I'm Your Man (26 page)

Rosengarten says, “Leonard felt it was helpful in deciding his persona onstage. A mask is neutral, it's the person that wears it that gives it life, the way you move your head and your eyes and all that stuff. It becomes very powerful.” In the end Leonard decided not to wear the mask. He held on to it for decades though. Mort eventually had it cast for him in aluminum.

“Oh man,” says Bob Johnston. “There was never anything like that tour.” It began with nine shows in eight European cities in two weeks and was fuelled by LSD and Mandrax. Leonard, dressed in a khaki safari suit and wielding Henry Zemel's whip, was a quixotic General Patton leading his ragtag army. Or, at the Hamburg concert, more like cannon fodder. It was May 4, 1970, the day of the Kent State massacre in the U.S., and, as some kind of convoluted antiauthority peace gesture, Leonard decided to start the second half of the show by clicking his heels twice and giving the Nazi salute. He had come back onstage to lighted matches and a long standing ovation, but the mood changed instantly.

The large crowd “went nuts,” says Johnston, “cursing and throwing shit. One guy came running down the aisle with a gun. He was five feet from the stage when security wrestled him to the floor. Charlie Daniels turned to me and said, ‘I'm out of here.' I said, ‘Don't move, if they're going to kill someone it's Leonard.' But the crowd quieted when Leonard took up his guitar. He said, ‘Are you finished, are you all through?' and they applauded as he started playing. But it was an old Yiddish song. And he started dancing on one leg across the stage like Jews do, singing ‘
Ai-eee, ai-eee,
' and they started cursing and throwing things again. Then he started one of his own songs and we all joined in, and it calmed down. Leonard was always pulling stunts like that, and getting away with it.” The next morning at the hotel, though, Daniels told them he was quitting. “I've had it,” he said, “I've got a wife and kid and you guys don't. I can't get shot out here over Leonard Cohen.” It took the whole band to talk him into staying.

In London, Leonard gave a poetry reading at the ICA and played two nights at the Royal Albert Hall, which sold out the moment the concerts were announced; his first album had recently gone gold in the UK and the second was high on the charts. The
Guardian
reported, “The fashionably hippy audience cheered hysterically. But I hope they understood what Cohen is all about.” If they didn't, the reviewer Robin Denselow explained that Leonard's songs reflected a “peculiarly Canadian wasteland” and that their message, with the poetry peeled off, was “self-obsession, cynicism, non-communication; it is two strangers frantically making love in a shadowy hotel bedroom.”
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Leonard called Nico, who was also in London, but she turned him down once again. He made the acquaintance of several women who were more generous with their affection. He bought a book for Suzanne titled
The Language of Flowers,
which he inscribed to her, writing that she was “a fragrant breath amid the foul storms of life.”
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Leonard took Cornelius, Johnston and Donovan to meet a friend in London who—he told them—had the best acid anywhere. “It was called Desert Dust and it was like LSD-plus,” says Cornelius. “You had to take a needle—a pin was too big—and touch your tongue with this brown dust, and with as much as you could pick up on the end of that needle you were
gone,
sixteen hours, no reentry.” Ample supplies were purchased and consumed; it would get to where the tour manager made them all hold hands at the airport as they walked to the plane so that he would not lose anyone—“a big conga line,” Donovan says, “with everybody just singing along.”

On the plane to Vienna the stewardess informed them that they had heard that there were around three hundred fans waiting for them at the airport. “Leonard said, ‘Oh, they love me in Vienna,' ” says Johnston, “but when we landed and he went out and waved to the crowd, they were all hollering, ‘Where's Bubba?' Turned out Bubba Fowler had a big hit in Vienna but didn't know it.” But the audiences across Europe loved Leonard, even when he provoked them—which could have been why he provoked them, although his pharmaceutical intake might have had something to do with it too. Much as Leonard claimed not to like performing, his feelings toward his audiences were of affection and gratitude. At the Amsterdam concert, he invited the entire crowd back to his hotel, which resulted in police action. At the Paris Olympia he invited the audience to come onstage, and once again the police were called.

It was his first real tour and he was still finding his way as a stage performer, but for a first tour it was quite remarkable. The band left France for New York in July, just as the Royal Winnipeg Ballet were getting ready to premiere
The Shining People of Leonard Cohen
in Paris. Choreographed by a McGill University graduate named Brian Macdonald, who had met Leonard in 1964, it featured an electronic score and the reading of several of Leonard's poems, among them the erotic “When I Uncovered Your Body” and “Celebration.”

In the U.S. Leonard was booked to play at the Forest Hills folk festival. To leave the grand opera houses and music halls of Europe for a show at a tennis stadium put a dent in Leonard's mood, which seemed to linger. Bob Dylan, who was also at the festival, had chosen that day to meet Leonard. Dylan was not in the best of humor either, having been barred from going to Leonard's dressing room by an official, who must have been the only man at a folk festival to fail to recognize him. The official called Johnston over: “This guy says he's Bob Dylan and he says he knows you.” Johnston deadpanned, “I've never seen the son of a bitch in my life. But okay, let him in.” “Man, that wasn't funny,” said Dylan.

Leonard was backstage with Ron Cornelius, who was restringing his guitar. Johnston put his head around the door saying, “Bob Dylan's here.”

“So?” said Leonard.

“He wants to meet you,” said Johnston.

“Let him in, I guess,” said Leonard. Dylan came into the room and for a while he and Leonard just stood there, saying nothing. Dylan broke the silence. “How're you doing here?” he said.

“Well you've got to be somewhere,” Leonard answered.

“It was the strangest conversation,” says Cornelius, who knew Dylan and had worked with him in the past. “They were talking between the sentences, if you know what I mean. You could see they were communicating, however it really had nothing to do with the words coming out of their mouth. It was one of the weirdest atmospheres I've ever been in in my life—just a tiny bit hostile. But that also goes along with the fact that we'd been playing in places where Leonard was number one and Dylan was number two—Leonard could sell out the Albert Hall in thirty-two minutes—and then we came to the U.S. and Bob Dylan is number one and nobody's ever heard of Leonard.” However strange the encounter, Leonard and Dylan each left considering the other a friend. But Cornelius was correct about Leonard's lack of status in the U.S. A review of the show in
Billboard
described him as “nervous” and “lifeless.” Wrote Nancy Erlich, “He works hard to achieve that bloodless vocal, that dull, humorless quality of a voice speaking after death. And the voice does not offer comfort or wisdom; it expresses total defeat. His art is oppressive.”
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Leonard and the band still had two festivals left to play in Europe, so they flew straight back. The first festival was in the South of France, in the Provençal countryside six miles outside Aix. Their hotel was an old country lodge on the outskirts of the city. The hotel had stables and the band had the afternoon to themselves; they hired horses and rode through a landscape that looked like a Cézanne painting, singing cowboy songs. Unbeknownst to them, the three-day festival, whose bill included French bands and international acts—Mungo Jerry and Johnny Winter among them—had turned into a mini French Woodstock. More people had shown up than the organizers planned for, and many refused to pay fifty-five francs for a ticket and broke down fencing to get in. The local prefecture, concerned about the “hordes of destructive hippies in search of uproar and scandal” who were setting up makeshift camps in the meadow, dancing with the Hare Krishnas and basking stoned and naked in the sun, issued a ban on the festival and sent in the CRS—the French riot police. The show went on, by all accounts without any problems, apart from the demands from the more vociferous festivalgoers that the festival be free and the concerns of the organizers that they might not make enough to pay the acts.

Driving along the tree-lined road to the festival site, Leonard and the band found it completely blocked with parked and abandoned cars. There were still some miles to go—too far to walk, and they had instruments—and there was nowhere to call for help. Which was when Bob Johnston thought of the horses. Back at the inn, after negotiating terms through a translator, they set off again on horseback, taking the back route along narrow mountain roads, on a warm, starlit night, toward the distant lights.

“About halfway there,” says Johnston, “Leonard said, ‘We can't play the concert. We've run out of wine.' We were in the backwoods out there. I said, ‘Leonard, don't worry.' Then about a mile down the road in the middle of nowhere we saw a bar called Texas.” The good Lord had blessed and guided them to an unlikely Wild West theme bar. There was even a hitching post. They dismounted. In the bar, they hatched a plan to make their festival entrance by riding their horses onto the stage. It was the kind of decision that a large intake of wine mixed with the leadership style of Bob Johnston and the bravado the European tour had engendered might produce. When they rode into the backstage area, they headed toward the ramps and up onto the stage. “The stage was swinging up and down,” says Johnston. “The French festival guys were all waving and screaming that it was going to collapse.” This seemed a genuine possibility. The white stallion that Leonard was riding seemed to believe it and refused to move. In the end it was persuaded. “I gave it a kick on the ass,” said Johnston, “and Leonard rode it up there into the middle of the stage, where it reared up, and Leonard saluted the audience.”

At that moment, Leonard was the consummate showman, appearing to be in full control of both the spontaneity and the artifice. The only problem was that his grand entrance was greeted with hisses and boos. Hecklers began to shout insults: that Leonard was a diva, making such a grandiose entrance; that he was a capitalist and the tickets were so expensive because of his exorbitant fee; that he was a fascist sympathizer, having a house in Greece yet refusing to speak out against the military government. Leonard, as was his tendency, tried to engage “the Maoists”—as he called his detractors—in a debate in between songs. Their response was to throw bottles. At one point Leonard thought he heard gunshots, but it was only a stage light smashing. Still, whatever might happen, Leonard was not afraid. He was no longer Field Commander Cohen, he was Conquest, the white Horseman of the Apocalypse. He told the hecklers that if they wanted a fight they should come onstage: he and his men were ready to take them on. By the end of their performance, Leonard's band had an official name: the Army. Their next campaign would be to take a small island four miles off the coast of southern England, which had been invaded by six hundred thousand young people—ten times more than attended the Aix festival. But before landing in the Isle of Wight, Leonard went to a mental hospital.

O
n August 28, two days before he was due to play the Isle of Wight Festival, a sedan pulled up outside the Henderson Hospital in Sutton, on the southern edge of London. Looking up, Leonard saw an old, imposing building with a tower with narrow windows. It had the look of an institution you might check into and never leave. Leonard went inside. Bill Donovan was there, telling him everything was set up for him in the tower. “Oh boy,” said Leonard to Bob Johnston as the medical director of the hospital led them in, “I hope they like ‘So Long, Marianne.' ”

“Leonard said, ‘I want to play mental asylums,' ” says Johnston. And just like he'd done when Johnny Cash told him he wanted to play prisons, Johnston said, “Okay,” and “booked a bunch of them.” Despite appearances, the Henderson (closed now, due to funding cuts) was a pioneering hospital with an innovative approach to the treatment of personality disorders. It called itself a therapeutic community and the patients residents. “It was all talking therapy,” says former charge nurse Ian Milne. “No medication, no ‘zombies.' ” Most of the patients were Leonard's age or younger, and so were the staff; to outsiders they would have been barely distinguishable. Both were at the morning Community Meeting where the medical director announced that he'd had a call saying, “Some guy wants to come and sing to us and run through his program for the Isle of Wight. His name's Leonard Cohen.” Every mouth dropped; for once the talking stopped.

Ron Cornelius remembers the first time Leonard told the band of his intention to play at mental hospitals. “We were at the Mayfair Hotel and he said, ‘We're going to enjoy this tour. We're going to see these cities and spend two or three days in them sometimes. And when we're not playing, I want to go and play mental institutions.' I went, ‘What? I'm not going in a nuthouse to play. Yes, count me in for the Albert Hall, but count me out for the nuthouse.' Well they talked and talked and talked until Leonard finally said, ‘Ron, just come one time.' After seeing what that music did for those people I ended up enjoying many of those, and we played a lot of them, all over Europe, Canada, even in America.”

Leonard did not say why he wanted to play to mental patients and the band didn't ask, but Johnston recalls Leonard telling him once that “he had to go to the loony bin one time, when he wrote
Beautiful Losers
or something.” As Johnston remembers it, Leonard said he had taken a lot of acid, gone out on a little boat and stared at the sun too long. He told journalist Steve Turner in 1974 that he was drawn to mental hospitals through “the feeling that the experience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work. In a sense, when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat. To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements of this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs.”
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