Leonard played Lewy the new songs he had recorded in Montreal, including “Misty Blue,” a cover of a country-soul song from the sixties written by Bob Montgomery, and “The Smokey Life,” which Leonard had recorded in some form with both Lissauer and Spector (with the latter under the title “I Guess It’s Time”). Lewy liked what he heard and suggested they book a studio and make some demos—very informal, just the two of them. The place Lewy chose was Kitchen Sync, a small eight-track studio in East Hollywood that was popular with L.A. punk bands. Harvey Kubernik, who was in Kitchen Sync recording Voices of the Angels, an album of punk artists reading poetry, “was startled,” he says, to see Leonard, “a guy who’s been in the biggest studios in the world,” recording there. “This was Bukowski land, the only place where you’d get hit on by a hooker and she’d say, ‘I’ve got change for a fifty,’ ” says Kubernik. When he asked Leonard what he was doing there. Leonard answered, “My friend Henry Lewy and I are doing some exploratory navigation.”
As work on Leonard’s album continued, Lewy suggested they bring in a bass player. The man he had in mind was Roscoe Beck. Beck was a member of a young jazz-rock band based in Austin, Texas, named Passenger. They had come to L.A. because Joni Mitchell was looking for a backing band for her tour and Lewy had put their name forward. The tour failed to materialize. Lewy called Beck and booked a session. Beck says, “I went to the studio, met Leonard, shook his hand, and we sat down one-on-one to record. He showed me, on guitar, the two songs we did that day, ‘The Smokey Life’ and ‘Misty Blue,’ and Henry pushed ‘record’ on the tape machine and that was that.” Leonard, dressed in a dark gray suit, a tie and black cowboy boots, “had a very gentlemanly manner about him and a lot of charisma,” Beck remembers. “I was really struck by that. I had the immediate feeling that it was the beginning of something.” Noting how pleased Leonard had been with the session, Lewy said, “He has a whole band, you know.” Leonard said, “Well, great, next time bring them all.”
The album, retitled Recent Songs, was recorded at A & M, a major studio situated on Charlie Chaplin’s old lot in Hollywood. There were no guns, no bodyguards, not even any alcohol in the studio that anyone can recall. Lewy “created an extremely hospitable atmosphere where things could just happen,” Leonard said. “He had that great quality that Bob Johnston had: he had a lot of faith in the singer, as he did with Joni. And he just let it happen.”6 Mitchell was actually at A & M herself, working in a studio down the hall on her album Mingus, which Lewy was producing at the same time as he was making Leonard’s. Sometimes she would drop by Leonard’s sessions. It was all very easygoing. “Henry’s spirit was just lovely,” says Beck, “and ‘lovely’ was a word he used a lot. You would finish a take and Henry would hit the talk-back and say, ‘That was just lovely.’ I don’t recall ever hearing a negative word out of Henry’s mouth.”
After laying down the tracks with Passenger—augmented on “Our Lady of Solitude” by Garth Hudson, the keyboard player with the Band—Leonard brought in Jennifer Warnes as his main backing vocalist. He also hired John Bilezikjian and Raffi Hakopian to play oud and violin solos on “The Window,” “The Guests,” “The Traitor” and “The Gypsy’s Wife.” Another thing in Lewy’s favor was that, since he was not a musician—he was an engineer—he worked best with artists who had their own strong vision of what they wanted to do. “The musical ideas were specifically mine,” said Leonard. “I’d always wanted to combine those Middle Eastern or Eastern European sounds with the rhythmic possibilities of a five- or six-piece jazz band or rock ’n’ roll rhythm section.”7
In his album credits, Leonard thanked his mother for reminding him, “shortly before she died, of the kind of music she liked.” When he had played her his last album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, she had asked why he didn’t make songs like the ones they used to sing together around the house, many of these being old Russian and Jewish songs, whose sentimental melodies were often played on the violin. So Leonard did. He found the classical violinist Bilezikjian through a mutual acquaintance, Stuart Brotman.* When Bilezikjian came to the studio, he also brought with him his oud. Leonard was so taken with his improvisations on it that he had him switch instruments, hiring Bilezikjian’s friend and fellow Armenian Hakopian to play the violin.
That the album would include a mariachi band was a spontaneous idea of Leonard’s. He and the band had taken to enjoying a post-session burrito and margarita at El Compadre, a Mexican restaurant favored by rock musicians, on Sunset Boulevard, nearby. Mariachi bands would often perform there into the early hours, and Leonard approached one of them and asked if they would be willing to come to the studio and play on his record. The band, who seemed to have no idea who Leonard was, performed on “Ballad of the Absent Mare,” a song inspired in equal parts by the horse Leonard had bought from Kid Marley in Tennessee and Roshi’s teachings on the Ten Bulls, illustrated poems depicting the stages along the path to enlightenment. They also played on “Un Canadien Errant” (“The Wandering Canadian”), a patriotic folk song from the 1840s, about a rebel from Quebec, banished to America and longing for home. Being sung in English by a Canadian Jew who had wandered to California of his own volition, accompanied by a Mexican band living in L.A., brought new layers to the song’s theme of exile. And Leonard, newly orphaned and divorced, did appear, despite his self-proclaimed lack of sentimentality and nostalgia, to be longing for home—or some sort of home. The nearest he had was with Roshi, to whom he wrote in the album credits, “I owe my thanks.”
Leonard also thanked his late friend Robert Hershorn for introducing him to the Persian poets and mystics Attar and Rumi, “whose imagery influenced several songs, especially ‘The Guests’ and ‘The Window,’ even if the imagery in ‘The Window’—spears, thorns, angels, saints, “the New Jerusalem glowing,” the “tangle of matter and ghost” and “the word being made into flesh”—appears largely Christian.* The image of the window had long been important in Leonard’s poetry and song, as a place of light and observation, as a mirror and as a boundary between different realities, between the internal and external. Leonard, talking about this song, described it as “a kind of prayer to bring the two parts of the soul together.”8
Recent Songs teems with feasts, thorns, roses, smoke and sainthood, songs about light and darkness, and about loss and being lost. “The Gypsy’s Wife” directly addresses the loss of Suzanne. Its sensual melody is paired with dark, accusatory lyrics that are biblical in tone. Leonard said it was one of the quickest songs he had ever written. After Suzanne left him, he was in a woman’s apartment in Los Angeles, and the woman had a guitar, which he picked up and played while she got ready to go out. “And that is exactly what I was thinking,” he said, “ ‘Where, where is my gypsy wife tonight?’ In a sense it was written for . . . the wife that was wandering away, but in another way it’s just a song about the way men and women have lost one another.”9 It does seem a touch disproportionate that a man who had referred to himself in song as “some kind of gypsy boy”10 and who clearly did not want for female company should be so apocalyptically stern in song about the judgment that awaited whomsoever might come between a man and his wife. But the pain of losing his family was still acute.
Recent Songsalso featured three songs from the abandoned Songs for Rebecca album: “Came So Far for Beauty,” “The Traitor” and the jazzy “The Smokey Life.” The first gave John Lissauer credit as its cowriter and coproducer. “It was exactly as I recorded the demo,” Lissauer says—Lissauer playing piano, John Miller on bass. “They didn’t do anything to it.” Lissauer received no credit on the other two songs, although he says that they too were very much as he and Leonard had done them together.
“I was so brokenhearted by this whole thing,” says Lissauer. “I was doing dozens of other albums and Leonard wasn’t selling a ton, so I wasn’t losing big dollars or anything, I just was disappointed by how I was treated. I’ve always said, it’s not Leonard, it’s Marty [Machat].
” There appeared to be no other Rebecca songs among the outtakes, which included “Misty Blue,” “The Faith,” “Billy Sunday” (an unreleased song Leonard would sing on several dates of the 1979–80 tour) and “Do I Have to Dance All Night,” a dance song recorded at a 1976 concert in Paris and released as a single (backed with “The Butcher”) in Europe.
Recent Songs was released in September 1979, two years after Death of a Ladies’ Man—a quicker follow-up than fans had come to expect from Leonard. It was dedicated to Irving Layton, Leonard’s “friend and inspiration, the incomparable master of the inner language.” The portrait of Leonard that took up the entire front cover was based on a photo shot by his friend and onetime lover Hazel Field; the illustrated version made him look less haggard and more Dustin Hoffmanesque than in the photograph. After the incongruous rage and bombast of Death of a Ladies’ Man, its largely acoustic style and graceful arrangements, along with the romantic gypsy-folk flavor of the violin and the Near East exoticism of the oud, were greeted by critics as a return to form. The New York Times placed it among its top ten albums of the year. Rolling Stone wrote, “There’s not a cut on Recent Songs without something to offer.”11 Larry “Ratso” Sloman, reviewing for High Times, predicted it would be “Cohen’s biggest LP” and said it was “sure to go silver, if not gold.”12
But John Lissauer was correct; the album did not sell many copies. Despite the warm critical response, it barely sold at all in the U.S. and failed to make the charts in Canada. In the UK it reached No. 53—but this was the lowest position yet for a Leonard Cohen studio album; even the widely unpopular Death of a Ladies’ Man had made it to No 35. NME, echoing the generally middling reviews it received in Britain, described it as “Cohen’s most accomplished album in musical terms,” but took it to task for its “detached, almost impersonal air” and lyrics that “tend towards a rather fey obscurity.”13 But Leonard was pleased with Recent Songs.“I like that album,” he would say more than twenty years later. “I think I like it the best.”14
The Recent Songs tour began in Sweden, in October 1979. Leonard’s band for the fifty-one-date European tour was Passenger—Roscoe Beck, Steve Meador, Bill Ginn, Mitch Watkins and Paul Ostermeyer—plus John Bilezikjian and Raffi Hakopian. “It was world music before the term existed,” says Beck. “Leonard and I have talked about what a unique group it was for its day.” Leonard was also accompanied by two of his finest female backing vocalists, Jennifer Warnes, who had toured with him at the beginning of the decade, and a newcomer named Sharon Robinson.
Robinson had been singing and dancing in Las Vegas in the Ann-Margret revue when Warnes, who had taken on the task of finding a second backing singer, called out of the blue, asking if she would like to audition for Leonard Cohen’s European tour. Robinson was not familiar with Leonard’s work, but Europe sounded good. “Jennifer vetted me beforehand at her house on her own, then she brought me to audition for Leonard.” Sharon remembers, “The whole band was there. I was a little nervous, but Leonard, sitting on the couch, seemed to exude a really bright kind of energy and a real warmth and friendliness that I really appreciated. I felt at home right away.”
Helping make Leonard feel at home was Roshi. He traveled with the band on the tour bus, dressed in his robes, reading quietly through his big square spectacles as Europe rolled by on the other side of the glass. “He came to the concerts and he was there backstage,” Beck recalls. “It’s very odd, his presence was at once large and yet almost invisible at times. Not a lot of words were spoken, and he seemed to disappear into the wall of the greenroom. He is really a Zen master!” It was in tribute, perhaps, that when Leonard sang “Bird on the Wire” he changed the “worm on a hook” into “a monk bending over a book.” On the long drives between cities, Leonard and the band would sing “Pauper Sum Ego” (“I Am a Poor Man”), a monastic chant in Latin in the round. During the long bus rides, Leonard and Jennifer Warnes cowrote a song about a saint called “Song of Bernadette.” Sometimes Bilezikjian would go to the back of the bus when the rest of the band were in their bunks, sleeping, and play his oud and violin, “softly so I wouldn’t wake anyone up.” But when everyone was up, he remembers, “all of us would sing Leonard’s songs. They became like our anthem. We’d come up with a vocal arrangement, singing as if we had our instruments. I think Leonard was touched by that. I saw a big smile on his face.” As on their 1972 tour, they had a filmmaker with them on the road. Harry Rasky, a Canadian, was making a documentary on Leonard for CBC. Their number increased again when Henry Lewy flew out to join them for the UK tour—a hectic eleven shows in twelve days—recording the concerts with the aim of making a live album. Despite Leonard’s sounding less improvisational and significantly more cheerful on this tour than he had on his last live album, 1973’s Live Songs, Columbia chose not to release the album recorded on the 1979 tour—at least not until two decades later, when it finally appeared in 2000 under the title Field Commander Cohen.* The tour came to an end in Brighton in December, sixteen days before the end of the seventies. After two months off (two weeks of which Leonard spent in a monastery)—it resumed in the eighties with a successful tour of Australia.
When the band members flew back to their respective homes, according to Jennifer Warnes, they did not know what to do with themselves. “[There were] two or three divorces right after the tour, and I think they were simply because the mates couldn’t understand what had happened. There had been severe altering of personalities. Roscoe started wearing Armani suits. It was a mess. We’d call each other and say, ‘What do we do now?’ The aperture of the heart had been broken open.”15 Beck and Warnes were now a couple, having become romantically involved halfway across Europe. Like the rest of the band, they wanted nothing more than to take the tour across America. “We couldn’t mount enough interest to put one together,” says Beck. Curiously though, at around this time an interview with Leonard appeared in the U.S. celebrity weekly magazine People.
Readers more used to stories about movie stars and the Betty Ford Center read how a Canadian singer-songwriter who could not sell records in America recovered from his “brief periods of collapse” in Roshi’s “center for meditation and manual labor.” Leonard explained, “When I go there, it’s like scraping off the rust. . . . I’m not living with anybody the rest of the time. Nobody can live with me. I have almost no personal life.” As this last statement was a concept alien to People, they also interviewed his former partner. Suzanne was quoted as saying of Leonard, “I believed in him. He had moved people in the right direction, toward gentleness. But then I became very alone—the proof of the poetry just wasn’t there.” The article reported Suzanne’s claim that Leonard had not kept to their child-support agreement. Leonard in turn complained about Suzanne’s “Miami consumer habits,” adding, “My only luxuries are airplane tickets to go anywhere at any time. All I need is a table, chair and bed.”16
Harry Rasky’s documentary Song of Leonard Cohen, which was broadcast in Canada in 1980, made a far more dignified setting for Leonard. The film opens with Leonard sitting in the window—that most symbolic of places for him—in his apartment in Montreal. The apartment looks sparse and uncluttered—much more like Leonard’s home in L.A. and his house on Hydra than the nearby cottage crammed with knickknacks and books where he had lived with Suzanne and their children. This has white walls, bare; painted floorboards; an old wooden table, and a small claw-footed bathtub. Leonard also appears to be surrounded by friends and supporters. Hazel Field, who lives in the neighboring apartment, is seen clambering over the balcony, all long limbs and ironed hair, carrying a cup of coffee for Leonard, and Irving Layton drops by, bringing a young, blond companion with him. The two sit spellbound when Leonard plays them his song “The Window” on a boom box.
“Leonard was a genius from the first moment I saw him,” Layton states, adding, “[His songs have] the quality of mystery, of doom, of menace, of sadness, the dramatic quality that you find in the Scottis
h ballads, the English ballads” from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Asked by Rasky if he found Leonard’s songs sad or joyful he answers, “Both. What I like particularly in Leonard’s songs is what I call the depressive manic quality. If you notice, in some of his most telling and moving songs, he always begins on a note of pain, of anguish, of sadness, and then somehow or other works himself up into a state of exaltation, of euphoria, as though he had released himself from the devil, melancholy, pain.”17 Then, Jews, Layton says, “have always had the gift of anxiety and pain and solitude.”18 The Wandering Canadian tells Rasky that “he is tired of moving around” and would like to “stay in one place for a while.” The problem is that “there always seemed good reasons to move.19
On October 24, 1980, Leonard was back in Europe for five more weeks of concerts. Jennifer Warnes chose not to join him this time, leaving Sharon Robinson as his sole backing singer. By this time Leonard and Sharon had become close. In Israel, where the tour ended, they started writing a song together, called “Summertime.” Sharon, says Leonard, “had this melody that I hadn’t written a lyric for but I really loved.” In the lobby of their Tel Aviv hotel there was a baby grand piano, so she played it to Leonard, who liked it. “Right on the spot,” she says, “he started looking for the appropriate lyric.” Although Leonard did not record the song himself, their first cowrite would be covered by both Diana Ross and Roberta Flack.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 33