Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  It was to remain so, through twenty years of heavyhearted lamenting. Some dissenters saw Cohen as a lugubrious folk minstrel with nothing but misery and self-pity to offer. His followers adored him. There was something in the man and the voice that inspired heated devotion. The songs poured out. “Bird on the Wire,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” “Who by Fire,” “Take This Longing,” “The Guests,” “If It Be Your Will” … all of them haunted by that black, somber wash of a voice. Best of all were 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate (which featured the almighty “Avalanche”) and 1979’s Recent Songs. Strangest and, perhaps, most intense of all was 1977’s Phil Spector collaboration, Death of a Ladies’ Man, of which more later.

  Through all this time, Cohen has endured as the supreme stylist of the anguished ballad, of the dark romance, of the melancholic state. Fusing sexuality with spirituality, most of his work (from records to poems) has sidestepped the risk of damp self-indulgence. Cohen, believe me, is rarely, very rarely funereal. There is a massive sense of joy glistening in these songs. Len Cohen’s broken voice sounds like its owner has seen and felt it all but it never sounds like its owner wants to give up and get out. This romantic comes to tell how it is. It is not without suffering. It is not without splendor or wild rejoicing. It comes to worship or abandon itself. Sometimes to warn or to weep. But never to wilt, and lick dust.

  Barry Manilow’s “If I Should Love Again” saturates the hotel lounge.

  JW: Do you simply aim to cause ripples?

  LC: I don’t think anybody really knows what they’re doing at any point.

  JW: I must say, Len, that’s an admirable thing to say.

  LC: [Laughs.] How did I ever get into this racket? I dunno! What am I exactly doing in it? I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue. I think it just comes down to nudging the guy next to you and saying, “That’s the way, isn’t it?” They can either agree or not agree. One is continually trying to affirm something with the man in the next seat. I don’t think it’s like a buffet table where you choose what you’re gonna eat. Somehow things are given and they are given powerfully. You’re stuck with them. Your own nature is one of those things. You don’t wake up in the morning and choose the sort of guy you’re gonna be. Maybe you can in a really superficial way. Like in Rhinehart’s Dice Man. I loved that book very much, as a wonderful escapist idea. I think you’re kind of stuck with who you are and that’s what you’re dealing with. That’s the hand that you’ve been dealt. To escape from the burden of decision is a delightful notion … but nothing more.

  JW: The darkness in your songs almost sounds like a sense of menace at times …

  LC: There’s certainly a dark side to it. I also think there’s a couple of laughs in there, which people miss.

  JW: When you sing, “Giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limos wait in the street” in “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” that always makes me laugh.

  LC: That’s not a bad line, is it?

  JW: Why are there two limos, though?

  LC: One for each of us. We’re both waiting to leave. We’re both killing time or something!

  JW: You’ve always written about emotional pain, never physical pain.

  LC: I don’t think I’ve written about that and I don’t know too much about it. I’ve had the occasional toothache, y’know.

  JW: You once walked out on the stage to five hundred people and remarked, “The person here in the most pain is me.” Could you ever have said something like that and not laughed out loud?

  LC: Well, I can’t even remember saying it! It is a hilarious line, though. I think Steve Martin could have delivered that line better than me. If I ever said anything like that, I hope I was laughing.

  JW: Your new LP is completely off the beam, nothing like you’ve tried before. An emphasis on dance. It sounds almost too willing to come up to date.

  LC: You think it works?

  JW: I think it’s an interesting failure.

  LC: OK. Well … it wasn’t a curious effort to come up to date but I don’t think you can stand apart from what’s going on. You say it’s erratic, uneven. Mmmm. I’m interested in stretching out a bit. I think my sound has always been a little different to whatever else has been happening, though. Out of time or something.

  JW: You’re a man out of time, Len?

  LC: Well, let’s just say I hear a different drum. Like that poem I wrote that went, “When it comes to lamentations, I prefer Aretha Franklin to Leonard Cohen, let us say he hears a different drum.” I never thought I had a voice in the sense of a singer’s voice. I can hardly carry a tune but I think it’s a true voice in the sense that it’s not a lie. It presents the singer and the story he’s telling.

  JW: Going back to Death of a Ladies’ Man, you said at that time, “Sometimes the heart must roast on the fire like a shish kebab.” That seems to have been a messy time for you. The making of the LP now seems dominated by all that surrounded it. There’s that story that it was virtually recorded at gunpoint.

  LC: Well, Phil [Spector] had a lot of guns all over the place. You’d always be tripping over bullets that had fallen out of guns. Once I challenged one of Phil’s bodyguards to draw on me. It got that tense. My state of mind was only slightly less demented than Spector’s at the time.

  JW: Wasn’t this a time of great personal tragedy for you?

  LC: I don’t know if I’d dignify my condition by the use of the word tragedy. When I was writing the album with Phil, it was all very agreeable. He is a very charming and hospitable man. Though he did lock the doors when you visited him so you couldn’t leave without his permission. Outside of that, he was a very sweet guy. As far as the actual record went, it was definitely the most painful to make because I lost control of it. Phil would confiscate the tapes every night under armed guard. There was a lot of love in the air though, curiously enough. Phil is a very affectionate person if you manage to penetrate the extremities of his expression. At one time, at three o’clock in the morning, he came over to my place with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other. He put his arm around my shoulder, shoved the .45 into my neck and said, “Leonard, I love you.” I said, “Phil, I sincerely hope you do!” I had the notion of hiring my own private army and fighting it out with them on Sunset Boulevard, but I was a coward in those days.

  JW: Didn’t you also have some weird scene with [Norman] Mailer over the poem “Dear Mailer”? (“Dear Mailer, don’t ever fuck with me, or … I will kill you and your entire family.”)

  LC: I actually recited the poem to Mailer with a smile, at some reading where we met up. He didn’t punch me out but he was alarmed. He said, “God, don’t publish that. You don’t know that some loony isn’t going to be excited by it and do what you threatened to do.” It really scared him. I then had second thoughts about the poem because suddenly I saw it from his point of view. Earlier, I saw it as a humorous response to the position he was taking at the time, coming on like a bully. I had a real laugh when I originally wrote it. I then tried to stop its publication but it had already gone to press.

  JW: Perhaps your most famous line is, “For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind” from “Suzanne.” Is it special to you?

  LC: People have quoted that a lot. It’s one of those lines where you either say, “Yeah, that’s the way it is,” or you puke.

  JW: Perhaps your most interesting lines come from a poem in The Energy of Slaves, where you write, “My own music is not merely naked, it is open-legged, it is like a cunt, and like a cunt, must needs be house-proud.” Now, that’s quite a line, Len.

  LC: [Laughs.] Well, people should have a kind of nervous reaction to that word. It is one of the sacred words and it deserves to be whispered. I’m glad you whispered it when you said it.

  JW: Could you just as easily have said that your work was like a prick?

  LC: Not myself, no. I guess a woman could have said that. [Laughs.] I’m starting to remember the line now. It takes a while for it to return
. I guess, at the time I wrote that [around 1969], I felt in a grieved state where I somehow felt that everything I was coming across in writing and everything around me was false. I was hungry for a kind of expression that was a lot more raw than what I was getting. I wanted to read something that was on the frontline, that comes from real, undiluted experience and I wasn’t defending anything. Now that word belongs to the woman and to her nakedness and that is still the prerogative of the woman to uncover and that power is still not diminished.

  JW: I assume that the words pour out of you.

  LC: Not at all. I always feel I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when I write and it takes a long time to bring anything to completion. I don’t get any sense of luxury or excitement. I always hope I’m going to come up with something, anything. The hunger to speak is there but the capacity is seldom there. [A tall man in a black suit suddenly approaches our table and hands Len a small black travel bag. Len lets out a huge sigh of relief. The man bows and disappears.]

  JW: What’s that then, Len?

  LC: I left it in the car last night. It’s got everything. My tattoo.

  JW: You’ve got your tattoo in your bag?

  LC: It’s one of those stick-on ones, a big snake, a present for my daughter. Here are my airplane tickets. Checkbooks. A picture of my girlfriend.

  JW: Can I have a gander, Len?

  LC: Sure. I took it myself.

  JW: Very beautiful. What’s that bit of paper there?

  LC: That’s my AIDS test result. Negative. It’s good to carry that around. “Hi, I’m Leonard, here’s my card!” It’s like being let out of prison, getting one of those.

  JW: Do you feel like the spokesman for the human condition? That’s a big job.

  LC: If I was sure I had the job, I’d probably feel pretty good.

  JW: Do you always see emptiness coming? Can you always avoid it?

  LC: I think loneliness or emptiness is a fearful condition and I’ve certainly felt it throughout my life. I think you have to learn to live with it. You have to get used to being married to your hand.

  JW: A solitary man?

  LC: I tend to spend a lot of time alone but it’s usually because I’ve gone to the wrong city or lost my phonebook. We’re always moving between those poles.

  JW: What makes you shy or vulnerable?

  LC: I’m always on the edge of helplessness, though that’s not the edge I like. I prefer the other edge, the one that gives you the notion that you’re on top of things.

  JW: Do you ever wish you could be a virgin again?

  LC: I’m completely innocent. Absolutely. I am an innocent man.

  JW: Do you ever feel that your own feelings are not like anyone else’s?

  LC: On the contrary. I feel that my feelings are like everybody else’s. I don’t think a writer knows his feelings, though. That’s why he writes. I would say that he probably knows them less than anyone else. Generally speaking, a writer is more confused, more bewildered, than other people who aren’t writers. One of the absolute qualifications for a writer is not knowing his arse from his elbow. I think that’s where it starts. With a lack of knowledge. The sense of not knowing what is happening and the need to organize experience on the page or in the song is one of the motivations of a writer.

  JW: You seem to completely trust the emotions. The emotional response. Does this imply that you distrust the intellectual response?

  LC: I don’t want to present myself as some kind of anti-intellectual fascist. There’s a lot of that going on today and it’s a very fashionable position. I think we should row with both oars. There’s the intellect and the emotions.

  JW: You seem to have been through some weird times. I recall you saying at some point in the midseventies, “It may turn out that the records still keep coming and the books keep coming but I won’t be there.” What did that mean?

  LC: What did I mean by what? Search me! I’ve never been very attached to my opinions. I’m not flippant about them but, whenever I hear myself say something, I recognize my own unwillingness to stand behind it.

  JW: Is communication terrifying?

  LC: It’s the easiest thing and the hardest thing.

  JW: What do you remember?

  LC: My mother crying. My father dying. My childhood was very ordinary. I always seemed to be living exactly the same childhood as all my friends. There were never any special stresses. Nothing extraordinary about it. I can’t even say that it’s extraordinary now. One’s own life is mysterious. The predicaments one finds oneself in at particular moments are the result of a web of inextricable circumstances that I certainly can’t penetrate. As you get older, you begin to accept the circumstances.

  JW: You have a strong purpose of mind?

  LC: [Laughs.] To do anything … bullfighting, boxing, motorcar racing, singing, or even getting to work every morning. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. There’s a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don’t have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He’s been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said “Leonard, I’ve been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I’m going to stay or not.” I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  JW: How would you like to be seen?

  LC: I would like the word stylist. I’d like to think of myself that way. You want your work to have certain qualities. To be stylish in the way that any designer of an aircraft or automobile would want their machine to move well.

  JW: Would you like to come back as something else … a scorpion or a bullfrog or any of those things?

  LC: As long as it isn’t Leonard Cohen, I’ll settle for anything.

  JW: What happens next?

  LC: I pick up my black bag and get on a plane.

  INTERVIEW

  KRISTINE MCKENNA | March 1988, interview | May 6, 1988, L.A. Weekly (Los Angeles)

  In 1988, after three years without a tour or a new album, Cohen moved into high gear, releasing I’m Your Man on February 2 and supporting it with one of his most ambitious tours ever. He performed fifty-nine concerts between April and July in seventeen European countries, then did another twenty-five gigs in the United States and Canada in July, October, and November.

  And he was talking as much as he was singing. In the first of six 1988 interviews included in this book, he chatted with Kristine McKenna, whose 1985 interview with Cohen appears earlier in this volume. This conversation took place at the artist’s Los Angeles home. —Ed.

  Kristine McKenna: What is your earliest memory?

  Leonard Cohen: Pissing on a doctor who was examining me when I was three. I remember it as a sparkling moment because I wasn’t punished for it, yet it produced a sense of alarm in the atmosphere that I found exciting.

  KM: Is memory the mechanism that gives memory to the present, or does it obstruct our ability to enjoy it?

  LC: Memory is like the soundtrack to a film. You don’t want it operating all the time, but there are occasions when it can interact with the action and produce powerful effects. It’s important that we have our soundtrack appropriately tuned to our activity.

  KM: What’s the first piece of music that made an impact on you?

  LC: Synagogue music was the first music that addressed a part of my soul that was hungry. I still love that music, but many permutations of it have been lost to history. So many beautiful Hebrew traditions were wiped out in a single afternoon of the Second World War.

  KM: Did that episode in history play a role in shaping what’s widely perceived as your dark cast of mind?

  LC: Yes, I think so. I don’t think any Jew who grew up during the war and had European parents could be untouched by that. I don’t think I have a dark cast of mind, by the way—realistic is how I’d des
cribe it. Look at what humans do to one another. And all that was learned from the Holocaust is that people can get away with such acts. Yes, war criminals are still being prosecuted, but this is mere nail polish on the claws. Human beings have a deeply homicidal appetite—I see it in myself, and in everyone else. Acknowledging it is a first step towards controlling it, and it’s best not to provoke it by having people starve, and giving people an excuse to devour one another. It’s best to establish a system where people get a square deal.

  KM: What do you do on your record, I’m Your Man, that you’ve never done before?

  LC: This record broke down three or four times in the making of it, and the sense of struggle was more pronounced for a number of reasons. For one thing, I came to the end of a period I’d roughly describe as a religious inquiry, and many of the songs for this record began as purely religious songs. For instance, “I Can’t Forget” began as a song about the exodus of the Hebrew children from Egypt, which was intended as a metaphor for the freeing of the soul from bondage. When I went in to record the vocal for the track, however, I found I couldn’t get the words out of my throat. I couldn’t sing the words because I wasn’t entitled to speak of the emancipation of the spirit.

  KM: Who is entitled to speak about it, if not you and everyone else?

  LC: Anybody who has emancipated their spirit is entitled to speak about it, but at that point I was in the process of breaking down. What I mean by breaking down is that you can’t get out of bed, you can’t move.

  KM: How did you pull yourself out of that?

  LC: Somebody told me a story that turned things around.