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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
With his songs of love and God and unspeakable yearning, Leonard Cohen occupies his own place in the musical cosmos.
Jun 15, 1999 | Judy Collins loves to tell the story of the first time Leonard Cohen took the stage, in 1968. She had met the young Canadian poet in the mid-'60s, when he came to New York from a lengthy sojourn on the Greek isle of Hydra; the folk explosion was news to him. He still thought songwriters had to go to Nashville, and as laughable as it may sound to some, he thought songwriting was the way to make some money. He had played her a few songs then and, though she was impressed, there was nothing that blew her away. With her pure, bell-like voice and radiant beauty, Collins had already established herself as the interpreter of budding songwriters of the moment, a sort of pop Joan Baez. Call me when you've got something I can use, she told him, and back he went to his family home in Montreal.
He phoned her a few months later with a new composition, and while she listened, long-distance, Cohen picked out the opening notes of "Suzanne," the song of the strange, untouchable beauty "wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters," and she knew, she claims, she had a hit. She recorded the song, and it was an immediate sensation; with its haunting images of children "leaning out for love ... while Suzanne holds the mirror," and a whole verse about Jesus (what was He doing here?), "forsaken, almost human," it wasn't quite like any song anyone had heard. She coaxed Cohen down from Canada to join her in a concert at New York's Town Hall, and he arrived in a suit, nervous. "He came out and began singing the song and I knew he was shaking like a leaf because I'd seen his hands on the guitar," she recalled in a 1988 BBC documentary. "He got about halfway through the first verse and he stopped and dropped his hands to his sides and said, 'I can't go on.' Then he turned and walked off the stage. And everybody went crazy; they loved it. It was very avant-garde."
Stage fright or no, Cohen used his big debut to good effect. There's nothing quite like the sight of a man before a microphone, too overcome to speak. Sensitivity was a much sought-after commodity then. Singer-songwriters as disparate and geographically distant as Neil Young and Nick Drake seemed to be vying for some bleeding-heart medal, and breaking down on stage, even with an unconscious nod to Beckett ("I must go on"), seemed a savvy stage move. Such stuff was old hat in poetry, of course, with walking-wounded poets like Anne Sexton all but contracted to lose it during readings, and with several volumes under his belt, Cohen was already an established poet. ("I am the most distressed person here," he told a poetry audience of 500 people around the same time as the Town Hall concert.) Pop music had known such emotional extremes as well, of course. The legendary Johnnie Ray (whose hits in the '50s included "Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried") used to collapse in a pool of tears at the end of each concert, and Cohen wrote poetry while listening to Ray Charles, Edith Piaf and Nina Simone.
For more than 30 years, Leonard Cohen has been stereotyped and derided by both camps: Many poets thought his recordings were a betrayal of his craft (his fiction, too, had been well received, winning him comparisons to James Joyce and Henry Miller) while rock critics thought his songs too "poetic"; the guy just couldn't win. And though he never expected to top the pops with his sonorous, funereal voice ("I was born like this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice," he sang in the 1988 "Tower of Song"), "good singing" was relative in the post-Dylan world of folk/rock. Besides, he despised the artificial division between poetry and song; the Tower of Song he sang of was one that began with Solomon and Homer and worked its way down to Hank Williams, still "a hundred floors above me/in the Tower of Song."
"I feel myself a very minor writer," he told the Los Angeles Times' Robert Hilburn in 1995. By then Cohen was 61 and living at the Zen Center on Mount Baldy, in Southern California, with no plans to record or perform despite the reawakened interest in him and his work. His last album, "The Future" (1992), had solidified his place as a sort of Cassandra of contemporary culture, speaking the truth no one wanted to hear while dancing away like Rumpelstiltskin when the world reached out to embrace him ("You don't know me from the wind/You never will, you never did," he sang on the title track, "I'm the little Jew/Who wrote the Bible").The man who just a year or so before had been engaged to actress Rebecca De Mornay (one of a string of beautiful women he's been paired with) was now making soup for a dying Zen master. "I've taken a certain territory, and I've occupied it, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."
