I'm Your Man (42 page)

Burke's version topped the UK singles chart over the Christmas of 2008, prompting protest action from outraged Jeff Buckley fans that resulted in the late singer's “Hallelujah” taking over the No. 1 position and pushing Burke down to No. 2. In the aftershock, Leonard's original version rose to No. 36—a trinity of “Hallelujahs” in one chart at the same time. Leonard's version also resurfaced the following year in the movie
The Watchmen,
providing the background music to a sex scene between two superheroes. For most who knew the song, it brought a wry smile to the face. But one exasperated journalist called for a moratorium on the use of “Hallelujah” on film and TV soundtracks. “I kind of feel the same way,” said Leonard in a CBC TV interview. “I think it's a good song, but too many people sing it.” He couldn't help mentioning that there was also “a mild sense of revenge that arose in [his] heart” when he recalled that his American record label had refused to release it. “They didn't think it was good enough.”
14

J
ennifer Warnes, who had signed to Arista as a solo artist, had been talking to Clive Davis, the head of the record label, about the new album she wanted to make. On Leonard's 1979 tour, on which Warnes and Roscoe Beck became a couple, they had the idea of making an album of her singing only Leonard Cohen songs, which Beck would produce. “I could hear it before it became a reality,” remembers Beck. “I specifically recall watching Leonard and Jennifer doing their duet on ‘Joan of Arc' every night, and visualizing it with Jennifer singing the lead.” Davis, who had been the head of Columbia Records when Leonard was signed by John Hammond, seemed to hold much the same view of the marketability of Leonard's songs in America as had Walter Yetnikoff, the man who succeeded him in the job. Davis turned her down. But Warnes saw it as “a record that had to be made”—not just for herself, but for Leonard. “Leonard had years of mixed reviews and I think he had lost faith.”
15
Warnes, on the other hand, had enjoyed considerable commercial success with her duets with Joe Cocker (“Up Where We Belong”) and Bill Medley (“[I've Had] The Time of My Life”). Says Beck, “We would have given our dying breath to finish that record.” Finally, they found a small independent label that was willing to release it and started work.

Around forty musicians appeared on Warnes's
Famous Blue Raincoat.
They included David Lindley, who had played on Leonard's first album; Sharon Robinson, who sang with Warnes on the 1979 tour; guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan; R & B singer Bobby King; and composer, arranger and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks. As the recording progressed, Beck would call Leonard and update him on how it was going. He told Leonard they had recorded the Cohen-Warnes cowritten “Song of Bernadette” and asked if he might have any more new songs they could hear. “He played me his working copy of ‘First We Take Manhattan' over the phone. I taped it and we came up with our own arrangement, a bluesier version. As soon as I heard it I knew I wanted Stevie Ray Vaughan to play on it.” Beck knew the celebrated young blues rock guitarist from Austin, where Passenger was based: “Stevie and I were friends from the age of twenty; he used to sit in with Passenger quite often and I used to sit in with his band. He was in L.A. for the Grammy Awards, so I tracked him down to play on the song.” Vaughan was performing at the Greek Theatre; Beck invited Leonard and Jennifer to go with him. “They had never seen him live. Jennifer was amazed, as was Leonard. I remember him commenting, ‘Now that's what I've been trying to get my guitar players to do for years: make the guitar talk.' ”

Beck played Jennifer Warnes's record for Leonard, and Leonard listened in silence. Impressed, Leonard began to take a much closer interest in the album. He sang a duet with Warnes on “Joan of Arc.” He also gave her another of his new, unreleased songs, “Ain't No Cure for Love,” whose title he had come up with after reading about L.A.'s AIDS crisis.

Famous Blue Raincoat
was released in 1987. It featured nine songs,
*
including a few that Judy Collins had previously covered (“Bird on the Wire,” “Joan of Arc,” “Famous Blue Raincoat”) and a few that Warnes—like Collins in the past—would release before Leonard had recorded his own versions. It was to some degree a tribute album, but really it was a Jennifer Warnes album whose songs all happened to have the same writer. Her impeccable vocal brought out the lyricism of Leonard's songs. By removing the factor that some people seemed to have problems with—Leonard's voice—they sounded smoother, more melodious, and with Beck's polished production, more contemporary. “She transformed grappa into Chardonnay,” said the review in
Saturday Night
. “A perfect elixir for mid-Eighties audiences.”
16

Warnes's album sold three quarters of a million copies in the U.S. It went gold in Canada and spawned a single, “Ain't No Cure for Love,” that was a hit in both the adult-contemporary and the country music charts. The artwork on the inner sleeve was a drawing that Leonard had made: a hand—Leonard's—holding out a torch to Warnes, with the caption “Jenny sings Lenny.” He was happy and grateful to pass the torch on to her. With
Famous Blue Raincoat,
he had finally succeeded in hiding his own voice and giving his songs entirely over to the female voice.

Leonard was writing songs for his own new album. Once again it was a slow and painful process. Over a glass of brandy, he complained to Roshi how difficult it was and asked him what he ought to do. Roshi answered, “You look up at the moon, you open your mouth and you sing.” So Leonard sang, recording as he went along over a span of a year and a half, running up studio bills in three different countries as he bounced back and forth between his lives in Paris, Montreal and L.A., leaving a paper trail of abandoned words as he went. He was happy to hear, as he had been before, that the songs he had managed to write in the past were getting on without him. Aside from Jennifer Warnes, Nick Cave had covered “Avalanche” on his first album with the Bad Seeds. Leonard's children were telling him that he had become something of a cult figure among younger musicians: Ian McCulloch and Suzanne Vega were singing his praises in interviews, and the British band Sisters of Mercy, having taken their name from one of his songs, had nicknamed their drum machine Doktor Avalanche. Leonard also learned that there was another musical based on his work being made in New York, called
Sincerely, L. Cohen
, its title taken from the closing words of “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

It was intriguing, this resurgence of a song that Leonard had always had problems with—that he had “never been satisfied with, never really nailed the lyric, always felt there was something about the song that was unclear.”
17
His mother had liked the melody though. “I remember playing the tune for her, in her kitchen, and her perking up her ears while she was doing something else and saying, ‘That's a nice tune.' ”
18
And the song had held up and served him well, just like the old Burberry raincoat that inspired it. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had bought the coat in London, when he was a twenty-five-year-old writing his first novel and sleeping on a cot in a cold Hampstead boardinghouse. A girl Leonard had pursued during his first London winter had told him that it made him look like a spider—which might, he thought, be why she refused to go to Greece with him. “It hung more heroically when I took out the lining,” he wrote in his liner notes to
Greatest Hits
(1975), “and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days.” The coat was stolen from the loft where Marianne had lived when she visited New York, while he was recording his first album. Leonard said, “I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.”

In September 1986, while in Paris visiting Dominique Issermann, Leonard recorded a new song called “Take This Waltz.” The lyrics were Leonard's English adaptation (assisted by a Spanish-speaking Costa Rican girlfriend) of a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca. It was for a compilation album,
Poetas en Nueva York,
that would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Lorca's death. It had been hard work—it took a hundred and fifty hours, Leonard said—but it was more than a translation, it was a poem in itself, and one that seemed to reflect Leonard as much as Lorca. For example, Leonard rendered Lorca's macabre image of a forest of dried pigeons as “a tree where doves go to die.” After recording the song, Leonard flew to Granada to attend a gala in Lorca's honor. Then he flew back to the U.S. to take a role in the TV detective series
Miami Vice
. Over the years the program had invited an eclectic list of guest stars, such as Frank Zappa and James Brown, to make cameo appearances. Leonard's character, the French head of Interpol, was on screen for barely a minute, murmuring in a dark, French manner into a telephone, but it had the effect that Leonard desired when he took it on: it impressed his now-teenage offspring.

Leonard's relationship with Dominique, though, was going the way of all flesh. In 1987, back in Paris again, he wrote in a poem, titled “My Honor”:
*

    
My honor is in bad shape

    
I'm crawling at a woman's feet

    
She doesn't give an inch.

    
I look good for fifty-two

    
but fifty-two is fifty-two

    
I'm not even a Zen master. . . .

He was nothing more than

    
that asshole in a blue summer suit

    
who couldn't take it any longer

"Then I broke down,” said Leonard, “and went to a monastery. . . . I thought, I don't have to do a record any more, I'll be a monk.”
19

Leonard had gone to the monastery to be nowhere and to be no one. He had gone to sit in this austere place for hour upon hour with no goal. It said in the literature that if he were able to sit goal-less for long enough, all the versions of himself would arise and, having arisen, decide there was nothing to stick around for and take off, leaving only perfect peace. He had gone to be with Roshi, whom he loved, and who both cared deeply and deeply didn't care who Leonard was. Leonard had gone to work hard, to bang nails, to fix and mend things, at least physically. Roshi knew how much Leonard liked austerity, solitariness and work. He instructed him to go and find a tennis court, and play.

Eighteen

The Places Where I Used to Play

I
ggy Pop has a story about Leonard Cohen. Iggy was in Los Angeles, recording an album, when one night Leonard phoned. “Leonard said, ‘Come over, I've got a personal ad from a girl who says she wants a lover who will combine the raw energy of Iggy Pop with the elegant wit of Leonard Cohen. I think we should reply to her as a team.' ” Iggy said, “ ‘Leonard, I can't, I'm married, you're going to have to do this yourself.' I guess he did,” says Iggy. “I don't know if he got laid.”

Iggy Pop was curious as to the outcome of a reply you sent a woman seeking love through a personal ad.

“[Smiles] As I remember it, I bumped into Iggy at a session being produced by Don Was, a friend of mine, and I showed him the clipping that someone had sent me from a San Francisco newspaper. We decided to reply, and to certify its authenticity, Don took a Polaroid of Iggy and myself sitting together in my kitchen. We spoke to the young woman—at least I spoke to her—on the telephone. But there was no personal involvement.”

Leonard surely felt an empathy with this woman who named herself “Fearless” and whose ideals, when it came to romantic partners, seemed almost as formidable as his own. If nothing else, answering the ad with Iggy was an exercise in making the impossible possible—if only for a moment, and for someone other than himself. Leonard had been living with impossibilities for some time, one of them being the idea that he might ever finish another album. For more than three years he had been writing, unwriting and rewriting songs, then, having finally deemed something ready to record, after listening to himself singing it, he would decide that it did not sound honest and needed to be rewritten yet again. Leonard had been serious when he spoke about never wanting to make another album, and the thought of giving it up and going to a monastery was certainly a possibility. However arduous that existence might be, it had nothing on the hard labor that songwriting had become.

Various Positions,
the album he had hoped would resurrect his career and his confidence as a songwriter and help take care of his financial responsibilities, had done none of these things. It took “a great deal of will to keep your work straight,” he told Mat Snow in the
Guardian,
but “with all the will in the world you can't keep your life straight. Because you're too much of an asshole. . . . As you get older, you get very interested in your work, because that's where you can refine your character, that's where you can order your world. You're stuck with the consequences of your actions, but in your work you can go back.”
1
He had left behind him, he said, a “shipwreck of ten or fifteen years of broken families and hotel rooms for some kind of shining idea that my voice was important, that I had a meaning in the cosmos. . . . Well, after enough lonely nights you don't care whether you have a meaning in the cosmos or not.”
2

But still he worked. He lived alone and he recorded alone—no musicians, no producer, just an engineer—slowly and painstakingly, at a glacial pace. Leonard was spending long periods in Montreal, so several of his new songs were recorded there, in Studio Tempo. Anjani Thomas—who by coincidence was also living in Montreal at that time; her boyfriend, Ian Terry, was the studio's head engineer—added backing vocals to some of them. “It really was a solo affair,” said Leonard, “because I had the conception very clearly in mind, I knew exactly the way I wanted it to sound, and I was using a lot of synthesised instruments.”
3
But by 1987, Leonard had reached a point where he could use an outside pair of ears. Having been impressed by his work on
Famous Blue Raincoat,
he called Roscoe Beck and asked him to book a studio in L.A.

Beck remembers the first time he heard the song “First We Take Manhattan,” which Leonard had given Jennifer Warnes for her album. What stood out was its “harmonic sophistication. It was no longer just folk songs on guitar. Now that Leonard was writing on keyboards, he was writing from a different perspective.” Leonard had become used to playing his new songs alone and was keen to retain as much of that spare, unembellished feel as possible on the album. “He wasn't sure at first whether we were going to hire a band,” Beck says. “I think it was a mutual decision not to and to record them as they were, just as he was playing them on his keyboard.” Leonard had upgraded from his ninety-nine-dollar Casio to a Technics keyboard, but it was still a primitive synthesizer with no individual outputs, making it a challenge to record. The engineers, technicians, keyboard players and track performers listed in the credits far outnumber the conventional musicians. There were drum machines, synthesized strings and push-button cha-cha rhythms, as well as some of the most singular keyboard playing to have ever made it onto a major-label album, such as the proudly plinked one-finger solo on “Tower of Song.” Toward the end they brought in “a few last people to sweeten it,” says Beck, including Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel on “I Can't Forget,” John Bilezikjian on oud on “Everybody Knows,” and Raffi Hakopian on violin on “Take This Waltz,” the song Leonard had recorded in Paris for Lorca's fiftieth-anniversary album. Jennifer Warnes came in to sing on several tracks, including the catchy, retro-pop “
dee-do dum-dum
”s in “Tower of Song.”

Eight songs had been completed, but an album that was eight songs and forty minutes long looked a good deal more undersized on compact disc than it would have done on a vinyl LP. So Leonard tried for a ninth. He recorded a new version of “Anthem” with Beck, and strings and overdubs were added before Leonard once again pulled the song. They also recorded an early, very different version of “Waiting for the Miracle.” This Leonard liked. He called Beck to say how happy he was with it. Three weeks later, he called again to say that he had rewritten the lyrics and wanted to redo the vocal. In the studio, Beck discovered he had also rewritten the melody, “and it didn't match up with the track [they'd] cut.” They kept working at the song, long into the night. “We cut several vocals until he got very tired. Finally he said, ‘I'm done, comp it' ” (meaning, make a master vocal out of the best bits of his various vocal takes). Leonard found a place to lie down and sleep while Beck worked. “Just as I had it together, Leonard woke up, walked into the control room and said, ‘Well, let's hear it.' I played it for him and he said, ‘I hate it.' He left and that was that.”

The song went through several more changes before it was finished. At one point Leonard gave it to Sharon Robinson—although they had not worked together since the 1980 tour, they had remained close friends—who came back with “a completely different version,” says Beck, “that I played guitar on. I really liked Sharon's version, but that didn't end up being the final version either” (which was the one that would appear on his 1992 album
The Future
). Another Cohen-Robinson cowrite made it onto this album. On a visit to her house, he had handed her a sheet of verses—a litany of world-weary wisdom and cynicism—and asked her if she could write a melody. She did, and it became the song “Everybody Knows.”

What struck Beck most strongly when working with Leonard on the album was the change in his voice. “I thought, ‘Wow, Leonard has found a whole new place to sing from.' The baritone element in his voice was always there—on the song ‘Avalanche,' for instance, he's singing deep in his chest—but here he was really making use of it and his singing voice was becoming more narrative.” His delivery was laconic, almost recitative, like an old French
chansonnier
who had mistakenly stumbled into a disco. It was urbane and unhurried; as one UK critic would put it, Leonard lingered on every word “like a kerb crawler.”
4
His voice was as deep and dry, sly and beguiling, as his songs. His new album had everything. It was polished and mannered but very human, it was brutally honest but very accessible and its songs covered all the angles: sex, sophistication, love, longing and humor—particularly humor.

    
I was born like this

    
I had no choice

    
I was born with the gift

    
of a golden voice

“Tower of Song,”
I'M YOUR MAN

The humor had always been there, but many had failed to see it—it was dark and ironic and generally aimed at himself. But the gags were never as overt as on this album.

I'm Your Man
was released in February 1988 in the UK and Europe and two months later in the U.S. and Canada. The title track presents the prophet as lounge lizard, falling to his knees, howling at the sky, trying to figure out what it is that women want and ready to give it to them in whatever form they might require. While “Ain't No Cure for Love,” a sing-along about love, sex and God, was inspired by reports of the AIDS crisis, it was imbued with Leonard's own take on love: that it is a lethal wound that a man can no more avoid than Jesus could the Cross. “I Can't Forget,” which started life as a song about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, has Leonard moving on once again but unable now to remember his motive, having spent so long living in the myth of himself. “Everybody Knows” is an infectious paean to pessimism. “First We Take Manhattan” is very likely the only Eurodisco song to reference the war between the sexes and the Holocaust. “Tower of Song” is about the hard, solitary, captive life of a writer (going so far as to evoke a concentration camp in the line “They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track”) but substitutes self-mockery for the usual self-indulgence of this type of song: he was still “crazy for love” but now he ached “in the places where [he] used to play” and in spite of all his hard work, none of it was of any significance to women, to God or even to pop-music posterity; his writing room was still a hundred floors below Hank Williams.”

The photo on the front sleeve shows Leonard dressed in a smart pin-striped suit, wearing big French-film-star sunglasses, his hair slicked back, his face as unsmiling and impenetrable as that of a Mafia don. In his hand, where a gun might be, or a microphone, is a half-eaten banana. It was shot at the former Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Wilmington, California, a gigantic windowed room with a vast steel-girdered indoor parking lot that is often used as a movie location. Jennifer Warnes was there shooting the video for her version of “First We Take Manhattan,” in which Leonard had agreed to appear. Sharon Weisz, the publicist for Warnes's record label, was on the set, shooting stills, when the steel doors of the truck-sized elevator opened and Leonard stepped out with the banana. “I pivoted and took one picture of him,” says Weisz, “and forgot about it. When I got back the proof sheet and saw it, I thought it was really funny and had a print made and sent it to him. A few weeks later he called and said, ‘What would you think if I put it on the cover of my album?' I didn't even know he was making an album. I asked him what he was calling it, and he said
I'm Your Man,
and I started laughing uncontrollably.” Although the pose was a lucky accident, Leonard could not fail to recognize how perfectly it summed up the heroics and absurdity that went into the album's creation.

I'm Your Man
rebranded Leonard, not least among younger fans, from dark, tortured poet to officially cool. Although it sounded different from Leonard's early albums, it had that feeling of instant familiarity, rightness and durability that makes for a classic. It was preceded in January 1988 by a single, “First We Take Manhattan”—one of the two songs on the album already familiar to many listeners thanks to the success of Jennifer Warnes's album.
Famous Blue Raincoat
had definitely helped pave the way for Leonard's eighth album (in America in particular) and
I'm Your Man
sped along it, propelled by its more upbeat songs and contemporary sound. The album was a success—Leonard's biggest since the early seventies and biggest in America since his debut. It made No. 1 in several European countries, went platinum in Norway, gold in Canada and silver in the UK, where it sold three hundred thousand copies before it was released in the U.S. It even sold well in America. Leonard waggishly attributed this to the payola he sent the marketing department of Columbia in New York.

It was a scheme he hatched up with Sharon Weisz, whom he had asked to do publicity for the album. “He had kind of an odd relationship with the record label, since they had refused to put out his previous record,
Various Positions,
and he was very cynical about it,” says Weisz. “So I was trying to figure out how he was going to work with these people and how receptive they were going to be to a new record by him.” They did not appear overenthused, judging by the poor turnout of people from Columbia Records at a party in his honor in New York, where the international division presented him with a Crystal Globe award for sales of more than five million albums outside the U.S. “From that point on, it sort of became the two of us against the world,” says Weisz. She came up with a list of names of the various Columbia promotion reps across the U.S., and Leonard sent each of them a hand-signed letter.

“Good morning,” Leonard typed on a plain, gray sheet of paper, dated April 1, 1988. “I don't quite know how this is done so please bear with me. I have a new record, I'M YOUR MAN, coming out next week. It is already a hit in Europe and I'm on my way there now for a major concert tour. I know I can count on your support for this new record in the U.S., and if you can make a couple of phone calls on my behalf, I would really appreciate it. I've enclosed a couple of bucks to cover the calls. Thank you in advance for your help,” the letter concluded. “Regards, Leonard Cohen. PS. There's more where this came from.” (“We went back and forth on whether the dollar bills should be brand-new or really old,” Weisz remembers, “and we settled for the kind that looked really mangy.”)