I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  Before leaving for the tour, Leonard had told Ratso Sloman, “Look, nobody enters a Zen meditation hall to affirm his health. You enter because you have a doubt and because you want to study how the mind arises, so they make you sit still for seven days, and finally you get so bored and fatigued with your mind that you might be lucky enough to let it drop for a second. As soon as that mind is at rest, the Mysteries manifest as reality. It ain’t no mystery.” Leonard also told Sloman that this was the first time in his life that he’d had to work, to support his kids, but that it was the thought of his kids that kept him going. “Other than that,” Leonard said, “it’s bleak, it’s bleak.”

  When the European tour ended on March 24, they flew back to the U.S. to play a handful of East Coast concerts. At the Boston show, at a safe distance from Poland, Leonard dedicated “The Partisan” to the Solidarity movement. Crossing the border to Canada for a whirlwind tour, Leonard learned while he was there that Night Magic, his musical film collaboration with Lewis Furey, had won a Genie Award for Best Original Song, “Angel Eyes.”* The tour continued in Australia, then returned to America, the West Coast this time, for shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then it was back to Europe again for fifteen more shows, plus one in Jerusalem.

  It was the midsummer of 1985 when Leonard was finally home in L.A. In his still-barely-furnished half of the duplex, he unpacked his case, opened a bottle of wine and heated up a TV dinner.

  Various Positions was finally released in America in January 1986, on the tiny Passport label. It did not trouble the U.S. charts. But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and particularly so in the miraculous story of “Hallelujah.” John Lissauer had told the record label that he thought it should be a single; “I thought it the best single I’d ever made for a serious artist. But they said, ‘What is this? We don’t even know what it is.’ ‘Well, it’s kind of an anthemic thing,’ I said.” They told him, “It will never get off the ground.” Some twenty-five years after its first appearance on Various Positions, “Hallelujah” would become, as Maclean’s magazine described it, “the closest thing pop music has to a sacred text.”

  In recent years a number of essays and lengthy articles, as well as an hour-long BBC documentary, have appeared across the world on the subject of this one Leonard Cohen song. At the time of the writing of this book, “Hallelujah” has been covered by a remarkable assortment of artists, more than three hundred of them. Some interpretations favored one ending of the song over another. John Cale went so far as to ask Leonard for all the verses he had written so that he could compile his own version; Leonard offered him fifteen. “Subsequent covers tinkered here and there with the words to the point where the song became protean, a set of possibilities rather than a fixed text,” wrote Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times. “But only two possibilities predominated: either this was a wistful, ultimately feelgood song or it was an icy, bitter commentary on the futility of human relations.”12 He forgot to mention a third category, “the hallelujah of the orgasm,” as Jeff Buckley described it onstage, although arguably this might fit into the first possibility. But Appleyard was right; “Hallelujah” would become a kind of all-purpose, ecumenical/secular hymn for the new millennium. As k. d. lang remarked, “It just has so much fodder, so much density, it can be deep, simple, mean a lot of things to different people, there’s so much in it.”13 Also, as with many of Leonard’s songs, the melody’s spaciousness was generous to people who chose to cover it.

  Among them were Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson, Bono, Hawaiian ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro and San Franciscan a capella group Conspiracy of Beards. Rufus Wainwright sang it on the soundtrack album to the animated film Shrek.* Justin Timberlake and Matt Morris from The Mickey Mouse Club sang it in the Hope for Haiti telethon. Jeff Buckley’s transcendent version, recorded on his 1994 album Grace, was used on the soundtracks of numerous American television series, including ER, Scrubs, The OC, The West Wing and Ugly Betty. “Hallelujah” was sung in the finale of American Idol, where the judge Simon Cowell declared it (specifically the Buckley rendition; fans of the song take distinct sides) one of his favorite songs of all time. In similar fashion, it made the finale—it’s a song made for finales—of the UK TV talent show The X Factor, where the big, gospel version by the young winner Alexandra Burke became the fastest-selling Internet download in European history.

  Burke’s version topped the UK singles chart over the Christmas of 2008, prompting protest action from outraged Jeff Buckley fans that resulted in the late singer’s “Hallelujah” taking over the No. 1 position and pushing Burke down to No. 2. In the aftershock, Leonard’s original version rose to No. 36—a trinity of “Hallelujahs” in one chart at the same time. Leonard’s version also resurfaced the following year in the movie The Watchmen, providing the background music to a sex scene between two superheroes. For most who knew the song, it brought a wry smile to the face. But one exasperated journalist called for a moratorium on the use of “Hallelujah” on film and TV soundtracks. “I kind of feel the same way,” said Leonard in a CBC TV interview. “I think it’s a good song, but too many people sing it.” He couldn’t help mentioning that there was also “a mild sense of revenge that arose in [his] heart” when he recalled that his American record label had refused to release it. “They didn’t think it was good enough.”14

  Jennifer Warnes, who had signed to Arista as a solo artist, had been talking to Clive Davis, the head of the record label, about the new album she wanted to make. On Leonard’s 1979 tour, on which Warnes and Roscoe Beck became a couple, they had the idea of making an album of her singing only Leonard Cohen songs, which Beck would produce. “I could hear it before it became a reality,” remembers Beck. “I specifically recall watching Leonard and Jennifer doing their duet on ‘Joan of Arc’ every night, and visualizing it with Jennifer singing the lead.” Davis, who had been the head of Columbia Records when Leonard was signed by John Hammond, seemed to hold much the same view of the marketability of Leonard’s songs in America as had Walter Yetnikoff, the man who succeeded him in the job. Davis turned her down. But Warnes saw it as “a record that had to be made”—not just for herself, but for Leonard. “Leonard had years of mixed reviews and I think he had lost faith.”15 Warnes, on the other hand, had enjoyed considerable commercial success with her duets with Joe Cocker (“Up Where We Belong”) and Bill Medley (“[I’ve Had] The Time of My Life”). Says Beck, “We would have given our dying breath to finish that record.” Finally, they found a small independent label that was willing to release it and started work.

  Around forty musicians appeared on Warnes’s Famous Blue Raincoat. They included David Lindley, who had played on Leonard’s first album; Sharon Robinson, who sang with Warnes on the 1979 tour; guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan; R & B singer Bobby King; and composer, arranger and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. As the recording progressed, Beck would call Leonard and update him on how it was going. He told Leonard they had recorded the Cohen-Warnes cowritten “Song of Bernadette” and asked if he might have any more new songs they could hear. “He played me his working copy of ‘First We Take Manhattan’ over the phone. I taped it and we came up with our own arrangement, a bluesier version. As soon as I heard it I knew I wanted Stevie Ray Vaughan to play on it.” Beck knew the celebrated young blues rock guitarist from Austin, where Passenger was based: “Stevie and I were friends from the age of twenty; he used to sit in with Passenger quite often and I used to sit in with his band. He was in L.A. for the Grammy Awards, so I tracked him down to play on the song.” Vaughan was performing at the Greek Theatre; Beck invited Leonard and Jennifer to go with him. “They had never seen him live. Jennifer was amazed, as was Leonard. I remember him commenting, ‘Now that’s what I’ve been trying to get my guitar players to do for years: make the guitar talk.’ ”

  Beck played Jennifer Warnes’s record for Leonard, and Leonard listened in silence. Impressed, Leonard began to take a much closer interest in the album
. He sang a duet with Warnes on “Joan of Arc.” He also gave her another of his new, unreleased songs, “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” whose title he had come up with after reading about L.A.’s AIDS crisis.

  Famous Blue Raincoat was released in 1987. It featured nine songs,* including a few that Judy Collins had previously covered (“Bird on the Wire,” “Joan of Arc,” “Famous Blue Raincoat”) and a few that Warnes—like Collins in the past—would release before Leonard had recorded his own versions. It was to some degree a tribute album, but really it was a Jennifer Warnes album whose songs all happened to have the same writer. Her impeccable vocal brought out the lyricism of Leonard’s songs. By removing the factor that some people seemed to have problems with—Leonard’s voice—they sounded smoother, more melodious, and with Beck’s polished production, more contemporary. “She transformed grappa into Chardonnay,” said the review in Saturday Night. “A perfect elixir for mid-Eighties audiences.”16

  Warnes’s album sold three quarters of a million copies in the U.S. It went gold in Canada and spawned a single, “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” that was a hit in both the adult-contemporary and the country music charts. The artwork on the inner sleeve was a drawing that Leonard had made: a hand—Leonard’s—holding out a torch to Warnes, with the caption “Jenny sings Lenny.” He was happy and grateful to pass the torch on to her. With Famous Blue Raincoat, he had finally succeeded in hiding his own voice and giving his songs entirely over to the female voice.

  Leonard was writing songs for his own new album. Once again it was a slow and painful process. Over a glass of brandy, he complained to Roshi how difficult it was and asked him what he ought to do. Roshi answered, “You look up at the moon, you open your mouth and you sing.” So Leonard sang, recording as he went along over a span of a year and a half, running up studio bills in three different countries as he bounced back and forth between his lives in Paris, Montreal and L.A., leaving a paper trail of abandoned words as he went. He was happy to hear, as he had been before, that the songs he had managed to write in the past were getting on without him. Aside from Jennifer Warnes, Nick Cave had covered “Avalanche” on his first album with the Bad Seeds. Leonard’s children were telling him that he had become something of a cult figure among younger musicians: Ian McCulloch and Suzanne Vega were singing his praises in interviews, and the British band Sisters of Mercy, having taken their name from one of his songs, had nicknamed their drum machine Doktor Avalanche. Leonard also learned that there was another musical based on his work being made in New York, called Sincerely, L. Cohen, its title taken from the closing words of “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

  It was intriguing, this resurgence of a song that Leonard had always had problems with—that he had “never been satisfied with, never really nailed the lyric, always felt there was something about the song that was unclear.”17 His mother had liked the melody though. “I remember playing the tune for her, in her kitchen, and her perking up her ears while she was doing something else and saying, ‘That’s a nice tune.’ ”18 And the song had held up and served him well, just like the old Burberry raincoat that inspired it. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had bought the coat in London, when he was a twenty-five-year-old writing his first novel and sleeping on a cot in a cold Hampstead boardinghouse. A girl Leonard had pursued during his first London winter had told him that it made him look like a spider—which might, he thought, be why she refused to go to Greece with him. “It hung more heroically when I took out the lining,” he wrote in his liner notes to Greatest Hits (1975), “and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days.” The coat was stolen from the loft where Marianne had lived when she visited New York, while he was recording his first album. Leonard said, “I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.”

  In September 1986, while in Paris visiting Dominique Issermann, Leonard recorded a new song called “Take This Waltz.” The lyrics were Leonard’s English adaptation (assisted by a Spanish-speaking Costa Rican girlfriend) of a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. It was for a compilation album, Poetas en Nueva York, that would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lorca’s death. It had been hard work—it took a hundred and fifty hours, Leonard said—but it was more than a translation, it was a poem in itself, and one that seemed to reflect Leonard as much as Lorca. For example, Leonard rendered Lorca’s macabre image of a forest of dried pigeons as “a tree where doves go to die.” After recording the song, Leonard flew to Granada to attend a gala in Lorca’s honor. Then he flew back to the U.S. to take a role in the TV detective series Miami Vice. Over the years the program had invited an eclectic list of guest stars, such as Frank Zappa and James Brown, to make cameo appearances. Leonard’s character, the French head of Interpol, was on screen for barely a minute, murmuring in a dark, French manner into a telephone, but it had the effect that Leonard desired when he took it on: it impressed his now-teenage offspring.

  Leonard’s relationship with Dominique, though, was going the way of all flesh. In 1987, back in Paris again, he wrote in a poem, titled “My Honor”:*

  My honor is in bad shape

  I’m crawling at a woman’s feet

  She doesn’t give an inch.

  I look good for fifty-two

  but fifty-two is fifty-two

  I’m not even a Zen master. . . .

  He was nothing more than

  that asshole in a blue summer suit

  who couldn’t take it any longer

  "Then I broke down,” said Leonard, “and went to a monastery. . . . I thought, I don’t have to do a record any more, I’ll be a monk.”19

  Leonard had gone to the monastery to be nowhere and to be no one. He had gone to sit in this austere place for hour upon hour with no goal. It said in the literature that if he were able to sit goal-less for long enough, all the versions of himself would arise and, having arisen, decide there was nothing to stick around for and take off, leaving only perfect peace. He had gone to be with Roshi, whom he loved, and who both cared deeply and deeply didn’t care who Leonard was. Leonard had gone to work hard, to bang nails, to fix and mend things, at least physically. Roshi knew how much Leonard liked austerity, solitariness and work. He instructed him to go and find a tennis court, and play.

  Eighteen

  The Places Where I Used to Play

  Iggy Pop has a story about Leonard Cohen. Iggy was in Los Angeles, recording an album, when one night Leonard phoned. “Leonard said, ‘Come over, I’ve got a personal ad from a girl who says she wants a lover who will combine the raw energy of Iggy Pop with the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen. I think we should reply to her as a team.’ ” Iggy said, “ ‘Leonard, I can’t, I’m married, you’re going to have to do this yourself.’ I guess he did,” says Iggy. “I don’t know if he got laid.”

  Iggy Pop was curious as to the outcome of a reply you sent a woman seeking love through a personal ad.

  “[Smiles] As I remember it, I bumped into Iggy at a session being produced by Don Was, a friend of mine, and I showed him the clipping that someone had sent me from a San Francisco newspaper. We decided to reply, and to certify its authenticity, Don took a Polaroid of Iggy and myself sitting together in my kitchen. We spoke to the young woman—at least I spoke to her—on the telephone. But there was no personal involvement.”

  Leonard surely felt an empathy with this woman who named herself “Fearless” and whose ideals, when it came to romantic partners, seemed almost as formidable as his own. If nothing else, answering the ad with Iggy was an exercise in making the impossible possible—if only for a moment, and for someone other than himself. Leonard had been living with impossibilities for some time, one of them being the idea that he might ever finish another album. For more than three years he had been writing, unwriting and rewriting songs, then, having finally deemed something ready to record, after listening to himself singing it, he would decide that it did
not sound honest and needed to be rewritten yet again. Leonard had been serious when he spoke about never wanting to make another album, and the thought of giving it up and going to a monastery was certainly a possibility. However arduous that existence might be, it had nothing on the hard labor that songwriting had become.

  Various Positions, the album he had hoped would resurrect his career and his confidence as a songwriter and help take care of his financial responsibilities, had done none of these things. It took “a great deal of will to keep your work straight,” he told Mat Snow in the Guardian, but “with all the will in the world you can’t keep your life straight. Because you’re too much of an asshole. . . . As you get older, you get very interested in your work, because that’s where you can refine your character, that’s where you can order your world. You’re stuck with the consequences of your actions, but in your work you can go back.”1 He had left behind him, he said, a “shipwreck of ten or fifteen years of broken families and hotel rooms for some kind of shining idea that my voice was important, that I had a meaning in the cosmos. . . . Well, after enough lonely nights you don’t care whether you have a meaning in the cosmos or not.”2

  But still he worked. He lived alone and he recorded alone—no musicians, no producer, just an engineer—slowly and painstakingly, at a glacial pace. Leonard was spending long periods in Montreal, so several of his new songs were recorded there, in Studio Tempo. Anjani Thomas—who by coincidence was also living in Montreal at that time; her boyfriend, Ian Terry, was the studio’s head engineer—added backing vocals to some of them. “It really was a solo affair,” said Leonard, “because I had the conception very clearly in mind, I knew exactly the way I wanted it to sound, and I was using a lot of synthesised instruments.”3 But by 1987, Leonard had reached a point where he could use an outside pair of ears. Having been impressed by his work on Famous Blue Raincoat, he called Roscoe Beck and asked him to book a studio in L.A.