Leonard stayed and joined Glass in a public discussion of the work. When he was asked whether he considered what Glass had done to be classical or musical theater, Leonard’s answer, “Glassical,” was wry but accurate. Although originally labeled minimalist for their haunting, repetitive rhythms and motifs, Glass’s musical compositions were also earthy and erotic and drew on any number of different musical styles, all of them evident in this work. The Toronto Star’s reviewer’s description was “a confusing work of considerable importance.”2
Following three successful nights in Toronto, the show left on a small tour, and in December 2007 the album Book of Longing: A Song Cycle Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen was released, making it to No. 17 on the U.S. classical music charts. Over the next two years, the production would be staged in a number of U.S. and European cities and at a festival in New Zealand. In 2009 it returned to America for a five-night stand in Claremont, the university town at the bottom of Mount Baldy. The theater in which it was staged faced the mountain. A college building nearby hosted an exhibition of Leonard’s art. Both events had been arranged by Robert Faggen, a writer and professor of literature at Claremont Graduate University who had a cabin on Mount Baldy, a short walk from the monastery. He and Leonard had become good friends since their first encounter in Wolfe’s Market—the store at the bottom of Mount Baldy where Leonard would go to buy treats for Roshi. On the occasion of their meeting, Leonard was standing in the deli aisle, dressed in his monk’s robes, meditating on the merits of buying some potato salad.
Faggen took Glass, who flew out for the Claremont shows, to the monastery to meet Roshi. Glass, like Leonard a Jew of Lithuanian-Russian descent, also shared his deep involvement with Buddhism; he had himself been on long retreats (where, in his case, he was given special dispensation to take his piano) and had been a contributing editor to the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. At Mount Baldy Zen Center, Glass sat for a teisho with Roshi. Although the old teacher declined to come down from the mountain to go to the concert, the audience included a number of monks.
There were now three productions featuring Leonard’s work without Leonard making the rounds: Book of Longing: A Song Cycle, Came So Far for Beauty, and Leonard Cohen: Drawn to Words. It was an invisible kind of visibility that suited Leonard just fine. “If you hang in there long enough, you begin to be surrounded by a certain gentleness and invisibility,” he once told an interviewer. “This invisibility is promising, because it will probably become deeper and deeper. And with invisibility—and I am not talking about the opposite of celebrity, I mean something like The Shadow, who can move from one room to another unobserved—comes a beautiful calm.”3
With age had come a greater degree of serenity than Leonard had ever felt in his adult life. With age too had come homages and awards without end. He had to stop counting how many tribute albums there were—more than fifty by this point, from twenty different countries. A couple had caught his eye. One, because it was recorded by his first and most stalwart champion, was Democracy: Judy Collins Sings Leonard Cohen—from 2004, the year Leonard turned seventy—on which Collins had gathered all her interpretations of his songs under one roof. Another that had delighted Leonard was Top Tunes Artist Vol. 19 TT–110, an instrumental album of his songs (packaged with an album of Enya songs) made specifically for karaoke bars. “At last,” Leonard said, “somewhere to go in the evening,”4 though in reality he was still happiest at home, “an old man in a suit . . . delicately talking about his work to somebody.”5 Then Sony decided to reissue Blue Alert.
On its original release the previous year, Anjani’s album had reached No. 18 in the U.S. jazz charts but had had little impact anywhere else. For the new edition the record label added a DVD of videos and a documentary by Lian Lunson on the making of the album. The label also put together a short tour. In March 2007, shortly before Roshi’s one hundredth birthday, Leonard flew with Anjani to Europe. The first three shows, in London, Oslo and Warsaw, were invitation-only events, media mostly, and Leonard Cohen fans who had won tickets through radio and website contests. Journalists who wanted to interview Leonard—and there were many—were told that they would have to talk to him and Anjani as a pair. As far as Leonard was concerned, the tour and the album were Anjani’s, not his.
To a UK newspaper, Leonard described his work with Anjani as more than mere collaboration, “an expression of some kind of deep mutuality, some kind of marriage of purpose.”6 Picking up on the “marriage” aspect, the host of a Norwegian television talk show asked Leonard to talk about their “love story.” Leonard’s answer—that he “found it’s best not to name a relationship”—demonstrated that he had lost none of his skills at deflection. However, Anjani did appear to be wearing an engagement ring. In an interview with the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun Leonard elaborated, “The woman is saying, ‘What is our relationship? Are we engaged?’ . . . and my disposition is, ‘Do we really have to have this discussion, because it’s not as good as our relationship?’ But as you get older, you want to accommodate, and say, ‘Yeah, we’re living together. This is for real. I’m not looking for anyone else. You’re the woman in my life.’ Whatever terms that takes: a ring, an arrangement, a commitment, or from one’s behavior, by the way you act.”7
During the Blue Alert tour Leonard had restricted his role to making the introduction, then taking a seat in the audience to watch the show. But one night, partway through a concert in a nightclub in London, Anjani invited Leonard to come up and sing with her, an invitation he accepted, shyly. His appearance was greeted by rapturous applause. When the tour arrived in the U.S., Leonard would show up on occasion and duet with Anjani on the song “Whither Thou Goest.” As word of this spread, the small venues where Anjani had been booked to play started to attract large crowds—people who were hoping to see Leonard. The question was, did Leonard want to see them?
Leonard had never much enjoyed touring, however good the concerts might have been. He toured simply because if you were in the music business that was what you did. You made an album and when it was done you went on the road to check in with your fan base and sell it. This ritual was of particular importance to an artist like Leonard, whose records were not all over the radio. It had been almost fifteen years since Leonard had last toured, with The Future, and it had been such a disagreeable experience that it was one factor in Leonard’s decision to leave the music business and go live in the monastery. Since his return to the music business, none of his albums had sold a fraction as well as The Future, so there seemed even less point in going out on tour.
But the music business had changed drastically during Leonard’s absence. As the Internet grew and people increasingly wanted music for free, or at best to buy it online one song at a time, even big-name, established artists were no longer selling albums in the large numbers they had before. Musicians were starting to look for new ways to sell their music and themselves, coming up with all manner of solutions. Joni Mitchell, for example, had signed a deal with the coffee shop chain Starbucks, which played her CD as background music and sold it alongside lattes and croissants. Joni had been on Leonard’s mind lately; Herbie Hancock had asked him to appear on a tribute album, River: The Joni Letters (2007); Leonard recited “The Jungle Line.”
Major artists were increasingly making their money from touring, charging considerably higher ticket prices than under the old system, when concerts existed to promote album sales. Although Leonard refused to consider himself a major artist, he also knew that the tributes, the collaborations, the signed limited editions of his artwork and even the lawsuits had done little to refill his empty retirement account. Of all the options available to him for making a living, the only one that appeared even remotely feasible was going back on the road. But Leonard was almost seventy-three years old, and it had been so long since he had last toured, it seemed to him, that to expect that he would still have an audience would be like making a sandcastle and going
back a decade and a half later and expecting it to be there waiting for him.
Still, he thought, it was not going to be any easier when he was seventy-five or eighty. And due to the combined publicity from the film and the tribute concerts, Anjani’s album, Glass’s production and the media interest in his financial problems, Leonard was as much in the public consciousness as he was likely to ever be again. Tentatively and ambivalently—very ambivalently—Leonard began to consider the idea of a tour. Since he had no manager to look into setting one up, having parted company with Sam Feldman some time ago, Leonard asked Robert Kory if he would do it.
As it happened, Leonard was not the only one considering the possibility. Steven Machat had heard from Leonard’s old European promoter, asking if he would help him talk Leonard into touring. Machat knew Leonard had financial problems; he had first read about the business with Kelley Lynch in the New York Times, and though he was not entirely sympathetic—he had not forgotten that Lynch, who had once been his father Marty Machat’s assistant, had, as he saw it, purloined Leonard’s files, with Leonard’s support, as his father lay dying—he was curious. He put in a call to Leonard, as he had promised the promoter he would. Leonard invited him to his house for lunch. Standing at the stove in his small kitchen, cooking, Leonard conceded to his guest that he might indeed have to tour, since he had no money. “I said to Leonard, man to man, why would any human being allow someone else to have the access to his fortune for five years? But Leonard is an extremely fearful man,” Machat says. “Kelley Lynch played that to the hilt.”
If Leonard was going to tour, it certainly would make sense to start in Europe, where he had his most loyal following. Robert Kory had thought as much and had already put in a call to AEG Live, a London-based promoter. He asked what they knew about Leonard Cohen and the response was “Not much, but there’s a man in the company who is a big fan.” That man was Rob Hallett. Hallett had an impressive record in the business. In the eighties he had been Duran Duran’s worldwide promoter, and he had been behind Prince’s recent sold-out twenty-one-night stand at the twenty-three-thousand-capacity O2 Arena in London. Kory called Hallett, who flew to L.A. to meet with him and Leonard and make his pitch. “I’ve got every album you’ve ever made,” Hallett told Leonard. “I’ve read every novel, every poem, I bore all my friends regularly with quotations from your songs, and I’ve lived my life by a couplet from a poem that you wrote in 1958, ‘He refused to be held like a drunk / under the cold tap of fact.’ ”
Leonard listened soberly. The more he heard, the more he saw the potential for humiliation. “He wasn’t sure he could do it,” says Hallett, “and he wasn’t sure if anyone cared. I said, ‘I’m a cynical old bastard and I don’t want to see anything, but I want to see Leonard Cohen, so there must be others.’ I was convinced there were hundreds of thousands of people out there who wanted to see him. His biggest concern was that he didn’t want to embarrass himself. But also, he didn’t have any money left. So I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, do some rehearsals, do as long as you want, audition as long as you want, and I’ll pick up the tab and pay for everything. If at the end of it you say, “Thanks, but this isn’t working for me, I can’t go out there and perform,” I’ll go, “Well, we tried,” and you won’t owe me anything.’ ” It was an offer Leonard couldn’t refuse. There were no strings and it had an escape clause, two of his favorite things. “That sounds like a reasonable deal,” Leonard said. They shook hands on it. Kory began putting together a touring plan, while Hallett set about convincing the industry that Leonard Cohen concerts would be a going concern.
When Sharon Robinson opened her door one day soon after, she saw Leonard on her doorstep with a worried look on his face. “Darling,” he said, “I think I’m going to have to go on tour again.” He didn’t want to do it, he said, but all the signs were pointing that way. He did not ask Sharon to come on the road with him. Nor did he ask Anjani. He thought—because the tour for The Future had soured him on working with old friends, perhaps, or because he did not want to let old friends down or let them see him fail—that he should take all new people with him, musicians he’d never worked with before. The one exception was Roscoe Beck, whom he asked to be his musical director.
“Leonard was very apprehensive about the entire enterprise,” Beck remembers. “He didn’t even want to talk on the phone about it. He flew down to Austin to talk to me in person. He said, ‘I’m thinking about touring again. Would you help me put the band together and would you go?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course, I had already promised myself if I ever heard from you again I would go.’ ” (Beck had put together Leonard’s I’m Your Man touring band but had been unable to join himself.) “Leonard said, ‘Look, I don’t know if I’m really going to do this. I hope you won’t hold it against me if I decide to back out.’ He really wasn’t sure he could go through with it. He said, ‘I’m 92.7 percent sure’—the numbers would change all the time—‘I’m 82 percent sure, I’m 93 percent sure.’ He said, ‘I have the option of backing out at any time if I don’t like the way it’s developing, and if I do go I’m only committed to do six weeks. But if the whole thing doesn’t happen would you forgive me?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ ”
Leonard had begun to feel less concerned about the actual touring—as long as his vocal cords didn’t give out, he felt confident he could keep up the pace—than about the band. It had been so long since he’d played with one, he had no idea what kind of band he wanted. He was used to working at home with Anjani and Sharon, but an old man with two women and two synthesizers would not really cut it onstage. In January 2008, Beck started making calls and holding auditions. The first person Beck hired was actually someone Leonard knew well—Bob Metzger, Leanne Ungar’s husband, who had played on the I’m Your Man tour and on the album Ten New Songs—though the next two recruits were new to Leonard, Neil Larsen, a keyboard player whose résumé ranged from Kenny Loggins to Miles Davis, and Javier Mas, a Spanish bandurria, laud and twelve-string-guitar player. Mas had been the musical director of a Leonard Cohen tribute concert in Barcelona, in which Leonard’s son, Adam; Jackson Browne; and Anjani had performed. Leonard had seen a DVD of the concert and Mas had impressed him.
Beck was also trying to work out exactly what kind of show Leonard had in mind. Over the years, as Leonard’s voice became increasingly deeper and his musical approach more refined, the bands and the volume level had changed accordingly. It appeared to Beck that this band he was putting together was “more like a chamber group.” Six weeks into rehearsals they still had no drummer. Eventually they hired Mexican-born Rafael Gayol, another newcomer to Leonard; Beck had worked with Gayol in Austin. At one point Leonard decided he wanted a violin player, and a female violinist joined the band. Then Leonard realized he did not need a violin, and she was let go, and once again Leonard began to doubt himself—to regret, as he put it, “that I had started the whole process.”8 Instead, Beck brought in a multi-instrumentalist, Dino Soldo, to play saxophone, woodwind and keyboards.
All that remained to find were the backing singers. Beck asked Jennifer Warnes, but she declined. Anjani had dropped by for some of the early rehearsals, but no mention was made of her joining the tour. Says Beck, “I just wasn’t sure what was going to happen in that regard because of the personal relationship between Anjani and Leonard.” Anjani herself attributes it to “a difference of opinion” in their approach to the concerts. “I had in mind a revolutionary approach to Leonard’s music; I wanted to showcase it in ways that hadn’t been done before, with arrangements that were innovative and unexpected. The other approach was to re-create the past tours. In the end he went with what he felt comfortable with, and I understand the decision.” Beck called Sharon Robinson, who expressed interest. But Leonard wanted two backing singers, and the search went on.
It was March 2008; the tour, if there was going to be one, was just two months away. Leonard meanwhile was in New York, being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame—the American hall of fame, the big one, the greatest honor the once-dismissive U.S. music industry could bestow on him. Lou Reed was there to introduce Leonard and present his award. In an odd little ceremony-within-a-ceremony Reed, dressed in a black leather suit and fuchsia shirt and carrying a stack of typewritten notes and a copy of Book of Longing, gave a reading instead of an introduction. Now and then he paused to interject his own comments like an enthusiastic college professor: “He just gets better. . . . We’re so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is.”9
Leonard, silver haired and dignified in his tuxedo and black bow tie, came out onstage, bowed deeply to Reed and thanked him for reminding him that he had written a few decent lines. This was “such an unlikely event,” Leonard said, and it was not just modesty; he meant it. It brought to mind, he said, “the prophetic statement by Jon Landau in the early 1970s: ‘I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll, and it is not Leonard Cohen.’ ”10 Leonard was making a joke; what Landau, the head of the Hall of Fame’s nominating committee, had actually said back in the days when he was a journalist for Rolling Stone was that he had seen the future of rock ’n’ roll, and it was Bruce Springsteen. But Rolling Stone magazine had certainly dismissed Leonard’s early albums, describing Songs from a Room as “depressed and depressing”11 and Songs of Love and Hate as “unlikely to make you want to shake your little body.”12 As Lou Reed had, Leonard gave a recital in place of a speech—a solemn reading of the first five verses of “Tower of Song.” He declined to follow the Hall of Fame tradition of performing with the other inductees; he was not ready to perform yet. But he was getting there. Leonard left the stage to Damien Rice to sing “Hallelujah,” a song that at that time was No. 1 on the iTunes chart—the late Jeff Buckley’s version. That it had been propelled back into the national consciousness had nothing to do with Leonard’s finally taking his official place among the popular music pantheon, but through the sheer number of online discussions that followed Jason Castro’s performance of “Hallelujah” on American Idol.
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 49