I'm Your Man (18 page)

Leonard now lived in the Chelsea Hotel. An imposing redbrick Victorian at 222 West Twenty-third Street in what once was New York's theater district, it had four hundred rooms, a great many of which were occupied by artists, writers and bohemians. Mark Twain had stayed there; Arthur Miller lived there for six years, praising it as a place with “no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no shame.” Dylan Thomas died there in his room and Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in his. The hotel was the setting for Andy Warhol's film
The Chelsea Girls
.

The Chelsea was popular with Beat poets and equally popular with their successors, rock musicians—among them Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Patti Smith, who lived there with her photographer lover Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith described the hotel as “a doll's house in the Twilight Zone.”
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(Leonard had met Patti Smith the year before and taken her to dinner with Irving and Aviva Layton. “She was just a young kid then,” says Aviva, “a skinny little waif, no breasts, and wearing rags, not feathers; I think she may have been living on the street—and Leonard told us, ‘She's a genius, absolutely brilliant, she's going to be a real force.' ”)

The walls of the lobby of the Chelsea jostled with paintings, which had been given or hocked to Stanley Bard, the hotel manager, in lieu of rent. A door from the lobby led to the Spanish restaurant and bar next door, El Quijote. The slowest elevator in American hostelry crept up the twelve floors, opening out onto corridors painted yellow and a warren of rooms of various shapes, sizes and luxury. Leonard's, on the fourth floor, was lit by an overhead bulb and had a small black-and-white television, a hot plate and a washbasin where the water ran rust-brown until you counted to ten. More than half the hotel was taken up with long-term residents. Some gave the impression that they lived there for the sole purpose of getting an upgrade to a bigger, better room. It was “a big boho fraternity house,” says the writer and journalist Thelma Blitz, and Leonard, the former fraternity house president, “felt entirely at home.”

He had everything he needed in this latest version of home, including the succor of women. From the age of nine, when his father died, Leonard had been nurtured by women. During his infancy in the music business, those women were Mary Martin and Judy Collins.
In My Life
had been Collins's biggest-selling album to date, spending thirty-four weeks on the U.S. charts and getting a good deal of attention and radio play. “It was really the edge of the ‘pop success' era,” said Collins, “so it was partly that and the kind of promotion I was getting from Elektra.” With “Suzanne” being such a powerful song and Collins such an evangelical cheerleader for its writer, Leonard was getting attention too, including from John Hammond, the leading A & R man at America's foremost record company, Columbia.

Hammond was a New York aristocrat—his mother was a Vanderbilt, his grandfather a Civil War general. His upbringing was extremely privileged, but, like Leonard, he chose a different path. Hammond aligned himself with the civil rights movement and became a jazz critic, a record producer and an A & R man with a remarkable résumé. Among the many greats Hammond signed and/or produced were Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan. “John Hammond was a genius,” said Collins. “With Dylan he was able to see beyond his boring Woody Guthrie blues and signed him up for a three-record deal before ‘Blowing in the Wind' ever happened. He was always carefully watching what was going on, and listening. He listened to what I was doing—he tried to sign me to Columbia, but I'd promised my hand to Elektra the week before—and that's where he heard Leonard, because there was nowhere else to hear him at that point.” Mary Martin, meanwhile, was calling Hammond, talking Leonard up, sending him copies of Leonard's books and persuading him to go to CBC's New York office for a private screening of
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen
. She had Leonard record a demo tape of his songs, in her bathroom, sitting in the empty bathtub and singing into a borrowed Uher tape recorder. A copy was made for Garth Hudson, the keyboard player with the Band, to do the lead sheets of each of the songs, for publishing purposes. Another copy was delivered to Hammond personally at his office, Martin and her lawyer colleague E. Judith Berger having changed into their tiniest miniskirts.

Leonard received a phone call from Hammond inviting him to lunch at a nearby restaurant. Afterward, Hammond asked if he might come back to the Chelsea with Leonard and hear him play his songs in his room. Perched on the edge of the bed, beneath the overhead light, Leonard sang to him for an hour: songs including “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “Master Song,” “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye,” “The Jewels in Your Shoulder,” and a song he told Hammond he had just written that day, “Your Father Has Fallen.” Hammond sat in the only chair, eyes closed, stone quiet. When Leonard finally stopped playing, Hammond opened his eyes and smiled. “You've got it,” he said. Leonard, not entirely sure what it was he had, thanked him and showed him out. Back at Columbia Records, Hammond announced that he planned to sign Leonard. Not for the last time, this did not meet with universal enthusiasm at the label. The acting chief executive, Bill Gallagher, said, “A thirty-two-year-old poet? Are you crazy?”
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He had a point; in 1967 rock was the new poetry, and the rock world did not trust a man over thirty. But Hammond persisted. Larry Cohen, former vice president of Columbia/Epic, who had the office next door to his, recalls Hammond telling him that “out of all the artists he had ever signed that Leonard was the most intelligent. That's saying something coming from John. If you knew John, he was not given to extraordinary platitudes. He thought very highly of Leonard Cohen.”

On February 22, still unsigned, Leonard made his official live debut as a singer in New York. It was a benefit concert for WBAI, held in the Village Theatre on Sixth Street at Second Avenue, with an impressive lineup that included Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and Judy Collins. It had been Bob Fass's suggestion that Collins bring him onstage and introduce him as a new artist, much as Joan Baez had once done with Dylan. Collins jumped at the idea but Leonard said no. “He said, ‘I can't sing and I certainly can't perform,' ” remembers Collins. “I said, ‘Of course you can.' But Leonard never dreamed of being a performer. I said, ‘Why don't you just come and sing “Suzanne”? Everyone will know the song so it'll be comfortable for you.' Finally he consented.”

“Judy told me, ‘I don't think he wants to,' ” says Bob Fass, “then she called back again and said, ‘He's changed his mind, he's going to come,' so we advertised him. On the night, Judy came onstage and sang a song, then called for Leonard to come out. And he came out, and he had trouble tuning his guitar and she finally gave him hers. He began to sing, but maybe it was in the wrong key or something or he couldn't hear, and his voice broke. He said, ‘I can't go on,' and he left the stage. I thought, ‘That's really too bad,' and went on with the show.” Much later in the show, Collins told him Leonard would like to come back on. “And he did. I said, ‘This man has balls.' ” Says Collins, “Leonard was very, very nervous, shaking like a leaf. He hadn't sung in public like this before, only in these little clubs in New York where he read his poetry, and he started singing ‘Suzanne' and about halfway through the song he stopped and walked off the stage. But everybody just adored him. So I went back and told him, ‘You've got to come back and finish the song.' He said, ‘I can't,' and I said, ‘I'll come out and do it with you.' So I went onstage with him and we finished the song up together—and that was Leonard's debut.”

In a letter to Marianne dated February 23, 1967, Leonard wrote, “Darling. I sang in New York for the first time last night, at a huge benefit concert. Every singer you've ever heard of was there performing. Judy Collins introduced me to the audience, over 3000 people.” He described hitting a chord and finding his guitar “completely out of tune, tried to retune it, couldn't get more than a croak out of my throat.” He managed to sing just four lines of “Suzanne,” he said, his voice “unbelievably flat, then I broke off and said simply, ‘Sorry, I just can't make it,' and walked off the stage, my fingers like rubber bands, the people baffled and my career in music dying among the coughs of the people backstage.” He described to Marianne how he had stood and watched numbly from the wings while Collins played some more songs, and how he had finally come back on and managed to get through “Stranger Song,” even though his voice and guitar continued to break down. “I finished somehow and I thought I'll just commit suicide. Nobody really knew what to do or say. I think that someone took my hand and led me off. Everybody backstage was very sorry for me and they couldn't believe how happy I was, how relieved I was that it had all come to nothing, that I had never been so free.”
*

Marianne says, “I was sitting in my mother's house in Oslo with little Axel at the time and something very strange happened. Suddenly my son stood up and said, ‘Cohne died, Marianne'—he called Leonard ‘Cohne' in those days—and, as Leonard told the story himself, he ‘died' that night on the stage.” Leonard's letter closed by saying that he would be back in Hydra in a month or two to start working on another book. “I hope you're feeling good, little friend of my life,” he closed the letter. “Axel's card was beautiful, hug him from me. Goodnight darling. Leonard.”
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Leonard was still talking about writing a book when he wrote to Marianne in April, three days after performing to a sold-out crowd at an arts festival at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He had been offered a forty-date tour of American colleges in the fall, he said, and, prior to that, the Newport Folk Festival and Expo 67 in Montreal, and he was “very anxious” to write a book before it started. But “it” had already started. A second recording artist, Buffy Sainte-Marie, was covering two of his songs, and Nico was planning to sing “The Jewels in Your Shoulder” on her debut solo album—all women. Yet he wrote to Marianne that he was “dead to lust, tired of ambition, a lazy student of my own pain.” He told her that he had “given up plans for sainthood, revolution, redemptive visions, music mastery.” What he wanted, he said, was to be with Marianne on Hydra.
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Days later he wrote to Marianne again, this time describing the thin green candle he kept burning in his room that was “dedicated to St Jude Thaddeus, Patron Saint of Impossible Causes.”
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He made no mention of Nico in the letter. But clearly Nico was not the only lost cause on Leonard's mind.

John Hammond had not given up on Leonard. When Columbia Records appointed a new head, Clive Davis, Hammond persuaded him to give the go-ahead to sign Leonard. A contract dated April 26, 1967, naming Mary Martin Management Inc. as representative and Bob Johnston as producer, was delivered to Martin's Bleecker Street office. It offered four one-year options and an advance of $2,000, which would be paid within thirty days of his completing the recording of two sides of an LP. Leonard took out his pen and signed. He was a recording artist.

C
olumbia Studio E was on the sixth floor of the old lead-lined CBS Radio building on East Fifty-second Street. Stepping out of the elevator on May 19, 1967, his first day of recording, Leonard's eye was caught by a large canvas sign that read
THE ARTHUR GODFREY SHOW
. Godfrey, a popular radio personality, broadcast his daily program from a room next to the recording studio. Godfrey was known for his cheery persona; he even had his own line of plastic ukuleles and played one regularly on his shows. But the warmth did not spread to the freaks and long-haired musicians with whom he was obliged to share the floor.

Leonard, carrying a briefcase and a guitar, looking more like a college professor than a musician, pushed through the heavy door and into a room about thirty feet square with a nineteen-foot-high ceiling. Sitting on a couch in the control room, dressed in a suit and reading a newspaper, was John Hammond. Bob Johnston, the staff producer named on the contract, had been taken off the project. “I told Leonard I wanted to do it so bad,” says Johnston, “and Leonard wanted me to do it, but they told me absolutely not because I had too many artists already—Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel.” Six months earlier, the last of these had been in Studio E with Johnston recording their hit album
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
. John Hammond had decided to take over Leonard's album himself and brought along a small handful of session musicians.

In that first three-hour session, they recorded five takes of “Suzanne,” six of “Stranger Song”—with guitar and organ, guitar and bass, and just guitar—and six of “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye,” five described as “rock versions” with the band and one “simple version,” performed solo. Hammond, behind the glass, would call enthusiastically over the talk-back, “Watch out, Dylan!” Hammond “never said anything negative,” said Leonard. “There were just degrees of his affirmation. Everything you did was ‘good' but some things were ‘very good.' ” Over time Leonard came to learn that “if it was just ‘good,' you knew you had to do another take.”
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At the second session he recorded four takes of “So Long, Marianne.”

There was a lot of time in which to learn. Leonard often said that
Songs of Leonard Cohen
was a hard album to make, and job sheets found in Columbia's archives—handwritten cards that logged the dates, times and content of each recording session—back this up. Leonard recorded the album from May 19 until November 9, with two different producers in three different studios. For the fourth and fifth sessions in June, the operation shifted to Studio B, a penthouse in the old Columbia building on Seventh Avenue, where the elevators had operators who wore gray uniforms with brass buttons and piping. It was a smaller room at least, with a drab functional appearance that Leonard tried to alleviate with candles and incense. It made him no less uncomfortable.