by Jeff Burger
Can it really be that simple? Can the mood of his classic songs really be explained by unfortunate brain chemistry? He recently told his biographer Sylvie Simmons that in everything he did, “I was just trying to beat the devil. Just trying to get on top of it.” As well as Judaism and Zen Buddhism, he briefly flirted with Scientology. He has never married but has had several significant relationships, including Joni Mitchell, actor Rebecca De Mornay, and the woman with whom he had two children in the early seventies, Suzanne Elrod (no, not that Suzanne). He was a serious drinker and smoker who experimented with different drugs. On his 1972 tour, as documented in Bird on a Wire, he christened his band the Army and they in turn dubbed him Captain Mandrax after his downer of choice.
In that film he appears fractious and exhausted: a “broken-down nightingale,” addressing audiences with irritable humor. Yet on his comeback tour he looked profoundly grateful for every cheer or clap. “I was touched by the reception, yes,” he says. “I remember we were playing in Ireland and the reception was so warm that tears came to my eyes and I thought, ‘I can’t be seen weeping at this point.’ Then I turned around and saw the guitar player weeping.”
The tour was partly triggered by financial necessity after his business manager siphoned off almost all of his savings. Was he reluctant to go on the road again? “I don’t know if reluctance is the word but trepidation or nervousness. We rehearsed for a long, long time—longer than is reasonable. But one is never really certain.” He hopes to play more concerts and to release another album in a year or so. He is already older than Johnny Cash was when he released his final album; soon he’ll creatively outlive Frank Sinatra. On the back of one of his notebooks he has written: “Coming to the end of the book but not quite yet.”
In Paris, after the press conference, I’m discreetly ushered into a back room for a rare interview alone with Cohen. Up close, he’s a calming presence, old-world courtesy mingled with Zen, and his smoke-blackened husk of a voice is as reassuring as a lullaby. I ask him whether he wishes the long and painful process of writing his songs would come more easily.
“Well, we’re talking in a world where guys go down into the mines, chewing coca and spending all day in backbreaking labor. We’re in a world where there’s famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it’s very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?”
Does he learn anything from writing them? Does he work out ideas that way?
“I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.”
In “Going Home,” the first song on Old Ideas, he mentions writing “a manual for living with defeat.” Can a listener learn about life from his songs?
“Song operates on so many levels. It operates on the level you just spoke of where it addresses the heart in its ordeals and its defeats but it also is useful in getting the dishes done or cleaning the house. It’s also useful as a background to courting.”
Is a cover of “Hallelujah” a compliment he has grown tired of receiving?
“There’s been a couple of times when other people have said, ‘Can we have a moratorium please on “Hallelujah”?’ Must we have it at the end of every single drama and every single Idol? And once or twice I’ve felt maybe I should lend my voice to silencing it but on second thought no, I’m very happy that it’s being sung.”
Does he still define success as survival? “Yeah.” He smiles. “It’s good enough for me.”
THE WORKS OF LEONARD COHEN
STUDIO ALBUMS
1967 Songs of Leonard Cohen
1969 Songs from a Room
1971 Songs of Love and Hate
1974 New Skin for the Old Ceremony
1977 Death of a Ladies’ Man
1979 Recent Songs
1984 Various Positions
1988 I’m Your Man
1992 The Future
2001 Ten New Songs
2004 Dear Heather
2012 Old Ideas
COMPILATION ALBUMS
1975 Best of Leonard Cohen
1997 More Best of Leonard Cohen
2002 The Essential Leonard Cohen
LIVE ALBUMS
1973 Live Songs
1994 Cohen Live: Leonard Cohen in Concert
2001 Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979
2009 Live in London
2010 Songs from the Road
BOOKS
1956 Let Us Compare Mythologies
1961 The Spice-Box of Earth
1963 The Favorite Game
1964 Flowers for Hitler
1966 Beautiful Losers
1966 Parasites of Heaven
1971 Selected Poems: 1956–1968
1972 The Energy of Slaves
1978 Death of a Lady’s Man
1984 Book of Mercy
1993 Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
2006 Book of Longing
2009 The Lyrics of Leonard Cohen
2011 Poems and Songs
2012 Fifteen Poems
CONCERT VIDEOS
2009 Live in London
2009 Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
2010 Songs from the Road
Note: Cohen is also featured in films he did not produce, including Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965), Bird on a Wire (1974), The Song of Leonard Cohen (1980), I Am a Hotel (1983), and I’m Your Man (2005).
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Elizabeth Boleman-Herring is publishing editor of WeeklyHubris.com, a columnist for Huffington Post, and author of The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable. An academic for thirty years, she has also worked steadily as a founding editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers, and is the author of fifteen books in diverse genres. Boleman-Herring is a Traditional Usui Reiki Master and an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher (who, through GreeceTraveler.com, leads trips to Greece); and, as “Bebe Herring,” she has been a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans.
Born in London in 1950, Mick Brown has contributed to such publications as the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. He now writes on a wide variety of cultural subjects for the London Daily Telegraph magazine. He is the author of six books, including American Heartbeat: Travels from Woodstock to San Jose by Song Title, The Spiritual Tourist, The Dance of 17 Lives, and, most recently, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector.
Adrienne Clarkson is a Canadian journalist and stateswoman. She has been a producer and broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and is a former governor general of Canada.
Bill Conrad is a semiretired music journalist and publicist who lives and continues to write in Jacksonville, Florida. He has worked with record executives and producers Jimmy Bowen and Ken Mansfield. His years with country star Waylon Jennings are the focus of a memoir in progress. A list of his film and print credits is at IMDb.com under William F. Conrad.
Stina Lundberg Dabrowski is a professor of television at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. She is also an award-winning journalist, writer, producer, and TV host. Dabrowski, who has been a popular figure on Swedish television since 1982, has interviewed Muammar al-Gaddafi, Hillary Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, Mikhael Gorbachev, Al Gore, David Bowie, Norman Mailer, and many other luminaries.
Writer, critic, and biographer Sandra Djwa, who holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, taught Canadian literature at Simon Fraser U
niversity from 1968 to 2005. In 1973, she cofounded the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures. Djwa is best known for her articles on Canadian poets like Margaret Atwood and for her biographies of distinguished Canadians, including F.R. Scott and Roy Daniells. Her latest book, Journey with No Maps: A Life of P. K. Page, was published in 2012.
Chris Douridas garnered attention in the 1990s as host of the daily Morning Becomes Eclectic program on Santa Monica, California’s KCRW-FM, where he has also served as program director. Douridas has been an A&R executive at DreamWorks Records and has produced soundtracks for many popular films, including American Beauty, Shrek 2, and As Good as It Gets. He has had television acting roles and he hosted the inaugural season of PBS’s Sessions at West 54th.
Gillian G. Gaar is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. Her books include She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll, Green Day: Rebels with a Cause, The Rough Guide to Nirvana, Return of the King: Elvis Presley’s Great Comeback, and Entertain Us: The Rise of Nirvana. She has contributed to many publications, including Mojo, Rolling Stone, and Goldmine, and she served as project consultant/historian for Nirvana’s 2004 box set With the Lights Out.
Vicki Gabereau has been a popular Canadian radio and television talk-show host for more than three decades. Her book This Won’t Hurt a Bit collects her conversations with the “famous, not-so-famous, and should-be-famous.”
Jian Ghomeshi, who lives in Toronto, hosts the national daily cultural-affairs talk program Q on CBC Radio One and Bold TV. The show, which he cocreated, has become the highest-rated morning program in CBC history. Ghomeshi has written opinion pieces for the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the International Herald Tribune, and other publications. During the 1990s, he was a member of the popular Canadian folk-rock group Moxy Früvous.
Mikal Gilmore, one of America’s leading music journalists, has written for Rolling Stone since the 1970s. He is the author of Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock and Roll and Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents. His 1995 memoir, Shot in the Heart, recounts his destructive childhood and relationship with his older brother Gary, who in 1977 became the first man to be executed in the United States after restoration of the death penalty. It won the Los Angeles Times book prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Toronto-based Barbara Gowdy is a novelist and short-story writer whose bestselling books include Falling Angels, The White Bone, The Romantic, and Helpless.
Brett Grainger is a freelance writer and a recipient of a National Magazine Award in Canada. He is the author of In the World but Not of It: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America. Grainger, who lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania, has a doctorate in the history of religion from Harvard University.
Richard Guilliatt is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in many leading newspapers and magazines including the Times, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Talk of the Devil— Repressed Memory and the Ritual Abuse Witch-Hunt and coauthor with Peter Hohnen of The Wolf—How One German Raider Terrorized the Allies in the Most Epic Voyage of WW1. He lives in Sydney, where he is a staff writer at the Weekend Australian Magazine.
Jack Hafferkamp lives and works in China. On certain Tuesdays he sings and plays some of Leonard Cohen’s songs (“the easy ones”) in the Red Lion bar and restaurant in Wuxi “where most of the people have never heard them or even understand them,” since they’re being sung in English. “That’s OK,” Hafferkamp says. “I often think I don’t understand them, either.”
Montreal-born Sarah Hampson is a columnist with the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading national newspaper, which she joined in 2007. Before that, she freelanced for the Globe and Mail, the Observer in London, and many other publications. She has interviewed more than five hundred celebrities and won several National Magazine Awards in Canada. Her memoir, Happily Ever After Marriage: A Reinvention in Midlife, was published in Canada in 2010. Her website is hampsonwrites.com.
Though Patrick Harbron did some writing early in his career, he is known for his photography. His iconic images of Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, and hundreds of other rock artists have been featured on album and DVD covers and in such periodicals as Rolling Stone, Time, LIFE, People, and Business Week. He has produced three books of photography and has photographed for television and film clients such as HBO, ABC, Sony, NBC, Netflix, Disney Films, and Warner Brothers. Harbron, whose work is on view at the Morrison Hotel Gallery in New York and the Analogue Gallery in Toronto, is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts offered an extensive exhibit of his rock music photography in 2012. His websites are patrickharbron .com and rockandrollicons.com.
Alan Jackson is a UK-based freelance journalist who has been interviewing musicians, actors, and other public figures for nearly thirty years, and for a variety of publications, most regularly among them the London Times, the Observer, and the Mail on Sunday. His interview subjects have ranged from Madonna to Peggy Lee, Bob Dylan (three times) to Justin Timberlake, and Chris Brown to Dusty Springfield. Examples of his work can be found at alanjacksoninterviews.com.
Brian D. Johnson has been a writer for Maclean’s, the Canadian weekly news magazine, since 1985. He has also been a filmmaker, a columnist for the Globe and Mail in Toronto, and a broadcaster and producer with CBC Radio. He left journalism for some years to perform as a percussionist with rock and reggae bands and has published three nonfiction books as well as a collection of poetry and a novel. He has written for such magazines as Toronto Life, Saturday Night, and Rolling Stone and has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards. He is currently president of the Toronto Film Critics Association.
Thom Jurek, who served as senior editor for Detroit’s Metro Times from 1990 to 1996, has been affiliated since 1999 with All-Music Guide (allmusic .com), where he is a staff writer. He grew up in and around Detroit, and has been writing about music since he was fifteen. He has contributed to such periodicals as Rolling Stone, Creem, Musician, Spin, American Songwriter, and Interview. He is the author of two collections of poetry: DUB and Memory Bags, the latter with the late French artist Jacques Karamanoukian. His fiction has been anthologized in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook on Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction.
Longtime music journalist and record producer Harvey Kubernik is the author of This Is Rebel Music, Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music in Film and on Your Screen, and Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon. His newest book, Turn Up the Radio!: Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956–1972, was published in 2014. He coauthored A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival. He has published more than a thousand music- and pop culture-related articles and served as a consultant for television and film documentaries.
Arthur Kurzweil is a writer, teacher, and publisher. He was editor in chief of the Jewish Book Club from 1984 to 2001. His writing can be found online at arthurkurzweil.com.
John Leland, who has worked for the New York Times since 2000, previously served as editor in chief of Details, a senior editor at Newsweek, an editor and columnist at Spin, and a reviewer for Trouser Press. He is the author of Hip: The History and Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They’re Not What You Think).
Dorian Lynskey has been writing about music and culture since 1996 for titles such as the Guardian, Q, and Spin. He is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs and The Guardian Book of Playlists. He lives in London.
Alberto Manzano created the Spanish translations of Leonard Cohen’s The Spice-Box of Earth, Book of Mercy, Stranger Music, and Book of Longing. He is the author of Leonard Cohen The Biography and Conversations with a Survivor, a compilation of articles and interviews with the singer. In 1966 he worked wit
h the flamenco singer Enrique Morente on adaptations of Cohen’s songs for the record Omega, and in 2007 he produced the homage album According to Leonard Cohen, which featured such artists as Jackson Browne, John Cale, Anjani Thomas, Perla Batalla, Santiago Auseron, Adam Cohen, Constantino Romero, and Elliott Murphy. Manzano met Cohen in 1980, traveled with him on several European tours, and visited him in Hydra and in Los Angeles. Manzano’s latest book on Cohen, Lorca and Flamenco, was published in 2012. He has translated more than a hundred books of rock lyrics and is the author of three books of poems.
Ray Martin has been one of Australia’s most popular TV journalists for decades. He hosted The Midday Show with Ray Martin from 1985 to 1993.
Kristine McKenna is a Los Angeles-based writer and curator. Her fourteenth book, Tripping: Clothing & Costume in the American ’60s, is slated for publication in 2014. She is currently editing a collection of writings by artist David Salle and working on a monograph on artist Joe Goode.
Robert O’Brian has been a journalist for more than thirty years. In addition to Leonard Cohen, his interview subjects have included Bill Moyers, Paul Simon, Buckminster Fuller, B. F. Skinner, Joan Baez, Al Green, Alan Lomax, Ken Burns, Willie Nelson, and Frank Zappa. He is the author of the novel Jack Kerouac’s Confession. He lives in New York City with his wife, journalist Ilaina Jonas.
Robin Pike was born in Cheltenham, England, and educated at Cheltenham Grammar School, where he was a contemporary of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. He is currently collaborating with Paul Trynka in writing a biography of Brian. Pike has been a teacher of chemistry and with his friend David Stopps started Friars, a now world-famous rock music club in Aylesbury. Later Pike ran Division One Club, a launch pad for bands such as Primal Scream. He lives in Hertfordshire, England.