I'm Your Man (31 page)

At the Albert Hall, 2008.
Photo by Eija Arjatsalo

 

Leonard and the band, Helsinki, 2008.
Photo by Jarkko Arjatsalo

 

Soundcheck, 2009 tour.
Photo by Eija Arjatsalo

 

Poster boy, Venice, 2009.
Photo by Eija Arjatsalo

Thirteen

The Veins Stand Out Like Highways

H
e smiled like a holy fool from the photo in the bottom corner of the album sleeve, which had been shot on tour—eyes ecstatic, face unshaven, his head dissolving into the black background. On the back cover, in place of song titles there was, written in white on black like a message on a madhouse chalkboard,

    
THEY LOCKED UP A MAN

    
WHO WANTED TO RULE THE WORLD

    
THE FOOLS

    
THEY LOCKED UP THE WRONG MAN

Critics had called
Songs from a Room
bleak; it wasn't, it was stark.
Songs of Love and Hate
was bleak: songs of pain and self-disgust of endless variation, including a hunchback, an immolation, a cuckold, a suicide, an abortion, broken limbs, a broken sky and a washed-up writer—“Last Year's Man”—who felt unable to move his hand and write the world back into being. Leonard was depressed and wasted. He'd had it. He had been backstage and he knew how they hid the rabbits in the hat. Those reviewers who had seen through the con and called his voice “weak and pitiful” and his songs “self-indulgent” had been right. There had been no victories. The medals were a sham. Almost four years had passed since he had written to Marianne describing his excruciating first stage appearance with Judy Collins and the freedom and beauty he felt from his “total failure.” But now, living in the Tennessee cabin with Suzanne and contemplating a third album he did not want to make, didn't believe that he could make, but that his record contract required that he make, Leonard felt only “a deep, paralyzing anguish.”
1

Love, lust, the Bible Belt and the company of men, musicians, whom he trusted and admired might appear to an outsider to be the ideal Leonard Cohen setup. Then, they might have said the same thing about his life with Marianne in the little house on Hydra. Leonard's depression begged to differ. Says Suzanne, “Of course, it can feel like a dark room with no doors. It's a common experience of many people, especially with a creative nature, and the more spiritual the person, the closer to the tendency resembling what the church called
acedia
”—a sin that encompassed apathy in the practice of virtue and the loss of grace. “Maybe the biggest struggle—what permits the work to shine or lets you shine through the work—is the undressing, being only truly who you are, [and] tailoring the pathos, quieting the daily pettiness and ending the second-guessing, just in action”—knuckling down and getting on with it.

Leonard's contract with Columbia stipulated two more albums from him. He asked Bob Johnston if they could give the record company two live albums, since they'd recorded most of the shows on the last tour. Johnston said they might be able to get away with one live album, but not until they'd given the label a new studio album. So Leonard knuckled down and got on with it. He took a room in a hotel in Nashville, he swam in the pool at the Y twice a day and for five days straight he went to the studio. The recording was relatively painless at first; there was an easy familiarity with the road-honed band, the engineers and the studio. Charlie Daniels says, “We'd gotten used to each other and had much more of an idea of where we were going and what to do with his songs.” And there were only eight songs, almost all of which Leonard had previously attempted to record on his first two albums and/or had performed with the band onstage. The version of “Sing Another Song, Boys” that appears on the album was in fact recorded live at the festival outside Aix.

After five days in Studio A, the band went their way and Leonard and Johnston took the master tape to London to do overdubs: Leonard's spoken-word part on “Joan of Arc,” the children's choir on “Last Year's Man” and the string arrangements by Paul Buckmaster, a classical cellist and experimental rock bassist who had arranged Elton John's first two albums. They gave him “a free hand,” Buckmaster said, but “Cohen's music is almost unarrangeable.” His contribution was to add “little areas of emotional texture and color.”
2

Cornelius remembers, “It started out the way we recorded
Songs from a Room
but then it grew as things got deeper. ‘Famous Blue Raincoat' kind of matured right before your eyes, and also ‘Avalanche.' It's so easy to get too much going on, and yet at the same time without enough horsepower behind it that song would have never had the energy that it has. But it kind of grew into a monster.” Cornelius and Leonard agreed there was something not quite right about the album. Leonard flew him to London. “For a while,” says Cornelius, “with Bob [Johnston] and I, it was flat-out almost fistfights over things going in the record—fighting over wanting it to be the best for Leonard. There was tons of stuff that Buckmaster wrote that Leonard and I would finally just end up putting great big red X's through, because it would actually have been too much; but if you listen closely there's a heck of a lot on there.”

“It was an odd sort of record,” said Leonard.
3
There's barely a trace of Tennessee in it at all, except at a push the skewed back-porch rhythm of “Diamonds in the Mine,” a snarling, screaming sing-along about the nothingness of it all. The album contains some of Leonard's blackest songs and also some of his most beautiful. The resigned eroticism of “Joan of Arc” and the serene bittersweetness of “Famous Blue Raincoat”—another of Leonard's triangle songs, this a letter written to a rival or friend or both in the dark hours before dawn—sound almost unbearably lovely alongside the dark, disturbing “Sing Another Song, Boys,” “Dress Rehearsal Rag” (of which Leonard said, “I didn't write that song, I suffered it”
4
), and “Avalanche,” the intense, compelling song with which the album opens. It is sung in the character of a hunchback, a grotesque creature with a mountain of gold lusting over women—a Nazi caricature of a Jew. Or from the depths of hell by a tormented man who longs for connection with the Divine. Or by a man who already has the woman but does not want her or the domesticity she offers. And/or it is sung by God—a gentle, New Testament Jesus, with the crumbs of the Last Supper on the table and a wound in his side, who turns out to be as hard and demanding as an Old Testament Jehovah. In these six verses, sung in a minor key, untempered by women's voices, there are layers upon layers, a whole house of mirrors, but the constants are a sense of loneliness and longing, depression and despair.

Songs of Love and Hate,
along with the first two albums
Songs of Leonard Cohen
and
Songs from a Room,
make up a kind of trilogy wherein killers march alongside suicides, martyrs with soldiers, and gurus with Old Testamentarians, and men who long for love and their lovers march in opposite directions. As in Leonard's books of poetry, there are recurring themes and motifs, lessons learned and unlearned, joy becoming love becoming pain. Joan of Arc, whose picture was on the back sleeve of Leonard's first record, is the subject of a song in his third. Marianne Ihlen, pictured on the back of his second album, was the subject of a song on the first. “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” a song written for the first album and recorded for the second, finally made it onto the third, three years after its appearance on the Judy Collins album that effectively launched Leonard's musical career.

When
Songs of Love and Hate
was released in March 1971, an imaginary whistle blew and the U.S. and UK ran to opposite ends of the playground. In Britain the album was a Top 5 hit. In America, despite a promotional campaign, it was an abject failure, not even making it into the Top 100. Canada did not take to it as warmly as to his last album, but Dalhousie University in Halifax was moved to award Leonard an honorary doctorate in the month that it came out. The citation read: “For many young people on both sides of the Atlantic, Leonard Cohen has become a symbol of their own anguish, alienation and uncertainty.” It echoed the Columbia Records ad about there being millions of Leonard Cohens out there, disengaging themselves from life. “People were saying I was ‘depressing a generation,' ” said Leonard, “and ‘they should give away razor blades with Leonard Cohen albums because it's music to slit your wrists by.' ”
5
The UK press had taken to calling him “Laughing Len.”

S
pring in Montreal is a wonder. That after such prolonged abuse it still has the will to follow winter seems always little short of a miracle. The sun, no longer slacking on the job, got on with melting the snow. Tables and chairs sprouted outside cafés, where survivors, peeled of their winter armor, sat marveling at the flowers. The darkness had passed, for now. Leonard and Suzanne were installed in their little cottage near the Parc du Portugal. Suzanne had adopted “three adorable but constantly quacking ducklings, until Leonard said, ‘It's me or the ducks, Suzanne.' ” Leonard was trying to write. “He was always writing,” says Suzanne, “even when he thought he wasn't. Continuously.” Suzanne was writing too, a pornographic novel. “It was an innocent ruse, catnip for a blank page, not only to amuse Leonard, but to get him to continue [to try] to write another novel again. I believed—and still do—that he had another novel waiting to be born, that I wished he would consecrate himself to. So I started this book—pornographic, I suppose, for 1969/70, but in today's market it would be just another modern sardonic/romantic novel—pretending I was having the writer's block, not him. I asked him if I wrote a paragraph if he would write one, to push me along, and he did, and that's how it began, playfully,” each writing a page and reading it to the other. “I never imagined I'd actually finish it, but I did”—it took Suzanne around two years. They sent it off to some publishing houses. “We laughed as the rejection letters came in, because along with the regrets they asked to meet me anyway.”

Leonard completed his novel too, although not until the midseventies. It was accepted by his publisher, but at the proof stage, Leonard withdrew it. One friend to whom Leonard spoke of the book had the impression it was an autobiography, in which Leonard discussed the nature of fame and the sexuality of celebrity—what people expected of him and what they offered him now that they had not offered him before he became a music star. Another friend gathered that it was fiction, largely autobiographical, and that he had written so frankly about his family that he had second thoughts about making it public—curious when Leonard wrote about his family with such candor in
The Favorite Game
. A 1976 interview with
Melody Maker
6
appears to confirm the latter. He had written about his family, Leonard said, but he felt “that it wasn't honest enough. In other words, it would hurt them but it didn't have the good side. So I took it back at the last moment. But I feel good because it's written. Maybe there'd be an appropriate time for it some time. But not for a while,” and not by the time of this book's publication.

In the summer a new film appeared in theaters featuring a soundtrack by Leonard Cohen. Robert Altman's
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
was a Western of sorts, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as a gambler and prostitute who team up to run a bordello. Altman was a great fan of
Songs of Leonard Cohen
—he played it so often he wore more than one copy out, adding considerably to its U.S. sales. Altman called Leonard to ask if he might use it in his film; Leonard agreed, although given his experiences with directors he was not holding his breath. Then Altman called the production company, Warner Bros., to see if they could procure rights from Columbia. At the time the music department of Warner Bros.'s films division was run by Joe Boyd, an American who had made his name in Britain in the sixties, producing or launching the careers of artists such as Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band. Altman invited Boyd to a screening.

“The lights went down and onto the screen comes Beatty,” says Boyd, “walking down a hill to the arpeggio guitar intro of ‘The Stranger Song.' And then a couple of scenes with Julie Christie and Leonard Cohen's guitar and voice. I thought, ‘Huh? That's a little wacky'; I didn't have any great feeling of ‘Oh my god, Leonard Cohen's music, incredible.' But when the film finished and the lights came up, everyone else in the room—crew, editors—turned to Robert and said, ‘Oh my God, Bob, that's
so
unbelievable, you're such a genius.' ” So Boyd phoned Columbia Records. He ended up talking to Bob Johnston and asked him if he knew how they could get hold of the guitar tracks without the vocals. Although Johnston had not recorded that album, he knew that they could not have the guitar tracks, because the performances were recorded live in the studio, “the voice singing at the same time as the guitar was played.” But they did find some instrumental passages that the Kaleidoscope had done without Leonard's vocals, which did not make it onto the album. Watching the movie in a cinema, Chris Darrow almost jumped out of his seat when he recognized the instrumentation they had improvised to “Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song.” Chester Crill had much the same reaction. “When I heard it I said, ‘
That's
the way the album was supposed to be mixed, stripped down, with the instruments actually responding to Leonard's vocal.' ”

That same year “Sisters of Mercy” would also feature five more of Leonard's songs in the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film
Warnung vor einer Heiligen Nutte
—
Beware of a Holy Whore
. (Fassbinder, an early fan, would go on to employ Leonard's songs in several films.) Another German film, Werner Herzog's
Fata Morgana,
used “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye.” Others of Leonard's songs were also keeping busy. Tim Hardin covered “Bird on a Wire” (one of several cover versions to substitute an “a” for Leonard's “the”), and the ever-faithful Judy Collins included two more Cohen songs on her new album
Living,
“Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Joan of Arc.” A live recording from the Isle of Wight of “Tonight Will Be Fine” turned up on a triple album, a compilation titled
The First Great Rock Festivals of the Seventies: Isle of Wight/Atlanta Pop Festival,
released in the summer of '71. Delighted that so many of his songs were making a living without his having to perform them, Leonard settled down to his writing. He was working on the final edits of a new book of poetry, as well as on what he described to Danny Fields as “a new big chunk of prose.” It was called
The Woman Being Born—
a title that was also given to an early draft of Leonard's book
Death of a Lady's Man
.