I'm Your Man (36 page)

When Leonard returned to America in the fall, it was to spend more time with Roshi. In an unpublished piece with the pessimistic title “The End of My Life in Art,” he wrote: “I saw Roshi early this morning. His room was warm and fragrant. . . . Destroy particular self and absolute appears. He spoke to me gently. I waited for the rebuke. It didn't come. I waited because there is a rebuke in every other voice but his. He rang his bell. I bowed and left. I visited him again after several disagreeable hours in the mirror. . . . I was so hungry for his seriousness after the moronic frivolity and despair of hours in the mirror.”
27
Leonard was also hungry for hunger. This domestic life had caused him to put on weight and what he needed was to be empty. As he wrote in
Beautiful Losers,
“If I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness . . .”—a loneliness deeper than anything that the ongoing presence of a woman and children could relieve.

Lissauer flew to L.A. to meet Leonard and they resumed work on
Songs for Rebecca
. “We took a couple of rooms at the Chateau Marmont with an outdoor patio and rented an electric piano. We worked on these songs and got them happening and I taught him some chords for a couple of the songs so he could play his guitar. And then he and Marty said, ‘Let's go back out on tour.' ” A week of concerts had been booked in the U.S. Leonard's American record label was releasing a
Best Of
album, presumably having figured that
New Skin for the Old Ceremony,
which failed to even make it into the U.S. Top 200, was a dead horse no longer worth flogging. The compilation album was released under the title
Greatest Hits
on the other side of the Atlantic, where Leonard actually had hits—
New Skin
had made it to No. 24 on the UK charts. Leonard picked the songs for the compilation himself and wrote the liner notes.

For this tour Lissauer put a new band together, which this time included a drummer. They set off on the road in November, taking with them the new cowritten songs, adding them to the regular set. “Leonard was thrilled, I was thrilled, even Marty seemed to be happier than expected given that he didn't want Leonard to collaborate with me in the first place,” Lissauer says. After the last concert, Leonard and Lissauer went into the studio—first Sound Ideas in New York, then A & M in Los Angeles. They recorded all the new collaboratively written songs and their new version of “Diamonds in the Mine.” “And then the faucet shut off. Leonard disappeared. Marty wouldn't take my calls, I said, ‘What the hell's going on?' It just evaporated. Without a word from anyone.”

It was December 1975 and Leonard had gone home to Montreal. It turned out that Bob Dylan was also in Montreal, on his Rolling Thunder tour—a traveling rock revue whose guests included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakley, Bobby Neuwirth, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg. Dylan was keen to add Leonard to the lineup. Ratso Sloman, who was traveling with the tour as a reporter,
*
remembers, “Bob was incredibly intent on getting Leonard to come. He was obviously a fan of Leonard's work, and vice versa. Dylan was proud of what he was doing on Rolling Thunder because those performances were intense and enthralling, and Montreal was Leonard's town, so it meant a lot to him for Leonard to be there. Bob was hounding me—‘Make sure he comes'—and he dispatched me to Leonard's house.”

When the car pulled up outside a “crazy little bungalow” off Saint Dominique Street, Sloman double-checked the address. It did not give the appearance of a celebrity's house. When Suzanne let him in, Sloman ducked instinctively, the beamed ceiling was so low. The floor sloped and the walls were crammed with shelves filled with books, framed pictures and dusty tchotchkes. It looked like a fairy-tale grandmother's gingerbread house. Leonard was inside with a bunch of his friends, who were all playing music, Mort Rosengarten playing spoons to Leonard's harmonica. Suzanne took Sloman upstairs to see the children. “They looked so sweet, these little angels in their cribs in this ramshackle little room, and Suzanne was so patient. It looked like a very tranquil domestic scene.”

It was hard work persuading Leonard to leave the house and come with him to the Forum. When he finally succeeded, Leonard insisted on taking his friends and his harmonica along with him. Everyone piled into the car and sang old French folk songs along the way. When they pulled up at the venue, Dylan came right out to greet Leonard. He told him that if he wanted to come up and play a couple of songs, it would be fine by him. Ronee Blakley, Bobby Neuwirth, and Ramblin' Jack came over too, as well as Dylan's wife Sara and Joni Mitchell. Leonard addressed Mitchell as “my little Joni,” and the two appeared very relaxed around each other. Joni joined Sara in asking Leonard to sing something in the revue, but Leonard declined. “It's too obvious,” he said. Leonard, Sloman surmised, was “a bit of a control freak, in the sense of controlling his own music, of presenting the songs and the context. He doesn't strike me as someone who jams with the band, unless it's his friends, at home.” Although Leonard did not participate, Dylan dedicated a song to him—“a song about marriage,” “Isis,” whose lyrics included the sentiment “What drives me to you is what drives me insane.” “This is for Leonard,” said Dylan, “if he is still here.”

Leonard was still trying to make his relationship with Suzanne work. He bought a small apartment building across the road from the Montreal cottages in order to have more space. A nanny had moved into his writing room in the cottage, and since it was too cold to use the shed, he worked in the kitchen. “I loved hearing him in the background playing the guitar, quietly singing or writing,” says Suzanne. “When he wanted to enjoy the children he did. I never put pressure on him or made it an obligation, there was no domestic tyranny, but he was a loving, solid, dutiful father. He sung them lullabies and the normal tender gestures.”

Come the spring, Leonard left once again on another European tour. This one was considerably longer, with more than fifty dates, starting in Berlin in April 1976 and ending in July in London. John Miller replaced Lissauer as musical director, the rest of the band consisting of Sid McGinnis, Fred Thaylor and Luther Rix. Leonard's new backing singers were Cheryl Barnes (who three years later would appear in the film of the musical
Hair
) and a nineteen-year-old Laura Branigan (who three years later would sign to Atlantic and become a successful solo pop artist). The set list this time included some new—or, technically, old—songs: “Store Room” was an outtake from Leonard's first album, “Everybody's Child” was an unreleased track from the second album, and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” a German folk song about freedom of thought, had been written in the nineteenth century. A live review in
Melody Maker
noted how cheerful Leonard appeared onstage. “Gone is the doom and gloom, [he's] at his funkiest and wittiest.”

After the final concert Leonard went to Hydra. Suzanne and the children were there and Irving and Aviva Layton were visiting. Leonard was eager to show Irving what he had been writing. “They always read to each other what they'd written,” says Aviva. Irving was as effusive as ever about his friend's work. “The only time I ever heard Irving even mildly criticize Leonard was when Leonard went through a very religious, sort of mystical, semi-Judaic, semi-Christian stage and that was very much not Irving's sensibility. But that was all; Leonard loved Irving's poetry and Irving loved his.”

When the Laytons left, Leonard spent hours with Anthony Kingsmill, the painter who lived on Hydra. Richard Vick remembers Kingsmill as “an incredibly witty and quite wise little man, as well as something of a drinker, [who] had quite a strong influence on Leonard. I remember an occasion at one of the places at the port where people would gather at dawn, after having gone around the bars during the night. Leonard was there, strumming a few chords, and Anthony, who was in his cups, got very frenetic and said, ‘And who do you think
you're
fooling, Leonard?' ” Leonard appeared to ponder the question deeply. He continued pondering after he left Hydra for the U.S.

Leonard rented a house in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, just off Sunset Boulevard. His reason for living in L.A. was that Roshi lived there, and Leonard was spending a great deal of time with Roshi, at the Zen Center in Los Angeles and on Mount Baldy, often acting as his chauffeur and driving him between the two. Roshi told Leonard that he should move to Mount Baldy with Suzanne and the children—there were family quarters at the monastery as well as individual monks' cabins—and stay there and study. It was tempting—at least it was to Leonard. Suzanne had accompanied him on one retreat but found that “sitting all through the night was an austerity [she] couldn't share.” Leonard was also spending a lot of time in L.A. with a record producer with whom he was cowriting songs—not John Lissauer but Phil Spector. These days Spector is an inmate of a California state prison, serving nineteen years to life for second-degree murder, but at that time Spector lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills.

“So,” says John Lissauer, “the famous missing album. I have the rough mixes but the master tapes just disappeared. Marty culled the two-inch tapes from both studios. He never returned my calls and Leonard didn't return my calls. Maybe he was embarrassed. I didn't find out what happened for twenty-five years. I heard this from a couple of different sources. Marty managed Phil Spector and Spector had not delivered on this big Warner Bros. deal; they got a huge advance, two million dollars, and Marty took his rather hefty percentage, but Phil didn't produce any albums. So Warner Bros. go to Marty, ‘He comes up with an album or we get our money back.' So Marty said, ‘I know what to do. Screw this Lissauer project, I'll put Phil and Leonard together.' ” Which is what he did.

Fifteen

I Love You, Leonard

P
hil Spector was thirty-six years old, five years younger than Leonard, a small, fastidious man with bright eyes and a receding hairline and chin. In matters of dress Spector favored bespoke suits and ruffled shirts, or sometimes a cape and wig. Between them they reflected his status as “the first Tycoon of Teen” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed him) and, for many years, the Emperor of Pop. Spector had been nineteen years old when he wrote and recorded his first No. 1 in 1958, a song called “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” its title taken from the words on his father's tombstone. In 1960 Spector became a record producer, then the head of his own record label. During the first half of the sixties he turned out more than two dozen hits.

There had been record producers before Phil Spector but there was nobody like him. Other producers worked behind the scenes; Spector was up front, flamboyant, eccentric and more famous than many of the acts whom he recorded. His records were “Phil Spector” records, the artists and musicians merely bricks in his celebrated “Wall of Sound”—the name that was given to Spector's epic production style. It required battalions of musicians all playing at the same time—horns bleeding into drums bleeding into strings bleeding into guitars—magnified through tape echo. With this technique Spector transformed pop ballads and R & B songs, like “Be My Baby,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Unchained Melody” into dense, clamorous, delirious minisymphonies that captured in two and a half exquisite minutes the joy and pain of teenage love.

Leonard was not a teenager. It is quite possible he never was a teenager. Leonard's songs, like his poetry, were a grown-up's songs. His lyrics were sophisticated and his melodies uncluttered, which gave his words room to breathe and resonate. His delivery was plain and his taste in production, as in most everything else, was subtle and understated. Other than finding themselves the last two left at a key party, it is hard to picture Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector ever ending up as musical bedfellows. But by the grace of Marty Machat they did. Machat's logic was simple. He had a client—Spector—who was one of the best-known names in American pop, but who had hit a rough patch and was about to lose them a lot of money if he didn't give Warner Bros. an album soon. And he had another client—Leonard—who was revered almost everywhere but America, who was cowriting songs with a producer far less celebrated than Spector—Lissauer—and whose last album with Leonard did nothing to get him onto the U.S. charts. Spector had seen Leonard play at the Troubadour and told Machat he had been “entranced.” Leonard had confessed to being a fan of Spector's early records, considering them “so expressive I wouldn't mind being his Bernie Taupin.”
1
So why not put them together and have Leonard do the lyrics and Spector the music? It would solve the Spector problem, and perhaps even Leonard's problem too.

As it turned out, Leonard and Spector had more in common than one might think, besides both being East Coast Jews who shared a manager. Spector and Leonard had both lost their fathers when they were nine years old—Spector's committed suicide—and had very close relationships with their mothers. Each deeply loved the sound of women's singing voices—Spector, who often wrote for women, had put together several sixties girl groups. Both were very serious about and protective of their work. They were also both subject to black moods and, in 1976, when they began working together, were in disintegrating relationships and drinking heavily. So began the extraordinary story of
Death of a Ladies' Man
.

Spector lived in a twenty-room mansion, a Spanish–Beverly Hills movie star hacienda built in the early twenties. There was a fountain in the front, a swimming pool in the back and, all around, lush gardens. The property was ringed with a barbed fence hung with “Keep Out” signs. Should someone choose to ignore the warning, there were armed guards. When Leonard first walked up its front steps, Suzanne beside him, the maid who answered the door led them past an antique suit of armor and walls hung with old oil paintings and framed photographs—Lenny Bruce, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Spector's heroes and friends—to the living room. Like the rest of the house, it was cold and dimly lit; there was more light coming from the aquarium and the jukebox than from the grand chandelier overhead.

Spector had invited the couple to dinner. It was a small gathering and Spector turned out to be a charming host—smart, funny and convivial. But as the night wore into morning and the empty bottles piled up, Spector became increasingly animated. One by one the guests took their leave; only Leonard and Suzanne remained. When they finally got up to go, Spector shouted to his staff to lock the doors. “He wouldn't let us out of his house,” Suzanne says. Leonard suggested that if they were going to stay all night, they might find something more interesting to do than shout at the servants. By the next day, when the door was unlocked and Leonard and Suzanne were allowed to go home, Leonard and Spector had worked up a new arrangement of country singer Patti Page's “I Went to Your Wedding” and had made the first forays into cowriting songs.

Over the coming weeks, Leonard was a regular visitor to the mansion. Spector was a night owl, so it would be afternoon before Leonard would drive the short distance from his rented house in Brentwood. Leonard was dressed for work, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He looked, Dan Kessel recalls, “like a suave, continental Dustin Hoffman.” The maid would take Leonard to the living room, where the thick velvet curtains were firmly drawn against the bright California sun and an air conditioner blasted icy air, and leave him there alone, giving his eyes time to adjust to the round-the-clock twilight. A few minutes later Spector would make his entrance, flanked by Dan and David Kessel. The Kessel brothers had known Spector since childhood; their father, the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, was a close friend of Spector who had played on a number of his hit records. His sons, who were also guitar players, had in turn appeared on several Spector records, including John Lennon's
Rock 'n' Roll
album, which Spector produced.

An antique silver cart was rolled in, laden with drinks and food. While the Kessel brothers retired to the adjoining room, Spector's office, Leonard and Phil hung out for a while and chatted before getting to work. Sometimes they would pick a song to listen to from Spector's jukebox, which was stacked with obscure R & B and rock 'n' roll as well as old hit singles: Elvis, Dion, Dylan, Sun-era Johnny Cash, Frankie Laine. Then they would start work on the songwriting, sitting together at the piano on the long mahogany bench. The Kessel brothers would listen in on the studio monitors in the office, giving an opinion when Spector asked for it and, when their services were required, coming in and playing guitar. The rest of the time they shot pool.

“All day and into the night, every day, they would work for a while, break for a while, work for a while, break for a while,” says David Kessel. “Suggestions went back and forth between them. Leonard had notes with him and Phil would say, ‘Well okay, that story line goes on this kind of a music track,' or Phil would have the music track and Leonard would go, ‘Hey, man, that kind of brings to mind this for me.' Many times during breaks I sat outside with Leonard by the fountain and he would go, ‘Wow, this is different.' ‘This is interesting.' ‘This should be quite something.' ‘I've never done this like this.' He would use us as sounding boards: could we give him any insights as to where this was headed or what he could expect? All Phil said about it was, ‘This is cool, it's going to be interesting; I want to see how it comes out and hopefully it'll come out pretty good.' ” Dan Kessel remembers, “Leonard was notoriously slow and deliberate; Phil got straight on it and got it done. Even so, or maybe because of that, they complemented each other as songwriters. There was plenty of laughter.” When Doc Pomus, the blues singer-songwriter, Spector's friend, came by the house one day to visit Spector, they were “like two drunks,” he said, “staggering around.”
2

Among the papers Leonard carried in his briefcase were lyrics of some of the songs he had worked on with John Lissauer for
Songs for Rebecca
—“Guerrero” and “Beauty Salon,” given different melodies and arrangements, would become “Iodine” and “Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On.” Leonard also brought along an unfinished song called “Paper-Thin Hotel,” which he had begun writing on the
New Skin
tour. The song “Memories,” though, was written at the piano in Spector's mansion. Introducing it at a concert in Tel Aviv in 1980, Leonard called it a “vulgar ditty that I wrote some time ago with another Jew in Hollywood, in which I have placed my most irrelevant and banal adolescent recollections.”
3
Leonard's lyrics recalled, in an almost Spectorian fashion, his high school days and the near-terminal case of sexual longing with which he was plagued. At times it also evokes his failed seduction of Nico:

    
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel

    
I walked up to the tallest

    
and the blondest girl

    
I said . . . Won't you let me see

    
Your naked body

In less than a month, they had around a dozen songs ready to go. In January and February 1977—plus one last session in June—they recorded nine of them: the eight songs that made it onto the final album plus one that didn't, another of the
Songs for Rebecca
songs, “I Guess It's Time.” Recording began in Gold Star, a small, dark studio in the shabby heart of Hollywood. Spector's favorite place to record, its old tube equipment gave the studio its rich, expansive sound, as well as a distinctive smell of burning dust when the tubes in the mixing board started heating up. “It also had a famous echo chamber,” says Hal Blaine, “like a cement casket running the length of the studio; an amazing sound. We did so many hits with Phil at Gold Star.” Blaine, a drummer, was a linchpin of the loose group of top-notch, versatile L.A. studio musicians nicknamed the Wrecking Crew. Spector would always hire them when he needed a band;
Death of a Ladies' Man,
says Blaine, “was just another job. We never knew what we were going to do until we got there and did it.”

On January 24, 1977, Leonard arrived at Gold Star for the first session dressed in pale slacks and a dark blue blazer, “looking,” as David Kessel recalls, “like he was entertaining a date on the Riviera.” Walking into the studio, Leonard was taken aback. The room was crammed with people, instruments and microphone stands. There was barely space to move. He counted forty musicians, including two drummers, assorted percussionists, half a dozen guitarists, a horn section, a handful of female backing singers and a flock of keyboard players. “It blew his mind,” says David Kessel. “He was kind of disoriented, like, ‘Whoa. Okay. Is this how he normally does it? What are we doing here? Can you help me figure it out?' This was a different thing for him.” Spector, who was up in the control room and even more sharply dressed than Leonard, in an expensive black suit, green shirt and Cuban-heeled boots, called over the studio monitor, “Anybody laid-back in this room, get the fuck out of here.”
4
On the console was a bottle of Manischewitz Concord grape wine. Spector picked it up, poured it into a Tweetie Pie glass and sucked it through a plastic straw.

There was another face in the room Leonard recognized: Ronee Blakley, the vivacious folksinger he had met in Montreal on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. Blakley, who had recently become famous for her portrayal of a fragile country star in Robert Altman's 1975 film
Nashville,
was a friend of Spector. “I wasn't his girlfriend,” says Blakley, “but I went around with him a little bit. Phil has a very, very dear, sweet side to him.” Spector had asked her to come and sing duets with Leonard on “Iodine”—the first track they recorded—a song about failure, loss and the wounds of love, which had been given a beguiling Nino Tempo arrangement. She also sang with him on the album's bittersweet opening track, “True Love Leaves No Traces,” which was based on the poem “As the Mist Leaves No Scar” from Leonard's 1961 book
The Spice-Box of Earth,
and “Memories,” a rambunctious burlesque number whose lyrics make wry reference to the kind of teen-angst pop in which Spector specialized and whose chorus was made for drunks in midnight choirs to sing along with.

It seemed to be the first time Leonard had heard anything about duets, but he raised no objection. “He was an elegant man, soft-spoken and thoughtful and kind,” Blakley says. “He was not mean, not sharp, never ‘I'm intelligent and I have a way with language and I know how to make a remark that may sound fine but has a cruel edge to it.' ” There were no rehearsals or charts; they simply sang the song through together once or twice and Blakley made up her part. She remembers that “it wasn't that easy.” As Hal Blaine points out, Leonard's “weren't regular rock 'n' roll songs. These were songs written by a poet for a rock 'n' roll record and kind of off the wall. Leonard was in a whole other world.” The other problem was that Leonard seemed insecure about his singing. Says Blakley, “He really believed that he doesn't have a great voice, although it's amazing—so sensitive and vulnerable. It trembles at times, but at the same time it almost rumbles, it has that biblical quality. I think it's a voice that female voices work with especially well.”

The sun was starting to come up by the time the first recording session ended. The Kessels checked that the tapes had been correctly cataloged and oversaw the loading of them onto a dolly, which was wheeled out to Spector's car after every session under armed guard—Spector's bodyguard George. “Phil always took his tapes home,” says Dan Kessel. “He didn't single Leonard out, that's just the way Phil conducted his business. Studios don't protect your tapes with the same stringency you do.” George was a retired U.S. federal marshal. Like Spector, he wore a gun in his shoulder holster. The difference, says Dan Kessel, was that “the bodyguard's gun was always loaded. Phil's never was.” Leonard joked about getting his own armed bodyguard and having a shoot-out on Sunset Boulevard. He asked Malka Marom, who was visiting him in L.A., to come to the studio with him. He told her that Spector was afraid of her because he thought she was an Israeli soldier. Marom agreed to go to the studio. She found the atmosphere “very scary—because Phil Spector was sitting there with bottles of Manischewitz wine and a gun on the table. I said to Leonard, ‘Why are you recording with this madman?' He said, ‘Because he's really very good at what he does.' ”