Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  VS: Something a bit more natural.

  LC: Yes, because we know that you cannot touch things with your mind in any tangible sense and believing that you can leads you into the darkness of mystical speculation, which we want to avoid at all costs. That was her position. But in the Rolling Thunder Review, when she came to Montreal with Dylan and much water had gone under many bridges, she sang the song and when I saw her in the catacombs of the Forum in Montreal, she said, “I finally got it right.” Very generous of her.

  VS: She was able to grow into it and accept it. Back to the Chelsea Hotel. Another question I’ve always wanted to ask you: The song which is called “Chelsea Hotel No. 2”—why “No. 2”? Is there another …

  LC: There were many “Chelsea Hotels” but I was singing a different “Chelsea Hotel” during a tour of 1972 and Ron Cornelius, the San Francisco guitarist, was playing with me, and we developed the song, he gave me a chord for it. And we sang it. It was excruciatingly slow. Well, I was on Mandrax at the time. They used to call me Captain Mandrax.

  VS: Mandrax? That’s one I don’t even know.

  LC: I think it was like a Quaalude. I think it was the English version of it. And my performances started getting slower and slower. I was in the Mahatma Gandhi stage of my performance. I was relaxed beyond any reasonable state.

  VS: No fear of British soldiers or the audience! [Laughs.]

  LC: No. I was ready to embrace the world with a great sense of relaxation. There’s a very bad movie that was made about that tour called Bird on the Wire, a documentary, and I think we can be seen singing “Chelsea Hotel No. 1.” [The film, directed by Tony Palmer, is actually called Bird on a Wire. —Ed.] It takes about half an hour to sing the song. Anyways, I had to rewrite the song. There were different lyrics, of course. So I finished that “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” in the Imperial Hotel in Asmara, Ethiopia.

  VS: Rather far from the Chelsea Hotel.

  LC: Yeah, but I finally got it together. I was very indiscrete in an interview somewhere and I let it be known that I wrote the song for Janis Joplin. I think it was very ungentlemanly of me to let that news out and thereafter, once it was out, I used her name in the introduction to the song in concerts but I wish I hadn’t.

  VS: I’m not surprised that you wish you hadn’t. The song stands by itself, for one thing and, for another, it’s nobody’s business, really.

  LC: It’s nobody’s business. I think since the cat is out of the bag I’m quite willing to talk about it but I do feel it’s one of the few times where I feel I did something cheap. I attached the name of a great singer to this song in some way to promote the song. I was indiscrete about what had happened. These things went down and I had no business talking about them or at least identifying the actors …

  VS: As long as we’ve brought it up, though, can you tell the story that you sometimes tell in introducing the song about the elevator in the Chelsea hotel?

  LC: Do you mind if I don’t?

  VS: OK, sure, sure … There is this fall going to be published a volume of your collected works. Is that not correct?

  LC: A selection of poems and songs from the past twenty or thirty years.

  VS: Some of the books are constantly reprinted but you haven’t done anything for print per se in quite a while.

  LC: No, I think the last collection was in 1968. Then I put out a couple of books that made no impression at all, especially in this country. Death of a Lady’s Man and Book of Mercy. Energy of Slaves.

  VS: Is novel writing something you’re still interested in?

  LC: I like the regime that goes with writing of the novel. Maybe I could get back to that sometime. I have now some kind of romantic idea of just going to the desk a few hours a day and living in a bright place with a good woman.

  VS: That bright place is California these days, isn’t it?

  LC: Yeah, I’ve been living there for a while now.

  VS: But you go back and forth between that and Montreal?

  LC: Yes, about half and half.

  VS: Can you talk a little bit about Jennifer Warnes?

  LC: Jennifer Warnes is a very important figure in my life. Her voice is like the California weather. It seems very, very sunny and up but there’s an earthquake behind it, there’s a tidal flood, there’s another element that produces one of the most compelling sounds in popular music. I think she’s the most underrated pop singer around. I think she has the best pipes around. A lot of people have ripped off her style. I just wish that she could make the kind of living that she deserves to make out of recording.

  VS: That element of sunshine hiding the earthquake underneath would make it seem very appropriate for your songs.

  LC: I chose Jennifer Warnes out of an audition in 1972. I was looking for a backup singer and she came in. I didn’t know that she already had a career, that she’d appeared with the Smothers Brothers, that she had been a lead in Hair, or that she’d put out her own … I didn’t know who she was.

  VS: You can see her in reruns now. The Smothers Brothers are running all those old episodes again. It’s odd to see her cast back in that light. So she auditioned for you for backup vocal?

  LC: Right. And I chose her and went on tour and we became very close friends over the years and as my star fell, she would always say to me, “I really want to do an album of your songs,” and I thought this was just an expression of friendship. Because there was nothing in the marketplace that indicated a growing appetite for such a record. And we became musical friends as well as personal friends and we would show each other our work. She’s a wonderful writer of prose, not just of songs. A really impressive creative imagination. I just like her take on things. She’s one of the few people that I will ever show a song in progress to. Because she knows exactly where the song is and she doesn’t exert any leverage on the song to make it go the way she wants. You can show her a song just as it is. There are very few people I would ever think of doing that with. She does the same thing.

  VS: You can trust the honesty of her feedback, knowing that she’s gonna give it to you straight.

  LC: Yeah. Her instincts are impeccable in music.

  VS: So she recorded Famous Blue Raincoat, an album of the songs of Leonard Cohen.

  LC: Yeah, and she went from office to office of the record labels and she was kind of laughed out of the place in each and every one until she went to this new outfit called Cypress Records and they gave her some money to do it and actually the record did very well and was very much responsible for a kind of new take on what I was about.

  VS: Well, that record and then a couple of years later the I’m Your Fan album where a bunch of musicians in Europe and here in the States got together and recorded their versions of your songs, taking its title from I’m Your Man. That also helped to introduce you to a whole new audience that hadn’t known you before. [Can you talk about] a song on her most recent album that you are a cowriter of called “Way Down Deep”? This is the only version of the song at this point, right? You have not recorded this song.

  LC: I have an entirely different version of this song, which I tried to prepare for this new record. I just couldn’t finish it in time.

  VS: You cowrote the song with Jennifer and someone named Amy La Television.

  LC: Amy La Television wrote a song called “Way Down Deep” and … I thought it [had] a wonderful hook. And Jennifer phoned me and said, “Would you work on this song?” I don’t lightly commit myself to that because that’s a long, long period.

  VS: We know what that means for you. [Laughs.] This could be years.

  LC: I said, “Count me out. Let me off the hook on this one, Jennifer, because I’m in the middle of trying to write The Future and I can’t get into this song.”

  VS: What an odd statement that is: “I’m in the middle of trying to write the future.” The poet as God. [Laughs.]

  LC: I meant the record.

  VS: Yes, I know. [Laughs.]

  LC: Anyway, she said it’s going to be the
most important song on the album. I’m going to begin with it and end with it and it’s going to unfold and it’s going to examine everything from the creation of the world to the women’s movement and we’re going to have everything in this song called “Way Down Deep.” So I started writing verses to it. I heard Amy’s version and I couldn’t quite penetrate it except for the hook. So I started writing and it went through a lot of changes. Jennifer’s using some of my verses and curiously enough, some of Amy’s verses started making sense to Jennifer and she started using them…. Anyway, the thing became completely Jennifer’s song. Jorge Calderon played bass on her version of “Bird on the Wire” and he’s with me now.

  VS: David Mansfield’s on steel guitar and fiddle on the track. Have you ever played with Mansfield?

  LC: No, I haven’t.

  VS: He’s one of the great wonders on the violin. But you usually have a violinist in your bands, don’t you?

  LC: Yes, I have a wonderful violinist by the name of Bobby Furgo playing with me. [Scelsa plays “Way Down Deep,” then “Tower of Song” —Ed.] When Jennifer came up with that part [in “Tower of Song”], I knew we’d nailed the song.

  VS: The “da-doo-dum-dum” part. That’s perfect.

  LC: That really gave the song the perspective of real humor. Real lightness.

  VS: Sure. But there was enough humor in it to start out with. “I ache in the places where I used to play” and “I was born with this golden voice.” I mean, for people who say that there is no sense of humor in Leonard Cohen’s work, there’s a perfect example of its existence. Does that “Tower [of Song]“ exist anyplace, do you think?

  LC: A lot of people I know are in it.

  VS: Hank Williams is up very high in the tower.

  LC: Yeah, different floor.

  VS: [You’ll] be in town tomorrow night performing with a big band, right? A lot of pieces in the band?

  LC: Well, we’re nine onstage. There are two singers and six musicians.

  VS: Has your method of composing changed over the years with the changes in technology? Have you embraced computers?

  LC: I love computers. Most of my last album was written with the Mac Performa program. I played into the Mac from my keyboard and then changed in the Mac and then replayed and then dumped onto a twenty-four-track.

  VS: For those of us who don’t know, you have a keyboard, like a piano keyboard, in front of you?

  LC: That’s right, I have a keyboard that has an output that enables it to transmit signals to a computer, which then enables you to change those signals in the computer and then replay them out through the keyboard so there are endless variations and changes that you can make on it.

  VS: So you can write the arrangements as well.

  LC: Yes. Most of the arrangements were done that way on this new record.

  VS: Now why does it seem to me that Leonard Cohen and computer technology shouldn’t go hand in hand?

  LC: I don’t know. There was something about the computer. I was given one. I felt the same way and Macintosh had some kind of promotional program in Canada and they gave a computer to half a dozen writers and I said, “Look this is just a waste of money, chaps …”

  VS: Prior to this, would you write in longhand or on the typewriter?

  LC: Typewriter. I always liked typewriters.

  VS: And you’d compose with a guitar?

  LC: That’s right. Very rarely the keyboard but usually the guitar. But when they showed me how to work this thing and I also began drawing on it with a freestanding stylus that works on a digitized tablet and by pressure on the stylus you can widen or narrow the line itself so you can brush paint … there are many programs available now that are much more sophisticated than the ones I use but I loved it. It seemed magic to me. And while I could never really repair toasters or cars, I have a feeling for the computer.

  VS: Is there a kind of a relationship to poetry in the computer do you think or am I going too far? There’s a mystery about them …

  LC: There are computer mystics around. The philosophy and theory of the computer … that’s a little too deep for me. All I know is that I can do things with them. They seem like very friendly devices. First of all, you can change the typography on a lyric and that often changes the way you’re looking at it. You can put the whole thing out in old English type so you have a very modern line like “Give it to me, baby.” When you see that written in Gothic type it has a different meaning. And you can move things around that way and it refreshes the mind and it invites you to think about things different ways. It’s a very friendly kind of activity.

  VS: Do you write every day?

  LC: I do.

  VS: And do you have a set ritual? Do you have a discipline?

  LC: The record starts in fits and starts. You first of all gather the songs that didn’t make it onto the previous record because I’m always operating from a position of poverty. It’s not like I have thousands of songs like Prince to choose between. There are only a few things going. So you take the ones that didn’t make it onto the last record and you start messing around with them and you’re documenting your life and the whole dismal thing starts to unfold and as you approach the later stages of the thing, you’re in it all the time. I’ve developed a very pleasant life based around this obsessive activity.

  VS: Between albums will you remove yourself from that activity?

  LC: Well, between albums I have the tour. I tour every four years because that’s usually what it takes to put the album out. I go on this tour that is a completely changed kind of activity. I’m singing and dancing and talking to people and the other parts of the time are really quite solitary.

  VS: Does that solitary aspect of touring generate its own creativity or not?

  LC: I’ve never been able to write on the road but it’s so great to get out of your room, to be able to talk to people. Of course you’re tired a lot of the time. And the possibilities of disgrace are abundant. There are many obvious things about touring that are dangerous and fatiguing but it’s really great to get out of your house and get behind the songs and to gamble every night that you’re going to have the purity of spirit or the enthusiasm or the care … you’re gonna be able to summon your best self and present the songs.

  VS: It’s something that I’ve always wondered about with performers— with actors, for instance, who do the same play every night—how they can summon that freshness. If you sing the same song with the same group of musicians night after night after night, doesn’t it become rote after a while?

  LC: I’ve never found it to be that. I guess the thing is so risky moment by moment, certainly with the kind of show that we do. There are not too many guarantees. If anybody plays a wrong note, it’s gonna blow the song in some kind of way. It’s very precise. We’re all worried about blowing it. It isn’t like strolling in, this wandering troubadour, and playing a few chords. The songs are very carefully arranged and presented. Also, the red wine helps. I tend to drink a bit of red wine.

  VS: While you’re performing?

  LC: No, not while. A few glasses, sometimes many glasses, with a meal that we take in common, all of us, the technicians, the crew, and the musicians. We generally eat together and some of us will drink together. And I must pay my debt publicly to the red wine. It’s a wonderful thing. But I only drink professionally. I never drink after intermission. And I try to invite the people I work with not to drink after intermission also. I think it’s a sacramental activity. We drink together and we play and the wine speaks with the song. If you start drinking after the concert, then you’re really gong to get into trouble.

  VS: … Now in a sense, [the song “Closing Time”] brings you back to those first musical performances of yours when you were playing country music in Montreal.

  LC: That’s the full circle.

  VS: Setting the apocalypse or something like it in a country and western bar.

  LC: I was in this little town in Ontario. We were playing a concert there an
d I got a note from someone in the audience. It was Mike Doddman’s brother. [Mike was] my buddy in the Buckskin Boys. He sent me a note saying Mike had died. I’d lost contact with these boys. They were from my street; we grew up together. And [Mike’s brother] came backstage and showed me a picture of Mike, who was the harmonica player for the Buckskin Boys. He’d become a Trappist monk in his last years. And I now have a picture of him celebrating the mass. Anyway, let’s not get dismal. Yeah, it was, it’s back to the Buckskin Boys.

  VS: Tell me about “Waiting for the Miracle.” What is the miracle for you?

  LC: The miracle is to move to the other side of the miracle where you cop to the fact that you’re waiting for it and that it may or may not come. But free from waiting, free from the miracle, so let’s do something crazy, something absolutely wrong, while we’re waiting for the miracle to come. Once you have embraced this notion that you’re waiting for the miracle, that this thing is not going to work out, that there is a crack in everything, that this landscape is treacherous, and we don’t get what we want but we must wait but to go to the other side of waiting where you’re free from waiting … that gives you this madness. “Baby, let’s get married, we’ve been alone too long, let’s be alone together, let’s see if we’re that strong.”

  VS: This is very much akin to the Zen philosophy that you were talking about before, isn’t it?

  LC: I never figured out what the Zen philosophy was because this teacher of mine couldn’t speak English.

  VS: Wait a minute! You didn’t mention that before, Leonard. It was just the saki that you used to communicate …