I'm Your Man (45 page)

I'm Your Fan
was released in November 1991, with eighteen Leonard Cohen songs covered by, among others, the Pixies (“I Can't Forget”), R.E.M. (“First We Take Manhattan”), James (“So Long, Marianne”), Lloyd Cole (“Chelsea Hotel”) and Ian McCulloch (“Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye”). John Cale, the oldest of the contributors, gave “Hallelujah” its first cover by any artist of substance—
NME
described his version as “a thing of wondrous, savage beauty.” Leonard was “tickled pink” by the whole album. It did not bother him so much, he said, if his books were left to gather dust on shelves, “but the song really has an urgency, and if it isn't sung, it's nowhere.”
10
Everybody, he said, could use some encouragement, and if you hung around long enough it was bound to happen, and Leonard's time had come. The same year, Leonard was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame in Canada. In his acceptance speech he quipped, “If I had been given this attention when I was twenty-six it would have turned my head. At thirty-six it might have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At forty-six it would have rubbed my nose in my failing powers and have prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at fifty-six, hell, I'm just hitting my stride and it doesn't hurt at all.”
11
Which was fortunate, since his countrymen gave him an even higher honor in October, making Leonard an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Perhaps to help balance the scales, Leonard agreed to Hal Willner's request to appear on a tribute album to Charles Mingus,
Weird Nightmare
. “I went over to his house in L.A. one night with a bunch of Mingus's poetry,” Willner says, “and he picked out one stanza that he loved in a poem called ‘The Chill of Death.' I had a little DAT recorder and he sat at his desk and repeated the poem over and over again into the microphone for half an hour. While he was doing so, someone made a phone call, and he picked up the phone, still reading the poem. They said, ‘Leonard, what are you doing?' ‘I am a man reading “The Chill of Death.” ' That's on the record too.”

I
n March 1992, Rebecca attended the Oscars ceremony. Her escort, the immaculately dressed man who walked down the red carpet beside her, was Leonard. Cameras buzzed like mosquitoes, and photos of Rebecca and Leonard made it into a number of tabloids. “There was an English magazine that printed pictures of us and said ‘Beauty and the Beast,' ” says Rebecca. How mean of them to call her a beast. It brought to mind the headlines that greeted Serge Gainsbourg when he was photographed with his famous lovers Bardot, Gréco and Birkin. The difference was that Leonard, unlike Gainsbourg, had always gone out of his way in the past to avoid such attention. “The Academy Awards
was
probably the least likely place to sight Leonard Cohen,” Rebecca says. “I asked him to go with me, because they asked me, and I was with him at the time, and he just went, ‘Okay.' He didn't do the regular guy thing of having some reaction or antireaction to it, he just accepted it. It wasn't something he was looking forward to, but it wasn't something that he was going to say no to and leave me standing there without him. I think Leonard, like I am, is really in the moment with the individual he's with, as opposed to the image of what the person is supposed to be. There was just the reality of us as two people, irrespective of me being an actress, Leonard being a famous songwriter.”

Leonard, as well as working at home, was writing songs at Rebecca's house on her synthesizer. Two of those songs in particular stuck in her mind. One was “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” which Leonard kept writing over and over, “like a painter who paints over his original painting that you loved, and paints a whole new painting on top of it, and then he paints a whole new one on top of that, and ten years later it exists on a record
*
and doesn't have a single note or word that's the same as anything I heard when he first played that song.” The other was “Anthem.” “He got stuck on this one song. He was at my synthesizer and played it again—I'd heard it for years by now—and I suddenly said, ‘Just like that,
those
words,
that's
the song.' Again he looked at me kind of skeptical; I guess I just must provoke that response in him. He said, ‘You know what? You produce this song. I think you really know what this song has to be, I think you ought to produce it with me.' So he sort of launched me into this position, which I was extremely flattered by, and surprised. But I really did feel that I knew the song—in fact I just played it before I spoke to you for this interview and it still makes me cry. It has the impact of ‘Auld Lang Syne,' it's just immortal, it's the final statement on the subject, it's the searing authenticity that he has in his voice when you talk to him, the presence that he is in person. He is so fully present, with compassion for the underdog, as well as genuine compassion and understanding for the enemy—which is very hard to do and hard-won.

“However,” Rebecca says, “within this stance it's extremely hard to be Leonard Cohen. He's on his own solo voyage, and he's lying on a bed of cactus perpetually, but somehow finding windows into infinity everywhere: ‘
Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee. . .
;
Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.
' It's definitive. Such a unique way to describe the wisdom of compassion. I heard from a friend of mine who was in one of the established rehab places that they quoted this line in their pamphlets on recovery. He has taught me so much; he's humble but also fierce. He has this subtext of ‘Let's get down to the truth here. Let's not kid ourselves.' ” Early on in their relationship, Rebecca was “whining about the various pain I had, my childhood, and this and that. And Leonard is the best listener, but at a certain point he said, ‘I understand, it must have been really terrible for you, Rebecca, having had to grow up poor and black.' ” Rebecca laughed. “It wasn't in any way mean-spirited, there was no judgment from him; there never is. Leonard developed the tenacity and character to sit still within suffering—even though in earlier years, like many people, he tried every form of escape, be it drugs, sex, music, fame, money, all the usual things—but, early in his life compared to most people, he was brave enough to sit in the suffering, and write out of it, and live out of it, and not try to escape from it.”

April 1, 1992, was Roshi's eighty-fifth birthday. Shortly after the Academy Awards, Leonard threw a grand party of his own. A hundred people gathered in one of the big hotels on Sunset Boulevard. There was a band, fronted by Perla Batalla, and Leonard asked them to end the evening by singing “Auld Lang Syne,” Roshi's favorite song. By the time they got to it, the old man had nodded off in his chair. Leonard smiled. “It was a great sign if he's asleep,” he said. Guests left with a book that Leonard had organized and published, with help from Kelley Lynch, celebrating the old man's life. Leonard had it bound in gold, like an Oscar.

L
eonard was in the studio, working on his new album
The Future,
when the L.A. riots broke out on April 29, 1992. Four white police officers had been acquitted of the beating of a black motorist—an incident that had been caught on video by an onlooker and was frequently aired on television—and South Central L.A., a predominantly African-American neighborhood, erupted. Cars and buildings were set on fire and stores attacked and looted. A white man was dragged from his truck by a mob and severely beaten. As the violence spread, the dinner-party conversation in affluent white neighborhoods turned to buying guns. By the fourth day, the government sent in the marines. There had been fifty-three deaths, hundreds of buildings destroyed and around four thousand fires. Leonard could see them burning from his window. There was a layer of soot on his front lawn. His home was not far from South Central. The Zen Center was closer still. He had become used to hearing gunshots on his way to the
zendo
in the early hours of morning and to stepping over syringes to get through the gate. Now from his car he could see boarded-up stores and the charred remains of a gas station. It was “truly an apocalyptic landscape and a very appropriate landscape for my work.”
12
He had started writing the song “The Future”—then titled “If You Could See What's Coming Next”—in 1989, when the Berlin Wall toppled, and just as he had predicted, it was all coming down.

“I said to him, ‘Why do you even want to live in Los Angeles?' ” says Rebecca De Mornay. “ ‘You have a place in beautiful Montreal, and Hydra, and you've lived in New York and Paris. Why here?' Leonard said something like, ‘This is the place. It's like a metaphor of the decline. The whole system is coming apart, I can feel it. The future is grim, and Los Angeles is at the center of it. It has the decay, and some sort of wild hope too, like weeds growing through the asphalt. I want to write from this place, from what's really going on.' So I was like, ‘Wow, okay, we're living in the decay, you at the bottom and me at the top of this one street. Great.' And from within that he wrote ‘The Future'—and it was very different Leonard Cohen writing from what I'd ever seen him do.” Leonard renamed his new album—which he had had previously titled
Be for Real,
then
Busted
—after this apocalyptic song.

The Future
was recorded with a large revolving cast of musicians and engineers whose numbers rivaled Phil Spector's on
Death of a Ladies' Man.
The credits list almost thirty female singers, including Jennifer Warnes, Anjani Thomas, Julie Christensen, Perla Batalla, Peggy Blue, Edna Wright, Jean Johnson and a gospel choir. There were string players and synthesizer programmers, an R & B horn section and various country music instruments—mandolin, pedal steel—as well as the usual rock instruments and an “ice rink organ.” Perla Batalla, Rebecca De Mornay, Jennifer Warnes and David Campbell are credited as arrangers and Rebecca, Leanne Ungar, Bill Ginn, Yoav Goren and Steve Lindsey as coproducers of various tracks, but on the label it is described as “A Record by Leonard Cohen.”

“It was a difficult birth,” remembers Leanne Ungar, the album's chief engineer. “It was done kind of a song at a time and each song had its own specific method. A lot of the songs Leonard started at home with Yoav Goren, who was specifically working with him to program synthesizers on several songs to help him get the sounds he wanted. At the time, I was also working in another studio on another project, with Steve Lindsey, doing some overdubs and mixing for [R & B band] the Temptations. I mentioned that to Leonard and he said, ‘Oh, I want to do some Motown-flavor tracks,' and he asked if I would introduce him to Steve.” Leonard described Lindsey as “a man of great musical sensibilities. He's produced Aaron Neville, among others, and Ray Charles. He put together ‘Be for Real' ”—Leonard's cover on
The Future
of a soul ballad by Frederick Knight—“which I couldn't have done without him.”
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Lindsey also played a key role in the album's second cover song, the Irving Berlin standard “Always.” It was a favorite of Leonard's late mother. Leonard said, “He assembled those very fine musicians and organized the wonderful evening when we produced about an hour's worth of ‘Always.' Basically, I prepared my drink that I invented in the city of Needles, California, during a heat wave in 1976, the Red Needle—tequila and cranberry juice with fresh fruit and lemon and lime—for myself and for everybody else who wanted communion. The session became fairly animated, and we played for a long, long time.”
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Everyone was “bombed,” said Lindsey, and it sounds like it. “After doing multiple takes, we finally got the take we thought was really great. Leonard went in to do the vocals. He cut out during the solo, but when the solo was over he never came back. I found him lying on the floor in Capitol Studios' bathroom. He wanted me to get the janitor so he could thank him for cleaning up after him.”
15
Said Leonard, “Several musicians told me it was the happiest time they ever spent in a recording studio.”
16
Kelley Lynch, Leonard's manager, was also there for the recording. Leanne Ungar remembers seeing “sparks flying a little bit between Steve and Kelley.” The two would go on to have a relationship that produced a son.

Ungar was “thrilled” to see the return, after almost ten years, of Leonard's song “Anthem.” Although it was not she who had accidentally erased the version Leonard did for
Various Positions,
she says, “As the engineer of the project I always felt somehow responsible.” The new version was significantly different. “Closing Time” also went through several changes. “When it first came into the studio it was this absolutely gorgeous slow, slow song with slowed-down synthesized strings,” says Ungar. “I was in love with it. And Leonard came in and said, ‘We're going to have to scrap the whole thing and start over.' I was, ‘No, you can't!” But he came in the next day with his fast version of it, and went on not only to have a huge hit with it in Canada but the Male Vocalist of the Year award.” In his acceptance speech at the 1992 Juno Awards ceremony, Leonard deadpanned, “It's only in a country like this that I could win a best vocalist award.”

Rebecca, who went to Canada with Leonard for the ceremony, would also frequently drop by the recording studio while the album was being made. She was there for the recording of “Waiting for the Miracle,” the song that contained Leonard's marriage proposal, and for “Anthem,” for which Leonard gave her a coproduction credit. This was not a lover's indulgence, he said. “I generally designate the producer as the person without whom that particular track wouldn't exist. Rebecca happens to have an impeccable musical ear, a very highly developed musical sense. I had played many versions of ‘Anthem' to her—fully completed versions with choruses and overdubs, and none of them seemed to nail it—and while I was revising it for the hundredth time, at a certain point she stopped me and said, ‘That's the one.' It was quite late at night, but we managed to find a studio, and she lent me her Technics synthesizer and we produced the session that night, the basic track and the basic vocal. So her contribution was not insignificant.”
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The mixing of the album “took forever,” says Ungar, but finally it was done. Four years after
I'm Your Man
,
The Future
was ready to go.