I'm Your Man (34 page)

From Israel he flew directly to Ethiopia, a country that was also on the brink of war. He appeared to be courting danger, tempting fate. Instead of attempting to take up arms, this time he took a room in the Imperial Hotel in Asmara. While the rain poured down outside, freed up, Leonard wrote. “I had my guitar with me and it was then I felt the songs emerging—at last, the conclusions that I had been carrying in manuscript form for the last four or five years, from hotel room to hotel room.”
14
He refined “Lover Lover Lover,” changing its opening line from “
I saw my brothers fighting in the desert
” to

    
I asked my father . . . “Change my name.”

    
The one I'm using now it's covered up

    
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame

In Ethiopia he also finally “broke the code” of “Take This Longing”—a song he had written years ago to Nico and that Buffy Sainte-Marie had recorded as “The Bells”—in order “to get a version for” himself.
15
He made final edits to the lyrics of “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a second version of the song that described his sexual encounter in New York with Janis Joplin. Leonard and Ron Cornelius had written the music together on his last tour, on a transatlantic flight from Nashville to Ireland. “It was back when you could sit in the back of the plane and smoke,” Cornelius remembers, “and for the best part of this eight-and-a-half-hour flight Leonard and I sat there smoking and worked on that song. When we finally landed in Shannon, it was complete.” Leonard told Billy Donovan, the tour manager, that it was the first song he had ever cowritten. The other song that came together in Ethiopia was “Field Commander Cohen,” an ironic account of his imagined heroic military exploits. But in reality, in traveling to these combat zones, Leonard was avoiding the war that awaited him at home with Suzanne.

He was weary, though, and ready to make peace. He had seen too much blood and death and hatred in Israel. He felt he should go back and tend this little garden whose seed he had planted and see if somehow he could make a success of family life. But first he went to the monastery to sit in retreat with Roshi. When he finally went home to Suzanne and Adam at the end of the year, peace reigned in the cottage in Montreal, long enough for Suzanne to become pregnant with their second child.

I
n July 1974 the new version of the concert film
Bird on a Wire
opened in London. It did not stay in circulation long. The BBC by this time had given up on broadcasting it. It was shown on German TV, but effectively it disappeared (bar the odd bootleg copy) for almost four decades. Leonard flew to London for the premiere. He seemed “very cheerful” to the journalist from
ZigZag
for whom he played three of his new songs—even while recounting that he'd had to give up his writing room, now that there was a new baby on the way, and he was obliged to go to the garden shed to write. This was quite a change in mood from his last visit to London, when his interviews suggested that he planned to quit the music business. “I don't want to give you the impression that I was very sick and have just come through it, that's not true,” said Leonard. What had happened was that “two months ago I had a golden week, my guitar sounded good, a lot of unfinished songs suggested conclusions.”
16

Leonard had renewed his contract with Columbia Records. He had spent most of the past month in a New York studio working on a new record called
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
. Drawing a line under his first four albums, on this one he was trying for a different sound, using all new musicians and a new, young producer. John Lissauer was fifteen years younger than Leonard and not long out of Yale music school, where he had studied classical music and jazz. They met by chance in Montreal, at the Nelson Hotel, where Lissauer performed in a band with Lewis Furey, whose first album Lissauer had just produced. Leonard was in the audience; he had known Furey since 1966, when Furey was a sixteen-year-old violin player and fledgling poet. He had asked Leonard to look at his poetry, which Leonard did, giving him homework—read Irving Layton; write a sonnet—and becoming his mentor.

After the show, Furey introduced Lissauer to Leonard. This impressed Lissauer's girlfriend, who was a big Leonard Cohen fan, rather more than it did Lissauer, who “wasn't really into the folk singer-songwriter thing.” Leonard told Lissauer, “I like what you're doing; would you like to talk about recording?” Lissauer said, “Sure.” He heard nothing more for some time until, out of the blue, Leonard called and told him he was at the Royalton Hotel in New York and ready to start work.

Lissauer lived in a large loft space in a four-floor walk-up on Eighteenth Street—it had been a Mafia after-hours club in the fifties—that was strewn with “every instrument known to man.” Lissauer told Leonard to come over. He should ring the downstairs bell, then stand under the window, and Lissauer would throw down the front-door key. Some hours later, as Lissauer sat at the piano, playing quietly, listening for the doorbell, in walked Leonard, a large grin on his face. At the front door he had run into a pizza deliveryman with an order for Lissauer's neighbor. When she threw down her key, Leonard caught it, paid for the pizza and said he would take it up with him. “She was the biggest Leonard Cohen freak, so you can imagine, opening the door and having her pizza delivered by her idol. She screamed,” says Lissauer. “It was nuts.” He was beginning to get the idea that Leonard was popular with women.

Marty Machat, who had never heard of Lissauer, was not convinced by Leonard's choice of producer. He called John Hammond, Leonard's A & R man and first producer, who booked an afternoon session at Columbia Studio E. On June 14, 1974, Leonard and Lissauer arrived, accompanied by four musicians. Under the watchful eye of Leonard's doubting manager and Columbia's most celebrated executive, they recorded demos of “Lover Lover Lover,” “There Is a War” and “Why Don't You Try.” “I'd put together an Ethiopian, Middle Eastern kind of thing,” says Lissauer. “Leonard had never had rhythm like this on any of his songs and it worked great.” Hammond gave his endorsement: it was going to work, he told Leonard, he didn't need him there. Machat gave his more grudging assent. “I sensed that Marty didn't like me and I wasn't used to this because I'm easygoing and work hard and I get along with everybody. Maybe it was a possessive thing; Leonard was
his
guy and he was looking to me for stuff. Marty was obsessed with Leonard. Leonard was the only artist he cared about because he thought that by associating with Leonard he got some class and some humanity. I don't think he ever cheated Leonard—and it's legendary what a bad guy he was with other artists. But he did the right thing by Leonard. Whatever it was, it was not a comfortable situation.”

Lissauer asked that the studio be closed to everyone—managers, record company, girlfriends—except Leonard, the musicians and himself. Sometimes Machat would come by to listen to the rough mixes, but for the most part Lissauer's request was granted. So too was his decision to record not in one of the Columbia studios but in a small, intimate studio called Sound Ideas. “It was much more comfortable, the engineers were younger and hipper and not in lab coats, looking things up in reference manuals.” The team included a female engineer—a rarity in the early seventies—named Leanne Ungar; this album marked the beginning of one of Leonard's most enduring musical associations. “The atmosphere in the studio was really fun and really light” and the recording process “very experimental,” Ungar says. “We tried lots of different instruments and different things.”

Generally these ideas were Lissauer's. He would take home a simple guitar-vocal demo of the song and “fool with it,” Lissauer remembers, “and then come back and say to Leonard, ‘How about we do it this way?' I wanted to take him out of the folk world. I wanted the record to take the listener places, give them a little visual, cinematic trip. ‘This is poetry,' I said to him. ‘When you do a straight-ahead singer-songwriter album like the last two, it becomes easy to stop listening to the poetry and they're just songs.' I felt that I was illustrating the poetry with these little touches here and there, these unusual combinations of instruments.” Onto Leonard's basic guitar and vocal recording he added strings and brass from the New York Philharmonic; woodwinds and piano, which Lissauer played; a viola played by Lewis Furey and a Jew's harp played by Leonard. There were also banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass and—unusually for a Leonard Cohen album—drums, played respectively by Jeff Layton, John Miller, Roy Markowitz and Barry Lazarowitz. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, who happened to drop by the studio, sang some backing vocals.

On this occasion Leonard, according to Lissauer, showed “no insecurities about his singing. He felt he wasn't a ‘singer' singer, that he didn't have that pop tenor thing, but he knew that he carried musical attention and that he could communicate a story. We never talked about pitch; what we talked about was, ‘Have you kept your line?' In other words, has the narrative stayed intact? Do we believe this verse? That's all-important with Leonard. He never hides behind vocal tricks; that's what you do when you don't have anything to say. Sometimes he would say, ‘Let me do that again and see if I can get my energy up, see if I can find that line,' and use his finger to point the way. But for the most part, his vocals were effortless.”

A quite different approach was taken to “Leaving Green Sleeves,” the song that closed the album. Leonard's interpretation of the sixteenth-century English folk ballad was a live-in-the-studio recording with the band, “the product,” Lissauer says, “of
ng ka pay
”—a sweet Korean liqueur with 70 percent alcohol content. Reportedly good for rheumatism, it was a favorite of Roshi, who was in the recording studio drinking with Leonard. An exception to the closed-studio rule had been made for him. Lissauer had found a place in Chinatown where
ng ka pay
could be bought, “and once in a while we would do a run and pick up a bottle. Hence some of the, shall we say, exotic vocals. On ‘Leaving Green Sleeves,' we almost had to hold Leonard up to sing; he was
ng ka pay
'ed out of his mind.”

While Leonard sang, his hands held up in front of him as if he were reading an invisible book, Roshi sat on the couch in his
tabi
socks, saying nothing. Lissauer remembers he was “just beaming and emanating good vibes.”

What was Roshi doing in the studio?

“He was nodding off most of the time; he was already an old man.”

I meant, why was he there at all?

“We had been traveling to Trappist monasteries—at that time there was a rapprochement between Catholicism and Zen under the tutelage of Thomas Merton, who was a Trappist monk who wrote beautiful books—and I would go with Roshi and he would lead these weeks of meditation at various monasteries. We happened to be in New York at the time I was recording. So he came to the studio.”

Since everyone, even Zen masters, secretly want to be music critics, what did Roshi say about the songs and your performance?

“The next morning when we were having breakfast I asked him what he thought and he said that I should sing ‘more sad.' ”

A lot of Leonard Cohen fans would have bought him a drink and employed him as your musical director. What was your reaction?

“I thought, ‘Not more sad, but you've got to go deeper.' ”

To all appearances you were sad enough during that period. Because of your domestic situation?

“I don't think that was the case at all. Of course when this kind of condition prevails, it's almost impossible to sustain friendships.”

When you're so busy torturing yourself?

“You don't have time for anybody else. It's time-consuming. And, although I think everyone lives their life as an emergency, the emergency is acute when you're just trying to figure out how to get from moment to moment and you don't know why, and there are no operative circumstances that seem to explain. Of course the circumstances become disagreeable
because
of the relationships that you can't sustain, but I don't think it's the other way round.”

Did becoming a father make any difference to your depression, distracting it or shifting the focus in some way?

“It didn't happen in my case, although it's true that having kids gets you off center stage; you can't really feel exactly the same way about yourself ever after. But it didn't seem to mitigate that gloomy condition. I don't know what the problem was, still don't. I wish I did. But that was a component of my life and was the engine of most of my investigation into the various things I looked into: women, song, religion.”

In August Leonard was back home in Montreal, doing an interview with an Israeli-Canadian writer and broadcaster named Malka Marom for the CBC program
The Entertainers
. The interview took place in his garden shed—his new writing room—which was illuminated by candles. Marom recalls, “He was very whimsical. Soon after I set up the recording equipment, Leonard's hand went right underneath my skirt. I said, ‘What are you doing?' and he said, ‘This is the real dialogue,' or something to that effect. I said, ‘Well, aside from this physical thing, is there any other dialogue?' He said, ‘It can only be expressed in poetry.' So I asked the most mundane things just to see how far the poetry would go, like ‘When do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? Are you happily married?' and he answered everything with poems that he had not published.”