Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  “No,” said Cohen, “it was about a real Nancy.”

  By the time they’d finished discussing Marilyn Monroe, my momentum had been lost. Although it hadn’t been in my original game plan, I pulled a surprise by asking Cohen about longevity in songwriters, why so few lasted past adolescence.

  “I think there are a number of things that bear on that,” said Cohen, fielding the hot shot and throwing me out by a good two feet. “You can burn yourself out, for one. The late teens and twenties are generally the lyric phase of a writer’s career. If you achieve enough fame and women and money during that period, you quit, because that’s generally the motivation. I didn’t get enough money or women or fame for me to quit. I don’t have enough yet, so I’ve got to keep on playing.” He laughed. “I know it’s rather unbecoming at forty to keep it all going, but I have to do it.”

  I couldn’t decide whether he was putting me on or not. While my own train of thought stalled, M— roared in on the express. “Why do you in your songs, refer to yourself as ugly?” he asked.

  Cohen smiled at him. “How do I look today?”

  “You look handsome,” said the now besotted M—, “energetic and alive.”

  “I need a haircut,” parried Cohen.

  “Maybe I will have some wine after all,” I said, although no one had offered me any.

  M— passed me the bottle while Cohen extemporized further on his looks.

  “Actually, I’ve grown a lot better looking since I began calling myself ugly.”

  M— accused him of self-hatred.

  “Maybe it’s self-hatred,” Cohen allowed, “maybe it’s bending over backwards for accuracy.”

  “Cheese?” I said to no one in particular, “Why of course, thank you.”

  “In the sixties when I was writing the songs that come out of that experience,” Cohen explained, “I saw really beautiful youths around. It’s all a relative thing. If you’re at a bar mitzvah, you may look pretty good; however, if you’re with a bunch of lead guitarists at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966, and they’re all beautiful, tall, blonde youths … ”

  “I don’t think so,” M— protested. “I think a lot of them just look very hairy. I think it’s harder to look good at forty.”

  “Most of these lead guitarists don’t make it to forty,” I felt compelled to insert. They both ignored me. I drained the bottle.

  “I feel OK these days, you know. I’m making a living. I managed to get away from my family. I’ve been through a war. I’m OK.”

  M— suddenly turned to me. “Go on,” he said, motioning me back to my interview.

  “Hah?”

  “A friend of mine said about poetry,” Cohen told M—, “that the two things necessary for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.”

  M— seemed to identify.

  “What about a prose writer?” I cried in panic. “Do you think it’s the same thing, too?” However, M— was already reciting one of his poems to Cohen. Although I thought it a paltry work, Cohen seemed to like it. I cursed myself for not having had the sense to bring along one, if not all seven, of my unpublished novels for him to read. While M— recited another poem, I realized they were on the wavelength I had wanted to reach. M— was up there with Cohen, poet to poet, while I trailed a distant second, the interviewer, straight man, fink.

  Finally M— got up to go to the john. Alone at last. Here was my big chance. With one sweeping question I could reestablish myself as an equal in Cohen’s eyes. Instead I wound up asking him if he ever got letters from his fans and how he responded.

  “You’ve got to play it by ear,” he said. “You can involve yourself totally in the lives of your listeners, and it has got to be disaster. I put my work out the very best I can. It comes out of my life. It’s a very large chunk of my life. I can understand if it becomes important in another life. But whether you involve yourself personally in these other lives is another matter.

  “I’m not talking about somebody who has a fantasy of a singer. These are people who really relate to your own experience and vice versa. Now maybe they’re living in some kind of milieu where they don’t have people to relate to. You set yourself up as a kind of kin to these people and they see it and it’s true. That’s the fantastic thing about it. You meet them and immediately you see they are people who have your own experience. So over the years I have somehow fallen into some lives that my songs have led me into, and some of these lives have ended—rather violently, rather sadly …”

  When M— emerged from the john, Cohen told us that he must leave for a recording session. M— asked whether he could tag along, but Cohen said no, which pleased me no end. I suggested to M— that if he were going downtown, I’d walk him part of the way. He said OK.

  There’s really a one-to-one relationship between Cohen and his songs, his books, of that much I was sure. Here were M— and I filling up yet another chapter—two seekers, neophytes, in a foot race to the door of the master. At least we’d be leaving together. Not only was I salvaging a tie out of the day’s proceedings but I felt I was rescuing Cohen from a potentially maudlin evening with M—. In the next life Cohen might thank me.

  However, as we neared the elevators, as if he’d forgotten something, M— wheeled around and headed back to Cohen’s room, advising me to go on without him. What a move! I stood flatfooted in the hallway with no other choice but to leave, which I did. Score another one for M—.

  WHAT HAPPENED WHEN PHIL SPECTOR MET LEONARD COHEN?

  HARVEY KUBERNIK | January 1978, the Los Angeles Phonograph (Los Angeles)

  More than three years passed from when Leonard Cohen issued New Skin for the Old Ceremony on August 11, 1974, until Columbia released his next collection of fresh material, Death of a Ladies’ Man, which came out November 13, 1977. Unfortunately, the long wait ended with disappointment as the latter album is now widely regarded as Cohen’s one serious misstep.

  At the time of the LP’s release, Rolling Stone critic Paul Nelson tried to be kind, describing the record as “either greatly flawed or great and flawed—and I’m betting on the latter.” The consensus today, however, leans toward the former. Rolling Stone has called the record “a total waste,” and Cohen himself seems to at least partly agree. There are hints of that dissatisfaction in this piece, which appeared shortly after the album and which takes us inside the sessions with Spector. —Ed.

  Leonard Cohen—singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet, novelist, and sometime straight-faced spokesman of the hilarious ironies of the human condition—walks into the dimly lit recording studio control booth. The place is called Gold Star, and it is a shining capital of musical energy in the midst of a dying neighborhood in a particularly faded part of Hollywood.

  Cohen lets a hint of a smile cross his face, but nothing more. He is not one to demonstrate elaborate emotional feeling in a personal situation. He sports a finely tailored dark blue blazer and well-cut grey slacks, and he radiates a poise uncommon to the environment at hand. His charm is substantial, and it isn’t hard to fathom why at least some people find themselves so wholly taken with his art. It’s not so much what he is about that is important, but what he seems to be about—not so much what he says, but what he implies.

  As Cohen sits down in the booth, a voice screams out of the dark silence: “This isn’t punk rock! This is ROCK PUNK!” Then the first notes of a rhythm track drive through the monitors.

  The voice belongs to Phil Spector. Imposing, like a king bethroned [sic], he sits behind the mixing board, incessantly fondling an empty bottle, which once contained thirty-two ounces of pure Manischewitz concord grape wine. He wears a sharp, severe black suit, a green shirt, and a very expensive pair of shiny black leather boots—boots that are presumably made for rockin’.

  In a year of unlikely artist/producer combinations—Reddy/Fowley, Flack/Ezrin, Grand Funk/Zappa, etc.—this is perhaps the most unlikely: Phil Spector, demon genius of the rock-and-roll production number, producing Leonard Cohen, ascetic prophet of acousti
c disaffectedness, with the final product to be known as Death of a Ladies’ Man.

  “We’ve made some great fuckin’ music on this album,” Spector says, his voice assuming a high-pitched urgency, a blend of Arnold Stand and Jerry Mathers. With that, he leaps from his chair and hugs everyone in the room. He is very happy with his work, and he wants everyone to know it.

  The seventies have been a strange decade for Spector. At the beginning of the period, he made two splendid albums with John Lennon. Then came interesting but generally disappointing projects with Harry Nilsson and Cher. When Spector produced a Dion LP for Warner Brothers at great cost last year, the company decided to not even release it in the US.

  The worst blow came, in a sense, though, when Warner agreed to release a definitive Phil Spector anthology, an attractive, well-researched package, made with Spector’s full cooperation. It was an incredible collection of music, and a beautifully presented one—but Phil Spector’s greatest hits didn’t even make Billboard’s Top 200 album list.

  Insiders could probably explain away the LP’s low sales: Warner probably didn’t ship more than thirty thousand units at release, thereby marking the album as a sort of “labor-of-love” LP intended only for hardcore Spector fans or Spector supporters within the music industry. The record company didn’t even allocate a complete disc-jockey service nationally. It certainly wasn’t intended to be a major commercial release effort.

  Nevertheless, there have been three albums since it was released— Then I Kissed Her, Da Doo Ron Ron, and Be My Baby. Michael Lloyd and Jimmy Ienner will no doubt continue to find it an insatiable source of future cover tunes for their boppers well into the eighties. Thus, while the album was hardly a moneymaker in terms of actual units sold, it has proven and will continue to prove to be a veritable gold mine of publishing royalties.

  But that is hardly enough for Phil Spector, whose brilliance only starts with the songs he writes, but really gets to shining when he gets those songs into a studio. And so it is obvious that the Leonard Cohen sessions have been important to him, almost therapeutic. He certainly seems to be taking his work extremely seriously: he has been decidedly less theatrical in the studio of late; the usual Spector circus atmosphere seems to have been replaced at least in part by a rediscovered or new interest in the music itself. And that seems to be very good medicine, both for Spector and for Cohen.

  Spector and Cohen, despite their obvious surface differences both in personal style and in musical direction, share one all-powerful element of musical taste—a love for rock and roll. It is deeply rooted in them, and it pervades the work they do together. It is their shared medium, their common ground. A mutual affection for rock’s basic greatness has bound the two men together, and made their collaboration work.

  “Working with Phil,” says Cohen nonetheless, “I’ve found that some of his musical treatments are very … foreign to me. I’ve rarely worked in a live room that contains twenty-five musicians—including two drummers, three bassists, and six guitars.”

  The track Cohen and Spector are particularly interested in listening to right now is “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On,” the album’s all-out stomper, with hosts of loud horns and pulsating beat that’s hammered all the way home by dual drummers playing in perfect synch. Above it all comes Cohen’s menacing, gritty vocal work, which holds center stage in a most unexpected but effective way. “I can really belt ’em out, you know,” says the singer, as he takes a swig of Jose Cuervo from the bottle.

  Cohen and Spector first met late in 1974, when Cohen was in Los Angeles for a rare club appearance—a two-night gig at the Troubadour. After the last show on the second night, Spector hosted an informal reception for Cohen at his home—a Spanish-style mansion in the grand, excessive southern California tradition.

  Cohen was brought to Spector’s attention, and vice versa, by Martin Machat, who had independently become lawyer and business manager for both men. Machat took Spector to see Cohen perform. Throughout Cohen’s ninety-minute show, Spector sat quietly, very still, immediately impressed (he later said) by Cohen’s mystery and his technique (or maybe the mystery of his technique … or the technique of his mystery …)

  The two men got on well at the post-Troubadour reception, and kept in some sort of loose touch thereafter. Late in 1976, when Cohen visited Los Angeles again, Spector invited him to be his houseguest. The first night, the two worked out a new version of Patti Page’s “I Went to Your Wedding”; by breakfast, they’d cowritten two new songs—Cohen the lyrics, Spector the music (picked out on the piano). The seed was sown for what ultimately became Death of a Ladies’ Man.

  Cohen is said to have remarked of Spector that “Phil is not a great songwriter, but he’s a bold one. He’s bold enough to employ the most pedestrian melodies, and yet somehow make them absolutely successful. That is why his compositions are brilliant.” Cohen is especially impressed by Spector’s early work—“To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “(You’ve Lost That) Lovin’ Feeling,” etc. “In those songs, the storyline was as clear as clear could ever be. The images were very expressive—they spoke to us all. Spector’s real greatness is his ability to induce those incredible little moments of poignant longing in us.”

  Cohen’s own images are expressive, too, of course. On Death of a Ladies’ Man, they seem particularly direct. “This is the most autobiographical album of my career,” he says. “The words are in a tender, rather than a harsh setting, but there’s still a lot of bitterness, negativity, and disappointment in them. I wish at times there was a little more space for the personality of the storyteller to emerge, but, in general, the tone of the album is very overt, totally open.”

  He goes on to say, “I was a little off-balance this year.” Songs like “Iodine,” “True Love Leaves No Traces,” and the album’s title track mirror his situation. All the usual Cohen concerns—lost love, personal chaos, doubt, romantic dilemma, alienation, lust, etc.—are present in strong force. “And don’t forget humor,” Cohen adds. He also says, “I worship women,” and suspects that, with the release of this album, “Everybody will now know that within this serene Buddhistic interior, there beats an adolescent heart.”

  By 6 AM, Spector and Cohen are still listening to one rough mix after another. Bob Dylan appears somewhere in the midst of Spector’s huge, complicated sounds. So do Hal Blaine, Jim Keltner, Nino Tempo, Jesse Ed Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Art Munson, Ray Pholman, and Dan and David Kessel—sons of jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. The music is hard and solid and soulful. There is, above all, nothing “El-lay” about it.

  To this day, Spector meets people who can’t believe that all his great hits were cut in Southern California. “They thought Gold Star was in New York,” he says. “Of course, what I do is hardly typical California stuff. There are no four-part harmonies on my records … Maybe thirty-two-part harmonies …” He looks around the room. “Anyone here who plays Asylum records, please leave. Anybody laid-back in this room, get the fuck out of here!”

  Cohen likes Los Angeles. A native of Montreal who has spent much of his time in recent years in the south of France and in other European hideaways, he has now moved to Southern California himself. “I like it,” he says. “It’s so desperate here that it’s really not bad at all. And besides, this is the only city in the world where I’ve ever written a song while sitting in a driveway in a parked car.”

  Later in the morning, back at Spector’s mansion, as the jukebox plays the psalms of Elvis, Dylan, Waylon, Otis, and the Drifters, Spector muses about his own life. “It didn’t take extraordinary strength for me to change the way I was,” he claims. “What I was doing just had to stop. It isn’t hard to see that, especially after you’ve gone through a couple of windshields at high speeds.

  “I have to admit that I did enjoy it to a certain extent—being rich, a millionaire in his mansion, and dressing up like Batman … But now I can see beyond that, and see just how unhealthy and unproductive it became.

  “I’m ready for anythi
ng now. Nothing frightens me. I feel I can do more now than I could ever do before. I feel extremely ready musically. I’m more comfortable, more relaxed, more together. I understand what I want to do, and I’m going to do it. It’s time to get serious again.”

  Then he says, “Come into the other room. I want to play you some more of the Leonard Cohen tracks.”

  And as he punches up “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” once again, and the tight, string, perfectly conceived production fills the air, he says, “Ain’t none of us ready for the glue factory yet. I’ll go one-on-one with any producer in the world, anytime.” He smiles. “We can still kick ass!”

  PART II

  THE EIGHTIES

  Cohen offers only two studio albums, but they feature such monumental works as “Hallelujah,” “I Can’t Forget,” and “Tower of Song.”

  TV INTERVIEW

  PATRICK WATSON | February 1 and 8, 1980, Authors, CBC (Canada)

  By the beginning of 1980, Cohen had put the Spector project behind him and was promoting the considerably more satisfying Recent Songs, which Columbia had issued on September 27, 1979. In a pensive two-part television interview with the CBC’s Patrick Watson, the singer talked about a wide variety of subjects, including Death of a Lady’s Man, a book of poetry he’d issued in 1978 (not to be confused with the similarly named Spector-produced LP). —Ed.

  Patrick Watson: It seems that Leonard Cohen has been trying to heal pain with his songs since he first began to write them at the age of sixteen. And by songs I mean all those volumes of delicate lyrical poetry and the two rowdy, frenzied novels as well as the haunting music that has made him renowned throughout the world.

  Leonard Cohen rarely consents to television interviews but this week and next, on Authors, he speaks both about the pain and the healing. Now, some of the language you may find offensive, some of the ideas difficult and unorthodox. But the passage of Leonard Cohen through the highs and the hells of relationships and personal knowledge makes him a writer whose qualities transcend those of the work alone.