I'm Your Man (22 page)

There are characters in the songs as cryptic as those in Bob Dylan's, like the man with the sadism of a Nazi and the golden body of a god with whom the singer shares a lover in “Master Song.” Dylan, in fact, was the name that came up most often in the reviews of
Songs of Leonard Cohen,
particularly in discussions of the lyrics. “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” Leonard's wryly humorous song, inspired by Nico, about a man battered but unbroken by lust, shared a small patch of common ground with Dylan's “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” But the poetry of Leonard's lyrics was more honed and controlled, steeped in literary and rhetorical technique. In liturgy also.

“Suzanne,” the opening song, appears to be a love song, but it is a most mysterious love song, in which the woman inspires a vision of Jesus, first walking on the water, then forsaken by his father, on the Cross. “So Long, Marianne,” likewise, begins as a romance, until we learn that the woman who protects him from loneliness also distracts him from his prayers, thereby robbing him of divine protection. The two women in “Sisters of Mercy,” since they are not his lovers, are portrayed as nuns. (Leonard wrote the song during a blizzard in Edmonton, Canada, after encountering two young girl backpackers in a doorway. He offered them his hotel bed and, when they fell straight to sleep, watched them from an armchair, writing, and played them the song the next morning when they woke.) Yet, however pure and holy, a sense of romantic possibility remains for a man who in
The Favorite Game
described the woman making up the hotel bed in which they had just made love as having “the hands of a nun.” There are many lovers in these songs, but also teachers, masters and saviors. In the song titled “Teachers,” the initiate is offered a variety to choose from, including a madman and a holy man who talks in riddles.

Perhaps the most cryptic track on the album is “The Stranger Song,” a masterful, multilayered song about exile and moving on. It was born, Leonard said, “out of a thousand hotel rooms, ten thousand railway stations.”
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The Stranger might be the Jew, exiled by ancestry, perpetually on the run from his murderers and God; the troubadour, rootless by necessity; or the writer, whom domesticity would sap of his will to create. Here love is once again presented as something dangerous. We have Joseph, the good husband and Jew, searching for a place where his wife can give birth to a child who is not his, and whose existence will come to cause more problems for his people. In the “holy game of poker,” it is of no use to sit around and wait in hope for a good hand of cards. The only way to win is to cheat, or to show no emotion, or to make sure to sit close to the exit door.

If Leonard had recorded just this one compelling album and disappeared, as Anthony DeCurtis, the American music critic, wrote in his liner notes to the 2003 reissue, “his stature as one of the most gifted songwriters of our time will still be secure.” On its original release, the U.S. press was considerably more lukewarm. Arthur Schmidt in
Rolling Stone
wrote, “I don't think I could ever tolerate all of it. There are three brilliant songs, one good one, three qualified bummers, and three are the flaming shits. . . . Whether the man is a poet or not (and he is a brilliant poet) he is not necessarily a songwriter.”
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The
New York Times
's Donal Henahan damned it with faint praise: “Mr. Cohen is a fair poet and a fair novelist, and now he has come through with a fair recording of his own songs.” Leonard sounded “like a sad man cashing in on self-pity and adolescent loneliness,” he wrote, placing him “somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan” on the “alienation scale.”
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In the UK the album was received positively. Tony Palmer praised it in the
Observer
newspaper.
*
Melody Maker
critic Karl Dallas wrote, “I predict that the talk about him will become deafening. His songs are pretty complex things. No one could accuse him of underestimating his audiences.”
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The album failed to enter the charts in Canada. In America it scraped into the lower reaches of the Top 100, while in the UK it made it to No. 13 on the charts—a division of devotion that would continue throughout much of Leonard's musical career.

In interviews he gave in 1968 to promote the album, Leonard appeared to be feeling his way through this new pop music world he had entered. He complained to the UK press that New York did not understand him: “[They] kept putting me in an intellectual bag, but that's not where I'm at. I never thought of myself as a Poet with a capital ‘P,' I just want to make songs for people because I reckon that they can understand things that I understand. I want to write the sort of songs you hear on the car radio. I don't want to achieve any sort of virtuosity. I want to write lyrics that no one notices but they find themselves singing over a few days later without remembering where they heard them.”
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But despite his protestations that he wanted to be considered a popular artist, he had turned down “$15,000 worth of concerts,” he said, “because I didn't want to do them,” adding that “the presence of money in the whole enterprise has been having a sinister magical effect on me.” Although money had been a big motivation for the shift from literature to the music business, he told
Melody Maker,
he was already thinking of giving music up. “Right now I feel like I did when I finished my novel [
Beautiful Losers
]. At the end of the book I knew I wouldn't write another because I'd put everything I had into that one.”
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He talked about going back to Greece. But for now he stayed on the promotional treadmill and continued to try on masks to see how they fit. He described himself in
The Beat
as an anarchist “unable to throw the bomb.”
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He told the
New York Times,
“When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have together, then I know we've met. I really am for the matriarchy.” He was also for the Cross: “The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance.”
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In a 1968
Playboy
article he said, “I had some things in common with the Beatniks and even more things with the hippies. The next thing may be even closer to where I am.”
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The headline of the
Playboy
article summed it up quite perfectly:
RENAISSANCE MENSCH
. The photo, shot on Hydra, made the melancholy Canadian New Yorker look curiously like a silent movie actor playing a Florida real estate salesman: wide-brimmed hat, thin mustache and villainous smile.

Leonard's U.S. record label changed its original advertisement for the album, which included a quote from the
Boston Globe
review, “James Joyce is not dead . . . ,” to one with a quote from
Playboy:
“I've been on the outlaw scene since I was 15.” They added a rather incongruous photo of a smiling, bestubbled Leonard, dressed in striped pajamas, lying alongside his somber self-portrait on the album sleeve. As part of a more sensible promotional campaign in the UK, CBS released in early 1968 a low-priced sampler album titled
The Rock Machine Turns You On
. Among tracks from Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Spirit, Tim Rose and Taj Mahal was Leonard, singing “Sisters of Mercy.”

Leonard, meanwhile, was in a dreary room at the Henry Hudson, talking to a journalist from the
Montreal Gazette,
assuring him that his next album—the album that only weeks ago he was unsure he was going to make—would be a country and western record. As he had planned to do in the first place, he said, he was going to Tennessee.

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The Tao of Cowboy

H
e could ride a horse, he knew how to shoot a rifle and, for a man who claimed to have not a sentimental bone in his body, he could sing a Hank Williams song to break your heart. Out of all the thirtysomething urban sophisticates in New York City, the likeliest to survive being dropped from the sky into rural Tennessee was Leonard. But New York was not quite done with him yet. His American publisher, Viking, hitching a ride on the album's publicity campaign, issued a second edition of
Beautiful Losers
and was gearing up for the June 1968 release of a new poetry book,
Selected Poems 1956–1968
.
*
The first of Leonard's poetry books to be published in the U.S. offered twenty new poems, including the one he once scrawled to Marita on Le Bistro's wall, along with a selection from earlier volumes. Many were handpicked by Marianne and the emphasis was on his lyrical and personal poems of love and loss. Although their love affair was all but over, eroded by time and distances and Leonard's ways in matters of domesticity and survival, there were still ties that bound.

If there were good reasons not to leave New York, there were none to stay in the Henry Hudson Hotel. Leonard checked back into the Chelsea. Not many days passed before he noticed a woman who seemed to share his timetable, wandering the hotel at three in the morning looking for a drink and company. Janis Joplin had moved into the Chelsea while recording her second album with Big Brother & the Holding Company, which John Simon was producing. One night, as Leonard was on the way back to the hotel from the Bronco Burger and Janis from Studio E, they found themselves sharing the elevator, and then an unmade bed. In later years, after Leonard immortalized Janis's blow job in song—first in “Chelsea Hotel #1,” which he sang live but never released, then “Chelsea Hotel #2,” recorded on 1974's
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
—he polished the encounter into a stage anecdote. “She wasn't looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson; I wasn't looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot; but we fell into each other's arms through some process of elimination.”
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His words had the dark humor of both loneliness and honesty. Leonard's later refinements to the anecdote were less black, more stand-up comedy. He said he asked her who she was looking for and when she told him he quipped, “My dear lady, you're in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.”
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Either way, she made an exception.

Interestingly, the anecdotes followed a similar pattern to the songs. “Chelsea Hotel #1” was the more open and emotional of the two:

    
A great surprise, lying with you baby

    
Making your sweet little sound. . .

    
See all your tickets

    
Torn on the ground

    
All of your clothes and

    
No piece to cover you

    
Shining your eyes in

    
My darkest corner.

The second was more guarded and unsentimental:

    
I can't keep track of each fallen robin. . . .

    
I don't think of you that often

making the encounter sound humdrum—particularly when compared with the extravagance in his poem “Celebration,” where the orgasm from oral sex felled the protagonist “like those gods on the roof that Samson pulled down.” Leonard expressed regret on several occasions later at having named Joplin as the fellatrix and muse of the song. “She would not have minded,” he said. “My mother would have minded.”
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Quite possibly, but really it was Leonard who minded—not just this rare lack of good manners, but having revealed so much of the mystery, shown how the trick was done. Janis was a one-night stand and, it's safe to say, not the only woman in the Chelsea to have given him head, yet something about her, or about what happened to her—less than three years later, at the age of twenty-seven, in a hotel room in Los Angeles, Janis Joplin OD'd and died—seemed to have gotten under Leonard's skin.

D
avid Crosby was in Miami, in the brief hiatus between being fired by the Byrds and cofounding Crosby, Stills & Nash, when he first set eyes on Joni Mitchell. She was singing alone in a coffeehouse and Crosby was “smitten.” He brought her back with him to Los Angeles and she moved in with him. Crosby set about finding his new love a record deal and appointed himself her album producer. “She was magnificent and magical, and though I wasn't really a producer, I just knew that somebody needed to keep the world from trying to translate what she did into a normal bass, drums and keyboards format, because that would have been a fucking disaster.” Despite his good intentions, making an album with Joni “really wasn't fun”—working with Beethoven was no easier than living with Beethoven. When it was done, and the blood washed from the walls, Joni surprised Crosby by suggesting that he produce her friend Leonard Cohen's second album.

Crosby knew nothing about Leonard, other than “Suzanne,” Judy Collins's version; he thought it “one of the prettiest songs” he'd heard. But Joni was persuasive. Crosby booked two sessions, on May 17 and 18, at Columbia's Los Angeles studio, a large room in which he had previously worked with the Byrds, and Leonard, who appeared to have no objection to the plans Joni had made for him, flew to L.A. “I don't remember him saying anything about what he really wanted to have happen,” says Crosby, “he just put himself in my hands. Poor fellow.” On the first day, they recorded one song, “Lady Midnight.” On the second they recorded two, “Bird on the Wire” and “Nothing to One.”

“It really was not a happy experience,” says Crosby. “It's an embarrassing story for me and a bitter pill to swallow because I could produce him now in a minute, but then I had no idea how to record him. I listened to him sing, and I'm a melodic singer, so I didn't know what to do with a voice like Leonard's. The only other singer vaguely like Leonard was Bob Dylan, and I couldn't have recorded Dylan either. When the Byrds tried to record Dylan songs, we changed them completely, gave them a beat, put harmonies to them, translated them completely from their original form. It was quite obvious that Leonard was one of the best poets and lyricists alive, so I imagined that the way to go about it was to take him in the direction that Dylan had gone and speak the lyrics more than sing them. It did not make him happy.”

The Crosby-produced “Nothing to One” has Crosby singing harmony, while his production of “Bird on the Wire” has something of a solo, coffeehouse Byrds feel: folk rock with a touch of rhythmic pop. These two recordings were eventually unearthed as bonus tracks on the 2007 reissue of
Songs from a Room
. The Cohen-Crosby version of “Lady Midnight” remains in the vaults. “I've wondered over the years,” says Crosby of the experience, “if Leonard forgave me. God knows he deserved somebody a bit smarter and more experienced than I was. But Bob Johnston knew
exactly
what he was doing.”

Leonard ran into Bob Johnston in L.A. Normally Los Angeles is not a place to run into people, since they're all in cars inching along endless boulevards to some important meeting or other, but Johnston made a point of being the exception to the rule. Johnston, as Bob Dylan wrote of the man who produced many of his finest albums, was “unreal.”
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Like God, Johnston was everywhere, he had fire in his eyes, and heaven help you if you questioned his ways, particularly if you worked for a record company. Johnston was—still is at age eighty, at the time of writing this book—a maverick, a wiry, bearded redhead with a thick Texas accent and music in his blood. His great-grandfather was a classical pianist, his grandmother a songwriter, his mother won a songwriting Grammy at the age of ninety-two, and his wife, Joy Byers, had written songs that Elvis Presley covered. Johnston wrote songs too, but he was best known at that time as the producer of many of the era's greatest and most influential artists. Just four and a half months into 1968 he had recorded Bob Dylan's
John Wesley Harding,
Simon and Garfunkel's
Bookends
, Marty Robbins's
By the Time I Get to Phoenix,
Flatt & Scruggs's
The Story of Bonnie and Clyde
and Johnny Cash's
At Folsom Prison,
some of these albums still waiting their turn to come out, like buses in a depot. But having been thwarted the first time, he was still determined to produce a Leonard Cohen album.

“I had no plans to make another record,” Leonard said. “I didn't think it was necessary. Then one day I met Bob Johnston and I liked the way he talked and how he understood my first album, exactly what was good and what was bad about it.”
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Johnston says, “Leonard said, ‘Let's get together,' and I said, ‘Fuck yeah.' I had just rented a farm, two thousand acres, Boudleaux Bryant's place”—Bryant and his wife, Felice, were successful Nashville songwriters, with hits that included “Love Hurts” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream”—“and I told Leonard about it. He said, ‘Someday I'll have a farm like this and I'll write a couple of albums.' I said, ‘Here, do it now,' and I gave him the key, and he moved in for two years.”

But first Leonard went to Hydra. His affiliations with his second home were the opposite of his “neurotic affiliations” with Montreal. He wanted to sit in his shirtsleeves in the sun and smoke a cigarette and watch life crawl slowly by; he wanted to return to the simple life in the house on the hill with Marianne and her child. He was pleased to discover that the military junta had not had much tangible effect on the place. At first, when the new Greek government announced bans on long hair, miniskirts and a number of musicians and artists, the expats would gather in the tavernas at night, lock the doors, pull the shutters closed and play the outlawed music. But really the colonels hadn't noticed Hydra, or if they had, they did not much care. Still, there were some changes on the island that Leonard could not ignore. For one, George Johnston and Charmian Clift were no longer sitting at a table in the sun outside Katsikas, waiting for the ferry to arrive with its news and its newcomers. For another, at night the houses on the hills were lit up with electric lights.

It had been three years since Leonard had woken to find his house newly tethered to the twentieth century. Says Marianne, “Leonard got out of bed after a week of feeling lousy—he had been for a trip around the islands with Irving Layton and had some kind of flu. He came to his studio and he looked out and discovered that during the night they had put up all the new electric wires and they crossed in front of his window. He was sitting in this rocking chair that I brought from my little house. I brought him a cup of hot chocolate, and I took the guitar down which was hanging on the wall and it was totally out of tune. While we're sitting there, birds are landing on the wire like notes on a music sheet. I heard ‘
Like a bird—on the wire . . .'
So beautiful. But it took him three years before he felt the song was finished.”

Finishing their relationship also took a long time. Leonard would say in 1970 (when introducing the song “So Long, Marianne” at a concert), “I lived with her for about eight years, about six months of the year, then the other six months I was stuck somewhere else. Then I found I was living with her four months of the year and then two months of the year and then about the eighth year I was living with her a couple of weeks of the year, and I thought it was time to write this particular song for her.” But soon after starting the song he stopped singing and added, “I still live with her a couple of days of the year.”
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All that Marianne will say about the end of the affair is, “To me he was still the same, he was a gentleman, and he had that stoic thing about him and that smile he will try to hide behind—‘Am I serious now or is all this a joke?' We were in love and then the time was up. We were always friends, and he still is my dearest friend and I will always love him. I feel very lucky to have met Leonard at that time in my life. He taught me so much, and I hope I gave him a line or two.”

From Hydra Leonard went to London, where that summer he made two appearances on the BBC: the radio show
Top Gear,
hosted by John Peel (the revered and influential British DJ was an early Leonard Cohen enthusiast) and a television concert in which he performed almost all the songs from his first album, along with three songs that would appear on later albums, and an improvised, self-deprecating, stoned-sounding sing-along titled “There's No Reason Why You Should Remember Me.” Both shows were very well received. By now
Songs of Leonard Cohen
was in the Top 20 in the UK. He was to all intents and purposes a pop/rock star. There was some attention from the U.S. too. That summer, Leonard was featured in two different articles in the
New York Times:
one was an examination of the new singer-songwriter movement in pop; the other, illustrated with photographs of Leonard and Dylan, debated whether pop lyrics should be considered “poetry.”

That Leonard's latest book of poetry,
Selected Poems,
was proving popular in America only muddied the waters. The dust-jacket blurb made an appeal to the pop/rock market by mentioning Leonard's album and the covers of his songs by Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Noel Harrison. It also appealed to the literary underground by recalling the outrage that greeted his novel
Beautiful Losers,
to critics and academics by calling him “a contemporary
Minnesinger
” (a singer-poet in the German chivalric tradition), and to sensitive souls with its description of him as “eclectic, searching, deeply personal.”
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