I'm Your Man (16 page)

Marianne Ihlen says that Leonard was talking about making records as far back as the early sixties. “We were sitting in one of these diners in Montreal where there are two leather couches and a table in the middle and on the wall was one of those little jukeboxes. Leonard said, ‘Marianne, my dream is to have one of my songs in one of these boxes.' It was a long process. Leonard always had a guitar with him. If he sat at a table playing, suddenly there were twenty-five people standing around the table, so you could call it a performance, even though what he was doing was playing for us. You could hear in his voice that something was happening.”

In the midsixties, Leonard's Montreal filmmaker friend Henry Zemel, who had heard him sing at Dunn's Birdland in 1958, recorded Leonard playing guitar and singing on an old Uher reel-to-reel at Zemel's house on Sherbrooke Street. The room had exceptional acoustics, Zemel says, and Leonard, Mort, Derek May and various musicians, including local folk band the Stormy Clovers, would come over to jam. The music on Zemel's tape sounds neither country nor folk. It is mostly instrumental, a mysterious mix of John Cage, Eastern music, flamenco and ancient field recordings, but one can hear Leonard—accompanied by Zemel, improvising on tom-tom and Chinese flute—seeming to be working out his signature guitar sound. The last piece on Zemel's tape is an unknown and untitled song written by Leonard, on which he sings/intones, as if it were a dirge, the words “I can't wait.” During this period Leonard also composed instrumental music for a short, experimental film made by his friend Derek May, titled
Angel,
in 1966. Leonard made an appearance in the film, conversing in a park with a woman with a dog who took it in turns to wear wings. His music was performed on the soundtrack by the Stormy Clovers.

So it happened by degrees, sometimes in public, more often in private, alone or with friends. In February 1966 in New York, appearing at the 92nd Street Y for a reading, Leonard closed by singing “The Stranger Song”—a little slower, his voice strained and plaintive, and with a handful of different words, but otherwise much as it would appear two years later on his first album. In 1968 Leonard told the
Montreal Gazette,
“I just see the singing as an extension of a voice I've been using ever since I can remember. This is just one aspect of its sound.” In 1969 he told the
New York Times,
“There is no difference between a poem and a song. Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were situations. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

But everybody, including Leonard, agrees on why he decided to be a singer-songwriter: economics.

“Well, I always played the guitar and sang. I'd been living in Greece for a number of years and it was a very good way of living, I could live in Greece for eleven hundred dollars a year, but I couldn't pay my grocery bill, so I would come back to Canada, get various jobs, get that money together plus the boat fare, come back to Greece and live for as long as that money lasted. I couldn't make a living as an author. My books weren't selling, they were receiving very good reviews, but my second novel
Beautiful Losers
sold about three thousand copies worldwide. The only economic alternative was, I guess, going into teaching or university or getting a job in a bank, like the great Canadian poet Raymond Souster. But I always played the guitar and sang, so it was an economic solution to the problem of making a living and being a writer.”

Hydra was cheap, and Leonard had a $750-a-year inheritance, but living there had proven impossible on a writer's income.
Beautiful Losers,
despite the controversy and attention, did not sell in significant numbers until Leonard became a recording artist and it was reissued in paperback. He published a fourth volume of poetry in 1966, which made no impact on his bank balance. The poems in
Parasites of Heaven—
some dating back to the late fifties—were also about love, loneliness and despair, but more conventional in structure than those of
Flowers for Hitler
and more personal, more like songs. Michael Ondaatje noted that while the poems in
Flowers for Hitler
“had a cast of thousands, these have a cast of one or two [and] the objects of his descriptions are not intense public tortures but private pain and quietness.”
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He could well have been describing a sensitive sixties singer-songwriter. And
Parasites of Heaven,
while it was generally treated by literary critics as an insubstantial work, was significant for fans of Leonard's music, as it included a number of his future songs: “Suzanne,” “Master Song,” “Teachers,” “Avalanche” and “Fingerprints.”

In the summer of 1966 CBC offered Leonard a position cohosting a new television show. His job would entail interviewing guests, making short films and commentating. Leonard accepted enthusiastically; he had often spoken about looking for an audience beyond the ivory tower—“I think the time is over when poets should sit on marble stairs with black capes”
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—and this seemed a golden opportunity. He told the
Toronto Daily Star
that his intention was “to get close to the viewers, get them to participate in the show, even send in home movies”
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—an interactive approach that was unusual in the middle sixties. But the TV show came to nothing. The producer Andrew Simon was reported as saying that Leonard changed his mind: “There was no fight. It was a personal-emotional thing. Leonard felt that God hadn't put him here to be a TV star.” In the same article, though, Leonard said that he had no problem with the idea of a poet being on television: “I've always felt very different from other poets I've met. I've always felt that somehow they've made a decision against life. Most of them have closed a lot of doors. I never felt too much at home with those kind of people. I always felt more at home with musicians. I like to write songs and sing and that kind of stuff.”
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All the signs were pointing to music. In 1966 Leonard borrowed some money from his friend Robert Hershorn and set off for Nashville.

Why Nashville and country music? There was a lot more interesting music going on and places to be in 1966.

“I listened to the Armed Forces Radio that came out of Athens and it had a lot of good country music on it. I had a few records there—Ray Charles, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, Charlie and Inez Foxx, Sylvie Vartan; she did a Nashville record, in French; I don't know if you ever heard it, it's a great record—and I listened to those and to the radio. But I didn't know what was going on in America. Elvis Presley was the only guy that I was listening to, and the Shirelles, and the very early murmurings of Motown. I thought I would head down to Nashville and maybe get work down there. On the way down I stopped off in New York, and that's where I bumped into the so-called folk-song renaissance, which included Joan Baez and Dylan and Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell. This was the first time I'd heard their songs. I thought: I'd been writing those little songs for a while, just playing them for my friends, so I thought I'd try my hand at that and try presenting them to some kind of commercial institution who might be able to use them.”

S
tepping from the train at Pennsylvania Station, dressed in his blue raincoat, Leonard walked along Thirty-fourth Street to the Penn Terminal Hotel, suitcase and guitar in hand. A New York noir movie of a hotel, it was cheap and it looked it: dark brown brick, dark narrow corridors, an elevator just big enough for a man and a corpse. The window in his oddly shaped room had been screwed into a position that was neither open nor closed; the radiator hissed like a steam train, to which the dripping tap in the brown-streaked washbasin added a slow, perpetual accompaniment. It was a terrible room, Leonard concluded with no real animosity—he would think that whenever he stayed at the Penn Terminal, which was fairly often, even when he could afford somewhere better. His clothes hung loosely on his 116-pound postamphetamine frame. When he looked at his reflection in the mirror he saw a man who looked like he had lived on a mountain for several years. Leonard had a shave and then he headed out. He had a woman to meet.

Robert Hershorn had told Leonard about Mary Martin. She had moved from her native Toronto to New York in 1962, finding her way to Greenwich Village. She had worked her way up from a hostess job at the Bitter End folk club to executive assistant to Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, then director of A & R at Warner Bros. and, in 1966, the head of her own artist management company. In the male-dominated music business of the early sixties—what few women there were were mostly behind a microphone: Joan Baez, Judy Henske, Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins—Martin was an exception. She had a track record of helping Canadian musicians: she had been instrumental in getting the Hawks, later known as the Band, the job as Dylan's backing band, and she also managed Leonard's acquaintances the Stormy Clovers. “A very enterprising and very sensitive woman,” said Leonard, “and very supportive.”
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Leonard liked supportive women. He talked to Martin about his novels and his poetry and told her he had written a couple of things that he thought might be a song. Impressed with what she had heard, she told him she'd see what she could do. Then she called her friend Judy Collins.

Collins, then twenty-seven years old, was an aristocrat of the Greenwich Village scene: cool, elegant, with long straight hair and such remarkable blue eyes that Stephen Stills wrote a song about them.
*
She had begun as a classical pianist from Seattle, first performing with a symphony orchestra when she was thirteen, and then she discovered folk music. It led her to New York in 1961, where she moved into a two-dollar-a-night hotel, and barely had time to unpack before Jac Holzman, who owned and ran Elektra Records, saw her play at the Village Gate and offered her a record deal. Her first album,
A Maid of Constant Sorrow
—traditional folk—was released the same year. Holzman had previously tried without success to sign Joan Baez, who was the reigning queen of traditional folk and protest songs. He had been looking for his own Baez ever since, but it did not take him long to see that he had a quite different artist in Collins, who was musically much more experimental. This made her a more valuable commodity in the midsixties, at a time when traditional folk began its move into folk-rock.

When Leonard arrived in Manhattan in the summer of 1966, Collins was working on her sixth, and until then most innovative, album,
In My Life
. As well as the Beatles song of the title, she covered songs by Dylan, Donovan, Randy Newman, even Brecht and Weill. But Holzman, though he liked where she was heading, still thought there was something missing. “I told her, ‘It doesn't fly yet, we need more songs,' ” says Holzman. “Judy said, ‘Where the hell am I going to get more songs?' I said, ‘Put it out there that you're looking.' So she did, somewhat downheartedly. Then about ten days later I get a call from Judy saying, ‘I've met the most wonderful writer.' ”

Telling the story of the first time she met Leonard, Judy Collins laughs out loud. Two businessmen sitting at the next table in the hushed hotel in Beverly Hills look up from their expense-account lunches to stare at this magnificent seventy-one-year-old with a long mane of pure white hair and dressed in a sharp rockabilly jacket.

It was early evening, she remembers, in early fall. She opened her door and there stood “a small man in a dark suit, good-looking, shy.” He said Mary Martin had sent him and he had come to sing her his songs. “All the singers with new songs would come to me,” she said, “because I had the record contract and I could get them out, and because I didn't write my own songs—not until 1967, and I only wrote them because Leonard said to me, ‘Why aren't you writing your own songs?' ” Mary Martin “would always talk about Leonard,” Collins recalls. “It was ‘Leonard this,' ‘Leonard that.' She kept saying, ‘Oh you've got to help him, you've got to hear the songs.' I liked and respected Mary so I said, ‘Well what does he do?' She said, ‘He writes poetry and he has written a novel, and he's written something he thinks is a song, and he wants to come down here and see you.' Most of the people in the Village would literally grab you on the street, throw you down on the floor and sing you the song before you'd even said hello. So I said, ‘By all means, let him come.'

“He came to my house, we had some wine, and then we went to Tony's [a neighborhood Italian restaurant] for food, and then he left—no songs! We were having a conversation, you see, about things that mattered, and of course music matters, but not when you can have a really good conversation with someone. We talked about life, living in New York, Ibiza—Leonard had just come back from Ibiza and so had my lover Michael. And we talked about literature. By then I'd read of some of his poetry, and also
Beautiful Losers.
Michael was a writer also—he wrote a movie called
Scandal,
which is about the Profumo Affair—so we had a lot to talk about. When Leonard left I think I said, ‘I've heard about these famous songs. Why don't you come back tomorrow?' ”

Leonard returned the next day with his guitar. This time he sat in her living room and sang three songs: “Suzanne,” “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “The Stranger Song.” Collins was “bowled over,” she said, “particularly by ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag.' Talk about dark: a song about suicide. I attempted suicide myself at fourteen, before I found folk music, so of course I loved it. We were desperately looking for something unusual for my album and when I heard ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag,' that was it. ‘The Stranger Song' I thought the least accessible of the three songs he sang—nowadays I love it and would do it in a second, but I was not there yet. Then Michael said, ‘You have to do that “Suzanne” one too.' I thought about it and said, ‘Yes, it has to be “Dress Rehearsal Rag” and “Suzanne” as well.' ”