Beck remembers the first time he heard the song “First We Take Manhattan,” which Leonard had given Jennifer Warnes for her album. What stood out was its “harmonic sophistication. It was no longer just folk songs on guitar. Now that Leonard was writing on keyboards, he was writing from a different perspective.” Leonard had become used to playing his new songs alone and was keen to retain as much of that spare, unembellished feel as possible on the album. “He wasn’t sure at first whether we were going to hire a band,” Beck says. “I think it was a mutual decision not to and to record them as they were, just as he was playing them on his keyboard.” Leonard had upgraded from his ninety-nine-dollar Casio to a Technics keyboard, but it was still a primitive synthesizer with no individual outputs, making it a challenge to record. The engineers, technicians, keyboard players and track performers listed in the credits far outnumber the conventional musicians. There were drum machines, synthesized strings and push-button cha-cha rhythms, as well as some of the most singular keyboard playing to have ever made it onto a major-label album, such as the proudly plinked one-finger solo on “Tower of Song.” Toward the end they brought in “a few last people to sweeten it,” says Beck, including Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel on “I Can’t Forget,” John Bilezikjian on oud on “Everybody Knows,” and Raffi Hakopian on violin on “Take This Waltz,” the song Leonard had recorded in Paris for Lorca’s fiftieth-anniversary album. Jennifer Warnes came in to sing on several tracks, including the catchy, retro-pop “dee-do dum-dum”s in “Tower of Song.”
Eight songs had been completed, but an album that was eight songs and forty minutes long looked a good deal more undersized on compact disc than it would have done on a vinyl LP. So Leonard tried for a ninth. He recorded a new version of “Anthem” with Beck, and strings and overdubs were added before Leonard once again pulled the song. They also recorded an early, very different version of “Waiting for the Miracle.” This Leonard liked. He called Beck to say how happy he was with it. Three weeks later, he called again to say that he had rewritten the lyrics and wanted to redo the vocal. In the studio, Beck discovered he had also rewritten the melody, “and it didn’t match up with the track [they’d] cut.” They kept working at the song, long into the night. “We cut several vocals until he got very tired. Finally he said, ‘I’m done, comp it’ ” (meaning, make a master vocal out of the best bits of his various vocal takes). Leonard found a place to lie down and sleep while Beck worked. “Just as I had it together, Leonard woke up, walked into the control room and said, ‘Well, let’s hear it.’ I played it for him and he said, ‘I hate it.’ He left and that was that.”
The song went through several more changes before it was finished. At one point Leonard gave it to Sharon Robinson—although they had not worked together since the 1980 tour, they had remained close friends—who came back with “a completely different version,” says Beck, “that I played guitar on. I really liked Sharon’s version, but that didn’t end up being the final version either” (which was the one that would appear on his 1992 album The Future). Another Cohen-Robinson cowrite made it onto this album. On a visit to her house, he had handed her a sheet of verses—a litany of world-weary wisdom and cynicism—and asked her if she could write a melody. She did, and it became the song “Everybody Knows.”
What struck Beck most strongly when working with Leonard on the album was the change in his voice. “I thought, ‘Wow, Leonard has found a whole new place to sing from.’ The baritone element in his voice was always there—on the song ‘Avalanche,’ for instance, he’s singing deep in his chest—but here he was really making use of it and his singing voice was becoming more narrative.” His delivery was laconic, almost recitative, like an old French chansonnier who had mistakenly stumbled into a disco. It was urbane and unhurried; as one UK critic would put it, Leonard lingered on every word “like a kerb crawler.”4 His voice was as deep and dry, sly and beguiling, as his songs. His new album had everything. It was polished and mannered but very human, it was brutally honest but very accessible and its songs covered all the angles: sex, sophistication, love, longing and humor—particularly humor.
I was born like this
I had no choice
I was born with the gift
of a golden voice
“Tower of Song,” I’M YOUR MAN
The humor had always been there, but many had failed to see it—it was dark and ironic and generally aimed at himself. But the gags were never as overt as on this album.
I’m Your Man was released in February 1988 in the UK and Europe and two months later in the U.S. and Canada. The title track presents the prophet as lounge lizard, falling to his knees, howling at the sky, trying to figure out what it is that women want and ready to give it to them in whatever form they might require. While “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” a sing-along about love, sex and God, was inspired by reports of the AIDS crisis, it was imbued with Leonard’s own take on love: that it is a lethal wound that a man can no more avoid than Jesus could the Cross. “I Can’t Forget,” which started life as a song about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, has Leonard moving on once again but unable now to remember his motive, having spent so long living in the myth of himself. “Everybody Knows” is an infectious paean to pessimism. “First We Take Manhattan” is very likely the only Eurodisco song to reference the war between the sexes and the Holocaust. “Tower of Song” is about the hard, solitary, captive life of a writer (going so far as to evoke a concentration camp in the line “They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track”) but substitutes self-mockery for the usual self-indulgence of this type of song: he was still “crazy for love” but now he ached “in the places where [he] used to play” and in spite of all his hard work, none of it was of any significance to women, to God or even to pop-music posterity; his writing room was still a hundred floors below Hank Williams.”
The photo on the front sleeve shows Leonard dressed in a smart pin-striped suit, wearing big French-film-star sunglasses, his hair slicked back, his face as unsmiling and impenetrable as that of a Mafia don. In his hand, where a gun might be, or a microphone, is a half-eaten banana. It was shot at the former Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Wilmington, California, a gigantic windowed room with a vast steel-girdered indoor parking lot that is often used as a movie location. Jennifer Warnes was there shooting the video for her version of “First We Take Manhattan,” in which Leonard had agreed to appear. Sharon Weisz, the publicist for Warnes’s record label, was on the set, shooting stills, when the steel doors of the truck-sized elevator opened and Leonard stepped out with the banana. “I pivoted and took one picture of him,” says Weisz, “and forgot about it. When I got back the proof sheet and saw it, I thought it was really funny and had a print made and sent it to him. A few weeks later he called and said, ‘What would you think if I put it on the cover of my album?’ I didn’t even know he was making an album. I asked him what he was calling it, and he said I’m Your Man, and I started laughing uncontrollably.” Although the pose was a lucky accident, Leonard could not fail to recognize how perfectly it summed up the heroics and absurdity that went into the album’s creation.
I’m Your Man rebranded Leonard, not least among younger fans, from dark, tortured poet to officially cool. Although it sounded different from Leonard’s early albums, it had that feeling of instant familiarity, rightness and durability that makes for a classic. It was preceded in January 1988 by a single, “First We Take Manhattan”—one of the two songs on the album already familiar to many listeners thanks to the success of Jennifer Warnes’s album. Famous Blue Raincoat had definitely helped pave the way for Leonard’s eighth album (in America in particular) and I’m Your Man sped along it, propelled by its more upbeat songs and contemporary sound. The album was a success—Leonard’s biggest since the early seventies and biggest in America since his debut. It made No. 1 in several European countries, went platinum in Norway, gold in Canada and silver in the UK, where it
sold three hundred thousand copies before it was released in the U.S. It even sold well in America. Leonard waggishly attributed this to the payola he sent the marketing department of Columbia in New York.
It was a scheme he hatched up with Sharon Weisz, whom he had asked to do publicity for the album. “He had kind of an odd relationship with the record label, since they had refused to put out his previous record, Various Positions, and he was very cynical about it,” says Weisz. “So I was trying to figure out how he was going to work with these people and how receptive they were going to be to a new record by him.” They did not appear overenthused, judging by the poor turnout of people from Columbia Records at a party in his honor in New York, where the international division presented him with a Crystal Globe award for sales of more than five million albums outside the U.S. “From that point on, it sort of became the two of us against the world,” says Weisz. She came up with a list of names of the various Columbia promotion reps across the U.S., and Leonard sent each of them a hand-signed letter.
“Good morning,” Leonard typed on a plain, gray sheet of paper, dated April 1, 1988. “I don’t quite know how this is done so please bear with me. I have a new record, I’M YOUR MAN, coming out next week. It is already a hit in Europe and I’m on my way there now for a major concert tour. I know I can count on your support for this new record in the U.S., and if you can make a couple of phone calls on my behalf, I would really appreciate it. I’ve enclosed a couple of bucks to cover the calls. Thank you in advance for your help,” the letter concluded. “Regards, Leonard Cohen. PS. There’s more where this came from.” (“We went back and forth on whether the dollar bills should be brand-new or really old,” Weisz remembers, “and we settled for the kind that looked really mangy.”)
I’m Your Man was lauded by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. John Rockwell in the New York Times called it “a masterpiece”; Mark Cooper wrote in UK rock magazine Q that it was Leonard’s best album since the midseventies. Leonard had perfected “the art of being Leonard Cohen . . . the usual gorgeous melodies and an ageing poet taking himself very seriously, until he twinkles.”5 “All the major critics of the era reviewed it,” says Weisz, “and the reviews were extraordinary.” Those who seemed to think that Leonard had gone away hailed it as a comeback.
On February 7 Leonard left for Europe on a promotional tour to do interviews. There was great anticipation for the concert tour, which was due to begin in April. Leonard went back to Los Angeles to prepare for it, but there was a serious problem. His manager was dying. Marty Machat was gravely ill with lung cancer, and although it was clear to almost everyone else that his condition was terminal, Machat was convinced he was going to pull through. In early March, with only weeks to go before the tour began, Leonard was getting anxious. A large sum of money had been paid into Machat & Machat’s attorney account as a tour advance, and Leonard needed access to it. He called Marty. Avril, Marty’s lover, picked up the phone.
Says Steven Machat, “Dad was very quiet, very shy, Leonard was very quiet, very dark, and in the middle of their relationship was Avril.” Machat dismisses his father’s romantic partner as “a woman who Dad gave money to, to do Leonard’s PR” and someone whom he “kept around because he thought Leonard Cohen wanted her around.” Steven Machat did not like Leonard either. “I never liked him from the moment go; he never looks you in the eyes, ever. He plays victim.” But Marty Machat, he says, loved Leonard and would have done more for him than for anyone. Since this presumably included his son, it might not have helped relations between Steven and Leonard. “My dad would get on the phone with Leonard. My dad didn’t give a fuck about anyone, he wanted the money, but Leonard he would sit there with, he’d listen to Leonard. If Leonard got sick, my dad would be upset—‘Oh, Leonard’s got a cold.’ It was interesting. When Leonard went to Israel making believe he was going to fight in the war, all of a sudden my dad rediscovered that he was of Jewish blood.”
Steven knew that his father did not have long to live. In his mind he saw vultures circling and among them he included Leonard. But Leonard, on the eve of a major tour for what was potentially the most commercial album of his career, was doing his best to take care of business. Steven Machat says that Leonard turned to him for help and that, for his father’s sake, he agreed. Perhaps he did, although the evidence seems to indicate that Leonard turned to lawyers for advice and to women for help. With Marty’s blessing, Avril went with Leonard to the bank to withdraw the money he needed. Kelley Lynch, Marty’s secretary and assistant, stepped up and offered to take care of administrative matters for the tour. When Marty Machat died on March 19, 1988, aged sixty-seven, Lynch took various files on Leonard from the offices of Machat & Machat that the lawyers said could be taken legally, including documents relating to the publishing company that Marty Machat had set up for Leonard. Lynch took the files to L.A., where she set up shop and began making herself as indispensable to Leonard as Marty had once been. At one point Leonard and Kelley became lovers. Eventually she became his manager.
Meanwhile, Roscoe Beck had been putting together Leonard’s touring band. Leonard had asked him to come along as his musical director, but Beck was scheduled to produce albums by Eric Johnson and Ute Lemper. So Leonard went on the road with a band made up of Steve Meador and John Bilezikjian, both of whom had played on Leonard’s 1979–80 tour; Steve Zirkel (bass); Bob Metzger (guitar and pedal steel); Bob Furgo; Tom McMorran (both keyboards); and two new backing singers, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla.
They were quite a pair—Julie a striking, statuesque blonde who, for half of the eighties, had sung with her then husband Chris D. in an edgy L.A. punk-roots band called the Divine Horsemen, and Perla a petite, sparkling brunette of South American ancestry, with her own band and a background in jazz and rock. Both were stylish and mischievous, and accomplished singers who had sung together in the past. Christensen was the first of the two to be hired. Beck had known her from Austin, where she sang jazz and occasionally played gigs with Passenger. Christensen can remember seeing Passenger when they returned from Leonard’s 1979–80 tour and noticing how “they all came back changed; everyone had some kind of aura around them of having become citizens of the world.” So there was no hesitation when Beck invited her to audition for Leonard’s 1988 tour. Henry Lewy, overseeing the rehearsals with Beck, was impressed with not just her singing but her knowledge of Leonard’s songs; she had sung them at the piano with her mother since she was a young girl. “I didn’t have to audition for Leonard,” says Christensen, “but he wanted to meet me, because being on the road is like this marriage that’s going on.” Over lunch, Leonard told her, “This is going to be a very difficult tour; we’ll be playing four or five nights a week in different cities.” Christensen laughed and told him, “ ‘Leonard, I had just got done doing CBGB’s and the Mab and these places where I had to pee by the side of the road and change in awful restrooms.’ I was like, ‘Come on, let’s roll up our sleeves and go.’ ” Leonard was charmed.
When Beck called Perla to audition, having not grown up playing Leonard Cohen songs, she went straight to the record store and bought as many cassettes of his as she could find. This being America, there were not many. But Roscoe told her not to prepare anything, “because,” she says, “99 percent of this was Leonard’s feelings about me as a person. Which made me nervous. I remember walking in, dressed in white from head to toe, and Leonard was there completely in black. We just looked at each other and laughed and that was it.” Again, Leonard was charmed. “But the true magic happened when Julie and I started singing. We read each other’s minds musically; we’d never say which part we’d take, our voices were constantly mixing. Together we were a real force as a backup singing pair, and it showed onstage.” The day they left for Europe, Perla’s mother and father came to the airport to see her off. “It was my first time out of the country. My dad was really an old-fashioned kind of guy, very ill, but an elegant man, who dressed in a suit�
��he was like Leonard in that way—and it was a big deal to him that I was leaving for Europe. He asked Leonard to take care of me and they shook hands and Leonard promised him he would.”
The tour—fifty-nine concerts in three months—began on April 5, 1988, in Germany. “There was a good feeling among all the people on that tour,” Julie says. “Leonard just had this way of being really like the camp counselor. We would do this thing on that tour where, if we were jet-lagged and wide-awake in the middle of the night, we would hang a hanger on the door to indicate that we were awake and it was okay to come in, and there were several times when I would go to Leonard’s room and just have snacks and chat.” Perla remembers Leonard seeming “very happy, and very playful. A lot of people don’t know that side of him, but Leonard was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, so hilarious at times you just want to crack up.” When she and Julie came up with a spontaneous vaudeville routine onstage, Leonard happily played along with them. During the Spanish leg of the tour, Leonard had Perla translate for the audience what he said between songs, which, depending on his mood and his red wine intake, could be long, complex and mortifying—and terrifying for a woman who had been raised speaking English. “Every night we were on the edge of our seats to see where he was going to go,” Perla says. “It was so much fun, and as risky as live theater sometimes.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 37