I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Leonard had “always been interested in electronic machines and keyboards,” he said. “In fact, for my first record I interviewed one or two people who were doing experimental work in electronic instruments. I tried to get a sound, a drone, that would go behind ‘The Stranger Song’—I never managed to get the right kind I was looking for—but the technology had reached a sophistication by this time where I could use my little toys in the actual recording.”3 The first song to feature Leonard playing his Casio was the new album’s opening track, “Dance Me to the End of Love.” The seed of the song was something Leonard had read about an orchestra of inmates in a concentration camp, who were forced by the Nazis to play as their fellow prisoners were marched off to the gas chambers. As a testimonial to Leonard’s way with words and a romantic melody, it would go on to become a popular song at weddings.*

  Leonard named his seventh studio album Various Positions, a title suggestive of a Cohen Kama Sutra. But his aim with the album was to explore “how things really operate, the mechanics of feeling, how the heart manifests itself, what love is. I think people recognize that the spirit is a component of love,” he said, “it’s not all desire, there’s something else. Love is there to help your loneliness, prayer is to end your sense of separation with the source of things.”4 The songs take a variety of positions. Different characters in different songs offer different instructions: his dead mother sends him back into the world in “Night Comes On”; the commanding officer sends him back to the battleground in “The Captain.” Sometimes similar characters reappear in different songs in different contexts—“Heart with No Companion” has a mother with no son and a captain with no ship. “Hunter’s Lullaby,” sung in the persona of a wronged woman, the deserted wife and mother of his children, has echoes of Leonard’s commentaries in Death of a Lady’s Man.

  The song “Hallelujah” contains a multiplicity of positions. It is a song about the reasons for songwriting (to attract women; to please God) and about the mechanics of songwriting (“it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth . . .”), about the power of the word and of the Word, about wanting sex, about having sex and about the war of the sexes. It is also a song about “total surrender [and] total affirmation.” As Leonard explained it, “This world is full of conflicts and . . . things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess. . . . Regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms . . . and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’ ”5

  “Hallelujah” took Leonard five years to write. When Larry “Ratso” Sloman interviewed him in 1984, Leonard showed him a pile of notebooks, “book after book filled with verses for the song he then called ‘The Other Hallelujah.’ ” Leonard kept around eighty of them and discarded many more. Even after the final edit, Leonard kept two different endings for “Hallelujah.” One of them was downbeat:

  It’s not somebody who’s seen the light

  It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

  The other had an almost “My Way” bravado:

  Even though it all went wrong

  I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

  With nothing on my tongue but

  Hallelujah

  Bob Dylan said he preferred the second version, which was the one Leonard finally used on the album, although he would return to the darker ending at various concerts. Leonard and Dylan had met up when they both found themselves in Paris and sat in a café, trading lyrics back and forth. Dylan showed Leonard his new song “I and I.” Leonard asked how long it took him to write, and Dylan said fifteen minutes. Leonard showed Dylan “Hallelujah.” Impressed, Dylan asked how long it took Leonard to write it. “A couple of years,” said Leonard, too embarrassed to give the true answer. Sloman, who was a friend and admirer of both Leonard and Dylan, says, “I always had this kind of debate in my own head over who’s the better songwriter. Bob had those amazing feats of imagination that I don’t think anybody could ever come close to, these lines coming out of nowhere—‘I wrote it in fifteen minutes in the back of a cab’—which would literally knock you over. But I think that as a formal, structural writer Leonard is the superior writer.”

  “Hallelujah” was the one song Leonard had played to Lissauer in his hotel room on which he did not use the Casio. “He played me some verses on the guitar in his six-eighths style,” Lissauer remembers. “Kind of chung-chiggie, chung, chung, chung-chung-chung chung, you know, with chords that didn’t really go anywhere. That song was one of the first things I started working with. I took it home and started to work on the chords to make it more gospel and give it a lift. We went in the studio right away, and I sat down at the grand piano and played and sang it for him in a big, grand, gospel way. Leonard said, ‘That’s fabulous.’ So that’s the version we did. His original version was really quite different.”

  Lissauer brought the band in. “I didn’t want to make a power ballad out of it, so I told the drummer not to play with sticks but use brushes, nothing loud. I wanted it to be really exposed in the beginning, like the voice of God.” Then Lissauer added a choir. “Not a big gospel choir but regular people, people singing ‘hallelujah’ like they would in church, people who weren’t really singers, like the guys in the band, so that it had a feel of sincerity and it wasn’t ‘We Are the World.’ ” Among the women singers were Erin Dickins, Crissie Faith, Merle Miller and Lani Groves (one of Stevie Wonder’s backing vocalists) and a jazz singer and keyboard player making her first appearance with Leonard, Anjani Thomas. Leonard’s own voice echoed as if he were singing in a cathedral. “I remember being begged by Leonard for reverb,” says Leanne Ungar. “Leonard always liked reverb.” There is certainly plenty of it on Various Positions, on which Leonard’s already deepened voice sounds cavernous. When they finished recording “Hallelujah,” Lissauer played it back, and everybody, he says, was stunned. “We were like, ‘Whoa, this is a standard. This is an important song.’ ”

  Dylan had told Leonard that he thought Leonard’s songs were becoming “like prayers,” and none more so that the album’s closing song, “If It Be Your Will.” It was, Leonard said, “an old prayer that it came to me to rewrite.”6 The first draft was written in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in December 1980, shortly after Hanukkah was over and his children had gone back to their mother. It is a song about surrendering, resigning completely to the will of another, whether it be to “speak no more and my voice be still” or “sing to you from this broken hill.” It is a prayer for conciliation and unity, its last verse beseeching, “draw us near / And bind us tight / All your children here.” And, like Book of Mercy, it is a prayer for mercy:

  Let your mercy spill

  On all these burning hearts in hell

  If it be your will

  to make us well

  It is an intensely moving song, intimate and fragile, and sung in a voice that had deepened with age. Lissauer noted that it had dropped four semitones since he and Leonard had last worked together. “It was a heavenly recording,” Lissauer says. “Jennifer Warnes came in and sang with him. Just one take.” Leonard was very pleased with it. Asked in an interview in 1994 which song he wished he had written, Leonard answered, “ ‘If It Be Your Will.’ And I wrote it.”7

  The whole album, according to Lissauer, had been easy to record. “The boys in the band weren’t drinking or getting high, nor was Leonard, and Leanne Ungar is very straight; I was probably doing some coke at the time at two in the morning because I was working so much and staying up longer than my body could do on its own, but it was very straight-ahead.” Yet it had taken a long time, “about seven months, because Leonard would keep leaving for a couple of months.” This time, unlike on Songs for Rebecca, Leonard would come back, and they would work on one or two more songs. One reason Leonard would leave was to write. “He was still sh
y a song or two for an album,” says Lissauer, “and he was working at that as we went along.”

  Things might have been going well in the studio, but in his room at the Royalton Hotel, Leonard was tearing his hair out. “I found myself in my underwear, crawling along the carpet, unable to nail a verse, and knowing that I had a recording session and knowing that I could get by with what I had, but that I’m not going to be able to do it.”8 Part of the problem was perfectionism; it was not that Leonard literally could not write but that what he wrote was not good enough. “I had to resurrect not just my career,” he said, “but myself and my confidence as a writer and singer.”9 Among the songs attempted and abandoned for the album were “Nylon and Silk”—so called, says Lissauer, “because he was playing a nylon guitar and I was playing some silky synthesizer sounds. I don’t think he ever had any lyrics to it”—and also “Anthem,” a very different early version of the song that would finally appear two albums later on The Future. Due to a technical problem, the intro to “Anthem” was accidentally erased by a technician. “I’d thought of a few different ways to fix it,” says Leanne Ungar, “but Leonard decided that meant the song was not ready to be recorded yet.”

  When Leonard and Lissauer heard the final mixes of the album, they were both excited. Leonard was happy with the modern sound, the subtle arrangements and the smooth, high-tech production. “There were some exquisite moments on it,” says Lissauer, “ ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘If It Be Your Will.’ I was like, ‘This is special. This is it. This will be the record that’s going to do it for Leonard in the States.’ ” Leonard and Marty Machat took the tape to Columbia and played it to Walter Yetnikoff, the head of the music division. He did not like it. Leonard remembers, “Walter Yetnikoff said, ‘Leonard, we know you’re great, we just don’t know if you’re any good.’ ” They neglected to inform him that they had decided against releasing his new album in the U.S.

  How did you learn that Various Positions would not get an American release?

  “I happened to pick up a catalog of their recent releases and I just looked through it to see a picture of my record in the pamphlet. I couldn’t locate it, so I thought there must be a typographical error. They didn’t have to tell me why. From their point of view, the market was so limited that it didn’t justify the distribution machinery that would have to go into operation.”

  Had you resigned yourself by that time to not having an audience in the U.S.?

  “I thought they were making a mistake. I thought that there was an audience in the United States and Canada. What I didn’t understand at that time—because I thought that if they had bothered to promote it, the work would have sold more widely—but what I understand now, very thoroughly, is that the dollar they spend on promoting me can much more profitably be spent on promoting another singer, so I completely understand their strategy and I have no quarrel with it. I don’t think I suffered any sense of remorse or bitterness. Most of the energy was devoted to trying to find some little label that would put it out.”

  “When Leonard told me he’d had that meeting with Yetnikoff and he wouldn’t release the album,” says Ratso Sloman, “I was so infuriated that I literally started hounding Yetnikoff. I would go to all these Columbia events, like Dylan’s, and go up to him and say, ‘The nerve of you not releasing Leonard’s album, shame on you.’ ” He wrote in a 1985 article for Heavy Metal magazine that Columbia had sent “Leonard’s new kid straight to the showers. Aborted in the USA, as ‘the Boss’ would say. But, as Dylan told me a few months ago in the studio as he was finishing up his newest Columbia LP, ‘Somebody’ll put out Leonard’s record here. They have to.’ ” As for John Lissauer, he was devastated, he says, “because I knew how good the whole album was. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ve had it with the music industry, they’re a bunch of idiots,’ and I quit.” He says he was never paid for producing the album.

  In retrospect Various Positions can be viewed as a stepping-stone between the timelessness and guitar-ballad style of Leonard’s earlier albums and the slick electronics and almost anthemic sound of those that followed. The minor-key melody of “Dance Me to the End of Love” has a familiar Old European romance and gravity but also the modernity and jarring novelty of the tinny Casio. Where once there might have been dark, Old Testament lyrics, sung by Leonard alone, there are the transcendent prayer “If It Be Your Will,” sung serenely with Jennifer Warnes, and the hymn “Hallelujah,” sung with a choir of voices and a synthesizer.

  The album was released worldwide, excluding America, in January 1985. Unusually, it was largely ignored by the UK music press. NME noted the “sad gaiety” that hung over much of it, “the maidenly correctness” of Jennifer Warnes’s harmonies and the album’s overall resemblance to “a French movie soundtrack, or even Scott Walker in his Brel period. . . . If the title proposes another thesis of sexual sneering, the songs are complex but peaceful reports from a wearied heart.”10 Sounds magazine reviewed its first and only single, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” describing its chorus as “inspiration copulating with commerciality” and predicting a hit.11 It flopped. The album did not fare much better. In the UK it made it to No. 52, one of Leonard’s lowest chart positions. With the exception of Norway and Sweden, Leonard’s first album in five years did remarkably little across Europe, although it did make the lower half of the Top 100 in Canada.

  The Various Positions tour began on January 31, 1985, in Germany—a lengthy tour with seventy-seven concerts. Leonard, who had turned fifty a few months earlier, had no desire to go back on the road but dutifully dusted down his suit. John Lissauer could not go with him as his new wife was expecting their first child, but he put a band together for him: John Crowder, Ron Getman and Richard Crooks, who had played on the album, and Mitch Watkins, a veteran of Leonard’s 1979–80 tours. All it lacked was a keyboard player and backing singers. “I thought of Anjani,” says Lissauer, “killing two birds with one stone.”

  Anjani Thomas, then in her early twenties, was a singer and piano player who had played in a jazz trio in her native Hawaii. She had recently moved to New York, and Lissauer was one of the first people in the music business she met. He had hired her to sing a background vocal on “Hallelujah” after the main recording was finished, and two months later invited her to audition for Leonard’s tour. “So I went to John’s loft on Thirteenth Street,” Anjani remembers. “I got there first, then Leonard arrived. I remember John opening the door and I looked down—I was very shy then; I’d just moved to the big city from a little island in Hawaii, and I really knew nothing about Leonard or his work and stature. I saw his black shoes first. As my eyes traveled up I saw the black pants and the black belt and the black shirt and the black jacket, the black bolo tie, and I thought, ‘Wow.’ Where I come from the men wear aloha shirts and shorts. I’d never seen anyone so present in black like that before. He was very nice, shook my hand, and I played him a song and he said, ‘Well great, now I know you can sing and play. You’ve got the job.’ ”

  The European leg of the tour included, for the first time, Poland—the People’s Republic of Poland was not well-known for welcoming Western pop musicians. The four dates had been a last-minute addition resulting from the efforts of an independent promoter who was a Leonard Cohen fan. Leonard’s name was known in Poland largely through Maciej Zembaty, a comedian, writer and popular radio personality who had been translating and singing Leonard’s songs—more than sixty of them—since the early seventies, and who had been imprisoned in 1981 for organizing a festival of songs banned by the regime. Zembaty’s Polish version of Leonard’s adaptation of “The Partisan” had become an unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement. The concerts were instant sellouts (the first show was delayed by two hours while police at the front door confiscated thousands of forged tickets) and the fans so spirited that Anjani was given her own bodyguard, a man previously assigned to protect the pope.

  Leonard, with his Lithuanian ancestry, appeared touc
hed by his visit to Poland. He talked onstage about the “thousands of synagogues and Jewish communities which were wiped out in a few months” during the war. But when word reached him that Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, had requested that Leonard appear onstage with him, he declined, perhaps out of concern for the promoter who had fought hard to get him there, or likely his usual disinclination to take political sides. During that Warsaw concert Leonard also said, “I don’t know which side everybody’s on anymore, and I don’t really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we’re on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. It doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you courage in your struggle. There are on both sides of this struggle men of goodwill. That is important to remember—some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety. In solemn testimony of that unbroken faith which binds a generation one to another, I sing this song.” It was “If It Be Your Will.”

  Anjani was the sole woman on the tour (there was no second female vocalist; John Crowder, Ron Getman and Mitch Watkins also sang harmonies) and also the youngest member of the band. Neither of these things was a new experience for her, but a tour of this size was. “A couple of times on that tour I’d run into Leonard at the hotel sauna, and we spoke about spiritual matters, and that was a bit of a relief, you know, connecting with a kindred soul on the path.” Anjani had started meditating when she was sixteen years old, after a couple of her friends died from drug overdoses. “I knew that if I stayed in music and kept on doing drugs that that could very well be a possibility for me. I had to go in another direction completely, so I went off on a spiritual trek. I was young enough to believe that if you put in the time, you’ll become enlightened. It didn’t happen, but it certainly made my life miserable on the way. I also saw that Leonard was having a tough go of it on a certain level—because everyone on that spiritual journey is having a tough go of it, for the most part.”