by Ira B. Nadel
His own relationships with women had been largely on his own terms but Suzanne had demanded hostages to his future. “I gave a woman a house and babies just because she insisted,” he wrote. Cohen’s introspection culminated in a landscape that was simultaneously external and internal:
The moon is over the windmill. I sit here with a blanket around my shoulders. The daisies are all collapsed. It is very quiet. A dog is barking. I hope I can leave the garden soon. A clicking insect measures out a portion of the lightest breeze … A wave bends me over the blue table, and a dream of the mountain rolling down over the roofs and the daisies.
Cohen resolved to rebel “against Domestic Conversations,” the repressive relationship that had lost its love, and the home that had lost its meaning. Referring to both Marianne and Suzanne, he wrote:
The first woman spun it around her like a skirt, faster and faster, brighter and brighter, until I fell off the edge of her hem and the next one turned the other way, dark and silent and greedy, gathering everything in, and I went into it, like a canoe into a windspout, but she was not at the center, she didn’t know how to be there … I can’t flourish the old table like a banner of order and solitude. I am here to work in the garden. I am no longer your host.
Empty, he awaited the salvation that might rescue him from this purgatory. “Without the Name, I am a funeral in the garden. Waiting for the next girl.” He expanded this theme in “I Should Not Say You,” a prose poem from Death of Lady’s Man: “My heart longs to be a chamber for the Name … Without the Name the wind is a babble, the flowers are a jargon of longing … Without the Name sealed in my heart I am ashamed.”
Throughout his life Cohen has preferred the more formal Leonard to any other form of address because it defines his identity as a writer. “Names preserve the dignity of Appearance,” F. declares in Beautiful Losers. Earlier, in Parasites of Heaven, Cohen writes of himself that “Leonard hasn’t been the same / since he wandered from his name,” implying that his life in England and Greece has undermined and altered the anticipated plan of a middle-class life in Montreal. Cohen’s signature, on letters, documents, or autographs, always reads, in clearly printed script, “Leonard Cohen.” Yet he mocked his own formality in “The Other Village:”
When it comes to lamentations
I prefer Aretha Franklin
to, let’s say, Leonard Cohen
Needless to add, he hears a different drum
The final poem of Death of A Lady’s Man extended Cohen’s self-portrait:
I am almost 90
Everyone I know has died off
except Leonard
He can still be seen
hobbling with his love
Cohen’s relationship with Suzanne was deteriorating in a more graphic way than his relationship with Marianne had. “We will go back to that creek in Tennessee,” he wrote, “and she will shoot me with a .22.” His frustration increased: “I should have killed you in the war. I didn’t know that you would turn black and play the trumpet…. In a corner of my heart, I planted and watered and sang to the seeds of revenge … the garden is ruined and this vigil is coming to an end.”
Suzanne felt abandoned by Cohen, who was always either traveling or writing and had little time for her. She retaliated by acting like Cohen, staying out until 4: 00 a.m. Cohen was angry and replaced Suzanne with others: Stephanie, who was sixteen, and Sherry, “who loves me for something I said ten years ago.” There was “a blonde giant” named Vala who bit him all over his body, and one named Danae, who stayed with him a week at the Athens Hilton: “Did I know she was only fifteen? I thought she was only thirteen. I tried to seduce the mother and she calmed down a little.” A bout of gonorrhea caught from an Australian woman required a trip to Athens and a penicillin injection but it did not deter him. While undergoing treatment in Athens, he pined for the women he couldn’t have:
Desire in Athens disordered me. I saw a woman on a motorcycle, her thigh exposed. The buttocks of the telephone operator. Stephanie somewhere in the neighborhood. The girl from Radcliff reclining on a bed of ideas where I did not join her. All this fed my hatred and I could not welcome her [his dark companion]. As soon as I came back to my blue desk, my heart welcomed her. She does not give me songs but she is the muse of discipline.
His Greek friend George Lialios said that he and Cohen had a “thirst for, and attraction to, the opposite sex in all of its varieties, and with it the dream of some ideal woman that belonged to the sphere of metaphysics rather than to reality. All of Leonard’s erotic poetry bears the seal of this longing.”
In a 1980 film interview, Cohen admitted that he had been completely obsessed with women ever since he could remember. As he became more well known, this obsession was reciprocated. His aura of “spiritual poverty” made women want to help him. Once, at a Montreal party Cohen approached a tall, beautiful woman with long, dark hair. He took a piece of her hair, dipped it into his wine glass, and slowly proceeded to suck it dry. He then let it fall and walked away without uttering a word.
Awaiting another woman at the Athens Hilton, Cohen meditated on power and beauty:
To see me you must leave your consolation. You must forsake your mediocre ecstasy, your mediocre exercise of bliss. Put on your muscles and step out of the perfumed shower which has shriveled and softened you…. I go without a name from heart to heart, saying Courage, courage, you are already brave, knowing full well that they will die without the sight of her beauty.
By the summer of 1974 the woman from the Athens Hilton was with him in Hollywood, where Cohen realized that he “had not been denied the full measure of beauty … When we make love in the morning, the whole day is like coming off acid.” But with such beauty came fear and the inability to create: “If I could write a song for her I could pay for this suite.…The table, the climate, the perfect physique for a forty-year-old artist, famous, happy, frightened.”
In 1975 Cohen took a trip with Roshi to visit Zen monasteries in Japan and witnessed a monk slithering on his belly to the feet of a Zen master to present him with tea. Invited to ask the Master a question, Cohen was surprisingly silent. He remembered the beautiful calligraphy on the wall and thinking that “we didn’t get this one,” referring to the American bombardment of Japan and the untouched monastery. Upon returning, his religious convictions, always transient, shifted once more. “I decided to worship beauty the way some people go back to the religion of their fathers.”
A reading tour of Italy to support the translation of several of his books followed. He went to Milan, then to Florence and Rome for readings and talks and was captivated by the women. In Milan there was a female doctor, and a woman named Lori; in Florence, Hugette; in Rome, Patricia. Sitting with Patricia at an outdoor cafe, he saw two doves fly toward him “in the style of the Holy Spirit descending…. I have been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. I surrender to the iron laws of the moral universe which make a boredom out of everything desired. I will go back to my dark companion [Suzanne]. I don’t think I will.” In Rome he had a vivid fantasy about joining the Communist Party, which caused the rivers of his childhood to rise up, with snakes and sailboats, and his memory to fail as a series of ghosts spoke to him, including W.B. Yeats, “who lighted up a stick of sandalwood for my blurred soul, and the factories stamped out ten million hearts as false as mine … The ghosts of many crickets sang Another Man Done Gone, and little pebbles flew from my forehead against the stained glass windows of the CIA.” Yet he could not write, and longed passionately for the embrace of young women. On the train from Florence to Rome, he sang into the open window but “the song could not redeem me.”
Following a brief return to Hydra, and then to Montreal, Cohen headed on to California where Suzanne, Adam, and Lorca joined him. They were still trying to make the relationship work. But he wanted to escape, to write, and to sing. Roshi wanted him to move to Mt. Baldy with Suzanne and the children so that he could study with him. But Cohen felt it
was the wrong time; he had work he wanted to do. By December he was back in Montreal attending Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review at the Montreal Forum. Throughout the winter he prepared new songs, and his commitment to Zen was again tested.
Columbia Records was planning to release The Best of Leonard Cohen, a compilation of twelve of his best-known songs, including “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” and “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Cohen had agreed to do the album because there was a new generation of listeners and because he was given complete artistic control. He picked the songs, designed the package, and insisted the lyrics be included. Cohen compiled the album in London, writing new liner notes for each song, identifying its origin. He also offered a personal critique of “Last Year’s Man”:
I don’t know why but I like this song. I used to play it on a Mexican twelve-string until I destroyed the instrument by jumping on it in a fit of impotent fury in 1967. The song had too many verses and it took about five years to sort out the right ones. I like the children in this version. I always wait for them if I have to listen to it.
By April 1976 he was on the road again with his most extensive European tour, to support the new album. Unsuccessful in the United States, The Best of Leonard Cohen was a hit in Europe, his major market in the seventies. He began the tour in Berlin on April 22 and ended in London on July 8. Roshi was lecturing in Europe at the time and appeared at the Munich concert. Backstage before the performance, he saw Cohen quickly down a tumbler of cognac and offered this observation: “Body important.” A London critic remarked that the band had a definite rock quality and that a new up tempo but unrecorded song, “Do I Have to Dance All Night,” was a great success. It is “surprising how he sings with so much more life outside a studio.” In Paris Cohen gave four sold-out concerts with as many as twelve encores at some performances.
After the tour, Cohen and Suzanne spent the summer in Hydra, where he shared stories with Anthony Kingsmill and adventures with Pandias Scaramanga: “He told me about a whorehouse he had been to in Paris. I told him about a private club in New York.” But Cohen’s state of mind was fragile: “When I’m not plotting against everyone I know, or making myself look good in the eyes of the weak, my head is a din with the various commands of self-reform.” He could neither write nor sing, yet he believed that “life is not perfectable, but work is.” The only summer event that absorbed him was a play about the last days of Lorca written by a South African poet and performed in the lounge of a small hotel on Hydra. “Bitterly,” he wrote, “I held on to my own barrenness all through the evening, doubting I would ever speak again in the old high way.” However, Irving Layton’s presence on the island temporarily evoked his good spirits and imagination.
Throughout 1976 Cohen increasingly found in Zen what he felt Judaism lacked: a focus on the methods of prayer and meditation. “I wanted to go into a system a little more thoroughly,” he later explained. Meditation provided a respite from the turmoil of his private life. But an accident at Mt. Baldy in 1976 prevented him from sitting at any length in the zendo: late one night, he ran into a low wall and tore some cartilage in his knee. After treatment, it was still too painful for him to sit, so he returned to Judaism for spiritual sustenance, beginning a more deliberate, if private, study of the religion on his visits to Montreal. He prayed daily and put on tefillin. He made contact with several Hasidic rabbis and used a bilingual Hasidic prayer book obtained through the Lubavitcher movement. The two religions worked in juxtaposition. “I came upon texts and attitudes that I wouldn’t have been able to understand if I hadn’t studied with my old Japanese teacher…. I did get one or two things from Roshi that enabled me to penetrate, superficially, at least, the Jewish tradition [but] without his instruction, I don’t think I would have had the attitude that allowed me to enter the tradition.”
In California, Cohen continued to visit Roshi at Mt. Baldy or to get up early to drive to the Cimarron Zen Center from the ranch house he and Suzanne had rented in Brentwood. Anthony Kingsmill came to visit and Bob Dylan, estranged from his wife, stayed for a while. But Roshi increasingly commanded Cohen’s life. On New Year’s Eve Roshi, Suzanne, Cohen, and Joni Mitchell met at Cohen’s house, Mitchell delayed by viewing Mae West’s entrance with two bodybuilders at Ringo Starr’s New Year’s Eve party, her first stop. Suzanne led the conversation to a favorite topic, sex. Cohen asked Roshi, “How do you get rid of jealousy?” Before he could answer, Joni Mitchell said: “You quit it like you quit smoking,” and mimicked the crushing of a cigarette in an ashtray. Cohen gave her a hostile glance, thinking perhaps that she had intruded on Roshi’s territory. But Roshi didn’t seem to mind; as he prepared to leave, he hugged Mitchell and told her he wanted to move in with her.
The appearance of The Best of Leonard Cohen and dropping sales led some to think that Cohen’s recording contract with Columbia had ended. The release of his next album on Warner Brothers seemed to confirm this, although Cohen said that he received a release to work with legendary producer Phil Spector under the Warner Brothers label, although the album finally came out on CBS International. Spector’s reputation as a songwriter and producer came from another era. He was responsible for the “wall of sound” that characterized “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “Be My Baby,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and “He’s a Rebel.” Joni Mitchell warned Cohen about working with Spector, who she thought was difficult and past his prime. She had seen the struggle John Lennon had had recording with him, since she had been across the hall in the same complex at the time, recording her album Court and Spark.
Stories differ as to how Cohen and Spector became partners. The liner notes on the album state that Marty Machat, who was Spector’s lawyer as well as Cohen’s, introduced them. According to Cohen, this occurred backstage after one of his performances at the Troubadour in L.A. Spector had uncharacteristically left his well-protected home to see Cohen, and at the show was strangely silent. Spector then invited Cohen back to his home, which, because of the air-conditioning, was very chilly, about “thirty-two degrees,” Cohen recalled. Spector was also very loud, and the more people he had around him, the more wild and theatrical he became. Spector locked the door and Cohen reacted by saying, “As long as we are locked up, we might as well write some songs together.” They went to the piano and started that night. For about a month they wrote (and drank) together and Cohen remembers it as a generous period, although he had to wear an overcoat almost constantly to work in Spector’s freezing home.
Cohen accepted Spector’s eccentricities, and found that period “very charming and hospitable.” As for Spector’s genius? “I thought the songs were excellent,” Cohen said. In the studio, however, it was a nightmare. Spector was menacing and paranoid. “He kept a lot of guns around, armed bodyguards; bullets and wine bottles littered the floor.” With Spector brandishing a bottle of wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, the atmosphere was tense. At one point Spector pointed the loaded pistol at Cohen’s throat, cocked it, and said, “I love you, Leonard.” Quietly, Cohen responded, “I hope you love me, Phil.” At another session, Spector pointed a revolver at the violinist, who quickly packed up and ran out. Songwriter Doc Pomus, who was there, reported that Cohen was actually pushed aside and ignored during the sessions and that Spector was so paranoid about the tapes that he took them home each night with an armed guard.
One night, Cohen and Spector were unexpectedly joined by Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, who sang backup on “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On.” The night before, Cohen and Harvey Kubernik from Melody Maker had gone to the Troubadour for a poetry reading by Ginsberg. The next evening, Ginsberg and Dylan were eating with Ronee Blakley at Cantor’s delicatessen on Fairfax when they learned that Cohen was recording with Spector at the Gold Star studios. They dropped by and before long Hal Blaine, the drummer, was directing Ginsberg and Dylan in backing vocal parts. Spector also joined in on the song. However, Dylan wasn’t an influence on Cohen’s songwriting for this album; as
Ginsberg noted, “Dylan blew everybody’s mind, except Leonard’s.”
The recording of the song “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” was indicative of the album’s creation. The session began at 7:30 in the evening, but by 2:30 in the morning a complete take had not yet been made. The musicians were on double time after midnight; it escalated to quadruple time at 2:00 a.m. By 3:30 in the morning they had not even played the song all the way through yet. Spector took away the charts and prevented the musicians from playing more than six bars. Cohen sat crosslegged on the floor through most of this until around 4:00 a.m., when Spector clapped his hands and told Cohen to do the vocal. Approaching the microphone, a very tired Cohen sang the song flawlessly. Cohen has since said of the song, “It’s direct and confessional. I wanted the lyrics in a tender setting rather than a harsh situation. At times that fusion was achieved. Sometimes the heart must roast on the fire like shish kebab.”
Cohen expected to find Spector in his Debussy period; instead, he found him in “the full flower of his Wagnerian tempest.” Personally and musically he was out of control; he locked up the master tapes of the album and mixed them without Cohen’s knowledge or permission. Cohen had done only one take on the songs, what’s known as a scratch vocal (a simple one-track vocal to be replaced later with a more enhanced and prepared sound) and wanted to put on different vocals, but Spector went into hiding with the tapes. He added strings, horns, and a female choir, with Cohen’s groaning voice heard distantly in the mix. On “Iodine,” an enormous percussive Motown styled back beat thrusts itself between the lyrics and Cohen’s droning voice. “Fingerprints,” which on the lyric sheet looks like a conventional, downbeat complaint, becomes a primeval hoedown with long fiddle and steel-guitar breaks. “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On” is pure burlesque, pushing the sardonic lyric to new lows by using a punchy rhythm-and-blues style horn section. Purists objected to the overproduction, which buried Cohen’s lyrics.