I'm Your Man (69 page)
Authors: Sylvie Simmons
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Footnotes
*
The same report described Leonard's “personal and hygiene habits” as “neat and clean. He is careful about his clothes and always appears well dressed.” It also made note of his interest and abilities in sailingâ“one of the best skippers in the unit”âand his “fine sense of humor.”
*
Another song Leonard learned for the first time at Camp Sunshine was “The Partisan,” which would be the first song he recorded that was not his own.
*
Tinkie was still alive at this time; he would expire during his sixteenth year after wandering off alone in a snowstorm.
*
Curiously, on the same page as Leonard's “Folk Song” was a line drawing, not by Leonard, of a bird on a wire.
*
The contents of the drawer, as described by Leonard in
The Favorite Game,
also included “candle-butts from years of Sabbath evenings,” “brass keys to locks which have been changed,” “toothpicks they never used” and a “broken pair of scissors.”
*
“The Gift” was later published in
The Spice-Box of Earth
.
*
The Allan would later gain notoriety for its participation in Project MK-ULTRA, a covert CIA research program into mind control from 1957 to 1964, using drugs, abuse and sensory deprivation.
*
So Long, Marianne: Ei Kjaerleikshistorie
by Kari Hesthamar.
*
Rachman also made the newspapers as the owner of the house that served as the place of business of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, the call girls who almost brought down the British government in 1963 in the Profumo Affair.
*
Bacal is in the process of writing a memoir of this period,
A Different Story
.
*
Leonard was responsible for the title, according to Aviva Layton. “George said, âI just don't know what to call it.' Leonard said, âWhat's it about?' He said, âMy brother Jack,' Leonard said, âThere you are.' ”
*
In 1968 Pomerance released her experimental debut album titled
You Used to Think,
which contained her song “To Leonard from Hospital.” She went on to become a documentary filmmaker.
*
Showalter is known in Leonard Cohen circles as the webmaster of 1heckofaguy.com.
*
The critic, Nicolas Walter, was clearly no fan of Leonard's music: “The impact on a young student of a song like âDress Rehearsal Rag' must be overwhelming,” he wrote, “but in fact the song is merely an abstraction of all currently fashionable moods of doom, and in any case, overwhelming art is the kind you grow out of.”
*
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” was recorded with David Crosby and Graham Nash in 1969.
*
Nico's version was released posthumously on the compilation album
Le cinéma de Serge Gainsbourg
(2001).
*
Fields was responsible for signing, among others, Iggy Pop, the MC5 and the Ramones. Iggy, whom Nico did not turn down, would go on to write an almost Leonard Cohenesque song to her titled “Nazi Girlfriend”; its opening lines were “I want to fuck her on the floor / Among my books of ancient lore.”
*
Other accounts place Leonard's first appearance with Collins on April 30 at the Town Hall at a benefit concert for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE); the date on Leonard's letter belies that, as does an ad listing the participants in the SANE benefit.
*
Chase and Cohen came to a settlement in 1987.
*
This was Leonard's second movie appearance that year. He was filmed performing “The Stranger Song” in Canadian director Don Owen's
The Ernie Game
.
*
Because of the holidays, the release date is generally considered January 1968.
*
The same Tony Palmer would shoot the 1974 Leonard documentary
Bird on a Wire
.
*
The UK edition appeared in 1969.
*
Recent Songs,
1979.
*
She sang at two official dates, the Berkeley Community Center and the Hollywood Bowl.
*
Susan Mussmano changed her name to Aileen Fowler, the one under which she is credited on the 1970 recordings on the
Live Songs
album. She and Fowler, who adopted the new name Elkin Thomas, finally left the boat for a farm in the North Texas prairies. They still live there, when not touring together as folk duo Aileen and Elkin Thomas. Leonard's second backing singer, Corlynn Hanney, went on to make spiritual albums.
*
These words would later appear in the prose poem “Death to This Book” in
Death of a Lady's Man
(1978).
*
Except in the U.S., where a “modesty sleeve” with a photo covered the censored illustration.
*
The interview was intended for Andy Warhol's
Interview
magazine but at the last minute the editor decided Leonard “wasn't chic enough.” It ran in
Soho Weekly
in December 1974.
*
His account of the tour became the 1978 book
On the Road with Bob Dylan.
*
Brotman, coincidentally, had joined the band the Kaleidoscope shortly after their appearance on Leonard's debut album.
*
In the version of “The Window” published in
Stranger Music,
Leonard's 1993 collection of poetry and songs, Leonard changed the “New Jerusalem” line to the nondenominational “the code of solitude broken.”
*
The original photo of Leonard on which the
Recent Songs
portrait was based was used on its front cover.
*
In 1995 it would also provide the title and words to an eponymous book of art and poetry, whose introduction describes “a deliriously romantic song by Leonard Cohen that is brilliantly visualized through the sensual paintings of Henri Matisse.” None of the paintings depicted the Holocaust.
*
The soundtrack was released as a double album in France in 1985, where the film was also an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival.
*
John Cale's version was used during the movie itself, having previously appeared in the more sympathetic setting of
Basquiat
(1996).
*
There were four more on the 2007 twentieth-anniversary reissue.
*
Published in the book
You Do Not Have to Love Me,
1996, with lithographs by Josette Trépanier.
*
Ten New Songs,
2001.
*
The test, taken after studying a DVD course on safe handling of food, required correct answers to forty out of fifty multiple-choice questions. Leonard's exact score is unknown.
*
Leonard published a six-line edit of “Not a Jew” in
Book of Longing
(2006).
*
Later published in
Book of Longing,
2006.
*
Salman Rushdie, who grew up in the area, describes the pool in his book
Midnight's Children.
*
It would appear on her second album,
The Sacred Names
(2001).
*
A
Songs of Leonard Cohen
tribute album by the rock musician Beck and friends, including Devendra Banhart, was also released in September 2009.
*
Lynch was living in Berkeley, California, when on March 1, 2012, shortly before this book went to press, Michelle Rice led a team effort with private investigators and the LAPD Threat Management Unit to have her arrested. Lynch was charged with violating a permanent protective order that forbade her from contacting Leonard, which she had ignored repeatedly. After her arrest, she was transferred to a detention facility in L.A. County to await trial. On April 13, the jury found her guilty on all charges. On April 18, she was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and five years' probation. “It gives me no pleasure to see my onetime friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the services of darkness, deceit and revenge,” said Leonard in his statement to the court. “It is my prayer that Ms. Lynch will take refuge in the wisdom of her religion, that a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse.”
