by Ira B. Nadel
After one session in the late spring of 1986, Cohen and Warnes went out for dinner at Mario’s in Hollywood and she asked him about the album cover. On a napkin he rapidly sketched a torch held by two hands and the phrase “Jenny Sings Lenny.” But Cohen’s title and drawing weren’t used; instead, the album was released as Famous Blue Raincoat, with the image of a battered blue raincoat on the front. Cohen, of course, preferred the torch and two hands.
The album was a hit, reaching number eight in the United States; for seven weeks it held a top spot in England, and went gold in Canada. One critic said Famous Blue Raincoat had made Cohen’s voice respectable again in America. “It has been conclusively established that I do not know how to sing,” Cohen said, “but, like the bumblebee who defies the laws of aerodynamics, I persist … and I soar.”
Famous Blue Raincoat demonstrated a wide musical range, from the pulsating guitar work of Stevie Ray Vaughan on “First We Take Manhattan,” to the oddly grating voice of Cohen in duet with Warnes on “Joan of Arc” and the lyricism of Warnes on “Came so Far for Beauty.” With sales of over 1.5 million, the album was a commercial success and got radio play. Several critics have suggested that without this album Cohen’s re-emergence on the American scene could not have occurred, but Warnes never believed the album overshadowed Cohen or his singing.
What Warnes found so remarkable in Cohen’s songs was their ability to “pry open your heart with a crowbar.” Cohen changed the way she regarded music. His singing and its effect on his audiences was “the place where God and sex and literature meet … I’ve never known anyone with more courage to go where all of us are afraid to go.” And she always recalls Cohen’s remark that the divine, not the devil, can be found in the details: “Your most particular answer will be your most universal one,” he once told her. She felt that his songwriting ability was unparalleled:
Because of Leonard’s facility with language and his sense of his place in the culture and his respect for traditional literature, he builds a lyric in such a way, whether it’s use of interior rhyme or an eternal quality to the language, that the songs he writes beckon the soul with just the configuration of the lyric.
And Cohen found Warnes’ sound extraordinary: “Her voice is like the California weather, filled with sunlight. But there is an earthquake behind it. It is that tension that I think defines Jennifer’s remarkable gift.” He often refers to her as the most underrated singer in America and has said that “if you want to hear what a woman is thinking, if you want to hear what a woman sounds like in 1992, listen to Jennifer Warnes.”
At a Los Angeles warehouse to watch the filming of the Warnes’ video “First We Take Manhattan,” Cohen was photographed by publicist Sharon Weisz in his dark glasses, charcoal gray pin-striped suit, and white T-shirt, eating a banana. For him, the image was precise and revealing:
Sharon showed it to me later and it seemed to sum me up perfectly. ‘Here’s this guy looking cool,’ I thought, ‘in shades and a nice suit. He seems to have a grip on things, an idea of himself.’
The only thing wrong, of course, is that he was caught holding a half-eaten banana.
And it suddenly occurred to me that’s everyone’s dilemma: at the times we think we’re coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana ….
He admired the photo so much that it became the signature image for his 1988 hit album I’m Your Man, and the poster image of his 1988 world tour.
————
DURING the production and release of Famous Blue Raincoat, Cohen kept active by writing, traveling between the east and west coasts, trying his hand at acting, and giving readings. A cameo role in the television series Miami Vice as the head of interpol drew more on his presence than his acting, and most of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. His role was praised but he was eventually fired, his lines rewritten for another actor. From March through May 1986, he did several readings, including one at New York’s Carnival of the Spoken Word.
He sang on a compilation album to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Lorca entitled Poetas en Nueva York. His contribution, “Take This Waltz,” was recorded in September 1986 in Paris; a month later he participated in a celebration of the poet’s work in Granada. In the house near Granada where Lorca was born, Cohen starred in a CBS video of his song, hopping like a kangaroo and then standing on his head for nearly four minutes. “I thought we should do something wilder, surreal [because] that’s what Lorca brought us—surrealism.” For his translation of the Lorca poem that became “Take This Waltz,” he reportedly worked one hundred and fifty hours. During the filming, a Japanese tourist asked Cohen if he was a famous Spanish actor. “No, I’m a famous nobody,” he replied.
In New York, another musical based on his work appeared: Sincerely, L. Cohen, put on by the Medicine Show Theater Company in June 1987. Directed and arranged by Barbara Vann, it grew out of a popular set of readings of his work done in New York in 1986. Cohen assisted in the selection of material, and the success of the production marked the renewed interest in his work; he had re-emerged, and journalists noted that although Cohen might have been out of fashion, he was never far from the scene. Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine, voted him one of the “Ten Sexiest Men in Canada” that year.
Roshi continued to animate his life. An anniversary gathering was held for him at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 4, 1987, marking Roshi’s twenty-five years in America. To commemorate the event, The Zen of Myoshin-ji Comes to the West appeared in a limited edition of two hundred numbered copies. In pictures and prose, it told the story of Roshi’s life as the child of farmers, his arrival in America, his efforts at establishing a vibrant school of Rinzai in America, the success of his teaching, and the many centers then in existence in California, New Mexico, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico. Cohen participated in the production of the book and the gala evening.
————
COHEN EXPERIENCED intense depressions as he struggled with the songs for I’m Your Man. His relationship with Dominique was faltering. His depression was recurrent and he retried a variety of solutions from the past: travel, Zen, sex, drugs, Judaism, exercise. This time he read a book titled The Positive Value of Depression and consulted the work of the mystical Hasidic rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who treated depression as a “holy condition.” But recording the album became a difficult process. “It broke down a lot,” he said, “I had to leave it many times and I spent a lot of money and my judgments were all wrong. In the middle of recording, I realized that the lyrics were all wrong, and they’d already taken a year or two to write.” Cohen went into the studio with what he thought were finished songs, but “I couldn’t get behind the lyrics, even though they had taken months and sometimes years to finish. Although they had a certain integrity, they didn’t represent me accurately enough. I couldn’t find a voice for them. So I had to start over almost every song.” This album, he explained, was more holistic than the others, possessing a unified vision, although it had been recorded in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Paris.
The work had paid off. The album shot to the top of the charts in England when it was released on February 14, 1988, and it was nominated for album of the year in both England and the U.S. It remained number one for seventeen weeks in Norway and for almost as long in Spain. Sales in the United States, however, were low, despite an enthusiastic critical response. He was outside the commercial system. “Everything is public and the commercial institutions are now the landscaping of this public world,” Cohen said. “There’s nowhere else for you to exist … Unless you are in the system here, you don’t exist.” CBS Records awarded Cohen a Crystal Globe award, reserved for performers who have sold more than five million albums overseas. At the ceremony, Cohen commented that “I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.” I’m Your Man helped restore Cohen’s commerical appeal and re-invent the sixties’ bohemian as an eighties’ hipster.
The al
bum opens with “First We Take Manhattan,” originally called “In Old Berlin.” It plays with certain geo-political ideas then in the air, he explained to an Oslo interviewer: extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism. They are all attractive positions because they lack ambiguity; such dogmatism is always seductive, he added, because of its “total commitment to a position without any qualifications, without any conditions … there is some kind of secret life we lead in which we imagine ourselves changing things, not violently, maybe gracefully, maybe elegantly in a very imaginative way and with the shake of a hand. The song speaks of longing for change, impatience with the way things are, a longing for significance; we deal in the purest burning logic of longing.” Two years later, he referred to the song as a “demented manifesto,” although he also reported that it became so popular in Athens that people were greeting each other in Greek by saying, “First, we take Manhattan,” the other person replying with “Then we take Berlin!”
“Take This Waltz” was an elegant rendition of the Lorca poem originally recorded on Poetas en Nueva York. Expanding the images and adding a stronger, surrealistic element to the original poem, Cohen augmented the verse with music. The poem as song becomes a metacommentary on the deathly tradition it possesses, clarified by the refrain: “This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz. With its very own breath of brandy and Death. Dragging its tail in the sea.” Lorca sought “to get at the dramatic depths of the ballad and set them into action.” The basis for such evocation are the slow movements which “ought to be the plastic algebra of a drama of passion and pain.” Lorca’s phrase “plastic algebra” is pure Cohen, an expression he could have made up. To a Spanish journalist Cohen said that Lorca’s transcendental vision taught him that poetry can be pure and profound, as well as popular.
“Jazz Police,” the most unorthodox song on the album, was Cohen’s response to his band’s effort to introduce augmented fifths and sevenths to their playing. He policed such jazz intrusions, although he admits that he wasn’t sure of the lyric’s meaning and grew to dislike the conceit. But he left it on the album because “it caught the mood of this whole period … this kind of fragmented absurdity.” “I Can’t Forget,” with its limpid language, “started off as a song about the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt. As a metaphor for the journey of the soul from bondage into freedom.” It started that way, “but in the studio I couldn’t handle it and couldn’t sing about a burden being lifted since mine hadn’t.” Originally called “Taken Out of Egypt,” which took months to write, it had to be recast, beginning with the question “What is my life?” “That’s when I started writing that lyric: “I stumbled out of bed / I got ready for the struggle / I smoked a cigarette / And I tightened up my gut.”
“Tower of Song” is the keynote work on I’m Your Man. With it Cohen wanted to “make a definitive statement about this heroic enterprise of the craft” of songwriting. In the early eighties he called the work “Raise My Voice in Song.” His concern was with the aging songwriter, and the “necessity to transcend one’s own failure by manifesting as the singer, as the songwriter.” He had abandoned the song, but one night in Montreal he finished the lyrics and called an engineer and recorded it in one take with a toy synthesizer. Jennifer Warnes added some vocals and Cohen attempted some “repairs,” which was difficult since there were only two tracks. It was intitially felt that the quality was too poor and the musicality too thin. Warnes, however, “really placed it, putting it in the ironic perspective it needed; she was a real collaborator on it more than anything she ever did—and she’s done wonderful things for me but this was the most wonderous thing she ever did for me, this doo-wop kind of perspective; she really illuminated the song with that contribution,” Cohen said.
The revised song contains a classic Cohen opener, both self-reflexive and comic, positioning the singer in a new-found posture: “Well, my friends are gone / and my hair is grey. / I ache in the places / where I used to play. / And I’m crazy for love / but I’m not coming on. / I’m just paying my rent every day / in the Tower of Song.”
When he had written the song and completed the album, Cohen realized for the first time that he was an entertainer: “I never thought I was in showbiz.” Until then, he had held on to the notion of being a writer: “Now I know what I am. I’m not a novelist. I’m not the light of my generation. I’m not the spokesman for a new sensibility. I’m a songwriter living in L.A. and this is my record.”
His own tower of song was the second-story study of his modest Los Angeles home, where he kept a fax machine, an electronic keyboard/synthesizer, and a computer on an oversized, roughly cut wooden table. He quickly adjusted to using a computer: “They say that the Torah was written with black fire on white fire. So I get that feeling from the computer, the bright black against the bright background. It gives a certain theatrical dignity to see it on the screen.” The keyboard/synthesizer allows him to “mock up” his songs with various accompaniments to test their musical possibilities.
Supporting the April release of the single “Ain’t No Cure For Love,” Cohen sent a note to the CBS sales reps that read, “I don’t really know how to do this, but I hear you’ll be working my record, so here’s two dollars.” His joke was prompted by the publication of Fredric Dannen’s Hit Men, exposing the shoddy dealings of the record industry and the importance of payola. Reaction to the album was positive; it was hailed for its accessible sound and incisive lyrics, “a sardonic last call from a ravaged roué.” The month the album was released Cohen began a forty-one concert European tour.
Rehearsals for the tour were grueling and several days spent on perfecting one song was not uncommon. Often Cohen would complain that “it doesn’t sound like music.” Arrangements would change quickly and new approaches would be tried. A backup singer, for example, suggested a funkier version of “First We Take Manhattan,” replacing the Euro-Disco sound Jennifer Warnes used on Famous Blue Raincoat. It worked and Cohen used it. He constantly reminded his singers and musicians that “what you have to go for is honesty, not complication.” By honesty he meant an openness to the music and to oneself that would transcend even a flawless technique.
Reaction to his European performances was strong. Playing in smaller halls meant that the band was in some cities for two or three nights, allowing publicity to build and the people to swarm. Once on a ship leaving Denmark for Sweden, Cohen was besieged by groups of teenage girls screaming for his autograph. He acceded to each request. In Iceland, he was received by the president, who held a reception in his honor. The band included two new vocalists, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. Batalla had performed with the Motels, Cheap Trick, and Ted Nugent; Christensen had a gutsy sound drawn from years of singing with L.A. jazz and rock bands. John Bilezikjian played oud; Bobby Furgo, violin and keyboards; Bobby Metzger, guitars; and Steve Meador, drums. Tom McMorran assisted with keyboards, and Stephen Zirkel with bass and trumpet. Roscoe Beck was the musical director.
In December 1988, Cohen was disturbed by the unexpected death of Roy Orbison, just as his career was reviving with the Traveling Wilburys. A few days later a memorial was held in the lobby of the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. Cohen and Jennifer Warnes attended. Orbison had become the musical signature for Cohen’s 1988 tour. In rehearsal Cohen would tell the band to “make it like Roy Orbison would do it,” which led to an onstage joke, “Orbisize this song.” The musicians had a picture of Orbison pasted into their chart folder.
Cohen’s North American tour included the Théâtre St. Denis in Montreal, where, after his second performance, he met privately with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Afterwards, Cohen told reporters that they discussed “what you have to do to get a good review in this town,” alluding to his mother’s comment concerning his 1971 performance in Montreal when he failed to get a single positive notice.
Cohen’s voice, like Dylan’s, had long been the subject of jokes and imitations. In “Tower of Song” Cohen defused criticism by deadpanning, “I was
born like this, / I had no choice, / I was born with the gift / Of a golden voice.” In concert, cheers and applause greeted his ironic declaration. It was the unmusicality of his voice, which makes his phrasing flat and his ability to shift registers impossible, that led to his becoming a songwriter. “I think if I had one of those good voices, I would have done it completely differently. I probably would have sung the songs I really like rather than be a writer … I just don’t think one would have bothered to write if one could have really lifted one’s voice in song. But that wasn’t my voice. This is my voice.” A new self-confidence, if not happiness, began to seep through his persona of darkness. “I’ve come a long way compared to the kind of trouble I was in when I was younger. Compared to that kind of trouble, this kind of trouble [the difficulty of songwriting] sounds like peace to me … I’m a lot more comfortable with myself than I was a while ago. I’m still writing out of the conflicts and I don’t know if they’ll ever resolve.”
A 1988 BBC film, “Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen,” capitalized on his renewed profile. It combined concert footage with an interview, early film clips, and documentary footage from Hydra. The film lacked a unifying narrative, but it showed a much more relaxed and confident performer than the one seen in the 1972 film “Bird on the Wire.”
Cohen also performed on Austin City Limits, a one-hour concert filmed in Austin, Texas, for PBS television and appeared on David Sanborn’s late-night show in New York where he did a memorable duet with Sonny Rollins. When Rollins began a sensational saxophone solo on “Who By Fire,” Cohen turned his back to the camera to admire the jazz great. Taking advantage of his popularity, CBS/SONY reissued all of Cohen’s albums on CD, making Various Positions widely available for the first time and his earliest work accessible in the new digital format. At the age of fifty-four, Cohen was becoming a rock star.