by Ira B. Nadel
Suzanne was radically different from Marianne; whereas Marianne was domestic and protective, Suzanne was direct and domineering. With her dark, sultry beauty and aggressive sexuality, she sustained Cohen’s interest for nearly a decade, and he never learned to refuse her various demands, whether they were for clothes or homes. A longtime friend from Greece commented that both women “had catlike characters”: Marianne was “a puma,” whereas Suzanne was “a Persian in a lady’s parlor” who could jump with claws at any instant. Marianne seemed difficult to get to know, as if she had a wall of glass around her. She was loving, compliant, and understanding. With Suzanne, Cohen felt he had found an equal, someone who could meet him at the same level of intensity. He found her beauty inescapable and her sensuality irresistible. She hung erotic woodcuts beside religious icons on the white-washed walls of his house on Hydra. She was Jewish, from Miami, a beautiful, difficult woman. “God, whenever I see her ass, I forget every pain that’s gone between us,” he once remarked. When he discovered that she had small handwriting much like his own, he said, “I fear we are to be together for a long time.”
Their difference in age never affected their relationship, although once when Cohen was doing an interview and gave his real age, thirty-four, she interrupted to say, “Leonard, don’t say how old you are.” He laughed and quoted John, 8:32: “The truth shall set you free.” In their first year together, Cohen and Suzanne were itinerant, living on Hydra, at the Chelsea in New York, and briefly in Montreal where, after a short stay with Robert Hershorn, they rented a small house in the Greek section near Mount Royal. He wrote and composed, while she dashed off a pornographic novel, written “to make us laugh.” He gave Suzanne a filigreed Jewish wedding ring, although they never actually married. They eventually settled in Nashville.
Cohen decided to go to Nashville to record his second album, Songs from a Room, after meeting Bob Johnston, Columbia’s leading producer of folk rock, in Los Angeles in 1968. Johnston, who had produced Dylan, had heard Cohen’s debut album and was interested in producing his next.
Nashville was the bible publishing capital of America, referred to as the “buckle of the Bible belt” and seen by many as a Christian, largely Republican theme park. The juxtaposition of a lugubrious, urban Jew and the rural, country backdrop of Nashville seemed odd. Musically, Nashville leaned toward bad puns and cloying musical arrangements. The television show Hee Haw debuted in 1969 and Merle Haggard’s anti-protest song “Okie From Muskogee” was a number one hit. But its aw-shucks, hillbilly veneer belied the level of musicianship and innovation that thrived in Nashville. Chet Atkins and producer Owen Bradley were pioneering new sounds. Johnny Cash was doing interesting work. Kris Kristofferson was writing songs and working as a night janitor at Columbia Records. Elvis was recording at the RCA studios. Bob Dylan had recorded two albums there (John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline) and Buffy Sainte-Marie was developing one. Ever since his first band, the Buckskin Boys, Cohen had had an odd fondness for country music, and saw himself, incongruously, as a country singer.
When he arrived in Nashville, a pop/country crossover trend was beginning, blurring the distinction between the two. Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” had been a number one hit on both the country and pop charts. Glen Campbell had recorded “Witchita Lineman” and Ray Charles, a longtime favorite of Cohen’s, issued Volume 2 of “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” More experimentally, a series of twelve duets between Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash was recorded in March 1969. The crossover philosophy would be revived in cycles through the ensuing years, with varying degrees of success. In Nashville, Cohen found enthusiastic, professional musicians who were ready to accept him as a slightly older poet and budding folk-rock singer.
When Cohen decided to go down to Nashville in 1968, he was initially opposed to Suzanne coming with him. She spent the night before his departure carousing with several men, an unsubtle message. Cohen was upset but slightly overpowered. He was in thrall and it was decided that she would go with him. They stayed briefly in the Noel Hotel but decided to move to a small cabin in Franklin, Tenneessee, a rural town twenty-five miles southwest of Nashville. It was their home for the next two years. Producer Bob Johnston rented the place from Boudleaux Bryant, songwriter of “Bye, Bye Love” and other hits for the Everly Brothers, but let Cohen have it for seventy-five dollars a month. It came with twelve hundred acres of virgin forest filled with hickory, chestnut, oak, beech, and black ash trees. It also had a stream. Wild peacocks roamed the area and Cohen would amuse his occasional guests by imitating their cry.
He and Suzanne led a quiet rural life, driving in to Nashville only to record or to meet friends. Suzanne made long dresses, worked at her loom and dabbled with pottery. Guests to the farm found it isolated and Cohen’s life there simple. At the time he was continuing with his macrobiotic diet (between 1965 and 1968 he was a vegetarian). Cohen often had nothing to offer guests but soy tea.
In Tennessee, Cohen was able to fulfill his fantasy about being a cowboy. One of his favorite places in Nashville was the Woodbine Army Surplus store. A journal from that period contains photographs of various gun counters; he became the poet with a gun. On one occasion, friends came over for an afternoon of shooting, bringing a carload of weapons. Leonard joined them with the largest weapon he had at the time, a Walther PPK pistol. He noted the comic imbalance in firepower, commenting that he was impressed with the way the South protected its women.
Cohen decided he needed a horse, and he bought one from Kid Marley, a sometime cowboy and full-time drinker. A legend in the area, Marley could sing and play the harmonica and did so often with Cohen. The horse was lame and consistently uncooperative, spending most of its time in the pasture avoiding the Montreal cowboy, although Cohen did eventually learn to ride him.
One of Cohen’s neighbors was Willie York, a notorious figure who had an illegal still and had once shot a revenue officer. He became the subject of a hit song called “Willie York, Big East Fork, Franklin, Tennesssee” by country singer Johnny Paycheck. York looked after Cohen’s cabin and land while he lived there, but he also made off with a variety of goods, including Cohen’s rifle. An erratic neighbor, he would pound on Cohen’s door in the middle of a raging storm, demanding twenty dollars, and Cohen would give it to him. Yet his individualism appealed to Cohen and he enjoyed his company.
For the most part, Suzanne felt comfortable in Tennessee, although she made regular trips back to New York or Florida. “Diamonds in the Mine,” from Cohen’s third album, refers to her failure to write to him and his disappointment at not finding any letters from her in his mailbox on the farm. But in composing, recording, and living far from the pressures of Montreal or the intensity of Hydra, he was content: “I moved there. I had a house, a jeep, a carbine, a pair of cowboy boots, a girlfriend… A typewriter, a guitar. Everything I needed.” Suzanne’s view of their life there, however, was touched with cynicism: “As long as someone like him [Cohen] was in the universe, it was okay for me to be here. I was walking on tiptoe—anything for the poet. Our relationship was like a spider web. Very complicated.”
In rural Tennessee, Cohen had successfully transposed what he had in Hydra—the romantic isolation that allowed him to work. Yet he never quite escaped his melancholy, as a poem from the “Nashville Notebook of 1969,” entitled “The Pro,” makes clear. It is a serio-comic poem of departing:
I leave to several jealous men a second-rate legend of my life.
To those few high school girls
who preferred my work to Dylan’s
I leave my stone ear
and my disposable Franciscan ambitions.
The recording of Songs from a Room went well. Bob Johnston understood the fragility of Cohen’s songs and their blend of poetry with music and, like John Hammond, helped him to overcome his nervousness in working with other musicians. They worked in Columbia’s large, new 16th Avenue studio, which Johnston had had refitted. Johnston chose the sidemen, i
ncluding Charlie Daniels, an imposing Texan and a fiddle player who had worked with Dylan and would go on to his own successful career. The first session though, was unfocused. Cohen came in and asked, “What do you want to do?” Johnson said, “Let’s get some hamburgers and beer.” When they returned, Cohen again asked, “What do you want me to do?” Johnston replied, “Sing.” After the first taping, Cohen came into the control room and asked, “Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?” “Yeah,” said Johnston.
Charlie Daniels recalled the way Cohen appreciated the musicianship of the players but also brought his own unique talents to bear. In the studio, Daniels and the other sidemen were told to listen to Cohen in order to get into the songs. It was like mixing colors; you had to be one of the colors for it to work. Johnston later referred to the album as a painting, not a record, and described his role as “a musical bodyguard,” protecting Cohen and his music from artificial intrusions and falsification of sound. There was a fragile, gentle feel to the album. Johnston attempted “to make his voice sound like a mountain” without sacrificing the purity of his sound. When Cohen sang “The Partisan,” one of the few songs he has recorded that he didn’t write, Johnston felt that French voices would enhance it. So he and Cohen went to France and overdubbed three female French singers.
The music on Songs from a Room was produced in such a way as to enhance the language; no drums were used, and an electric guitar only sparingly. The sessions were quite loose, with plenty of time allowed for each take. Johnston had recently done Blonde on Blonde for Dylan, as well as Folsom Prison for Johnny Cash, so he was prepared for the new sound that Cohen brought.
Johnston has said that Cohen swept one’s psychic energy away. “Leonard has always had his finger on the future, Dylan his eye on tomorrow,” Johnston explained in an interview. He described Cohen’s guitar playing, with its beautifully constructed chords, as a black widow spider. Johnston recognized the offbeat power of Cohen’s voice, its ability to mesmerize.
Cohen himself maintained doubts about his voice. Of one song, “Lady Midnight,” he wrote, “The voice is uncertain. In those days it took me fifteen minutes to decide whether or not I should wear my cap when I went outside and a half hour whether or not I should take it off when I came back.”
Yet in the studio, Cohen was sure of what he wanted. Johnston “created an atmosphere in the studio that really invited you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgement, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation.” It was the way he moved while you were singing; “he’d dance for you” and “sponsor a tremendous generosity in the studio.” The recording process was becoming easier for Cohen and he was relaxed. In his journal he wrote, “read [the] Zohar, exercised, slowly came alive.”
The album was released in March 1969. Grim, hard, and emotionally powerful, it did nothing to dispel his reputation as the crown prince of pessimism. In “You Know Who I Am,” he sings:
Sometimes I need you naked
Sometimes I need you wild
I need you to carry my children in
And I need you to kill a child.
“Bird on the Wire” became an anthem and Cohen used it to open his concerts, explaining that it “seems to return me to my duties.” Kris Kristofferson, who had begun selling his own songs, told Cohen at a Nashville party that Cohen had stolen part of the melody from Lefty Frizell’s “Mom & Dad’s Waltz.” But Kristofferson admired the song and said that the first three lines—“Like a bird on the wire, / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free”—would be his epitaph.
“Bird on the Wire” began in Greece: when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones, and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires: “I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning.” Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. Often you’d see “three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds.” He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.
A single, “The Old Revolution,” hit #63 on the U.S. charts and did surprisingly well in England. In France the popularity of the album led to Cohen being named le folksinger de l’année by Le Nouvel Observateur. Cohen entered the cultural grammar; it was remarked that if a Frenchwoman owned but one record, it was likely to be by Leonard Cohen. It was later reported that the president, Georges Pompidou, often took Cohen’s records with him on vacation.
While still living in Nashville, Cohen made a trip to Italy. In June of 1969 he joined Franco Zefferelli and Leonard Bernstein at a villa outside Rome to score a movie on St. Francis of Assisi, titled Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Music was to play a leading part, with Bernstein composing the music and Cohen writing the lyrics. With Zefferelli, Cohen visited the tomb of St. Francis, taking away some small metal birds blessed by the abbot. There were long meetings and luxurious Italian meals served by attractive young men but little real work. Cohen was unhappy with the scene and left for Rome, where he unexpectedly ran into Nico. He was seized with his old obsession but nothing came of it. Zefferelli eventually made his film but Cohen was not a part of it. He was replaced by Donovan.
After several false starts, Cohen did get involved in scoring films, providing songs for Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Cohen was in Nashville recording some tracks for his third album, Songs of Love and Hate, and ducked into a theater to see Altman’s film Brewster McCloud. That night he was back in the studio again when, by coincidence, Robert Altman called him, telling him that he had built a film around Cohen’s songs from his first album. He said he had been writing the script while listening to Cohen’s record. Cohen said, “Who are you?” Altman replied, “Well, I did M*A*S*H, that’s my film.” “I don’t know it,” Cohen replied, asking if there was anything else he had done. “Well, I did a picture that’s been completely buried, that you wouldn’t know about; it was called Brewster McCloud.” To that replied Cohen, “Listen, I just came out of the theater. I saw it twice; you can have anything of mine you want!”
For McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Cohen did some additional instrumental music, although eventually the only piece used was guitar background for a soliloquy by Warren Beatty. The soundtrack for the movie, released in 1971, included “The Stranger Song” (the opening piece), “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Winter Lady,” with various instrumentals added. When he saw the finished picture—without the music—Cohen candidly told Altman he didn’t like the film. Several months later, however, when he saw the completed film with the soundtrack in Montreal, he managed to reach Altman in London. “Forget everything I said; it’s really beautiful!” he shouted into the phone.
Reaction to the film itself was mixed. Vincent Canby in the New York Times thought that its intentions were “not only serious, they are meddlesomely imposed on the film by tired symbolism, [and] by a folksong commentary on the soundtrack that recalls not the old Pacific Northwest but San Francisco’s Hungry i.” Several months later, John Simon complained in the same paper that the dialogue was “delivered sotto voce out of the corners of people’s mouths in a remote corner of the screen or entirely off it.” He continued, “There is not much to see in the film and even less to hear—often no more than a pretentious ballad by Leonard Cohen, the Rod McKuen of the coach trade, which has nothing to do with the matter at hand.” Time said that Cohen’s craggy voice sounded “like Villon with frostbite.” The movie did poorly at the box office, and Altman has called it “the biggest failure of all my films.”
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WHILE LIVING IN NASHVILLE, Cohen went to
Los Angeles for the wedding of his friend Steve Sanfield. It was Sanfield who introduced Cohen to his Zen master. An American from Massachusetts, Sanfield had been involved with LSD, Tibetan Buddhism, and mysticism. On Hydra he had peddled antique comic books and hashish. Planning to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, Sanfield left Hydra and went first to California where he learned of a Japanese Zen Buddhist missionary, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who had come to the United States in 1962 to establish a militaristic brand of Zen known as Rinzai. Unlike Soto Buddhism, which emphasizes gradual enlightenment, Rinzai stresses sudden, explosive enlightenment earned through austere regimes of zazen (meditation), sanzen (meetings with the master where a koan, or a question, is posed), and daily rituals of work and rest.
Sanfield met Roshi when the Zen master was fifty-seven. He had spent forty-one years as a monk in Japan, fifteen of them as a Zen master, and was now leading a small but committed Zen group in Gardena, a Los Angeles suburb. He had transformed his garage into a zendo, or meditation hall, and the bedroom into the sanzen, or spiritual examination room, and was sleeping on a mattress in the living room. After an excruciating session of zazen the evening of his first visit, Sanfield was unexpectedly admitted to sanzen and presented with his first koan: “Show me the voice of God.” Unable to answer, he was immediately shown out. He returned the next day and stayed for three years, soon moving into the attached garage/zendo to sleep.
In order to raise funds for Roshi’s growing roster of students and the expanding zendo, Sanfield went to New York in the fall of 1967 and there, at the Penn Terminal Hotel, re-met Cohen, then recording his first album. Cohen suddenly became very interested in learning about Sanfield’s teacher. Judaism was still important for both men, and one Sunday, Sanfield, Cohen, and Mort Levitt traveled downtown to visit a group of young Hasids. As they crossed Washington Square Park, they saw a large circle with Swami Bhaktivedanta seated in the center leading a mantra. This was his first visit to America, and the Hare Krishna movement was just beginning. Allen Ginsberg soon joined the growing circle of dancing, chanting figures. Cohen stayed while Sanfield and Levitt continued to their meeting. When they returned, the circle was just breaking up and Cohen offered his only comment: “Nice song.”