Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  “Is performing a natural extension of writing for you?”

  “In a sense it’s natural, but like every other thing that we call natural it takes a lot of work and practice.”

  “But what I mean is,” I rephrased, “it’s not a separate category of action?”

  “No, it has the same terrors and pitfalls and possibilities for humiliation. For me, personally, it’s a kind of dangerous work, but so is writing if you’re really going to lay your life out.”

  “But performing has a more immediate danger?”

  “Yeah, performing. I mean you can really be humiliated. There are other rewards and prizes that go with it—you can come out with a sense of glory, girls might fall in love with you, they might be paying you very well. All the possibilities of corruption and material gain and self-congratulation are present—but also at the same time there is this continual threat and presence of your own disgrace.”

  “You felt quite able to project the very personal, interior vision of your songs in front of 130,000 people?”

  “When you’re singing for that many people,” Cohen explained, “it becomes private again.

  “This last concert I gave in Paris, the stage was high, like the side of a building, and the audience was way, way, way down there, so you’re really only dealing with the microphone. They’re at an event, they’re outside, the wind is howling; it’s an event on a different order and you take your place in the moment.

  “But an audience of two or three or four thousand is the real test, because you can really do all the wrong things. You can play to the crowd, you can play for laughs, you can play for self-pity, you can play for heroic aspect; there are so many ways of selling out in front of an audience. There’s no such thing as a casual performance; one has an exact notion of what one is going to do out there.”

  “Forgive me for asking”—it may have seemed a significant question made banal, but it needed an answer—“what are you trying to achieve in your songs? What is your ambition?”

  “To create a vapor and a mist,” Cohen responded, “to make oneself attractive, to master it, to keep busy and avoid the poolroom and try to get good at what you’re doing. Really, it’s all an alibi for something nobody’s ever been able to talk about.

  “Mostly my idea of a song is, when you feel like singing and this is your song. It’s not what songs should be, not choosing; this is the song you make because it’s the only one you can make, this is the one that is yours. The fact is that you feel like singing, and this is the song that you know.”

  “As a rule,” I asked, “does the music come first or the words?”

  “Well,” he said, “most of the time you’re just scraping the bottom of the barrel to find any kind of voice at all. It could be a few words, a tone of voice, two chords together—it’s a ragpicker’s trade as I practice it; I don’t stand on the mountain and receive tablets.”

  Leonard Cohen, when I met him in his lawyer’s office, was unsure of his American audience, wondering whether they still existed. He was about to do three nights, six shows, at the Bottom Line in New York. “I’ll be interested in seeing what happens in America. I haven’t played any concerts here really for four years. You can completely die out …”

  The third night at the Bottom Line was a cold, wet, nasty New York City day. I arrived shortly before the show was to start, wondering whether anyone would be there. It was standing room only. There was a line of people a city block long, huddling against the side of the building, fooling with broken umbrellas, waiting for a chance to buy tickets to get into the second show.

  The crowd inside was terrific. So was Leonard and his group of musicians. The new stuff, arranged by Leonard’s new producer and piano player (“John Lissauer is fantastic. People are going to know about him way beyond the contribution he makes to my scene”), is the best stuff musically that Cohen has ever done. Lyrically, it doesn’t measure up to the astonishing, penetrating cleverness and word-trickiness of Cohen’s earliest songs, but it appeals to me on a different level—the maturity of the vision, the appropriateness of the imagery and irony for our newly nonapocalyptic (but still struggle-filled) lives.

  My favorite song on the new album, and they all run through my head, is “I Tried to Leave You,” a disarmingly simply love song, chanson, that cuts to the heart of Cohen’s dilemma: how to be a mature human male, with wife and children, and still stay alive. He pretends at irony: “Goodnight my darling. I hope you’re satisfied,” he sings with a twist in his voice.

  But the twist is that he really means it. He does so hope. “The years go by. You lose your pride. The baby’s crying so you do not go outside.” The melody is perfect. The empathy of the song bites the heart. The singer never drops either his own dignity or his lady’s, not for the slightest moment. The pain and beauty of Cohen’s vision is the perfect rejoinder to the pain and ugliness of Joseph Heller’s portrait of the married North American career man. God bless our romantics; they give us strength to go on.

  Leonard Cohen, reached after many complications (all lines to Mexico were busy and something about his lady taking the car keys) by phone in Acapulco, was very pleased and encouraged by the enthusiastic reception he got at the Bottom Line and at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. He was with his family, in a cottage outside the city, writing, relaxing, getting ready for several months of American concerts. At forty, he is the first of the rock generation of songwriters to reach maturity with his consciousness and courage and sense of humor intact.

  COHEN CLIP

  On Being a “Minor” Writer

  “I consider myself a minor writer. That’s not just an exercise in modesty, because I love the minor writers, like Robert Herrick. I’m not that kind of writer like Solzhenitsyn, a writer who has a great, great vision. I have a small corner. And I feel more like an inhabitant of that corner than any other kind of description, poet or writer or lyricist.”

  —from “Cohen Down the Road,” by Karl Dallas, Melody Maker (UK), May 22, 1976

  SUFFERING FOR FAN AND PROFIT: THE RETURN OF LEONARD COHEN

  MICK BROWN | May 24, 1976, interview | July 3, 1976, Sounds (UK)

  In 1976, as in 1975, Cohen released no new material. He did, however, find time for a two-and-a-half-month, fifty-five-gig European tour. It was during this concert series that he met backstage after a show in Bristol, England, with journalist Mick Brown. “He was very cordial, gentlemanly, elegant,” Brown told me. “The still, poised center of everything that was going on around him. I liked him.” —Ed.

  The poster outside the Colston Hall [in] Bristol announced the appearance that evening of “The Poet of Rock and Roll.”

  Inside, a girl takes photographs of the road crew setting up equipment onstage—for an art project, she explains. She really wanted to photograph the concert, so she’d scrimped, saved, begged, and borrowed enough to buy a couple of tickets. Now she can’t make it on account of the revision she has to do for tomorrow’s exams. She’d sold the tickets to friends in a matter of hours. She’s all of sixteen years old.

  Leonard Cohen is clearly bemused by it all. He sits back in his dressing room, issues a slight smile, and says isn’t it amazing that some of these people were only eight years old when he wrote his first song? Cohen is forty-one.

  Onstage, illuminated by the harsh glare of a single spotlight dividing his face into patches of darkness and light, he looks a curious cross between Lenny Bruce and an Old Testament prophet—the protruding, hawkish nose, the dark eyes, lines etched into his face and forehead.

  Backstage he looks strangely vulnerable; a thin, slight figure dressed in pressed slacks and a brown leather jacket, a cigarette burning between his fingers. One has heard that Cohen can be reserved to the point of being difficult. In fact he’s extraordinarily charming, polite, approachable.

  It is a rule of the road that he never gives interviews or holds audience before a performance, using those couple of hours before going onstage to summon up reserves of energy a
nd concentration for the task at hand.

  After a performance he will talk, sign photographs and scraps of paper, receive gifts, kisses, handshakes. Gladly. He says he cherishes the attentions of his audience.

  In Montreal he lives in an immigrant-worker neighborhood where he’s known only as a guy who has two kids and a small house and who never seems to be around very much.

  In the small village in Greece where he also spends his “sitting-down time” the people are similarly unconcerned with who he is or what he does. A little bit of attention on the road is, well, reassuring.

  Outside his dressing room young matrons with glasses and wistful expressions hover in droves, thrusting programs at the road manager who brings them back signed. In the inner sanctum, Cohen holds court with a tribunal from a local college newspaper, hunched in a chair wreathed in cigarette smoke, ringed by earnest, inquiring faces; a scatter of papers on the floor—Cohen’s poems, which one of his inquisitors has painstakingly copied by hand.

  “What I’d really like to know is why your poetry is so stark, so incredibly blunt—a poem like, for instance …” Cohen takes the proffered sheet, glances at the writing. “Yeah—I like that poem…. If it didn’t have the word ‘cunt’ in it I’d probably read it out loud onstage. But I’m not ready to say that word well enough yet. There are some things that are designed to rest on the page and not be spoken…”

  “Do you use the same technique then for writing songs and poetry?”

  “Yeah—just one word at a time…”

  “To what extent then should poetry have relevance throughout time, or do you think it should sum up an episode, a moment, and preserve that on paper for forever?”

  Cohen blinks at his questioner through the smoke-haze. “I don’t know: forever is a long time …”

  Leonard Cohen hasn’t come back. He’s never been away. While other performers tend to move, or even stand still, in a blaze of publicity, Cohen just keeps on toiling away quietly in what he calls his little corner—writing songs, sometimes; poems, sometimes; books, sometimes—all at his own pace.

  Traveling … He’s always been peripatetic—trace his career from Montreal to New York to Nashville to Greece—but more so in the last six or seven years, “since I could afford the airfares.” He was in Ethiopia just before the revolution: “I just get to a place, check into a hotel, and hit the streets.” The Wandering Jew.

  “But to tell you the truth I’m getting a little tired of all that now. A tour’ll cure that for you for a while.” Not that he tours often; he says he needs the nourishment of a private life more than anything touring can give him. But, for whatever reasons, this year he’s been back on the road— a brief round of club dates in the southern American states, and now Europe, where he seems to enjoy a larger and more loyal following than anywhere else.

  So far it’s been sold-out houses all the way, and Bristol is no exception—a lot of older faces in the audience, people for whom Songs from a Room was no doubt a soundtrack for sorrowful bedsit dramas all those years ago; a surprisingly large number of younger people who can’t have been aware of Cohen first or second time around, but who’ve tuned into that finely honed angst somewhere along the way; and a man in elfin boots, long hair, and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence that punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out, “God bless you, Leonard” to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience that, in short, substantiates the tag “The Poet” more than it does the description “Of Rock and Roll …”

  The tour publicist says it’s been like this everywhere Cohen has played, and it’ll no doubt be the same tomorrow night when he plays the [Royal] Albert Hall, even though he’s sure to get negative reviews.

  This anticipation of the critical thumbs-down seems strange at first, but thinking about it Cohen has always been more popular with the paying customer than with the press, who perhaps find the disarming frankness and pessimism of his lyrics and the dark, confidential monotone of his voice too much of an invitation for cynicism to turn down. Actually, says his publicist, it’s more of an inverted snobbery.

  The first time Leonard played London the nationals loved him; it’s since he became an institution that they changed their minds. And sure enough, the reviews of the Albert Hall concert are marked by a sort of reserve, dwelling on the despairing nature of Cohen’s lyrics and the fact that much of his material was familiar from his albums, not to say previous visits.

  Sure enough, it was, but familiarity is an intrinsic part of Cohen’s appeal, and anyway he is hardly the most prolific writer of songs.

  His last album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, appeared almost two years ago, and free as he is from the normally pressurizing demands of a one-or-two-album-a-year record contract he tends to work at his own pace, which he admits is slow.

  “Songs seem to take me a long time,” he says. “I don’t know why; they’re not especially excellent for taking so long. I don’t have any sense of urgency about any of my writing actually. I don’t think mankind will be damaged if I don’t put out a new album or a new book.”

  Nonetheless, he has put down five or six tracks for a new album, one of which, “Do I Have to Dance All Night,” was hurriedly recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich for release as a single. [Though frequently performed in concert and released in a concert version as a single in 1976, this song has never appeared on a Cohen album. —Ed.] Cohen says it would be “amusing” to have a hit with it, and the song gets two airings at Bristol—once to close the first half of the show and again during one of the innumerable encores—to help make it happen.

  It’s unusually lively for a Cohen song, but it fits the mood of his backing band, who seem to relish the opportunity to rock out—a guitar and pedal-steel player, drums, bass, a keyboards player with a taste for synthesizer swirls, and two strong girl singers who sound mournfully ethereal in all the right places, and who also work slick Lambert/Hendricks/Ross type scat arrangement behind Leonard on “I Tried to Leave You.”

  Generally, there is not much levity to be found in a Cohen performance, and what there is comes not so much from his songs as his wry, self-mocking introductions and the bittersweet poems, which he reads over a loose, jazz-tinged instrumental backing.

  But levity is not what Cohen’s audience comes for. His concerts tend toward the atmosphere of a public confessional, a knowing, world-weary perambulation around the more painful areas of the human psyche.

  Cohen is in the grand tradition of Jewish writers who wear their suffering on their sleeve. Maybe the English, generally tight-assed about their hang-ups, like living it vicariously.

  There is certainly a reassurance of sorts to be found in listening to someone who can so clearly and painstakingly articulate the emotional crises we all go through at some time or another. If anybody’s going to make your heart bleed for mankind in general, and for himself in particular, it’s Leonard Cohen. But I for one am happy to thank him for it—at least some of the time.

  Cohen agrees that his is very much a relating audience, often as prepared to share their confidence with him as he is with them. “There are some people who come to me for some illumination on their problems,” he says. “I guess they feel I’m writing about some of the things they themselves are going through. But I don’t usually have much help to give— there isn’t much you can say to someone in the midst of their own crises.”

  Cohen, one senses, has enough trouble with his own. Not that his personal life is perpetually in shreds. Cohen gives every impression of being quite contented with—or at the very least philosophically resigned to—whatever life has brought his way.

  He lives simply enough with his family; he says that because he didn’t taste success until he was in his thirties he was already too set in his ways to develop expensive tastes. His friends are the guys he grew up with on the same street in Montreal. He smiles more often than you’d expect and seldom frowns.

  You ge
t the feeling Cohen has to do more than just wake up in the morning to find all that pathos that permeates his work, and that plumbing the more despondent depths of his soul is a struggle. Some people may say he struggles too hard and that his visions are intimate almost to the point of indecency.

  Cohen says he abides by only one maxim in his writing: to always honor the difference between just a cry and a piece of work. “A cry of pain in itself is just that,” he says. “It can affect you or you can turn away from it. But a piece of work that treats the experience that produced the cry of pain is a different matter altogether. The cry is transformed, alchemized, by the work by a certain objectivity, which doesn’t surrender the emotion but gives it form. That’s the difference between life and art.”

  His books are extensions of the same vision—the gospel of objective self-revelation, autobiographical “because I can only treat the things I know—and I just know a small corner. There are writers who are great visionaries, who can depict huge movements—things like that. They’re the great writers. I’m just the other kind.”

  He supposes his writing is therapeutic in the way that any work is. “I feel better when I’m working than when I’m not, but I feel both things—a need to write and a need to quit. The need to write is greater—off and on. Sometimes you get tired of the whole thing, think you’ll get an honest job. Sometimes you know you’re just dealing with the pipes and you think you’d like to get out of the basement. But you recognize your limitations and try to work within them …”

  He is a perfectionist—his own harshest critic. His first novel, The Favorite Game, went through four drafts before publication. He’s spent the last two years working on another novel, but withdrew it from his publishers at the last moment. [This reference is apparently to an attempted third novel. Cohen had already followed The Favorite Game with Beautiful Losers, his second novel, ten years before this interview. —Ed.]