by Jeff Burger
COHEN CLIP
On His Hydra Home
“I still have my house there that I bought for fifteen hundred dollars in 1960. My kids still use it. But it’s a long way to go to find yourself not very far from the place you’ve left. When I got there, there was no electricity or running water. It was a very different kind of place. Not that I fault anyone for wanting to have linoleum and electricity as opposed to rough stone floors and chopping firewood. But it’s not that far away anymore.”
—from a sidebar to Wayne Robins’s article, Newsday, November 22, 1992
GROWING OLD PASSIONATELY
ALAN JACKSON | November 22, 1992, the Observer (London)
“I was excited to meet Leonard Cohen,” Alan Jackson told me, “as I’d had his albums with me through my teenage years and through university and I’d even read a novel of his. What I wasn’t prepared for was just what a naturally charming man he is, in the purest and most positive sense of the term.
“He was doing a full day of press and promotion in a London hotel suite, so time for individual interviews was limited,” Jackson recalled. “Mine lasted just half an hour. He was dressed formally in a well-cut dark suit, dark shirt, and tie and had impeccable, almost formal manners-something you don’t often encounter in celebrities or public figures.
“What I particularly recall was how intense the encounter was. He invited me to sit in a chair very close to his and he maintained eye contact throughout, concentrating on the questions, deliberating over the answers, and giving me for those thirty minutes the impression that the interview was of real importance to him—and that I was also. It was a feeling you don’t often get from interviewees, and I’ve been talking to famous people for a living for over twenty-five years now. He really was charm personified.
“It was a time in his life when he was involved romantically with the actress Rebecca De Mornay. Cohen has often been dubbed ‘Laughing Len’ in the British media and there had been some expressions of mystification in the press here about how ‘Laughing Len’ (an ironic take on the fact that a lot of people consider him the epitome of misery and melancholy) had managed to attract this much younger and beautiful woman. After meeting him, it made perfect sense to me. I could completely see how he could work his magic on anyone that he chose.” —Ed.
Leonard Cohen recently walked along a street crowded with college students while in the company of a writer friend, a man in his midseventies. “We passed a cafe. Outside were a number of lovely young women, and suddenly he grabbed my arm and said with an urgency, ‘Leonard, don’t believe anyone who tells you you’re not going to feel something about this matter when you’re older.’”
A still handsome and charismatic fifty-eight himself, Cohen smiles at the memory and notes wryly, “How you adjust yourself to that fact is something else, of course, and certainly we would hope that we civilize ourselves as we grow older. But the idea that your creative impetus is over by thirty, that you immolate yourself on this pyre of energy and sexuality and can then go back to cleaning up and doing the dishes … it just ain’t so. The fire continues to burn fiercely as you get older. It’s passionate.”
Although evidence of this enduring life force is everywhere in his lyrics, non-devotees remain unfamiliar with Cohen the Sensualist. Instead there is the lingering stereotype of Cohen the Miserablist, a hangdog, beat-generation character forever intoning depressive lyrics in some twilight zone. But the man himself, soberly suited and hunched over strong coffee in a Mayfair hotel suite, proves a conversational delight: funny, sage, generous, and warm.
No wonder, then, that he remains the muse of folk-rock princesses such as Suzanne Vega and Jennifer Warnes, whose superior LP of Cohen interpretations, Famous Blue Raincoat, released in 1986, helped to refocus attention on his then-neglected catalog of songs. He deflects the idea that he is king of a court of gifted women admirers, however (“What a lovely idea …”), and will confirm reports that he is romantically involved with the actress Rebecca De Mornay, to whom his new LP, The Future, is dedicated, only in the most decorous of tones—“There is a formal arrangement between us, yes.”
Appropriately enough, the album—his first for four years—reads and sounds like the work of a man in love. Its concerns are more than merely romantic and interpersonal, however. “Democracy,” the centerpiece, is a six-verse epic on the changing political mood of America, and was distilled from an original eighty verses. “It ain’t coming to us European-style, a concentration camp behind the smile,” says Cohen, snatching a discarded segment from memory. “It ain’t coming from the East, with its temporary feast, as Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle …”
Even in its truncated, recorded form, the song is an intense piece of work, and one that would have been seen as highly prophetic had it been released immediately after it was written in late 1988. At that point, Cohen stopped work on the album to help nurse his teenage son back from a near-fatal road accident, then found it hard to reengage with the project. “There was the normal, dismal process of assembling and rejecting, medication, heavy drinking, giving up smoking, changing girlfriends, y’know … all the stuff that goes into these things,” he says of the ensuing hiatus.
Reading the lyrics of “Democracy” before playing the song, it is impossible not to be struck by Cohen’s still-developing talent as a writer—each word and line is perfectly weighted to give a momentum independent of any melody or arrangement, each image makes its point with astonishing precision. “You’ve no idea how that is music to my ears,” says Cohen of the observation.
“I don’t do anything else—this is the front line for me. I try and keep my human associations going, but this is my pledge and my consecration. And though it’s not necessary to talk about it in such highfalutin’ terms, it’s all that’s going on for me. I’m a miniaturist. I’m trying to do what the microchip has done—find a form in which deep experience can be manifested with brevity, so that a six-minute song can have the qualities of a novel, can really take you on a trip. And I think I’m on the edge of doing it.”
The audience for Cohen’s current experimentation may well be his biggest for twenty years. He admits that he felt shut out by the music industry between the years 1972 and 1985, and says that it felt like a near-religious experience when record companies began to return his calls. He is sincerely grateful too for all the signs of interest in his work by other artists, not only last year’s hip I’m Your Fan, on which R.E.M., the Pixies, John Cale, and Ian McCulloch covered classics from his songbook, but also such ponderous if well-meant tributes as Neil Diamond’s doleful “Suzanne.”
“Although I kept working, I was effectively out of the business and a kind of joke for quite a long time, so my critical faculties still go into immediate but grateful suspension the minute anyone covers one of my songs,” he says. “It’s only recently that things have turned around for me, so I’m still not interested in if it’s any good or not—I’m just thrilled. But out of everything I would have to single out Jennifer’s album. It’s such a perfect and dedicated interpretation of my songs that there’s nothing for me to do but tip my head in awe.”
With perfect manners and a still-passionate spirit, Cohen is committed to continuing his quest to refine his songwriting skills further. “There is a wisdom appropriate to each age of man, and the early wisdoms all embrace notions of glorious finality, of burning beautifully—not a bad idea.
“But after a certain point in life, the allure of all that fades,” he says. “Now that I’m in advanced middleage I’ve discovered a certain buoyancy. Life weighs heavily upon one’s shoulders, but then you find that, with a certain kind of shrug, it will just lift off for a moment or two.”
He drinks deeply from his coffee cup and then admonishes himself for such relative optimism. “Having spoken in such a cavalier fashion I will, of course, be smitten with an acute clinical depression very shortly,” he says, with a short, sharp smile.
LEONARD COHEN: THE LORD BYRON OF RO
CK AND ROLL
KAREN SCHOEMER | November 29, 1992, the New York Times (New York)
“I was trying to play a part,” recalled Karen Schoemer of her interview with Cohen. “I’d listened to a lot of his albums and was wallowing in the Byronic romanticism I thought he represented. It was method journalism. He was charming and played his own part well.
“My connection with him was learned—it was secondhand,” Schoemer told me. “I had older friends whose lives had been affected by him so I was going on their experiences rather than my own. He represented an idea to me, a post-Dylan hippie intellectualism, and that’s what I was trying to investigate. I wanted to bring it to life, coax it out of the past. He was cooperative, a great sport.” —Ed.
Leonard Cohen has stopped to smell a rose. He was in the middle of a train of thought, sitting at a table in a piano lounge of a ritzy hotel in midtown Manhattan. But the lure of blood red petals, the possible prick of thorn and the whiff of romance have proven irresistible. He leans forward, bends the stem toward him, and breathes. The fragile petals contrast sharply with the chiseled age of his face. The strong reds and greens accentuate his iron-gray hair and tailored charcoal suit.
Mr. Cohen is a man made for such poetic moments. Songwriter, icon of sixties folk, sometime novelist, and perennial sage, he is in town to talk about his new album, The Future, his first record since the critically lauded I’m Your Man in 1988. He says he enjoys doing interviews, but he says it with a bit more flourish: “I’m very happy to cooperate with the convention of promoting the record.”
Mr. Cohen speaks like a poet. He culls a phrase like “blacken pages” where lesser mortals might simply say “write”; he has a store of aphorisms at his beck and call. “If I knew where songs came from I would go there more often,” he says at one point. He is prone to quoting poetry at will, although the poet he most likes to quote is himself. “Sail on, sail on, oh mighty ship of state / To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate,” he rejoinders on the general topic of America’s postelection political climate, borrowing lyrics from his song “Democracy.”
And Mr. Cohen, who is fifty-eight years old, has lived the life of a poet, full of deeds and escapades that qualify for the realm of the extraordinary. Born in Montreal, he played in a country band called the Buckskin Boys when he was a teenager. He was already embroiled in the bohemian life by the midfifties, when he published his first volume of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He spent several years living on the Greek island Hydra, and in the midsixties, he became part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, hanging out with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and releasing dark and voluptuous albums like Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs from a Room. His lyrics chronicled affairs with women both mysterious and infamous. “Suzanne” contained the consummate line “You’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.” “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” from the 1974 album New Skin for the Old Ceremony, was about Janis Joplin.
He has even more anecdotes up his sleeve. Out of the blue, Mr. Cohen is liable to begin a tale by saying, “You know, I was a close friend of Michael X, who was the leader of the black Muslims in England….”
After New York, Mr. Cohen lived for a year on a fifteen-hundred-acre homestead in Franklin, Tennessee, rented for seventy-five dollars a month. “Ah, that was a very pleasant period of my life,” he says wistfully. “There was a shack—a well-equipped shack, but not much more than that—beside a stream. There were peacocks and peahens. They used to come to my cabin every morning. I’d feed them. I had one of those centennial rifles that Remington put out, I think, in ‘67.” He pauses. “When was this country founded? Seventy-six?” He seems somewhat dismayed that mathematics could interfere with a colorful detail of his story. “Anyway, I had some kind of centennial rifle. I would amuse myself by shooting icicles on the far side of the creek.”
In the midseventies, a volatile partnership with the legendary producer Phil Spector resulted in the album Death of a Ladies’ Man. Since the eighties, Mr. Cohen has matured into a hero of the disaffected musical intelligentsia. Last year, younger fringe artists like Nick Cave, Lloyd Cole, and Ian McCulloch contributed to a Leonard Cohen tribute album, I’m Your Fan, released by Atlantic. Like a handful of his peers—Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull—Mr. Cohen is revered to a level that renders his modest commercial success irrelevant. He is a singular entity: a kind of rock-and-roll Lord Byron, a cultural scholar in the unlikely medium of pop.
Mr. Cohen has been working consistently on The Future since the release of I’m Your Man. “Some people write good songs in the back of taxicabs,” he remarks. “I wish I were in that tribe.” Throughout the album, the time he spent is evident. Never has Mr. Cohen’s low, groaning voice sounded quite so world-weary and edged with disgust. Never has his outlook seemed quite so grim. The song “The Future” pledges that whatever lies ahead is unquestionably uglier than the dismal state of things today; “Democracy” is an iconoclast’s lament on contemporary politics.
These songs, Mr. Cohen says, were “occasioned by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which all my friends rejoiced about. I was the only dour person at the party, saying, ‘This isn’t that good news. This is going to produce a great deal of suffering. You’re going to settle for the Berlin Wall when you see what’s coming next.’” The tension in his voice rises. “You’re going to settle for a hole in the ozone layer. You’ll settle for crack. You’ll settle for social unrest. You’ll settle for the L.A. riots. This is kindergarten stuff compared to the homicidal impulse that is developing in every breast!”
Mr. Cohen stops short, catching himself being carried away on the waves of despair. “Oh, forgive me for going on like that,” he sighs. “I have these gloomy visions of things.”
He finds the subject of America’s new president [Bill Clinton] somewhat more calming. “I’m a Canadian,” he says, “and Canadians are educated to watch America very closely—just as women are educated to watch men very closely—because what America does affects us. My song ‘Democracy,’ which was begun in ‘88 or ‘89, was certainly not designed as promotional material for the Democratic Party. I believe my songs last as long as the Volvo, which is about thirty years. So I don’t want to identify this song with this administration, which may last eight years. I’ve still got twenty-two years.
“But of course, as a Canadian, I wish the administration well,” he continues. “I can summon many blessings for the man, and especially for his wife, whom I find immensely attractive.”
As the evening wears on, the lights in the hotel lounge are brought down a notch, and Mr. Cohen’s reflection turns inward. “I find that more and more I inhabit the front line of my own life, with missiles and shrapnel flying through the air,” he says. “You really don’t have the opportunity to develop much of a strategy about things. Certainly not about your career, and not even about your loves or dreams. So there’s a certain urgency to the moment, and how to negotiate from one instance to the next.”
A blonde woman in a close-fitting gold dress sits down at the piano and begins to sing. “They say that falling in love is wonderful / It’s wonderful, so they say …” Mr. Cohen falls silent, listening. Gently and abstractly, he fingers the rose.
COHEN CLIP
On His State of Mind
“A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet. I don’t wait for the rain to fall. We are in the catastrophe. There’s no point in waiting for the catastrophe. Everybody knows it. You know it’s the flood. I mean it’s not ‘when I’m gone, I don’t care what happens.’ It’s ‘the deluge is here and I care what happens.’”
—from interview with Michel Field, Le Cercle de Minuit,
France 2 TV, December 1992
COHEN CLIP
On Surviving Amid Desolation
“My songs are about issues that appear to be widespread but are in fact all funneled down into songs about how I can survive amid the desolation. It’s about me. How am I going to make it
through? How can I fortify those close to me? Look, there’s this flood I’ve been talking about for twenty years now, and it’s wiped away everything moral, spiritual, political, every damn thing. All I’m asking is, ‘What is the appropriate behavior in these circumstances?’ When you’re hanging onto a piece of orange crate and people are floating away and going under all around you, are you really gonna give a fuck about the conservative/liberal divide? No! Are you really gonna talk about Communist vs. capitalist? No! Are you really gonna waste time debating Shiite vs. Sunni? Only if you’re stupid! And as for the rainforests, is that really what’s important? I think not. We’re missing the point.”
—from “Heavy Cohen,” by Cliff Jones, Rock CD, December 1992
COHEN CLIP
On What He Is
“I’m not even a novelist. I’m not even a poet. I’m a songwriter. Eventually, you realize you’re not going to be doing anything else. You’re not going to be leading the social movement. You’re not going to be the light of your generation. You’re not going to be many of the things you thought you might be. You’re this guy sitting in front of the table in the good parts of the day, and crawling around on the carpet in the bad parts. That’s what you’re doing. You’re writing songs for the popular market….Maybe you have a dream that they last for a while.”
—from “Life of a Lady’s Man,” by Brian D. Johnson, Maclean’s (Canada), December 7, 1992
COHEN CLIP
On Happiness
“I think it would be very incautious to declare yourself a happy man. There are a lot of forces that immediately are animated when someone makes that statement and you usually get creamed within seconds. So I’ll refrain from that kind of proclamation. But I can’t complain. I find the whole thing very workable.”