I'm Your Man (24 page)

On September 26, 1968, the pair arrived at Nashville's Columbia Studio A for the first session. Leonard was carrying a guitar and Zemel a lion tamer's whip. Looking around the room, Leonard took a deep breath: he would need a lot of candles to light up this place. It was enormous, large enough for a symphony orchestra with space left over for a football game. Bob Johnston was behind the glass, playing cheerleader, smiling and animated. But starting his second album couldn't help but bring back for Leonard unhappy memories of his first. Having his friend there helped. Zemel would crack the whip and keep him on task, which bemused the musicians almost as much as the Jew's harp he played on half the cuts. “I'm ready,” Leonard said, a brave man facing the firing squad. “What do you want me to do?”

The first question Johnston would always ask the artists he worked with was, “What do
you
want to do?” This was quite a concept at a time when recording artists were more used to being told what to do. Johnston had a reputation for going into battle with record company executives to get what his artists wanted. But Johnston was smart enough to know that this question would not help Leonard. Instead he said, “Play a song.” Leonard took out his guitar and started to sing. As he did, Johnston stood up and announced, “Okay, we're going out to have a hamburger and a couple of beers.” Leonard said, “Well, I was ready to do the song.” Johnston said, “You can do it when you come back.” They left to go to Crystal Burger. While they were gone, the engineer, Neil Wilburn, set up the mics the way Johnston liked them. Wilburn had worked with Johnston when he recorded Johnny Cash's prison albums and helped him get that deep, dark, jail-cell voice. For Leonard's album they used three microphones on his vocal, putting them through old echo plates for reverb.

“When we got back,” says Johnston, “Leonard said, ‘What'll I do?' I said again, ‘Just play a song,' and he did.” It was “The Partisan.” “Then I played it back to him. His voice sounded like a goddamn mountain. When he heard it he said, ‘Is that what I'm supposed to sound like?' I said, ‘You're goddamn right.' ” On that first day, starting at six in the evening and stopping at one in the morning, Johnston taped Leonard singing ten songs. Five would appear on
Songs from a Room;
one would be put aside for the third album,
Songs of Love and Hate;
and four have never as yet been released: “Baby I've Seen You,” “Your Private Name,” “Breakdown” and “Just Two People” (Leonard had also tried recording this last song with John Hammond for his debut).

For the same reason that Nashville teemed with songwriters, it also crawled with top-notch musicians. Johnston told Leonard he could have the cream of session men on his album, “but he said no, I want friends of yours, so they'll be friendly.” Johnston put together a small team of outsiders, men who could play country music but weren't part of the mainstream “Nashvegas” system. As well as Charlie Daniels, there was Ron Cornelius on guitar, Charlie McCoy on bass and Elkin “Bubba” Fowler, a guitarist and banjo-playing preacher who had been half of a toga-wearing psychedelic pop duo called the Avant-Garde. There was no drummer—Johnston was of a mind with Leonard on this—and Johnston himself played keyboards.

Ron Cornelius, to whom Johnston had given the role of bandleader, played with a young, hippie, country rock/electric folk band from Northern California called West. They had come to Nashville in 1967 to work with Johnston on their debut album and returned in 1968 to have Johnston produce their second. West's members prided themselves on not taking outside gigs, but things weren't going well with the band's career when Johnston persuaded him to play on Leonard's album. When Johnston played him Leonard's songs, “I went, you've got to be kidding me,” says Cornelius. “I was used to guitars, bass, drums, piano and loud, rock-out, amplified playing. I thought, ‘Man, this is really weird stuff.' But then, I guess like anyone who becomes a Leonard Cohen fan, as soon as you get ankle-deep in the lyrics, you're ‘Well, I don't care if I've never played anything like this in my life. This is very, very deep stuff.' ”

The artist's cards for
Songs from a Room
are not as tidy or detailed as those for
Songs of Leonard Cohen;
Johnston did not have the time or inclination for paperwork. “Bob didn't fill out anything,” says Cornelius, laughing. “He just rolled the tape and went to the airport.” Johnston would rush off to New York in the morning, work with Simon & Garfunkel, fly back in the afternoon, record Dino Valenti, maybe slot in a session with Dylan or Cash or Dylan and Cash together, grab a beer and some burgers and an hour's nap in his red Eldorado and then work five or six hours with Leonard. The artist's cards list just ten studio sessions with Leonard—four in September, one in early October and, after a month's break, five in November—plus a few more sessions without him for Johnston to do overdubs.

Life in Nashville fell into as much of a routine as something revolving around the workaholic Johnston's schedule would allow: a morning swim at the Y, lunch at Bob and Joy Johnston's place on a workday, then in the evening, Studio A. While the engineers set up the room they would hang out in the basement, which Johnston had converted into a Ping-Pong room. It doubled as a vocals room, as did the broom closet, if there was a particular sound Johnston was going for. When the session was over Leonard and Zemel would go for bacon and eggs at their favorite diner—“Bright fluorescent lights, a blond floozy waitress and a short-order cook with tattoos who looked like he was on parole,” says Zemel—and then a bar, where, unsurprisingly, they proved a success with several of Nashville's womenfolk.

Charlie Daniels recalls the recording as “very relaxed. All the candles were going and everything was so quiet. There were no charts—we changed things constantly—and nobody in the control room saying you need to do this or that. One of Bob Johnston's great strengths as a producer was that he stayed out of an artist's way and let the artist be who he was. He did it with every artist he produced, but it was very evident with people like Dylan and especially with Leonard Cohen. With Dylan it was a little different environment, because we used drums and electric instruments and it was more of a band concept. I remember one time, when Dylan wanted me to take a solo, Charlie McCoy said, ‘Well how much do you want him to play?' and Dylan said ‘All he can'—that was his attitude: ‘Well, I'm doing what I do, you do what
you
do.' But Leonard is a very unique individual. The thing about Leonard is it's the lyrics, it's the melody and it's the way he tunes his guitar—I've never seen anybody that had that softness of touch that could play a gut-string guitar with the strings tuned down like that, almost flabby. He has a very unique kind of music, very fragile, that could very easily be bruised or destroyed by somebody being heavy-handed.

“Leonard would stand there with his guitar and sing a song and we would try and create something around it that would complement it. If there was a place that we felt needed enhancing, in one way or another that's what we tried to do. The main thing was being part of it but unobtrusive, very transparent, nothing that would distract from his lyric and melody. You could put something in there that would mess it up real quick. I learned a lot of things by working with Leonard that I probably wouldn't have known otherwise, that sometimes less is more. Because when you've got a studio full of musicians, everybody's going to want to play something, but with these songs it's more about what you leave out. And Bob was very good at keeping it together and letting you know when it fit or [saying] ‘I think we need to go in a different direction on that.' ”

Cornelius remembers, “It became a team. I'm sure that Leonard, when he first looked at Charlie Daniels and me, went, ‘Oh brother, what have I got myself into here.' But then he saw that we got it, that we understood, musically, what he was doing and were in awe of him as a songwriter, and this was a project we thought about all day long, every day, until the album was over. And Bob Johnston is a very rare breed. He was born with a gift which I've never run into anywhere else, that he could make a stranger want to play or sing, right here tonight, better than they've ever sung or played in their life. Not by saying, ‘Here's what I want you to play'; he just had a way of drawing out of a musician or a singer the best in them.” Leonard would look up at the glass and see him swaying, sometimes dancing, lost in one of his songs. When he'd finished singing, Johnston would say, “Man! That is a fantastic song. We've got to have that on the album. My God, you've got to do that again,” at the same time boosting Leonard's confidence and getting him to do another take he could capture live.

One song whose recording did not come easily was “Bird on the Wire.” Leonard tried it over and over, in countless different ways, but every time he listened back, he thought it sounded dishonest somehow. Finally he told Johnston he was done, and the musicians were sent home. “Bob said, okay, let's forget it,” said Leonard. “I went back to my hotel to think matters over, but got more and more depressed.”
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He was determined to get this song right. It was as if the song, as well as being a letter to Marianne, were personal treatise of sorts, a “My Way,” but without the braggadocio (Leonard was never a big fan of Sinatra; he did have a fondness for Dean Martin, though). “In a way the history of that song on the record is my whole history,” Leonard said. “I'd never sung the song true, never. I'd always had a kind of phony Nashville introduction that I was playing the song to, following a thousand models.”
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Four days before his last recording session on November 25, 1968, Leonard asked everyone to leave except Zemel, McCoy and Johnston. “I just knew that at that moment something was going to take place. I just did the voice before I started the guitar and I heard myself sing that first phrase, ‘
Like a bird,
' and I knew the song was going to be true and new. I listened to myself singing, and it was a surprise. Then I heard the replay and I knew it was right.”
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Another song Leonard was not entirely convinced by was “The Partisan,” the song he had first learned to play at Camp Sunshine, from
The
People's Song Book,
when he was fifteen years old. Johnston says, “He played it for me and it was beautiful, but Leonard wasn't happy with it. He was pacing up and down saying it would be great with some French voices. I said, ‘I'll see you in a couple of days.' He said, ‘Aren't we recording?' I said, ‘Not right now.' The next day I flew to Paris and found three girl singers and an accordion player through some people I knew, and they came in and they did that, overdubbing Leonard's recording. I came back without saying anything to Leonard and I played it. He said ‘They're good, they really sound French.' I said, ‘That's because they are.' ” Johnston laughs. “He was so mad at me for not taking him to France with me.”

H
ank Williams called country music “the white man's blues.” By that definition you might say that, with
Songs from a Room,
Leonard succeeded in making his country album. The songs, like the raw, old country, folk and blues on Harry Smith's
Anthology,
are about God, death, love, loss, sin, redemption and soldiering on, and the sound is spare, much less ornamented than
Songs of Leonard Cohen
. “A lot of my friends who were musical purists had castigated me for the lushness and overproduction of my first record,” said Leonard, “and I think that got to me somewhere and I was determined to do a very simple album. It's very stark.”
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But, aside from the jaunty “Tonight Will Be Fine” and “Bird on the Wire”—a song that Johnny Cash would cover many years later and whose sing-along melody Kris Kristofferson once compared with Lefty Frizzell's “Mom and Dad's Waltz”—these were not “Nashville” songs; you could not imagine singing them on a back porch or in a bar. Despite the chirping-cricket sound of the Jew's harp, its overall feel is less of wide, open rural America than small, plain, European or New York City rooms.

The album teems with killers: religious fanatics, revolutionaries and suicides. In the beautiful and mournful “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” Leonard sings about a young woman he knew in Montreal, a judge's daughter, who shot herself when her illegitimate baby was taken away. In the haunting “Story of Isaac” Leonard takes the same biblical story Dylan referenced on “Highway 61 Revisited”—God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son—and transforms it into a protest about violence and atrocities both ancient and modern, public and personal. The song has a novelist's eye for detail, the potency and elegy of his early poetry and also a touch of autobiography in the protagonist being a nine-year-old boy, Leonard's age when his father died. “The Butcher,” raw acoustic blues, uses the Passover Haggadah to similar ancient/contemporary effect.

The reviews in the U.S. were not good.
Rolling Stone
's Alec Dubro wrote, “In ‘Story of Isaac,' he is matter of fact to the point of being dull. When he's not being matter of fact, but rather obscure, as he is in ‘A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes,' he's just irritating. Other singer-poets are obscure, but generally the feeling comes through that an attempt is being made to reach to a heart of meaning. But Cohen sings with such lack of energy that it's pretty easy to conclude that if he's not going to get worked up about it, why should we.”
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The
New York Times
's William Kloman was kinder, remarking that “as a story-teller Cohen is superb, even when he tacks self-effacing morals onto the end of his tales,” but he disliked the album's more understated production and concluded, “Cohen's new songs are short on beauty.”
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