band, unless it’s his friends, at home.” Although Leonard did not participate, Dylan dedicated a song to him—“a song about marriage,” “Isis,” whose lyrics included the sentiment
“What drives me to you is what drives me insane.” “This is for Leonard,” said Dylan, “if he is still here.”

  Leonard was still trying to make his relationship with Suzanne work. He bought a small apartment building across the road from the Montreal cottages in order to have more space. A nanny had moved into his writing room in the cottage, and since it was too cold to use the shed, he worked in the kitchen. “I loved hearing him in the background playing the guitar, quietly singing or writing,” says Suzanne. “When he wanted to enjoy the children he did. I never put pressure on him or made it an obligation, there was no domestic tyranny, but he was a loving, solid, dutiful father. He sung them lullabies and the normal tender gestures.”

  Come the spring, Leonard left once again on another European tour. This one was considerably longer, with more than fifty dates, starting in Berlin in April 1976 and ending in July in London. John Miller replaced Lissauer as musical director, the rest of the band consisting of Sid McGinnis, Fred Thaylor and Luther Rix. Leonard’s new backing singers were Cheryl Barnes (who three years later would appear in the film of the musical Hair) and a nineteen-year-old Laura Branigan (who three years later would sign to Atlantic and become a successful solo pop artist). The set list this time included some new—or, technically, old—songs: “Store Room” was an outtake from Leonard’s first album, “Everybody’s Child” was an unreleased track from the second album, and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” a German folk song about freedom of thought, had been written in the nineteenth century. A live review in Melody Maker noted how cheerful Leonard appeared onstage. “Gone is the doom and gloom, [he’s] at his funkiest and wittiest.”

  After the final concert Leonard went to Hydra. Suzanne and the children were there and Irving and Aviva Layton were visiting. Leonard was eager to show Irving what he had been writing. “They always read to each other what they’d written,” says Aviva. Irving was as effusive as ever about his friend’s work. “The only time I ever heard Irving even mildly criticize Leonard was when Leonard went through a very religious, sort of mystical, semi-Judaic, semi-Christian stage and that was very much not Irving’s sensibility. But that was all; Leonard loved Irving’s poetry and Irving loved his.”

  When the Laytons left, Leonard spent hours with Anthony Kingsmill, the painter who lived on Hydra. Richard Vick remembers Kingsmill as “an incredibly witty and quite wise little man, as well as something of a drinker, [who] had quite a strong influence on Leonard. I remember an occasion at one of the places at the port where people would gather at dawn, after having gone around the bars during the night. Leonard was there, strumming a few chords, and Anthony, who was in his cups, got very frenetic and said, ‘And who do you think you’re fooling, Leonard?’ ” Leonard appeared to ponder the question deeply. He continued pondering after he left Hydra for the U.S.

  Leonard rented a house in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, just off Sunset Boulevard. His reason for living in L.A. was that Roshi lived there, and Leonard was spending a great deal of time with Roshi, at the Zen Center in Los Angeles and on Mount Baldy, often acting as his chauffeur and driving him between the two. Roshi told Leonard that he should move to Mount Baldy with Suzanne and the children—there were family quarters at the monastery as well as individual monks’ cabins—and stay there and study. It was tempting—at least it was to Leonard. Suzanne had accompanied him on one retreat but found that “sitting all through the night was an austerity [she] couldn’t share.” Leonard was also spending a lot of time in L.A. with a record producer with whom he was cowriting songs—not John Lissauer but Phil Spector. These days Spector is an inmate of a California state prison, serving nineteen years to life for second-degree murder, but at that time Spector lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills.

  “So,” says John Lissauer, “the famous missing album. I have the rough mixes but the master tapes just disappeared. Marty culled the two-inch tapes from both studios. He never returned my calls and Leonard didn’t return my calls. Maybe he was embarrassed. I didn’t find out what happened for twenty-five years. I heard this from a couple of different sources. Marty managed Phil Spector and Spector had not delivered on this big Warner Bros. deal; they got a huge advance, two million dollars, and Marty took his rather hefty percentage, but Phil didn’t produce any albums. So Warner Bros. go to Marty, ‘He comes up with an album or we get our money back.’ So Marty said, ‘I know what to do. Screw this Lissauer project, I’ll put Phil and Leonard together.’ ” Which is what he did.

  Fifteen

  I Love You, Leonard

  Phil Spector was thirty-six years old, five years younger than Leonard, a small, fastidious man with bright eyes and a receding hairline and chin. In matters of dress Spector favored bespoke suits and ruffled shirts, or sometimes a cape and wig. Between them they reflected his status as “the first Tycoon of Teen” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed him) and, for many years, the Emperor of Pop. Spector had been nineteen years old when he wrote and recorded his first No. 1 in 1958, a song called “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” its title taken from the words on his father’s tombstone. In 1960 Spector became a record producer, then the head of his own record label. During the first half of the sixties he turned out more than two dozen hits.

  There had been record producers before Phil Spector but there was nobody like him. Other producers worked behind the scenes; Spector was up front, flamboyant, eccentric and more famous than many of the acts whom he recorded. His records were “Phil Spector” records, the artists and musicians merely bricks in his celebrated “Wall of Sound”—the name that was given to Spector’s epic production style. It required battalions of musicians all playing at the same time—horns bleeding into drums bleeding into strings bleeding into guitars—magnified through tape echo. With this technique Spector transformed pop ballads and R & B songs, like “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Unchained Melody” into dense, clamorous, delirious minisymphonies that captured in two and a half exquisite minutes the joy and pain of teenage love.

  Leonard was not a teenager. It is quite possible he never was a teenager. Leonard’s songs, like his poetry, were a grown-up’s songs. His lyrics were sophisticated and his melodies uncluttered, which gave his words room to breathe and resonate. His delivery was plain and his taste in production, as in most everything else, was subtle and understated. Other than finding themselves the last two left at a key party, it is hard to picture Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector ever ending up as musical bedfellows. But by the grace of Marty Machat they did. Machat’s logic was simple. He had a client—Spector—who was one of the best-known names in American pop, but who had hit a rough patch and was about to lose them a lot of money if he didn’t give Warner Bros. an album soon. And he had another client—Leonard—who was revered almost everywhere but America, who was cowriting songs with a producer far less celebrated than Spector—Lissauer—and whose last album with Leonard did nothing to get him onto the U.S. charts. Spector had seen Leonard play at the Troubadour and told Machat he had been “entranced.” Leonard had confessed to being a fan of Spector’s early records, considering them “so expressive I wouldn’t mind being his Bernie Taupin.”1 So why not put them together and have Leonard do the lyrics and Spector the music? It would solve the Spector problem, and perhaps even Leonard’s problem too.

  As it turned out, Leonard and Spector had more in common than one might think, besides both being East Coast Jews who shared a manager. Spector and Leonard had both lost their fathers when they were nine years old—Spector’s committed suicide—and had very close relationships with their mothers. Each deeply loved the sound of women’s singing voices—Spector, who often wrote for women, had put together several sixties girl groups. Both were very serious about and protective of their work. They were also both subject to black moods and, in 1976, when they began working together, were in disintegrating relationships and drinking heavily. So began the extraordinary story of Death of a Ladies’ Man.

  Spector lived in a
twenty-room mansion, a Spanish–Beverly Hills movie star hacienda built in the early twenties. There was a fountain in the front, a swimming pool in the back and, all around, lush gardens. The property was ringed with a barbed fence hung with “Keep Out” signs. Should someone choose to ignore the warning, there were armed guards. When Leonard first walked up its front steps, Suzanne beside him, the maid who answered the door led them past an antique suit of armor and walls hung with old oil paintings and framed photographs—Lenny Bruce, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Spector’s heroes and friends—to the living room. Like the rest of the house, it was cold and dimly lit; there was more light coming from the aquarium and the jukebox than from the grand chandelier overhead.

  Spector had invited the couple to dinner. It was a small gathering and Spector turned out to be a charming host—smart, funny and convivial. But as the night wore into morning and the empty bottles piled up, Spector became increasingly animated. One by one the guests took their leave; only Leonard and Suzanne remained. When they finally got up to go, Spector shouted to his staff to lock the doors. “He wouldn’t let us out of his house,” Suzanne says. Leonard suggested that if they were going to stay all night, they might find something more interesting to do than shout at the servants. By the next day, when the door was unlocked and Leonard and Suzanne were allowed to go home, Leonard and Spector had worked up a new arrangement of country singer Patti Page’s “I Went to Your Wedding” and had made the first forays into cowriting songs.