by Jeff Burger
“It isn’t any good,” he says with a faint smile. “But somebody said it’s as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good one, so I guess it’s kept me in shape doing it. In a way it’s too personal; it treats people close to me in a way that is somehow inaccurate, one-sided.”
A cry of pain rather than a piece of work? He laughs. “Yeah—it doesn’t have that objectivity that I think it should have. I try to be truthful in whatever I do in some kind of way—not so much truthful to the fact as truthful to the quality of the experience. The book was true—but it wasn’t fair.”
His publishers wanted it just the same. “They think they can sell it,” says Cohen.
It hasn’t always been like that. Cohen spent his youth in lonely Montreal hotel rooms, struggling to write books that some people liked but nobody would buy. Eventually he started concentrating on writing songs instead, “to pay my grocery bills.” He performed intermittently around Montreal and then moved to New York.
There he met Judy Collins and sang her some of his songs; she recorded one straight off. That led to a meeting with John Hammond— the legendary A&R man who discovered Dylan and Aretha Franklin— and a contract with Columbia Records.
On the way he managed to be duped out of the rights to “Suzanne” and a couple of other songs. “I didn’t really understand American business practices,” he says charitably, “but I heard someone singing ‘Suzanne’ in Corfu not so long ago and it seemed somehow fitting that I didn’t own it.”
It was around the time of his first album that he met Janis Joplin, an interlude in his life that prompted a song that is one of the highlights of his stage performance, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.” “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / You were talking so brave and so sweet / Giving me head on the unmade bed / While the limousines wait in the street.”
“I was saddened by her death,” he says. “Not because someone dies— that in itself isn’t terrible. But I liked her work so much; she was that good that you feel the body of work she left behind is just too brief.
“There are certain kinds of artists that blaze in a very bright light for a very brief time: the Rimbauds, the Shelleys, Tim Buckley—people like that; and Janis was one of them.
“Then there’s the other kind, like Sartre or Bernard Shaw, who are careful about themselves and what the risks are. You can’t get too safe, but as you get older you learn something about survival. The game is rough from a lot of points of view; because the prizes are big the defeats are big too.
“The life is rigorous, and the invitations to blowing it are numerous and frequent. Me? I’m careful as I can be without it getting too much of a drag. Anyway, I’m too old to die that kind of spectacular death. For me to commit suicide or O.D. would be …”—he pauses for the appropriate word—“ … unbecoming….”
LEONARD LATELY: A LEONARD COHEN INTERVIEW
BILL CONRAD | Fall 1976, interview | May 7, 2012, NoDepression.com
Bill Conrad spent time with Cohen a few months after Mick Brown did. He wrote about the Nashville encounter at the time for Texas’s Buddy magazine, and again for NoDepression.com in 2012. The latter reminiscence follows. —Ed.
The release of Leonard Cohen’s ten-song collection of new compositions, Old Ideas, motivated me to relive an afternoon and evening I shared with him in Nashville, Tennessee.
I was recently listening to k. d. lang’s version of Cohen’s now-classic “Hallelujah,” and thought Leonard must love the irony of this tune’s history. He first released it on his Various Positions album in 1984, after his label advised him it wasn’t worth including. Almost two decades later, it has been recorded by more than 200 singers in multiple languages, and let us not forget its place on soundtracks from Shrek and TV’s Scrubs. It has become the “White Christmas” of dark and moody songs. Even Cohen himself said, “I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it. Some have asked for a moratorium on ‘Hallelujah.’”
Suzanne and Other Confessions
“Civilian life got impossible.” Leonard Cohen, Canada’s answer to Bob Dylan, was announcing in 1976, his return to road shows. His blue folk-songs, contained in the Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate albums, and his experimental dark novel Beautiful Losers, added so much gravity to the ponderous seventies decade.
For fifteen years he sailed between his native Montreal and his adopted escape hatch on the Greek isle of Hydra. When he ventured onto American soil, he enjoyed the hard contrast of life in New York City and the highest point in Los Angeles County, Mount Baldy. On the road, boundaries disappear for Leonard. He said, “It’s not the country, but the hotel room.”
When I met Leonard Cohen in that autumn of ’76, he was lounging atop his queen-size bed in Room 418, enjoying the view of east Nashville from the fourth floor of Roger Miller’s King of the Road Inn. A star-struck, up-and-coming singer named Michael Murphey was also in attendance. The clean-shaven, hair-trimmed-close Mr. Cohen was in Music City for a two-night stand at the cozy Exit-In, a club with fewer than 150 seats. That seventies version of Leonard was fashionably lean and cordially introverted—still juxtaposed with the moment.
While Cohen’s shows and recordings kept him a central figure in Europe, Columbia Records stateside saw him as some sort of rare, sensitive creature who, in spite of his ’67 success with Songs of Leonard Cohen, was a hard sell to the masses. His latest release, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, went gold across the Atlantic, but was hard to find in American shops.
He shouldn’t have been surprised by corporate confusion. Leonard knew he was an odd mix of folk and blues, and blue singers do not sell rock-and-roll numbers. He accepted the media machine as a necessary distraction and agreed to visit with me, a roving journalist for Buddy magazine, a free music news publication out of Dallas, Texas.
When asked about another novel, he confessed his latest attempt was a failure. He had spent the previous two years, mostly on Hydra, a small Greek island, writing a book that in his opinion “wasn’t any good.” How could this be? He assured me, “It’s true. I’m not being coy; as someone observed, it’s just as hard to write a bad novel as a good one.”
Leonard strongly advised aging the written word: “I think Horatio, the Roman poet, said you should put stuff away for nine years.” After considering this time span, he added, “I don’t think it has to be nine, but three or four years I think is a good idea, especially to take it on the road for a couple of years.” This compressed maturation and life among civilians had him ready to “renew neurotic affiliations.”
No stranger to Nashville and its hillbillies, Leonard lived in Franklin, just south of Music City, in ’69-’70. During our time at the King of the Road, he recalled how much he enjoyed the company of his black neighbor, a whiskey-wise elder named Willie York. It was the time of psychedelics and Leonard decided to give Willie some LSD: “So he comes to me the next day, and I said, ‘Willie, what’d you think of that?’ He’s a heavy drinker. He said, ‘Leonard, that stuff makes ya awful nervous.’” Cohen loved recalling that moment in time. He concluded, “That’s all he said, y’know; that’s the only remark he cared to make about it.” Leonard flashed a wry grin.
When it came to politics, Leonard said he voted for candidates who “look good and sound good, and who are least likely to embarrass the country.” He had recently discovered a man with great potential: “I was watching television early on today, and there was one of those founders of the Dining Car Porters and Waiters Union—black guy, around sixty-five. He was talking and he sounded like Moses. It was something. It wasn’t like hokey. It wasn’t that kind of eloquence. It was classical. Obviously, the guy had been brought up on the Bible. I couldn’t even hope to duplicate it. It was the most … I said, ‘That man should be president!’ You know? This guy was serving tables, eighty-five bucks a week!”
On with the show. Cohen’s latest collection of players included a four-piece band, mostly acoustic, and a pair of sirens—slinky showgirls with angel
ic voices. One was brunette, the other blonde. The former exuded worldliness, while her partner came off as the innocent. Both were dressed in matching black. The blonde wore a floor-length, body-hugging dress, and the brunette, a pantsuit with white shirt and necktie. Were these Cohen’s fabled “sisters of mercy,” the two angels who saved him from an Alberta blizzard and inspired his classic ode from the ’67 album? “Oh I hope you run into them / You who have been traveling so long.”
Leonard’s show was a soft-focus reflection of his somber side. Even his song introductions were sweet prose: “This examines betrayal from a point of view,” and “This is a dialogue between you and your perfect lover … a song of unrelenting pessimism.” His tender-cold lament for the late Janis Joplin included her rejection of his advances: “I knew you well in the Chelsea Hotel … You told me again / You prefer handsome men / But for me you’d make an exception.” Cohen’s mastery of the facetious rhyme was woven throughout his melancholy. It was his recurring effort to “kinda wash the place out, change the air.” He mused, “I like a place that serves liquor. You know, there’s something happens to the audience when they’re drinking.” He really wanted to leave ’em laughing, and with lyrics like “You were Marlon Brando / And I was only Steve McQueen / You were that fancy K-Y Jelly / And I was ordinary Vaseline,” he did not fail to please.
Leonard Cohen bowed from the waist—romantic theatrics—and opened his show with “Bird on a Wire,” one of his many dark masterpieces. He told the audience he liked playing clubs because “people can talk to you, praise you, put you down.” The stage became his farthest distance from his island retreat. It’s where “every night is a problem, a challenge, a test just to get through without humiliating yourself.” Cohen loved enduring, “browbeating an audience, subjecting people to all this intensity. I sometimes feel guilty about it, but you’ve got to make a living.”
The Exit-In
With his back to just over a hundred fans who filled Nashville’s Exit-In, Leonard paused for the third time to tune his guitar. A drunken voice blurted from the darkness, “Good enough for folk music!” A few patrons chuckled.
Leonard made a final adjustment, then casually turned to respond, “Yeah, but not good enough for eternity.” He smiled his sardonic best and the adoring crowd filled the small room with laughter. Leonard was back, and we lucky few were there with him.
He left me with a final memory of life in Franklin and why he left Tennessee: “The girl I was with was what destroyed it, because she developed this obsession with Krystal burgers. I mean, it got to be a serious problem. She refused to cook, so we’d have to go in every day (twenty miles) to eat cheeseburgers, and it just destroyed the whole isolation.” Before speaking her name, he silently reflected in nostalgic warmth. “Suzanne.”
“ … takes you down to a place by a river / She feeds you tea and oranges / That come all the way from China.”
THE OBSCURE CASE OF LEONARD COHEN AND THE MYSTERIOUS MR. M.
BRUCE POLLOCK | Late 1976, interview | February 1977, After Dark (US)
Bruce Pollock has interviewed a lot of musicians, but he told me that his meeting with Leonard Cohen still ranks among his strangest such encounters. “Aside from Cohen,” Pollock said, “the dramatic focal point was the previous interviewer, from Creem magazine, who refused to leave Cohen’s apartment when I arrived, and who insisted on continuing his conversation with Cohen during my interview. And who then even refused to leave with me when both of our interviews were done.
“Perhaps due to some innate politeness—or dread fear—Cohen failed to acknowledge the inappropriate behavior of this third party,” Pollock added. “Perhaps due to the sheer audacity of the situation—or dread fear—I put up with the intrusions of this increasingly drunken oddball. But the incident itself offered an eerie view of Cohen’s ability to connect with his fans in personal relationships that, in Cohen’s own words, always ‘ended badly.’ I often wonder whether I was in on the start of a beautiful friendship between Cohen and this deluded intruder—or whether Cohen eventually had to call the cops on him. Or at least call his publicist.” —Ed.
As I hustled up Sixth Avenue toward the Algonquin Hotel for an interview with Columbia recording artist Leonard Cohen, writer of such heavyweight literary pop songs as “Suzanne,” “Bird on a Wire,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” I anticipated an epic conversation, a gargantuan verbal feast, an orgy of philosophical anecdote and analogy. After all, Cohen was far from being merely another songwriter; he was a published poet when he was fifteen, is a novelist twice over (The Favorite Game, Beautiful Losers), and I was about to be a published author myself. Cohen had read my book; I had read both of his. We’d be two authors talking shop. Before the afternoon was through, I was sure I’d have him begging me to send him one (if not all seven) of my unpublished novels. Perhaps a correspondence would result—the famous Cohen-Pollock letters, later to be collected in an expensive, coffee-table edition.
When I entered Cohen’s room, I was rather surprised to find another interviewer in the process of finishing up his visit. How were Cohen and I to achieve any literary epiphanies with this eavesdropper, obviously a rock-and-roll degenerate, sitting on the couch drinking wine? Cohen sat in a chair at a table in the far corner, wearing the same gray pants and black shirt he’d worn during his concert the night before.
“If you’d rather be alone, M— will leave,” Cohen said as I set up my tape recorder on the table.
“He can stay,” I said, then after a pregnant pause, “another five minutes.”
That settled, I commenced questioning Cohen about his first novel. How did he react to its publication and subsequent commercial failure? As he was fashioning a response, I began preparing myself to tell him about my first novel—still unpublished—my own expectations and fantasies. However, before I could verbalize them, he spoke.
“My training as a writer was not calculated to inflame the appetites,” he said with ease. “In Montreal in the fifties, when I began to write, people didn’t have the notion of superstars. The same prizes weren’t in the air as there are today, so one had a kind of modest view of what a writing career was.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. M—, still on the couch, showed no signs of leaving. Steadily swallowing wine, he ogled us with a slight smile with which he seemed to be transmitting signals to Cohen. “I just hope this doesn’t get too boring for you,” I told him. “I mean, for all I know, I may be asking him the same questions you did.” Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be the case. I’d be asking him insightful, prose-writer questions. Meaty stuff.
M— giggled. “Oh no,” he slurred, “we didn’t have that kind of interview. We were on a totally different wavelength.”
Rattled, I immediately quoted from an obscure article Cohen had written eight years ago in an obscure publication called Books, about his first performance onstage as a singer and the beauty of his utter failure. Totally different wavelength, huh? I’d show the both of them wavelengths! In the light of his career since then, would he still say it was better to fail than succeed? I asked adroitly.
This was such an arcane reference that M— was awed back into silence, and Cohen himself was hard-pressed to recall it. However, when he did, I could see he was impressed. His answer came in the form of an allegory.
“A man visits a master who’s living in a very pitiful terrain and the man says, ‘How can you survive here?’ The master says, ‘If you think it’s bad now, you should see what it’s like in summer.’ ‘What happens in summer?’ asks the man. The master says, ‘In the summer I throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.’ ‘Isn’t it worse then?’ says the man. ‘No,’ says the master, ‘pain cannot reach you there.’
“That’s really the way things are,” Cohen continued after acknowledging the chuckles from M—. “If you throw yourself into a kind of effort, it’s not better or worse. Like a chameleon, you take the color of the experience if it’s intense enough, and the pain cannot reach you there.
“Performing is definitely the boiling oil. You can’t really develop an intellectual perspective on it—I mean, you’re in it. You realize the next moment could bring total humiliation—or you could actually be lifted up into the emotion that began the song. But you’re already in the boiling oil by the time you’ve gotten that far.”
At this point M— burst in and asked Cohen if a character in Beautiful Losers was a real person. “Composite,” Cohen answered. Then, before I could regain my balance, M— recited an entire paragraph from page 143 of the book—to Cohen’s obvious delight. I too had read the book but had not thought to memorize it. Score one for M—. Retaliating, I brought up a moment from his concert, when he delivered a beautifully worded monologue about searching for the women who inspired “Sisters of Mercy.” I asked him if he was, like the true romantic he set himself up to be, haunted by the past.
He seemed interested in the topic.
“I think everybody is involved in a kind of Count of Monte Cristo feeling. You somehow want the past to be vindicated. You want to evoke figures of the past. My own experience has been that almost everything you want happens. I meet people out of the past all the time. Not only that, I meet people that I wanted to create. It’s like Nancy…” Cohen went on, referring to one of his songs, caught up in the idea. “The line is ‘now you look around, you see her everywhere …’ This is just my own creation, but obviously there’s a collective appetite for a certain kind of individual; that individual’s created and you feel you had a certain tiny part in that creation.”
Now that was a serious concept, something only two fiction writers could really get to the bottom of. But just as I was about to sink my teeth into it, M— hurled himself once again into the flow. “Does that song have anything to do with Marilyn Monroe?”