I'm Your Man (19 page)

“It's never come easily. I've never been particularly confident about the process and I was never able to exactly get what I wanted. I always had that sense, if I can just finish the damn thing! And you keep notching your standards down, degree by degree, until finally you say, ‘I've
finished
, never mind.' Not, ‘Is it going to be beautiful, is it going to be perfect, is it going to be immortal?' ‘Can I finish?' became the urgent question.”

As it was your first time, did you simply let Hammond get on with doing it the way he wanted to, or did you have any particular requirements?

“I asked them for a full-length mirror. That was my only requirement. And he had some very good ideas about how it should be done. He brought in a bass player whose name is on the tip of my tongue, a really fine bass player, and we just laid down a lot of the songs, just the two of us together. And he was a very sensitive player. I think those were the core tracks of at least half the songs on that record, just the guitar and bass.”

Leonard knew how he wanted to sound, or at least how he did not want to, but as an untrained musician he lacked the language to explain it. He could not play as well as the session musicians, so he found them intimidating. “I didn't really know how to sing with a band, with really good, professional musicians that were really cooking, and I would tend to listen to the musicians rather than concentrate on what I was doing, because they were doing it so much more proficiently than I was.”
18
Hammond, smartly, let the band go and had Leonard work with a single accompanist: Willie Ruff, a sophisticated, intuitive bass player who had played with Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Ruff did not care that Leonard could not read music or charts. “He supported the guitar playing so well. He could always anticipate my next move, he understood the song so thoroughly,” said Leonard. “He was one of those rare musicians that play selflessly, and for pure and complete support. I couldn't have laid down those tracks without him.”
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The location changed once again, this time to Studio C, a converted Greek-Armenian Orthodox church on Thirtieth Street where Miles Davis recorded
Kind of Blue
. By this point, Leonard was cutting his sixteenth take of “Suzanne” as well as a song titled “Come On, Marianne.” “I thought it always was ‘Come on, Marianne, it's time that we began to laugh and cry,' ” says Marianne, “but—unless I'm dreaming—there was a group in California, maybe the Beach Boys, who had similar words in a song. When he wrote it, for me it was like, ‘Come on, if we can just keep this boat afloat.' And then we found out that we could not.”

Leonard had begun writing the song the year before, in Montreal, and finished it in the Chelsea Hotel, but he was still vacillating in the studio over these two words in the title and chorus that gave the song very different meanings. “I didn't think I was saying good-bye,” said Leonard, “but I guess I was.” He did not write it as a farewell song; it was almost as if the song made the decision for him. “There's a certain kind of writer that says hello to people in their songs and there's a certain kind of writer that says good-bye to people—and you know I'm more a writer of elegies, at least in that particular phase,” he said in 1979. “I think for many writers the work has a prophetic quality, I don't mean in a cosmic or religious sense but just in terms of one's own life; you are generally writing about events that haven't taken place yet.”
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It was an interesting statement. The first half of it suggests that saying good-bye is a songwriting conceit, something that suited his taste and style; as to the second part, he was surely not so superstitious as to believe that the songs dictated his actions as they took form. When Leonard wrote a song, though, he did go deep, and it appears that what he found there was an urge to leave.

I
n July, Leonard took a monthlong break from the studio; it felt like he'd been released from jail. So much had happened while he was in New York, wrapped up in his new music career. There had been a coup d'état in Greece, which was now ruled by a military junta, and in Israel there had been the Six-Day War. His friend Irving Layton had gone to the Israeli consulate to offer his services in the army. They were declined.
21
Leonard's duties, and the reason for the break, were a series of concerts he had to perform.

The first, on July 16, was at the famous Newport Folk Festival, for which once again he had Judy Collins to thank. Collins was on the festival's board of directors and, two years after Bob Dylan had been booed for going electric, was still fighting the traditionalists to acknowledge the new direction folk music, including hers, was taking, Collins wanted to stage a singer-songwriter workshop, and finally she got her way. Topping her list of participants were Leonard and another newcomer, an unsigned singer-songwriter named Joni Mitchell.

Says Collins, “I came to know Joni through Al Kooper,” a rock musician friend who had played with Dylan in his historic Newport electric set. “He called me up, it was three in the morning, and he was hanging out with this girl who had told him she was a singer and writer, and he went home with her because he thought he could get laid, but he found out when he got to her house that she really
could
sing and write. He put her on the phone and had her sing me ‘Both Sides Now,' which of course I had to record.”

“Judy,” says Danny Fields, “was a fountain of discovery. Leonard first turned up in my consciousness, as with many other people, with the song ‘Suzanne' on Judy's 1966 album
In My Life
. After closing time at the Scene, a club where Hendrix and Tiny Tim became famous, a bunch of us who thought ourselves the cool rock 'n' roll crowd would go back to the owner Steve Paul's little house on Eighteenth Street and listen to that album. Then in early 1967 I started working at Elektra and Judy was one of my artists, and then came Leonard. But when I really met him was at Newport. I'd gone to the festival as representative of my record company and, like everybody, stayed at the Viking Hotel. It was beautiful and peaceful and I didn't have to drive so I took LSD. I was with Judy and Leonard and they said, ‘Let's go back to Leonard's room.' ”

Fields remembers “sitting on the floor, contemplating the carpet, while they sat on the two beds with their guitars. Leonard was teaching Judy ‘Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye,' and that was the audio track to the universe and the eight dimensions of existence in the shag rug. When I woke up it was just predawn, they were still sitting on the two beds with the guitars, and Judy said, ‘Oh, I think Danny looks as though he could use some fresh air, Leonard, let's take him for a walk,' and we went walking around the bay, where up on the cliffs the great robber baron palaces of Newport are, as the sun rose. It was wonderful. And when I flew back to New York, the next night Judy was doing the Central Park concert”—the Rheingold Festival—“and she brought Leonard up onstage with her to perform ‘Suzanne.' ”

The
New York Times
review of Leonard at Newport described him as an “extremely effective singer, building a hypnotic, spellbinding effect.” Still, as he had been at the WBAI benefit, Leonard was terrified. “He told me he was
terribly
nervous,” recalls Aviva Layton, who was in the audience in Central Park. “It was the middle of summer, the place was packed with people and the sun was setting, and Judy Collins said, ‘I want to introduce to you a singer-songwriter, his name is Leonard Cohen.' Leonard came out with his guitar strapped on—and some people groaned, because they'd come to see Judy Collins, not this unknown Leonard Cohen. So he had to win over the crowd. He was facing thousands of people, standing packed like sardines, and he just said, very quietly, ‘Tonight my guitar is full of tears and feathers.' And then he played ‘Suzanne,' and that was it. Incredible.” Leonard celebrated having made it through the performance, privately, in his Chelsea Hotel room. With him was his new inamorata, a woman he had met at Newport, a twenty-three-year-old, willowy blond singer-songwriter with a voice every bit as unique as Nico's.

J
oni Mitchell, like Leonard, was from the East Coast of Canada. But their versions of Eastern Canada were vastly different—Leonard's urban and cosmopolitan, Joni's vast prairie skies. Joni, the daughter of a Canadian Air Force officer, had been raised in a small town in Saskatchewan. She was a talented painter, and when, as a child, she contracted polio (in the same epidemic in which her fellow small-town East Canadian Neil Young also contracted it), during her long, lonely convalescence she also discovered a talent for music. She taught herself to play the ukulele, then guitar, excelling at the latter and inventing her own sophisticated tunings and style. In 1964 Joni quit art school to be a folksinger, moving to Toronto and the coffeehouses around which the folk scene revolved. In February 1965 she gave birth to a daughter, the result of an affair with a photographer. A few weeks later she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell and gave the baby up for adoption. The marriage did not last. Joni left, taking his name with her, and moved into Greenwich Village, where she was living alone in a small hotel room when she met Leonard.

It was an intense romance. At the outset Joni played student to Leonard's teacher. She asked him for a list of books she should read. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly,” she said. “My work seemed very young and naive in comparison.”
22
Leonard gave her some suggestions, including Lorca, Camus and the I Ching. But he was quickly aware that Joni needed little help with anything, particularly her songwriting. They each wrote a (very different) song called “Winter Lady”—Joni's appears to have been written first—and Joni wrote two love songs referencing Leonard's song “Suzanne”: “Wizard of Is,” with an almost-identical melody and near-quoted lines (“You think that you may love him,” she wrote of the man who speaks “in riddles”) and “Chelsea Morning,” set in a room with candles, incense and oranges, where the sun pours in “like butterscotch” instead of honey.

Leonard took Joni to Montreal. They stayed in his childhood home on Belmont Avenue. In her song “Rainy Night House” she described the “holy man” sitting up all night, watching her as she slept on his mother's bed. They painted each other's portraits. Leonard's was the face Joni drew on a map of Canada in her song “A Case of You,” in which a man declares himself to be as “constant as a northern star.” When it turned out he wasn't, Joni wrote about that too, in “That Song About the Midway” and in “The Gallery,” in which a man who describes himself as a saint, and complains of her description of him as heartless, pleads with her to take him to her bed.

For the first time the tables were turned: Leonard was the muse for a woman. Not just any woman but one whom David Crosby—who also had an intense and short-lived love affair with Joni Mitchell in 1968—calls “the greatest singer-songwriter of our generation.” Within a year Leonard and Joni's affair was over. Leonard told journalist Mark Ellen, “I remember we were spending some time together in Los Angeles years ago and someone said to me, ‘How do you like living with Beethoven?' ” How did Leonard like living with Beethoven? “I didn't like it,” Leonard said, laughing, “because who would? She's prodigiously gifted. Great painter too.”
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As David Crosby says, “It was very easy to love her, but turbulent. Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer.”

In later years Mitchell seemed keen to distance herself from Leonard artistically. “I briefly liked Leonard Cohen, though once I read Camus and Lorca I started to realize that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me,” she said in 2005 of the man she had once described as “a mirror to my work,” someone who “showed me how to plumb the depths of my experience.” She would go on to describe him as “in many ways a boudoir poet”
24
—a grander term than “the Bard of the Bedsit,” one of the nicknames the UK music press would later give him, but reductive nonetheless. Any close inspection of Mitchell's songs pre- and post-Leonard would seem to indicate that he had some effect on her work. Over the decades, Leonard and Joni have remained friends.

On July 22, 1967, Leonard was in Montreal, performing at Expo 67, the world's fair. It was an important concert. Canada, conscious of the eyes of the world on it, was treating the expo as a celebration of Canadian independence and, in the case of Quebec, harmony. As the Canadian journalist Robert Fulford wrote, its success marked “the end of Little Canada, a country afraid of its own future, frightened of great plans. Despite the spectre of French-Canadian separatism that haunted Canada through the early and middle 1960s, Expo seemed to suggest that we were now entering a new and happier period in our history.”
25
Leonard, “
poète, chansonnier, écrivain,
” as he was described on the bill, would perform at the Youth Pavilion (being two months off thirty-three did not exclude him). It was one of the smaller marquees, set up like a nightclub with chairs and tables, and it was sold out.

Leonard had been nervous playing in Central Park, but this hometown performance terrified him. His family was there—his mother was in the front row—as were many of his friends. Erica Pomerance was there, along with “a flock of Leonard Cohen aficionados who were half friends, half admirers, basically fans of his poetry.” Leonard had littered the small stage with candles. He told the audience to come forward and fetch a candle for their table so that he could sing. “He was tentative and earnest, very unpolished,” says Montreal music critic Juan Rodriguez. Nancy Bacal concurs. “He was horrified, just frozen. He told me, looking out at these people, how could he just become this other person? How could he become this performer when they knew him, they'd known him all his life? It was just too hard for him.”