Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen

by Jeff Burger

  London-based Alastair Pirrie is a writer, producer, and director of more than six hundred hours of British and international network television. He has produced television programs with Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, Elton John, and many other prominent rock artists; presented radio shows on BBC Radio One, Capital Radio, and other stations; authored novels; and lectured on media at Cambridge University.

  j. poet is the pen name of a music journalist, poet, short-story writer, and singer/songwriter. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Chronicle, Creem, Crawdaddy!, DRUM, Folk Roots, Magnet, Native Peoples, Pulse!, and SOMA. He lives in San Francisco and says he loves hot music, spicy food, tropical climates, and his wife, Leslie.

  After winning the Jerome Lowell Dejur prize for fiction at the City College of New York and the Deems Taylor award for journalism from ASCAP, Bruce Pollock went on to found and edit the popular magazine GUITAR: For the Practicing Musician. He has published three novels and eleven books on music, including Working Musicians, By the Time We Got to Woodstock, If You Like the Beatles, and The Rock Song Index: The 7500 Most Important Songs of the Rock Era. His latest book is A Friend in the Music Business: The ASCAP Story.

  Valerie Pringle, one of Canada’s best-known broadcasters, hosted Midday on CBC-TV from 1984 to 1992 and Canada AM on CTV from 1994 to 2001. She then helped produce, write, and host documentaries and series on CTV and CBC-TV. Now involved full time in not-for-profit work for several foundations, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada in 2006 for her communications and volunteer work. In 2012, she received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Ryerson University, from which she graduated in 1974.

  Jennie Punter lives in Toronto, where she edits Musicworks—a magazine about Canadian and international experimental new music and sound art—and covers Canadian film and TV industry news for Variety. Since 2001 she has also worked in documentary film research and production. Punter studied classical piano for fourteen years, during which time she also fell in love with punk and started collecting vinyl. From 1991 to 2004 she wrote extensively on popular music as an editor for the North American monthly Music Express and as a freelancer for the Toronto Star and the women’s magazine Flare.

  Wayne Robins has been a journalist specializing in music for more than forty years. Since his first paid assignment—reviewing the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Oakland show for the Berkeley Barb—he has written for Creem, Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Crawdaddy!, Zoo World, the Colorado Daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Japanese magazines Plus One and Music Life, the Boston Phoenix, and MSNBC.com. The author of three books, he spent twenty years as the pop critic for Newsday/New York Newsday and has taught writing at NYU and copyedited at Billboard. His biggest thrill was playing air guitar with Keith Richards.

  Shelagh Rogers, who joined CBC Radio in 1980, has hosted and appeared on many of its broadcasts. She currently hosts its weekly program on books and literature, The Next Chapter.

  Paul Saltzman is a two-time Emmy Award-winning film and television director-producer with more than three hundred productions to his credit. His first feature was the award-winning documentary Prom Night in Mississippi. His second feature was 2012’s The Last White Knight. In 1965, he did civil rights work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi. In 2010, he cofounded the nonprofit Moving Beyond Prejudice. His most recent book, The Beatles in India, features a photographic document of the quartet’s 1968 visit to that country.

  Vin Scelsa, one of the most important figures in the rise of freeform FM radio, is the longtime host of the New York-area program Idiot’s Delight, which airs on WFUV and on Sirius/XM satellite radio. He has worked at such stations as WLIR, WXRK, WNEW, and WABC (which became WPLJ). In 2007, the year he celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his first broadcast, he received the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award.

  Tom Schnabel helped introduce world music to American audiences as the first music director and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic (1979–’91) at the influential KCRW-FM in Santa Monica, California. He is the author of Stolen Moments: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians and Rhythm Planet: The Great World Music Makers, and has written for such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Downbeat, and Esquire. He has produced world music CDs, provided music supervision for advertising and movies, served as program advisor for the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall, and taught in Los Angeles and Paris. Schnabel, who holds an MA in comparative literature from UCLA, now hosts weekly online music shows for KCRW and writes a blog for its website called “Rhythm Planet.”

  Karen Schoemer is the author of Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other publications, as well as the anthologies Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap, and Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000. A resident of Columbia County, New York, she contributes essays about upstate life to the quarterly magazine Our Town and hosts a weekly music show on WGXC-FM and wwgxc.org.

  Jordi Sierra i Fabra has sold more than ten million books in his native Spain. His hundreds of titles include biographies, histories, works for children, and poetry collections. He has followed the rock scene since the 1960s and has founded such music periodicals as the Great Musical, Disco Express, Top Magazine, and Popular 1.

  Deborah Sprague found her musical passion early on, as a preteen peeking through the windows of the nascent avant-rock scene of Cleveland, where she discovered Pere Ubu, the Pagans, 15–60–75, and many more. Thus fueled, she headed to New York City at age seventeen, began writing for multiple fanzines, and wound up as editor in chief of the late, lamented Creem magazine. In succeeding years, her work has appeared in publications as varied as Rolling Stone, Variety, the New York Daily News, Spin, and Newsday. She has also contributed essays to books, including The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock and Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics.

  Robert Sward, the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, is the author of twelve books, including the novel A Much-Married Man and Four Incarnations: New & Selected Poems. His fiction has been heard on National Public Radio’s The Sound of Writing. Sward teaches for Cabrillo College and the University of California Extension in Santa Cruz.

  London-based Steve Turner, who has written for Rolling Stone, New Musical Express, and many other periodicals, is the author of such books as The Man Called Cash, Angelheaded Hipster (a biography of Jack Kerouac), and A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song.

  Suzanne Vega’s critically acclaimed, self-titled debut album, which appeared in 1985, went platinum in the United Kingdom. The follow-up, Solitude Standing, featured the worldwide hit “Luka” (number three in the United States). She has since released nine more studio albums, the most recent of which is Close-Up, Vol. 4: Songs of Family. A Leonard Cohen fan since age fourteen, Vega contributed a reading of his “Story of Isaac” to the 1995 tribute CD Tower of Song. A long and noteworthy 1992 conversation between the two artists is posted at suzannevega.com.

  Steve Venright’s books of poetry and short prose include Spiral Agitator and Floors of Enduring Beauty. As well as being an author and visual artist, he has released several recordings through his Torpor Vigil record label, including Samuel Andreyev’s The Tubular West and Dreaming Like Mad with Dion McGregor: More Outrageous Recordings of the World’s Most Renowned Sleeptalker. Venright was born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1961, and says he hasn’t been the same since.

  Patrick Watson has been a Canadian television and radio personality, writer, producer, and director for nearly half a century. He was chairman of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1989 to 1994.

  Jon Wilde was all set for a career as a professional footballer “until a painful toe injury put paid to all that.” Instead, he has enjoyed a long and v
aried career in journalism, specializing in interviews with the world’s leading hell-raisers, including Dennis Hopper, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, George Best, Keith Richards, and Harvey Keitel. Wilde is interviewer-in-residence at Mail on Sunday’s Live Magazine. He lives in Hove, England, with his spaniel, Banjo, and a lively assortment of cats and rats.

  In 1966, Paul Williams founded the hugely influential Crawdaddy!, the first national American magazine of rock criticism. He later published more than two dozen books, including Outlaw Blues, Das Energi, and the three-part Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Williams died in 2013.

  Chicago native Paul Zollo is a recording artist for Trough Records and has cowritten songs with such composers as Steve Allen, Darryl Purpose, and Severin Browne. His song “Being in This World”—which appears on his first solo album, Orange Avenue—is a duet with Art Garfunkel. Zollo is the author of several books, including Songwriters on Songwriting, Conversations with Tom Petty, and Hollywood Remembered. His first volume of photography, Angeleno, will be published in 2014. Zollo, who serves as the chief editor of Bluerailroad.com and senior editor of American Songwriter magazine, lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Jeff Burger edited Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, which Chicago Review Press published in 2013. He has been a writer and editor for more than four decades and has covered popular music throughout his journalism career. His reviews, essays, and reportage on that and many other subjects have appeared in more than seventy-five magazines, newspapers, and books, including Barron’s, the Los Angeles Times, Family Circle, Melody Maker, High Fidelity, Creem, Circus, Reader’s Digest, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, All Music Guide, and No Depression. He has published interviews with many leading musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, the Righteous Brothers, Roger McGuinn, Tommy James, Foreigner’s Mick Jones, and the members of Steely Dan; and with such public figures as Suze Orman, James Carville, Sir Richard Branson, F. Lee Bailey, Sydney Pollack, Wolfman Jack, and Cliff Robertson.

  Burger has been editor of several periodicals, including Phoenix magazine in Arizona, and he spent fourteen years in senior positions at Medical Economics, the country’s largest business magazine for doctors. A former consulting editor at Time Inc., he currently serves as editor of Business Jet Traveler, which the American Society of Business Publication Editors named one of the country’s best business magazines in 2011 and 2013.

  Burger, whose website is byjeffburger.com, lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey. His wife, Madeleine Beresford, is a teacher and puppeteer. The couple have a son, Andre, and a daughter, Myriam.

  CREDITS

  I gratefully acknowledge the help of everyone who gave permission for material to appear in this book. I have made every reasonable effort to contact copyright holders. If an error or omission has been made, please bring it to the attention of the publisher.

  “TV Interview,” by Adrienne Clarkson. Originally broadcast on Take 30, CBC, May 23, 1966. Copyright © 1966. Printed by permission of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

  “After the Wipe-Out, a Renewal,” by Sandra Djwa. Originally published in the Ubyssey, February 3, 1967. Copyright © 1967. Reprinted by permission of Sandra Djwa.

  “Ladies & Gents, Leonard Cohen,” by Jack Hafferkamp. Originally published in Rolling Stone, February 4, 1971. Copyright © 1971. Reprinted by permission of Jack Hafferkamp.

  “Famous Last Words from Leonard Cohen (The Poet’s Final Interview, He Hopes),” by Paul Saltzman. Originally published in Maclean’s, June 1972. Copyright © 1972. Reprinted by permission of Paul Saltzman.

  “Cohen Regrets,” by Alastair Pirrie. Originally published in New Musical Express, March 10, 1973. Copyright © 1973. Reprinted by permission of Alastair Pirrie.

  “Leonard Cohen,” by Pat Harbron. Originally published in Beetle magazine, December 1973. Copyright © 1973. Reprinted by permission of Pat Harbron.

  “Depressing? Who? Me?” by Steve Turner. Originally published in New Musical Express, June 29, 1974. Copyright © 1974. Reprinted by permission of Steve Turner.

  “Interview,” by Robin Pike. Originally published in ZigZag, October 1974. Copyright © 1974. Reprinted by permission of Robin Pike.

  “Interview,” by Jordi Sierra i Fabra. Originally published in Leonard Cohen, 1978. Copyright © 1978. Reprinted by permission of Jordi Sierra i Fabra. English translation by Jane Danko. Copyright © 1974. Reprinted by permission of Jane Danko.

  “Leonard Cohen: The Romantic in a Ragpicker’s Trade,” by Paul Williams. Originally published in Crawdaddy!, March 1975. Copyright © 1975. Reprinted by permission of Wolfgang’s Vault (wolfgangsvault.com).

  “Suffering for Fan and Profit: The Return of Leonard Cohen,” by Mick Brown. Originally published in Sounds, July 3, 1976. Copyright © 1976. Reprinted by permission of Mick Brown.

  “Leonard Lately: A Leonard Cohen Interview,” by William Conrad. Originally published on nodepression.com, May 7, 2012, and, in different format, in Buddy magazine, 1976. Copyright © 1976 and 2012. Reprinted by permission of William Conrad.

  “The Obscure Case of Leonard Cohen and the Mysterious Mr. M.,” by Bruce Pollock. Originally published in After Dark, February 1977. Copyright © 1977. Reprinted by permission of Bruce Pollock.

  “What Happened When Phil Spector Met Leonard Cohen?” by Harvey Kubernik. Originally published in the Los Angeles Phonograph, January 1978. Copyright © 1978. Reprinted by permission of Harvey Kubernik.

  “TV Interview,” by Patrick Watson. Originally broadcast on Authors on CBC, February 1 and 8, 1980. Copyright © 1980. Printed by permission of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

  “A Conversation with Leonard Cohen,” by Steve Venright. Originally published in Shades, August 1983. Copyright © 1983. Reprinted by permission of Steve Venright. Introductory comments first published on MondoMagazine.net, August 15, 2008. Copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission of Steve Venright.

  “Radio Interview,” by Vicki Gabereau. Originally broadcast on Variety Tonight, CBC, September 6, 1984. Copyright © 1984. Printed by permission of CBC.

  “Interview,” by Robert Sward. Originally published in Malahat Review, December 1986. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of Robert Sward.

  “Interviews,” by Kristine McKenna. Originally published in whole or part in the Los Angeles Times, 1985; Another Room, spring 1985; L.A. Weekly, May 6, 1986, and broadcast on Eight Hours to Harry, KCRW-FM. Copyright © 1985–1986. All interviews subsequently published in Book of Changes by Kristine McKenna. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission of Kristine McKenna.

  “TV Interview,” by Ray Martin. Originally broadcast on Nine Network, Sydney, Australia, May 24, 1985. Copyright © 1985. Printed by permission of the Nine Network/Australia’s The Midday Show.

  “Songs and Thoughts of Leonard Cohen,” by Robert O’Brian. Originally published in RockBill, September 1987. Copyright © 1987. Reprinted by permission of Robert O’Brian.

  “Len,” by Jon Wilde. Originally published in Blitz, February 1988. Copyright © 1988. Introductory material originally published on SabotageTimes .com, 2012. Copyright © 2012. Reprinted by permission of Jon Wilde.

  “Leonard Cohen: The Profits of Doom,” by Steve Turner. Originally published in Q magazine, April 1988. Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permission of Steve Turner.

  “I’m Your Man,” by Alberto Manzano. Originally published in Rockdelux (Spain), May 1988. Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permission Albert Manzano.

  “Dinner with Leonard,” by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring. Originally published in the Athenian, September 1988. Republished June 2012 on HuffingtonPost.com with new introduction. Copyright © 1988 and 2012. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Boleman-Herring.

  “Radio Interview,” by Tom Schnabel. Originally broadcast on Morning Becomes Electric, KCRW-FM, July 13, 1988, and published in Stolen Moments: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians, 1988. Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permiss
ion of Tom Schnabel.

  “Leonard Cohen and the Death of Cool,” by Deborah Sprague. Originally published in Your Flesh, spring 1992. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Deborah Sprague.

  “The Smoky Life,” by Jennie Punter. Originally published in Music Express, January 1992. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Jennie Punter.

  “Leonard Cohen: Inside the Tower of Song,” by Paul Zollo. Originally published in SongTalk, April 1993. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission of Paul Zollo.

  “TV Interview,” by Barbara Gowdy. Originally broadcast November 19, 1992, on TVOntario and published in 1994 in One on One: The Imprint Interviews, edited by Leanna Crouch. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted by permission of Leanna Crouch.

  “The Loneliness of the Long-Suffering Folkie,” by Wayne Robins. Originally published in Newsday, November 22, 1992. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Wayne Robins.

  “Growing Old Passionately,” by Alan Jackson. Originally published in the Observer, November 22, 1992. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Alan Jackson.

  “Leonard Cohen: The Lord Byron of Rock and Roll,” by Karen Schoemer. Originally published in the New York Times, November 29, 1992. Copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of Karen Schoemer.

  “The Future,” by Alberto Manzano. Originally published in El Europeo, spring 1993. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission of Alberto Manzano.

  “Radio Interview,” by Vin Scelsa. Originally broadcast June 13, 1993, on WXRK-FM. Copyright © 1993. Printed by permission of Vin Scelsa.

  “The Prophet of Love Looks into the Abyss: A Conversation with Leonard Cohen,” by Thom Jurek. Originally published in Metro Times, August 18, 1993. Copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission of Metro Times.

  “‘I Am the Little Jew Who Wrote the Bible,’” by Arthur Kurzweil. Excerpts originally published in the Jewish Book News, January 1994. Copyright © 1994. Printed/reprinted by permission of Arthur Kurzweil.