by Jeff Burger
A refugee from the men’s garment industry (he pushed clothes racks for a time), he has arrived at thirty-six years of age. He is tastefully dressed in conservatively flared tan pants, black shirt, and bush jacket, but he carefully denies affluence by keeping himself particularly emaciated. He firmly believes that women are gaining control of the world, and that it is just. He empathizes, “Women are really strong. You notice how strong they are? Well, let them take over. Let us be what we’re supposed to be— gossips, musicians, wrestlers. The premise being, there can be no free men unless there are free women.”
His stories, poems, and songs are all quite personal, written to and about himself and the lifetimes he has drifted through. Sometimes nakedly, but just as often humorously, he looks down from the cross and decides that crucifixion may as well be holy. He answers cautiously, but once begun, his conversation glides easily from the writing of his books to the writing of his songs. “As I’ve said before, just because the lines don’t come to the end of the page doesn’t necessarily qualify it as poetry. Just because they do doesn’t make it prose. Oh, I’m continually blackening pages …
“I’ve always played and sung. Ever since I was fifteen. I was in a barn dance group called the Buckskin Boys when I was about eighteen … seventeen. It was just at a certain moment that I felt that songs of a certain quality came to me that somehow demanded … or somehow engage a larger audience. Like when you write a good song, you feel like you can sing it to other people. When you write other songs that are not so good you just sing them to yourself. I don’t know … I guess greed had something to do with it.
“And I forget, a lot had to do with poverty. I was writing books [two novels and four volumes of poetry] and they were being very well received … and that sort of thing, but I found it was very difficult to pay my grocery bill. I said, like it’s really happening. I’m starving. I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but like … I’m really starving. So then I started bringing some songs together. And it really changed my whole scene.”
Bob Johnston, friend, producer, and keyboards, and Ron Cornelius, guitar and moustache for the Army, wandered in to tell of the arrival of the limousines. I asked about the picture on the jacket of his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen.
“The picture on the back is a Mexican religious picture called ‘Anima Sola,’ the lonely spirit or the lonely soul. It is the triumph of the spirit over matter. The spirit being that beautiful woman breaking out of the chains and the fire and prison.
“When the record came out … there was some difficulty between the producer [John Simon] and myself. I don’t mean there was any malice. It was really like a misunderstanding. And I wasn’t well enough versed in the whole recording procedure to be able to translate the ideas I had to him. So that he, naturally, took over and filled in the vacuum that was caused by my own ignorance and incompetence…. I like [the record] now. I think a lot of people have listened to it.
“The second one [Songs from a Room] was largely unloved as I can see it … from people’s reactions. It was very bleak and wiped out. The voice in it has much despair and pain in the sound of the thing. And I think it’s an accurate reflection of where the singer was … at the time. Too accurate for most people’s taste. But as I believe that a general wipe-out is imminent and that many people will be undergoing the same kind of breakdown that the singer underwent, the record will become more meaningful as more people crack up.
“The third one [just released] is the way out. It is a return … or maybe not even a return—a claim, another kind of strength …”
Isn’t that a kind of heavy responsibility? Aren’t you making a claim to be some sort of guide or prophet? It seems that by releasing records you are making that sort of claim.
“Very true, very true,” he said. “Look, I think the times are tough … these are hard times. I don’t want in any way to set myself up as Timothy Leary or Abbie Hoffman. I’m not one of those guys. I have my feelings about how to move myself into areas that are not completely bordered with pain. And I’ve tried to lay out my chart as carefully as I can. I have come through something. I don’t want to boast about it. I don’t even want to talk about it. Look … the songs are inspired. I don’t pretend to be a guide. I do pretend to be an instrument for certain kinds of information at certain moments. Not all moments, and it has nothing to do with me as a guy. I may be a perfect scoundrel…. As a matter of fact, I am … just like the guy on the scene. But there are moments when I am the instrument for certain kinds of information.”
In the Canadian Film Board movie, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen [A 1965 documentary. —Ed.] you wrote something on the wall while you were sitting in the bathtub.
“‘Caveat emptor,’ or buyer beware. I think it’s good advice. Especially these days. Not specifically from me, but … I let anybody judge me by the severest terms they choose … I simply think that on both sides of the underground railway there is a lot of occasion to exercise our skepticism.”
As Cohen speaks it becomes readily apparent that meeting people is only one reason for the tour. Another, more important reason is that for him “tours are like bullfighting. They are a test of character every night.” And that, as he says, “is something I am interested in examining.”
One purposely unpublicized aspect of the current US-Canada tour has been the stops at various mental hospitals. Cohen has initiated these concerts, he insists, not from any sense of charity but because he enjoys them. There is none of that “sense of work, of showbiz, of turning people on.” He does it because the people there are really in tune to the songs. “Those people are in the same landscape as the songs come out of. I feel that they understand them.”
In his way, Cohen has explored many terrains, physical and psychic. Success as a songwriter and performer has allowed him to wander to many places: from Montreal, his home, to Cuba, Hydra, Paris, Nashville—and back to Montreal. He left Greece, he says, because “I was ready to leave. Whether the regime changed or not. As a matter of fact, Greece is a very peaceful place to be in now.”
Carrying visions of the Spanish Civil War in his head, he went to Cuba to defend Havana during the Bay of Pigs. Slowly he came to realize that he “was exactly the kind of enemy the Fidelistos were describing: bourgeois, individualistic, a self-indulgent poet.” He began hanging out with people who were out of work and on no side, “procurers, pushers, whores, and all-night-movie operators.” Amid the Chinese and Czechoslovakian technicians, he found himself the only tourist in Havana.
In Paris during the O.A.S. riots and in Montreal during the so-called “occupation of the city” he felt the same stirrings. He is bothered by the fact that what he reads in other parts of the world about events he’s seen usually has “very little correspondence with the actual ambiance of the place. None of those reports correspond at all to the reality that I perceive.”
The Berkeley Community Theater was very nearly packed when Cohen came onstage fifteen minutes late. The audience was young but mixed. Streeties mingled with Cal frat men and their pin-mates. Only occasionally were they interrupted by a well-experienced face. He started “Suzanne,” but stopped and walked offstage accompanied by much good-natured applause. The audience was his before he came to the theater. Smiling like an expectant mother, Cohen, the self-proclaimed arch-villain, returned to invite those in the back of the hall to fill up the empty seats and space in front of the stage. Naturally enough, very little encouragement was necessary. A large number of people scrambled forward. He called for the house lights. “We should all be able to see one another.”
He began again with “The Stranger Song.” His voice was surprisingly well defined and strong. After another song the Army appeared. Two more guitars, bass, keyboards, and two female voices, Elton Fowler, Susan Musmann, and, that night, Michelle Hopper, made up the rest of the group. They all started into “Bird on the Wire.”
The associ
ation of Leonard Cohen with the Army was fortuitously arranged through the good offices of Bob Johnston. They provide just the right musical superstructure for his songs. Expertly but not overpoweringly they give his ideas a range and versatility his previous records have lacked. After the concert they would go back to Nashville with him to lay down the last track for the new album. If tonight’s concert is a proper indication, several tracks will have a definite country sound.
Meanwhile, having found less space than bodies to fill it, the crowd began settling in the aisles. Aisles-sitting, though—as everyone knows— is illegal. An announcement was necessary. “I’ve had some crucial news from the authorities,” he began facetiously, then broke into a spontaneous song:
It’s forbidden to sit in the aisles / As for me I couldn’t give a damn / I don’t care where you sit / I don’t care where you stand, either / Or recline in any position you wish / Nonetheless, I feel it is my civic duty / To tell you to get out of the aisles immediately / So come up on the stage instead / And they came up on the stage / And they won’t go back again / And they came up on my stage / And they won’t go back no more / Oh, I promise to do anything / But they won’t go back no more / No, they won’t go back anymore.
And, clapping, laughing, and singing, the audience once again moved forward. The Army was engulfed. Only Cohen stood out as if people were afraid to get too close. A few murmurs of discontent were heard from the expensive seats, but they were to no avail. Not only was the stage filled, but the aisles remained jammed.
Another announcement of some seriousness was imperative: “It is with no regret that I bear the final tidings in this sordid drama…. They say we’ve got just one more song….If the aisles aren’t cleared by then the concert will end.” Someone behind Cohen shouted, “Make it a long one.” He replied, “I don’t think they’ll be taken in by our cunning. In a while they’ll kill the power and then start on the rest of us…. I don’t care what happens myself because I feel really good…. I can’t concern myself with those details. I’m not in the business of clearing away people.”
As the song began, something truly remarkable happened. Hesitantly, a few people began to filter back to their original seats. Appreciative applause from the seat-bound majority led even more people to reconsider the moral implications of being in the way. A general retreat commenced. And at that very moment, the police, who allegedly had been grouping for action, relented by giving permission for people to sit in the aisles. Cheers filled the house. Leonard Cohen was still grinning when he left the stage for intermission.
Intermission? He and the Army stepped into the wings, looked at one another, and wordlessly returned to the stage. “That was intermission. This is so good, why stop now?” Although the concert was billed as an evening of songs and poetry, only two short poems were recited. Cohen sang several new numbers confidently. He was obviously pleased and his pleasure was returned by the audience.
The band couldn’t leave without an encore. Tired, but game, Cohen returned to sing “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” He explained that he wasn’t sure if he could remember the song. Nancy’s spirit was clear enough, but they hadn’t done it in a long time. For help he invoked her memory by telling her story. They knew one another in Canada, long years ago. In 1961. Before there was a Woodstock Nation or hip newspapers. When to be strange was to be on your own. Nancy’s father was an important judge, but she lived near the street. Her friends told her she was free. “She slept with everyone. Everyone. She had a child, but it was taken away. So she shot herself in the bathroom.”
After that, the crowd wanted still more. But Cohen would only come back to bow. The concert was over. Backstage, road manager Bill Donovan searched everywhere for Cohen’s already missing guitar. Leonard greeted some familiar faces and some he couldn’t remember. Gracefully he edged from person to person toward the exit. Clumps of people stood around speaking low with much affirmative nodding of the head. The guitar was found to have been stuck in the wrong case.
Back at the hotel, exhausted, champagned, and groupied after (some intellectually, some in the usual way), Leonard Cohen sank wearily into the sofa. A bottle circulated. “Nancy was with us. Without her we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.”
He slipped off his boots. People began arriving for a party. Partly from fatigue, partly from triumph, he spoke freely of the concert and bigger things. “I like that kind of situation where the public is involved. I happen to like it when things are questioned. When the very basis of the community is questioned. I enjoy those moments.”
The cheerful détente he had achieved between the crowd and the police reinforced something he had said earlier. “I believe there is a lot of goodwill in society and in men … and it’s just a matter of where you cast your energy. You can in some way place yourself at the disposal of the good will that does exist … or you can say there is no goodwill in society and what we must do is completely destroy the thing. I believe that in the most corrupt and reactionary circles there is goodwill. I believe that men are mutable and that things can change … It’s a matter of how we want things to change.”
More people arrived. Old friends, Ron Cornelius’s relatives, and strangers hoping for a chance to talk to Cohen. Despite his exhaustion, Cohen was ready for them. “Man, you know what is best about having a good crowd and giving them everything you’ve got? The incoherence afterwards. That’s what … Hey, where are the fourteen-year-old girls? This is California, isn’t it? Where are the fourteen-year-old girls?”
COHEN CLIP
On the Sources for His Songs
“My songs have come to me. I’ve had to scrape them out of my heart. They come in pieces at a time and in showers and fragments and if I can put them together into a song and I have something at the end of the excavation I’m just grateful for having it. It tells me where I am and where I’ve been. I can’t predispose the song to any situation or anything in the political realm, but I live in the political realm and I’m aware of what is going down and my songs come out of that awareness of ignorance. A lot of my songs come out of ignorance.”
—from “Complexities and Mr. Cohen,” by Billy
Walker, Sounds (UK), March 4, 1972
COHEN CLIP
On His Voice
“My voice just happens to be monotonous [and] I’m somewhat whiney, so they are called sad songs. But you could sing them joyfully too. It’s a completely biological accident that my songs sound melancholy when I sing them.”
—from “Behind the Enigma,” by Tony Wilson,
New Musical Express (UK), March 25, 1972
FAMOUS LAST WORDS FROM LEONARD COHEN (THE POET’S FINAL INTERVIEW, HE HOPES)
PAUL SALTZMAN | June 1972, Maclean’s (Canada)
About a year and a half after he talked with Hafferkamp, Cohen spoke in Toronto and Nashville with Paul Saltzman. Saying “I’m just reeling, man,” the singer indicated that his upcoming concert tour might be his last—and that this interview might be his last as well. He would make similar comments some months later to British journalist Roy Hollingworth (see page 40).
Saltzman, who remains a fan today, is obviously glad that the singer changed his mind. “Meeting Leonard Cohen began with my producing four of his concerts in the early 1970s,” he told me. “Taking Leonard on tour was a great honor for me as I’d read his poems and his novel Beautiful Losers, and was deeply impacted by them as a young man. Spending time only deepened how he influenced me: to be more circumspect, deeper, more conscious.” —Ed.
Last fall I’d heard from a friend that Leonard was passing through Toronto. Which is generally the way people who know Leonard hear about him. A friend will whisper to another: “Leonard’s in town y’know” or “Did you hear Leonard was in town last week?” and, as often as not, by the time you’d hear about it Leonard Cohen would be far away.
This time the rumor’s true, he’s still in town, and we meet in an elegant French restaurant where he and a writer friend are joyously immersed
in a rare seafood celebration. When I arrive they have just had their way with wonderfully rich dishes of oysters and clams and shrimps and are elated by the discovery of a lobster pie on the dessert menu. Leonard looks healthier than ever. There was a time when he could describe himself as “a fat, slobby kid of twenty-five” but he is thirty-seven now and in fine shape, having discovered yoga, meditation, fasting, and the general effects of eating with consideration for the body.
He was here this time because the University of Toronto had just bought his papers and he was spending each day sifting through the material to see what kind of man he’d been in the early days. He was about to hit the road again, he said, to leave for Winnipeg to pick up his Toyota jeep and drive to the mountains near Los Angeles and spend a month in a Japanese monastery.
After that he’s heading for Nashville, he adds, to rehearse with a new band for a concert tour of Europe. He’s obliged to deliver two more albums to Columbia Records and has decided the best way to honor the contract is with two live albums produced on tour. I tell him that I’m trying to write about him and could I come down to see him. He pauses, peers over the lobster pie, and says, “OK, why not?” So, it’s arranged. We’ll get in touch and I’ll go down to Nashville during the rehearsals.
I first met Leonard Cohen just before Christmas in 1970. He was doing a concert tour in the United States and I’d been asked to produce the four concerts here: Massey Hall in Toronto, Carleton University in Ottawa, Place des Arts in Montreal, and a free concert in a Montreal mental hospital. Leonard likes to play to mental patients, I was told; he admires the honesty of the audience. “If they don’t like you they just get up and leave.” By this time I was already haunted by him. Three years ago, I’d been touched, like so many others, by his music.