by Jeff Burger
LC: Thank you so much for coming. It’s very, very kind of you.
AK: Well it’s my pleasure. When I graduated from college, in 1971, I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and traveled around. I had my guitar with me, and I figured I only had room for one songbook. This [Songs of Leonard Cohen] was the songbook that traveled with me in Europe.
LC: Ah, great. That’s very kind!
AK: It’s been to Spain and to Yugoslavia and to Morocco and to Italy and to Israel. All over the place.
LC: Tell me, if you have a moment or two, what was your story? So you heard Baba Ram Dass, and then what was your trip? Where were you at the time? Just tell me a little about your own trip.
AK: I was in high school and college in the sixties.
LC: What college? What high school?
AK: I went to East Meadow High School on Long Island, a suburban public high school. I went to Hofstra University, and then I got a master’s degree in library science from Florida State in Tallahassee. I was busy, for a number of years, trying to end the war in Vietnam. Then I graduated college and went to Europe and it was at that time when I was beginning to discover Jewish stuff. And when I got back from Europe I discovered Ram Dass. I knew he was originally Dr. Richard Alpert and was at Harvard University, with Timothy Leary. Then Ram Dass went to India, and he met his guru, and then came back to the States. I started hearing him on WBAI. And then I went to hear him lecture and bought his tapes and just sat for hours. I must have a hundred recordings of his talks. I bought myself a printing press, setting the type by hand, and I sat, like a monk, I suppose, in my apartment, for months, printing little poetry cards. I’d find a poem and I’d set it in hand type and I’d just print them …
LC: Ah, it’s an old tradition. Beautiful!
AK: … and listen to Ram Dass tapes. My studio apartment on 101st Street in New York City was a little monastery for me. And at a certain point I realized that Ram Dass, a Jew steeped in Hinduism, was opening me up to Jewish things. And slowly but surely I became more interested in trying some of these things on and realizing, like you were saying, that the Shemoneh Esreh [central part of the Jewish prayer] is not just a bunch of words, that it’s a spiritual ladder.
LC: Right!
AK: Then there is Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who we were talking about before: he’s a brilliant, profound, wise rabbi in Jerusalem, who comes to New York three or four times a year, and who is trying to be a bridge between worlds.
LC: And you began studying with him?
AK: Yes, I began to study his books and study with him. And I looked for every opportunity to go sit with him and bring him my problems, to ask him my questions. And he became a very important person for me. And my genealogical research was very important to me, too. I was interested in my family tree, and I started tracing. I discovered that I had more in common with my dead ancestors than my living relatives. And, as I have often said, they are sometimes much easier to get along with.
LC: Right.
AK: So I hung around with my dead ancestors and went to old Jewish cemeteries in Poland and Hungary and Russia, and I did research and discovered who they were—and not only how they died but how they lived.
LC: Is your book available?
AK: I just finished a second edition. [From Generation to Generation: How to Trace Your Jewish Genealogy and Family History originally appeared in 1980. Revised editions were issued in 1994 and 2004.]
LC: I’d like to see this. Can you send me one?
AK: I would love to. I also wrote a book on Jewish genealogy for children that has a picture in it of my second cousin, Zsuzsa Barta, who learned English from your records in Budapest. So I’ll send it to you, and mark it, so you can see it.
LC: Great. Have you written a lot of books?
AK: I wrote three books on Jewish genealogy and family history.
LC: Incredible! That’s wonderful.
AK: So when I saw the names of the towns that your family came from, I knew them all. I knew them from maps.
LC: Well, now listen. Let me ask you something. The synagogue in Vilkaviskis, which is also known as Vilkavisk, was wooden. Is it true that it was octagonal?
AK: Have you seen the book Wooden Synagogues?
LC: No.
AK: Well, I have an album. It’s out of print. It was published in Poland right after the Holocaust [actually 1959] called Wooden Synagogues. I’ll look it up and see if there is a picture of it.
LC: Would you? I heard something in my family that it was like that.
AK: That it was octagonal? Some of them were absolutely exquisite. This book is extraordinary: pictures, drawings, and floor plans of wooden synagogues in Poland, of which none exist any longer. There is not a single one that stands. I’ll look and see.
LC: Because I have letters from my great-grandfather to my grandfather.
AK: Really? From the old country?
LC: Yes, yes. They are beautiful letters. They formally started off, “May the Almighty in His divine wisdom grant you and your family the blessings …” I mean beautiful salutations. And he says, “Thank you for your gift of thirty rubles. I had to ride twenty miles to the post office. And, thank God, I go to the synagogue every morning and every evening.” It was really an evocation of a life there. Wonderful letters.
AK: Well, I’ll do a little checking. It would be fun if I found something for you.
LC: That’s very kind of you. There were a couple of books written, kind of privately, about the family, by a Montreal genealogist.
AK: Is this somebody who is related to you?
LC: No, just because the family was a strong …
AK: A kind of illustrious family in the town.
LC: Well, it was illustrious only in the sense that they served. They were not particularly illustrious.
AK: Their reputation as community people …
LC: Yes, they were community people, exactly.
AK: Could I ask you to sign my items?
LC: Of course. I’ll even stamp it with my little colophon [printer’s mark] I developed. I’ll show it to you. Maybe you’re the man to ask about this. This is my colophon. The two hearts are intertwined in the same way two triangles are intertwined in a Magen David. [Literally “Shield of David,” it is a hexagram made from two equilateral triangles. A Magen David has been known, since at least the seventeenth century, to represent the Jewish people. It also appears on the flag of Israel.] I never knew this existed until I designed it. When I was reading a book by Gershom Scholem [often described as the founder of the modern, academic study of Kabbalah], he curiously enough happened to describe a synagogue, I think eighth century in Asia Minor. And he just happened to mention that there were two hearts interlocked on one of the walls. So I don’t know.
AK: I know an essay that Scholem wrote about the Star of David. I have the book at home with that essay in it.
LC: It’s wonderful that you’re a scholar, among other things. It’s wonderful that you have this stuff down like that.
AK: Well, it would be nice to find something.
RADIO INTERVIEW
CHRIS DOURIDAS | December 1993, Morning Becomes Eclectic, KCRW-FM (Santa Monica, California)
As 1993 came to a close, Cohen sat down with veteran disc jockey Chris Douridas for a live radio interview. The singer talked about his creative process and also about his frustrations with the American music business and his failed attempts to have his videos shown on television.
“I remember Leonard brought me a gift that day,” Douridas told me. “A set of worry beads from Greece, a traditional strand of beads a person uses to pass the time in Greek and Cypriot cultures. It was reflective of his love of Greece and also of my Greek heritage.
“Leonard has made many appearances at KCRW over the years,” Douridas added, “and along the way we’ve become friends. I love him dearly.” —Ed.
Chris Douridas: It’s great to have you here. Thanks for joining us in the rain this morning.
Leonard
Cohen: Oh, thank you for having me down.
CD: When you release a collection of songs, I wonder if there’s a pain of separation for you or is it a kind of freedom, a joyous sort of release for you?
LC: I’m always happiest when an album is finished. The quality I like most about an album is its doneness.
CD: So there’s no trepidation when you finally release it?
LC: No, I haven’t had a sense of trepidation about almost anything for a long, long time and when I finish an album it is such a sense of having completed a task that I can barely contain myself. Also, there’s a possibility of substantial income, which is always delightful to speculate upon.
CD: So it’s kind of like a lottery. You’re putting something out there and waiting to see what comes back.
LC: Well, I take the work very seriously and it’s a rigorous activity and it’s done with, as my confrere put it, blood on the tracks. One deserves the right to be comic about it after it’s over. But the work is rigorous.
CD: The creative process, as you said, can be grueling. There’s a Hebrew term for it that I’ve heard you refer to in the Book of Genesis.
LC: Well, God referred to it; it wasn’t actually me. But it’s in the first lines of Genesis. That notion has been used as an explanation of the creative process, since the process that God himself used in creating the cosmos involved tohu and bohu—chaos and desolation. The spirit of the Lord moved over the chaos and desolation. So lest anybody think that the making of anything is some kind of glamorous activity involved with bricks that are already baked it’s not at all that way. You’re dealing with the mud and the water. Those are the ingredients of anything that is beautiful— chaos and desolation.
CD: Diving into the creative process like that and surrendering yourself to this raw-material creation…. What must that be like to live with?
LC: It’s a bitch. I would advise anybody to avoid this enterprise like the plague. It’s not a really suitable profession except for a very few people. And even the ones that have the credentials of talent and application often don’t have the right spirit or psychology for it and self-destruct early on in the game. So I’m very reluctant to invite anybody into this guild.
CD: But I suspect that when you’re putting together an album, you have to invite people into these lower depths with you to help interpret the songs.
LC: You invite them but nobody really wants to come when they see it up close. And if you have any respect for your family or those you love, you allow them to bow out. And you make the occasion as graceful as possible. Nobody can follow you where you’ve got to go to do good work. Now, there are people who write great songs in the back of taxicabs and they are of an especially blessed tribe. But there is another tribe that doesn’t do it that way. And I’d much prefer to be in the former but I am in the latter. Nobody can follow you there and nobody wants to come and friends drop away and people turn aside and you can’t expect anybody to go the distance with you [pause] except for maybe one person in your life. Maybe one person can do it. One intimate soul.
CD: Was there one for you on this project?
LC: Yes there was. God has been good to me and usually someone has arisen in my life at these junctures and provided some kind of perspective and comfort, some kind of cheerfulness and help.
CD: And I suppose that can be found in the dedication to the album.
LC: Usually I dedicate these albums to the one who allowed the record to exist.
CD: When you listen to the album, there seems to be two emerging visions of the future. Kind of a positive and negative vision. It makes me think of something a mentor of yours, a poet in Canada, Irving Layton, said of you: “One eye was filled with joy and the other with pain.” Aside from being a beautiful line, do you think that still holds true for you?
LC: I don’t know, but I love Irving Layton. He’s an old friend and an old teacher of mine. He said one of the most penetrating things I’ve ever heard about the qualities a young poet needs. He said the most essential qualities for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience. And I had plenty of those qualities when I was very young. Layton has been a great example to me. He’s about eighty-five now and at the height of his powers. He’s produced maybe seventy books of verse and he goes from strength to strength. He has a wife of thirty. He goes on and on and on. I hope to be able to limp in his footsteps.
CD: Being from Canada and having spent a lot of time in Greece and the United States … I’m interested in your perspective of America and what it is for you. You once referred to the United States as a great experiment.
LC: Well, I’m a guest in your country and I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to shoot my mouth off about it. But I find myself defending America in many parts of the world. Not so much recently, but until quite recently … there was some kind of superiority, especially among the Europeans and the Canadians, about America. But America is the great experiment in democracy and it’s in America that the real confrontation between the rich and the poor, between the black and the white, between cultures, [occurs]…. It’s here that this experiment is unfolding. In Europe, which is beginning to have its own cultural problems with its own confrontations, they look a little less scornfully over here now than they did because America’s been dealing with these problems for a long, long time. And I think the outcome in America is very important for the rest of the world too.
CD: What’s the life of a song for you? Do the words come first? I suspect they do, being a poet.
LC: When you asked me the life of a song, I thought … they last about as long as a Volvo. Thirty years.
CD: What happens in thirty years?
LC: I don’t know but the ones I wrote thirty years ago are still moving around and I have high hopes that the new ones will also be around for a while.
CD: In terms of putting the songs together, do the words come first and then the melody?
LC: They’re born together.
CD: How do you know that words need to become a song? How do you know that it’s not done once it’s just the words there?
LC: One of the main motivations is like the bill from your kid’s college and that produces a sense of panic that makes you want to express yourself in some way. It’s a vice. It’s just a habit. One finds at a certain point that one doesn’t know how to do anything else. For instance, if you have a sense that you have another life ahead of you, that this sophisticated work that you’re doing now with music is just to pass the time before you get to your real profession, beware: you’ll find one moment that you really are a disc jockey living in L.A. That’s what I found out about myself, that I was a songwriter living in L.A. That’s why I write songs, because I don’t know how to do anything else.
CD: Say you’ve finished a song like “Democracy.” Do you immediately want to get it in a demo form to record it or do you wait till you’re about to get to an album and do it all at once?
LC: I have an intensely private and personal feeling about my work that I really do keep to myself, and I got that covered—whether the songs are any good or they mean anything or I’ve worked hard enough on them or they’re gonna live or they’re gonna die. But beyond that, there’s the relationship with the record company and with the marketplace that you have to deal with. You can’t deal with it of course unless you’re feeling strong and confident and cheerful about the work you’ve done. But mostly if you’re gonna survive as a songwriter living in L.A., you’ve really got to deal with the record company and with the marketplace. So most of the things you do with the songs themselves and what comes out after the record is really determined by the severe iron laws of the marketplace.
CD: And now there’s that added area of video.
LC: If only there were. I make videos but they’re not shown in America.
CD: Why do you think that is?
LC: I don’t know. I would really like to have people speculate on this matter.
CD: There is actually one video completed for The
Future, right?
LC: There’s a video for every record I’ve put out ever since there’s been videos. But none of them is ever shown in America.
CD: I guess there’s a video for “Closing Time.”
LC: It’s a wonderful video. Too bad nobody will ever see it here.
CD: Do you think you’ll compile them at one point and—
LC: For what? I mean, they’re compiled right now on the shelves of my library. For some odd reason, I can’t be shown. I thought at least I could be shown on the old people’s home of music channels—VH1—but I’m not even permitted to be shown on VH1. I don’t know what it is. I would honestly love to have it explained to me. Because there’s no way to sell records in this country, no way to have a career in this country, without video.
CD: I heard a rumor that you were going to be working with David Lynch on a new video for the album.
LC: He’s always spreading rumors like that around.
CD: [Laughs.] If it were to be true, what song might it be?
LC: “The Future.” But now that I thoroughly and profoundly have grasped this concept that I cannot get a video on a music channel in America, to put the kind of effort that is necessary into making a second video is very much less of an attractive idea than it was when I was filled with the heady intoxication of my record company’s speculations on the success of this record.
CD: Much of your material seems to come out of spiritual and sexual experiences and I wonder if you might speak to that tension between spiritual and sexual.
LC: There’s no tension for me. Everybody else seems to find some tension in this thing but for me, it’s just business as usual.
CD: You just came back from a rather successful European tour—
LC: Promotional tour, yeah.
CD: So you weren’t actually performing in concert over there?
LC: No, I was doing a lot of television work.
CD: Your career is really sustained by the support you’re getting in Europe and in Canada.
LC: It always has been.