by Ira B. Nadel
Cohen had already mistakenly signed away the publishing rights to three of his most important songs: “Suzanne,” “Master Song,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” unaware of the consequences. Mary Martin knew an arranger, Jeff Chase, who also promoted himself as a music publisher and who she thought would enhance these songs. He worked with Cohen to put together a demo tape for promotion, but Cohen soon realized that he and Chase had conflicting ideas. But he convinced Cohen that it would be useful for him to sign certain documents that “temporarily” gave Chase rights to the three songs and allowed him to represent Cohen. When things didn’t work out musically, Chase told Cohen he was contractually bound. If he pulled out, Chase would retain the publishing rights to those songs as compensation for damages. Cohen was inexperienced and unsure and sought Mary Martin’s advice. She suggested Cohen let it go. Cohen had lost the rights to Chase on a bluff of sorts, since Chase never did more than prepare the lead sheets.
In 1970, after his first tour, Cohen realized what a mistake he had made. He also realized that Stranger Music, a music publishing company he formed in 1967, was partly owned by Mary Martin, with whom by then he had become disenchanted. He went to Columbia producer Bob Johnston’s lawyer, Marty Machat, for advice, and Machat, who soon became Cohen’s lawyer, worked a deal whereby Mary Martin was bought out of Stranger Music. But that still left the matter of the song rights, which Cohen later described as having been “lost in New York City but it is probably appropriate that I don’t own this song [“Suzanne”]. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.” In 1983–84, Chase contacted Barry Wexler, a friend of Cohen’s, to tell him that Cohen should have the rights to these songs and that he was open to offers. A meeting subsequently took place at the Royalton Hotel in New York between a nervous Chase and an angry Cohen. Asked by Cohen how much he wanted, Chase replied, “What do you think?” Cohen thought for a second and said, “One dollar, you motherfucker!” Chase ran out of the room. But Cohen still wanted the rights to the songs and in 1987 successfully negotiated a sum that was more than his first offer but less than what Chase wanted.
Songs of Leonard Cohen introduced Cohen to the arcane financial machinations of the music world, a dark contrast to the book publishing industry which had relatively little corruption simply because it had relatively little money. But the album remains a coherent artistic statement, and it raised issues that would be addressed in later songs. Cohen has said on occasion that an artist has only one or two songs or poems that he constantly reinvents and that his earliest work contains all his later themes and variations. This is true of Songs of Leonard Cohen.
The back cover of the album shows a portrait of a Joan of Arc figure engulfed by flames. Her blue eyes and enchained hands are raised upward, while the flames reach her breasts. The unattributed image was actually a widely available Mexican postcard of a saint Cohen found in a Mexican magic store. It shows the anima sola, the lonely soul, seeking release from the chains of materiality. “I sort of felt I was this woman,” he remarked years later. The reappearance of the image on the reverse of the 1995 tribute album Tower of Song was “closing the circle,” he explained.
“Stories of the Street” documents Cohen’s despair and dislocation during his early days in New York. As he says at the beginning of the song, “the stories of the streets are mine,” elaborating his experiences in narrative: “I lean from my window sill / In this old hotel I chose / One hand on my suicide / One hand on the rose.”
“Sisters of Mercy” had been written in Edmonton after he ducked into a doorway during a blizzard, and encountered two young women with backpacks taking refuge. Since they had no place to stay, Cohen invited them to his hotel room. They had hitchhiked across the country the previous week and quickly fell asleep on his double bed. He sat in the armchair near the window, and as the storm abated and the sky cleared, he studied the moonlight on the North Saskatchewan River. A melody had been rattling in his head (he recalled playing it for his mother in her Montreal kitchen), and wrote the stanzas as they slept: “It was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect, completely formed, and they were … happy about it. Barbara and Lorraine were their names.”
“The Stranger Song,” which addresses loss, departure, and the constant need to move on is essentially a confessional. Love is necessary yet also destructive; the warmth and comfort that love provides also weakens one’s will. All of Cohen’s later themes were contained here; Songs of Leonard Cohen became a template for the songs to come.
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IT WAS IN NEW YORK that Cohen met Bob Dylan in the fall of 1969. Cohen remembers being in the dressing room of the Bitter End, a Greenwich Village folk club, where he had gone to see Phil Ochs or Tim Buckley perform. Dylan had returned to live in the Village after spending several years secluded in Woodstock, N. Y., following his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966. Dylan heard Cohen was at the club and sent Paul Colby, his assistant and friend, to summon Cohen, who then met Dylan at the Kettle of Fish, Dylan’s hangout on MacDougal Street.
Cohen’s talent had some of the same elements as Dylan’s: both wrote sophisticated lyrics, surprisingly elegant melodies, and neither had much of a voice. Dylan drew heavily from two of the same sources that Cohen did; the bible and Hank Williams.
Cohen has stated his appreciation of Dylan’s work many times, calling him, at one point, “our most sophisticated singer in a generation … nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso—that exuberance, range and assimilation of the whole history of music.” And Dylan has said that one of the people he would not mind being for a minute is Leonard Cohen (two others were Roy Acuff and Walter Matthau).
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WHILE LIVING in New York, Cohen began to make appearances on Canadian television. He was the perfect Canadian cultural commodity; articulate, sexy, and living outside the country. His first show was CBC’s Take 30, hosted by Adrienne Clarkson. He appeared with the Toronto folk group The Stormy Clovers, who had been singing his songs in Montreal and Toronto clubs. On Take 30, Cohen sang “Traveller” (an early version of “The Stranger Song”), “Suzanne,” and “So Long, Marianne.” Afterwards, Clarkson asked if he now wanted to sing rather than write poetry. Cohen replied, “Well, I think the time is over when poets should sit on marble stairs with black capes.”
In 1967, Cohen began a romantic relationship with Joni Mitchell, whom he first met at the Newport Folk Festival. He would visit her at the Earl Hotel on Waverly Place in the Village and since Mitchell frequently played in Montreal, she would spend time with Cohen there, writing the song “Rainy Night House” about their visit to his mother’s home. When Cohen went to Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, he spent nearly a month with her at her new Laurel Canyon home. Cohen, Mitchell acknowledges, inspired her, giving her another standard in songwriting, although sometimes his presence surprised her—as when she found his name inscribed on the back of a heavy pendulum that fell off an antique clock she owned. He and Dylan, she has remarked, were her “pace runners,” the ones that kept her heading to new and higher musical ground. Cohen characterizes their relationship as “the extension of our friendship,” a friendship that has endured.
Based on the belief that he was the voice of the new counterculture, Cohen was flown out to Hollywood in 1967 by a producer to score a film that was to be directed by John Boorman. It was his first time there, and what he remembers most distinctly were the matchboxes with his name on them in his hotel room. The producer thought Cohen would be a kind of authority on the new movement in music and the culture. It didn’t work. “They showed me the film but I couldn’t relate to it.” He went out again a year later to score a movie tentatively called “Suzanne,” an art film based loosely on his song. The filmmakers were unaware that Cohen had lost the rights to the song and the project didn�
��t work out. But Cohen took the opportunity to spend time with Joni Mitchell, who was becoming an important part of the west coast music scene, and then rented a car and drove up to northern California to visit his friend Steve Sanfield, whom he knew from Hydra.
Back in New York, Cohen began to perform more. On April 6, 1967, he was introduced to a standing-room only crowd at the State University in Buffalo, New York, with these words: “James Joyce is not dead; he lives in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” He read from Beautiful Losers and sang “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “The Master Song,” “Love Calls You by Your Name,” and “The Jewels In Your Shoulder” and did three encores. On April 30 he had his Town Hall debut for sane and, shortly after, performed at expo ’67 in Montreal in a small pavillion with a club-like setting. Walking out with his guitar and a handful of candles, Cohen engaged the audience by announcing that “I cannot sing unless you all agree to take a candle and put it in the middle of your table and light it.” The audience thought this was pretty tacky but humored the singer. A guest that night recalled that Cohen’s “guitar playing was terrible and his voice was not much better. But he got to you and the women were quickly taken in; the men were less sure of him, but the mood was fabulous.”
Cohen also performed at the Rhinegold Music Festival in Central Park and the Newport Folk Festival on July 16, where he joined Joni Mitchell, Mike Settle, and Janis Ian at the first singer-songwriter afternoon, which had been arranged by Judy Collins. In the car to Newport, Cohen confided to his lawyer Marty Machat that he had little confidence in his singing. “None of you guys know how to sing,” Machat replied, “When I want to hear singers, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.”
In September, Cohen appeared on CBS-TV’s Sunday morning cultural affairs program Camera Three, eliciting the largest audience response in the fourteen-year history of the show. In November, Judy Collins released Wildflowers, which included three of Cohen’s songs. The album became her biggest hit, reaching #5 on the charts. All of this set the stage for the release of Songs of Leonard Cohen.
A January 28, 1968, article in the New York Times captured Cohen’s state of mind. The interview took place in his hotel room in the dilapidated Henry Hudson Hotel, where Cohen was enjoying the trappings that go with being “strictly an underground celebrity.” With his album now released, he seemed “on the verge of becoming a major spokesman for the aging pilgrims of his generation, the so-called Silent Generation.” Cohen offered his views on sex, women, revolutionary movements, the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967, and suffering, an area where people increasingly looked to him for advice. He offered diet tips; three years earlier he had been a vegetarian, now he only ate meat, and even proposed a new language: “When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left … Everybody I meet wipes me out. It knocks me out, and all I can do is get down on my knees. I don’t even think of myself as a writer, singer, or whatever. The occupation of being a man is so much more.” He praised women as mankind’s salvation: “I wish the women would hurry up and take over. It’s going to happen so let’s get it over with … then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together; and men really are gossips and artists. Then we could get about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.”
Commenting on his work, Cohen says his novels “have a pathological tone. What I find out from my mail is that the best products of our time are in agony. The finest sensibilities of the age are convulsed with pain. That means a change is at hand.” Mankind, he summarizes, must “rediscover the crucifixion. The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance. It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.” The headline of the interview, taken from a statement he offers, was “I’ve Been On the Outlaw Scene Since 15.”
The next day, an unsympathetic review of the album appeared in the Times. The second sentence reads: “On the alienation scale, [Cohen] rates somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominent poets of pessimism.” Yet the critic believed that the album would be fairly successful, although “weltschmerz and soft rock” are not always big sellers. “Suzanne,” the critic said, “has its moments of fairly digestible surrealism.” A comparison with Dylan emphasized their differences: “whereas Mr. Dylan is alienated from society and mad about it, Mr. Cohen is alienated and merely sad about it.” However, the review concludes positively: “popular music is long overdue for a spell of neo-Keatsy world-weariness and Mr. Cohen may well be its spokesman this season.”
By the spring, Songs of Leonard Cohen was a modest hit, reaching #162 in the United States, sandwiched between the Young Rascals’ Collection and Petula Clark’s These Are Songs. In Britain that summer, he hit #13, forecasting his popularity in Europe. Columbia also released “Suzanne” as a single, but it did not reach the charts. Cohen did not support the album with a tour, largely because of his insecurity as a performer. In Canada, the national news magazine Maclean’s disliked the album, beginning its review with “Pity.” An article in the Village Voice entitled “Beautiful Creep” criticized the folk poetry movement and identified Cohen as its leading proponent. “Cohen suffers gloriously in every couplet,” the article said. Cohen’s work was characterized as depressing, dark, and despairing. Eight months later, the New York Times linked Cohen with Dylan, Paul Simon, Rod McKuen, and Laura Nyro as the new voices of folk rock poetry.
Cohen went to London to appear on BBC-TV, performing twelve songs on two of his own shows, both entitled “Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen.” The shows included “You Know Who I Am,” “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” The introduction to the last song indicated Cohen’s gloomy state. He talked about a Czechoslovakian singer who used to perform a song so depressing that afterwards people would leap out of windows. Cohen then reported that the singer himself had recently leapt to his death. “Dress Rehearsal Rag” was Cohen’s equivalent song, and he performed it only when “the environment was buoyant enough to support its despair.”
Although he was labeled a sixties poet and singer, Cohen remained aloof from the larger movements. “I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t that attractive to me. … Mostly I’m on the front line of my own tiny life. I remember that I was inflamed in the 60s, as so many of us were. My appetites were inflamed: to love, to create, my greed, one really wanted the whole thing.” In particular, Cohen felt that the folk movement had been rapidly usurped by commerce. “The thing died very, very quickly; the merchants took over. Nobody resisted. My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money. I suppose that had I moved into more popular realms, I might have surrendered some of the characteristics of my nature that are now described as virtues.”
Cohen’s dislocated situation in New York led to his exploring different sexual, spiritual, and pharmaceutical pathways, and one was Scientology. In 1968, as he was driving down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with Joni Mitchell, she spotted a building with a number of women wearing saris and handing out material. Above the door a large sign which read “Scientology.” “What is Scientology?” she asked Cohen. “Oh, some crackpot religion,” he replied. A few weeks later, he called from New York to say that he’d joined them and that they were going to rule the world. But a few months later, Cohen told Mitchell he was disenchanted and that he’d had some difficulty extricating himself from it. Initially, Scientology offered the goal of a “clear path” (“Did you ever go clear?” he asks in “Famous Blue Raincoat”). Cohen had also heard it was a good place to meet women. On June 17, 1968, Cohen received a Scientology certificate awarding him “Grade iv—Release.”
By this time Cohen’s relationship with Marianne was ending. He was seeing other women, defending his behavior a
s acts of generosity; he was restless in New York. He saw Marianne and Axel often, but he also knew that their future was bleak, as a number of his songs record. “So Long, Marianne” is the musical denouement to their arrangement. They finally separated in 1968. Although Marianne was still mad about him, she understood that she could never completely possess him. “My new laws encourage / not satori but perfection,” Cohen wrote. In subsequent relationships, he sought to enact this principle, building on his earlier experiences. He required a serious, monogamous relationship, but one that allowed for his need for the freedom which sustained his creativity. Marianne was both the inspiration for, and casualty of, this need.
8
AIN’T NO CURE FOR LOVE
LEONARD COHEN met nineteen-year-old Suzanne Elrod in an elevator at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Cohen was there to attend a Scientology session, one of the potholes on his road to enlightenment, and Elrod was living at the Plaza, supported by a businessman. Elrod stepped out of the elevator as Cohen was going in. He looked at her, spun around and quickly introduced himself. Their relationship began almost immediately. She soon left the Plaza and moved into Cohen’s downscale apartment at the Chelsea.