The 2010 tour began in Croatia on July 25, followed by thirty-four European and Eastern European concerts and one in Russia. The eight-month break appeared to have no ill effect on the performances. The shows were long, the band a well-oiled machine, and Leonard, despite his back injury, still skipped on and off, fell to his knees and held his hat over his heart while his musicians soloed or sang or cartwheeled. His voice sounded softer and rougher at the edges now, a little cracked, but no matter, that was how the light got in.
A few of the critics, particularly those who had seen multiple shows, made mention of how it had become a kind of smooth-jazz traveling theater, with the same production, the same choreography, night after night. In the beginning, this kind of military precision and discipline, leaving nothing to chance, knowing what was going to happen and when, was the only way that someone so anxious about performing was going to be able to do it after so long away. “You never know what’s going to happen when you step on the stage, whether you’re going to be the person you want to be, or if the audience is going to be hospitable,” as Leonard told Jian Ghomeshi, who interviewed him for CBC. “Even when you’ve brought the show to a certain degree of excellence,” he said, “there are so many unknowns and so many mysteries.”14 But as his anxiety subsided somewhat over time, there were subtle changes to the blueprint, with Leonard frequently adding or replacing a song, sometimes during the show. For the 2010 tour they devised a communication system, whereby Leonard would whisper a song title to Beck, and by pressing a foot pedal, Beck would convey it quietly to the rest of the band and crew. Among the songs added to the set list was “Avalanche,” one of the dark songs Leonard had eschewed in the earlier shows, and another new song, “Born in Chains,” which Leonard recited, then sang, in an almost Tom Waits growl:
I was taken out of Egypt
I was bound to a burden
but the burden it was raised
Oh Lord I can no longer keep this secret
Blessed is the Name
the Name be praised.
September 2010 saw the release of a second live CD/DVD from the tour, the first having given Leonard a top 10 hit in twelve countries. Songs from the Road, like its predecessor, was produced by Ed Sanders, who had been recording the entire tour from the first concert in 2008. The gatefold sleeve opens up onto photos of Leonard with his hand wrapped variously around a glass of whiskey, a wineglass and a microphone. In another he stands silhouetted in a doorway, the bright sky behind him. Aside from the fedora, one imagines this must have been how Leonard had first appeared to Marianne on Hydra when he asked her to join him. Leonard no longer went to Hydra. He still had his little white house on the hill, but his son and daughter used it mostly. Marianne, ever loyal, had come to the show in Oslo, though she did not go backstage. “Because I know he is working, I try not to impose,” she says, “but I believe he somehow knows I am there.” At other stations on the way there were other muses—Joni, Dominique, Rebecca.
This new live release, as it had the year before, coincided with the appearance of something else from the past: a DVD of Bird on a Wire, Tony Palmer’s long-lost documentary of Leonard’s 1972 European tour, which Leonard had rejected as too confrontational and had had remade. Steven Machat had somehow managed to get hold of two hundred reels of film footage that Palmer had long thought lost. Using the soundtrack as a guide, Palmer painstakingly pieced his original movie back together. Even if the film was not to Leonard’s taste, it is a remarkable account of the intense, often improvised, sometimes chaotic concerts in Europe and Israel, a tour beset by equipment problems and riots, journalists wanting to interview him, women wanting sex with him and Leonard trying desperately to deal with fame, trying to retain the purity of his vision as a poet and stay true to himself and his songs. “Although I didn’t think this at the time,” says Henry Zemel, the friend Leonard had hired to help reedit the film, “you could see his life to a large extent as an effort to recapture a purity.”
The 2010 tour was heading toward the finish line. In its closing weeks there were concerts as far apart as Slovakia, New Zealand and Canada, before Leonard worked his way back down the west coast of America toward home. The last two dates of the tour, December 10 and 11, were to be held in, of all places, a Las Vegas casino. The soaring, fake Corinthian-capitaled billboard outside Caesars Palace displayed an image of a small, white-haired Leonard, clutching his fedora, beneath a large gold sign reading JERRY SEINFELD.
There was a rodeo in town when Leonard arrived and, farther along the Strip, the American Country Music Awards. Sin City was teeming with Stetsons and men as big as beef cattle. There was a photo of a country singer on the backstage pass for Leonard’s show too—Hank Williams, part of a collage Leonard had made of his heroes, who included Ray Charles and Edith Piaf; the poets Lorca, Yeats and Irving Layton; Leonard’s parents; Saint Kateri Tekakwitha; Ramesh; and Roshi. Standing on the stage of the Colosseum theater, Leonard looked around him. “So strange a place, so unmagical, and with such great effort to achieve the unmagical,” he told the audience with a lopsided smile, “you’ve really got to love.” He looked old and frail, thinner than three years ago when the tour began, and he was thin enough then. He also looked unstoppable. “We seem to have come to the end of a chapter,” he said. When it began, he “was seventy-three, just a kid with a crazy dream.” As he reworked his old joke, there was emotion in his voice. He assured the audience that he and the band would give them “everything we’ve got.” At the end of the first half of the four-hour set, a woman ran onstage while Leonard was on his knees and held on to him like a crucifix. During the intermission, a group of fans gathered at the front and sang a song Leonard was filmed singing in Bird on a Wire, “Passing Thru.” When Leonard came back out onstage, he joined in the singing.
The band struck up “Tower of Song.” Leonard stood to one side, watching as the women sang the “da doo dum dum”s. He refused to come in, making them sing their part over and over again, with a big smile on his face like a child, or like a voyeur, or somebody who really had just seen the light. “Listening to you,” he said, “all the unimaginable mysteries are unraveled. I understand it now; it is a matter of your generosity. It has taken three years, I have found the answer to the riddle. It was so simple I should have known from the beginning. Here it is, the answer: da doo dum dum dum, da doo dum dum.” He had spent a lifetime trying to get to the bottom of the big, timeless subjects, going back over them again and again, digging deeper, trying to come up with some answer, or at least some beauty, or at the very least a gag. It had been hard work. Leonard had no problem with hard work.
These past three years on the road, with their three-hour shows and two-hour sound checks, sometimes barely a day off in between, had been more than rigorous, but much as Leonard had said of Roshi’s monastery, “once you get the hang of it, you go into ninth gear and kind of float through it all.” Leonard was floating. The parameters of this life, like his life on the mountain, had paradoxically given him a kind of freedom. The falling to his knees and the bowing—to the musicians who did him the honor of delivering his words, and to the audience who did him the honor of accepting them—satisfied a sense of rite that was rooted deep in him. More than one reviewer had likened Leonard’s concerts, the quiet, the jubilation, the sense of grace, the reverence for the beauty of the word, to religious gatherings. One or two went so far as to compare them to papal visits, but most alluded to some nondenominational yet authentically pure spiritual fellowship of the faithful. Leonard could joke onstage—and he did, frequently, as he settled into these tours—but at the same time he was intensely serious about his work. Always had been. It was evident when he was a nine-year-old boy, burying the first words he had written, to his dead father—words never revealed—in a secret ceremony. It was there too when he moved to the U.S. and took his first steps into pop music, and dissolved all boundaries between word and song, and between the song and the truth,
and the truth and himself, his heart and its aching.
All the heavy labor, the crawling across carpets, the highs, the depths to which he had plummeted and all the women and deities, loving and wrathful, he had examined and worshipped, loved and abandoned, but never really lost, had been in the service of this. And here he was, seventy-six years old, still shipshape, still sharp at the edges, a workingman, ladies’ man, wise old monk, showman and trouper, once again offering up himself and his songs:
“Here I stand, I’m your man.”
Twenty-five
A Manual for Living with Defeat
So the stage was dismantled one last time, the rabbit was put back in the hat, the equipment was loaded on the truck and everyone, Leonard included, was sent home. There were tears and emotional farewells; it had been quite a ride. As to the financial transgressions that had forced Leonard back on the road, there is an interesting footnote, and one that might indicate that the laws of karma might be more efficient than the courts of law.
In 2008, as the tour was about to begin, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought its own case against Neal Greenberg, the financier whom Kelley Lynch engaged to manage Leonard’s investment accounts, charging him with fraud and breach of fiduciary duty related to more than a hundred clients. Says Robert Kory, “According to the reports, his clients apparently lost a great deal of their money, tens of millions. The irony is that if Kelley had not taken the money, [leading to the] discovery earlier, which then prompted Leonard to reexamine what he was doing in his life and to go on tour, Leonard might well have lost all that money anyway, because it was invested with Neal Greenberg. And he would have lost it at a time when [because of the market crash] it would have been impossible for me to persuade promoters to finance Leonard’s tour.”
The tour not only restored Leonard’s lost funds, it improved on them considerably. But it also brought Leonard something more important: vindication as an artist. Even in parts of the world where he had spent almost his entire career undervalued, he had been playing to packed crowds in enormous venues, received universally with acclaim and love. If this were a Bible and not a biography, Kelley would have the Judas role, since it was her betrayal that set in motion the course of events that led to this remarkable resurrection. Lynch, after losing her house in Mandeville Canyon, continued to move around America, blogging, e-mailing and leaving offensive and threatening messages on answering machines as she went.* Greenberg, prohibited from working in investment as a result of the Securities and Exchange Commission case, moved to Leonard’s hometown, Montreal, where he was last reported working as a Buddhist teacher.
Back in his Los Angeles duplex, Leonard hung up his stage suit and put on a pin-striped suit, the old-fashioned kind with wide lapels that you find in thrift shops, as Leonard did. Along with the white-stubbled five o’clock shadow and the rakish tilt of the fedora he wore indoors, he looked less like a showman with connections than a private detective, retired, but should his services be required, still ready for the game. At home, Leonard was dressed for work. As soon as the tour ended, he picked up where he had left off on the album begun in 2007 and put on hold by the ever-expanding tour. Eager to finish it, he could not blame the urgency on his finances this time, so he rationalized it as being in “the homeward stretch”1 and the sense that time was running out. From a seventy-six-year-old this sounds plausible, although Leonard had said much the same thing when he was fifty-six.2 In truth, Leonard was in excellent shape—better shape, in many ways, than he had been twenty years earlier. Besides the food-poisoning incident and the exercise injury, he had breezed through the previous three years and the three-hour shows. More than anything, it appeared that he was so keen to complete this new album because he wanted an excuse to tour again.
After his initial reservations, Leonard had come to love this life on the road, the small, closed community of supportive fellow travelers and the almost military regime. Being in service and being of service both held enormous appeal for a poet who had so often seemed born to be a soldier or a monk. It is possible too that the rush of such an intense, heightened existence had become addictive—Leonard, after all, had for many years been inordinately fond of amphetamines. Having given up his last two vices, cigarettes and alcohol, for the tour, he was probably in no mood to quit cold turkey. But the most important thing about the tour, for a man of Leonard’s age and temperament, was the feeling of full employment: of doing what he had spent a lifetime training to do and doing it successfully and well. There had been times before the tour—and even farther back, times before his financial troubles—when he felt to some degree like he was treading water or even withdrawing. He had felt, he said, as he imagined Ronald Reagan had felt “in his declining years”—remembering that once upon a time, he’d “had a good role, he’d played the President in a movie, and I felt, somewhat, that I ‘had been’ a singer.”3 Although Leonard had never stopped writing and drawing, and likely never would, the desire to engage in the business of making his work public had become less and less urgent. Touring, he said, “really re-established me as being a worker in the world. And that was a very satisfactory feeling.”4 Through his own hard work, Leonard had won back his lost retirement fund. Now that he had it, he did not want to retire.
In Leonard’s half of the duplex, the living room, which doubled as a dining room, had been temporarily requisitioned as an informal music room, with two full-sized synthesizers squeezed between the three-piece suite, large dinner table, small marble-topped table and potted bamboo plant. Leonard went to one of the synthesizers and pressed the power switch.
“There’s one song that I’ve been working on for many, many years—decades. I’ve got the melody and it’s a guitar tune, a really good tune, and I have tried year after year to find the right words. The song bothers me so much that I’ve actually started a journal chronicling my failures to address this obsessive concern with this melody. I would really like to have it on the next record, but I felt that for the past two or three records. Maybe four. It’s a song I’d really like to complete. So, these are hard nuts to crack.”
And when you do crack them after all these years, sometimes is there nothing in there but dust?
“My father kept a bottle of champagne downstairs in a cabinet in the cellar. He died when I was quite young, but as soon as I got the keys to the cabinet, which my mother finally gave me when I was a little older, when we broke out this bottle that my mother had been keeping since maybe their wedding, it was undrinkable. So you have to develop a perspective about the whole thing. I mean it’s not the siege of Stalingrad. In the great scheme of things it’s not terribly important, but it bothers me a lot.”
The puzzle of the song?
“Yeah, the puzzle of the song. You know that. I’d like to finish my work; still in the back of my mind is: ‘What is the groove for that song?’ I’ve got the words and the tune but I don’t know the groove or the arrangement, and that’s going on in my mind as we speak; that’s what I’m thinking about.”
He pressed a button that struck up an electronic rhythm track, and over it he played a melody.
“I’m in this key.”
The music floated along serenely, hypnotically, until Leonard hit an unexpected chord. He stopped short, like he had hit a wall. His face had a quizzical expression that seemed to say, “Where the hell do I go now?”
“So, that’s what my work is right now and that’s what I think about. My mind is not given to philosophy, it’s given to a kind of prayer, a kind of work. But mostly it’s about that problem of getting back to the key I started off in.”
In reality the problem seemed mostly about Leonard’s pitilessness toward his songs when it came to judging them done. He already had enough material for an album. Prior to the tour he had amassed a small stack of songs, which included “The Captain,” “Puppets” and “Different Sides,” a cowrite with Sharon Robinson. There was “Lullaby,”
an early version of the song he premiered on tour; “Treaty,” a song he had been tinkering with for at least fifteen years; and the even older “Born in Chains,” which he began writing in 1988, the year he released I’m Your Man, and which he described when trying it out onstage as having been based “on some general appetite for prayer.”5 Leonard had also been trying his hand at writing blues songs. “I’ve always loved the blues and I’ve always loved the musical construction of the blues,” he said, but he had never felt he had the right to sing the blues. “Somehow the right was granted me, I don’t know by what authority, and a number of songs came to me in that way now that I have permission to sing the blues.”6 Two of these songs, “Feels So Good” and “The Darkness,” also made their way onto the tour’s expanding set list. Since his return from Las Vegas, he had been working with Anjani on new versions for his album of three songs they cowrote for her album Blue Alert—“Crazy to Love You,” “Thanks for the Dance” and “Whither Thou Goest”—as well as on a song they wrote together in 2001 called “The Street.” Anjani, who continued to live around the corner, came by often; they were still close. The second synthesizer was for her.
His life was busy and full, but he missed touring. On tour, “you know exactly what to do during the day and you don’t have to improvise—as you do here, especially now, in the midst of composing. There’s always something to draw you away.”7 Some distractions were less galling than others. Less than two months after the last date of the tour, the household had a new member, Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen. Lorca, who still lived downstairs, gave birth to her first child—Leonard’s second grandchild and first granddaughter—in February 2011. The tiny girl was the progeny of two Canadian musical dynasties, her father being Rufus Wainwright, the singer, Lorca’s close friend and, in the period when he shared Lorca’s apartment, Leonard’s downstairs neighbor. When fans of Rufus referred to Lorca as a “surrogate mother” online, the whole family, including Leonard, stepped up to correct them. The baby would be raised by Lorca, Rufus and “Daddy #2,” as Wainwright referred to his fiancé Jörn Weisbrodt. Leonard doted on the baby. When Lorca came upstairs with Viva or Adam came by with Cassius, Leonard would happily spend all day playing with them. Smiling, he said, “I feel I’m off the evolutionary hook. I’ve done my bit.” This, he said, was the legacy that mattered. “As to my own work, inhabiting the great scheme of things and knowing you’re going to leave pretty soon, you know that whatever you’re doing is tiny as hell, but on the other hand it’s your work, so you treat it with respect.”8
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 52