I'm Your Man (46 page)

The Future
was released in November 1992. Instead of a picture of Leonard on the cover, there was a simply drawn, quasiheraldic design of a hummingbird, a blue heart and a pair of unlocked handcuffs. They might have symbolized beauty, bravery, freedom, loss of freedom, S & M or all of the above; with Leonard one never knew. He dedicated the album to his fiancée with three verses from Genesis 24: “And before I had done speaking in mine heart, behold, Rebecca came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder, and she went down unto the well and drew water. And I said unto her, let me drink I pray thee. . . .”

Almost an hour in length,
The Future
was Leonard's longest album to date, containing nine songs, seven of them originals, one of those a cowrite and another an instrumental. Following the line begun by its predecessor, it is accessible and contemporary sounding, the songs catchy, the tempos often upbeat and the melodies sung in a deep, gruff, yet seductive voice somewhere between a prophet of doom with a black sense of humor and Barry White. The title track, which opens the album, sets gleeful pessimism to a synth-pop dance groove. “
I've seen the future, baby: / it is murder,
” Leonard prophesizes—going one step farther than Prince, whose own song called “The Future” says, “I've seen the future and boy it's rough”—and name-checking Stalin, the devil, Charles Manson and Christ. Leonard catalogs the sins of the West—crack, abortion, anal sex, Hiroshima and, worse than all of these, bad poets—and takes a bow as “
the little Jew who wrote the Bible.
” (“I don't exactly know where that line comes from,” said Leonard, but “I knew it was a good line when it came.”
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) It is his rap moment, his “Hoochie Coochie Man.” “It's humorous, there's irony, there's all kinds of distances from the event that make the song possible. It's art. It's a good dance track. . . . It's even got hope. But the place where the song comes from is a life-threatening situation. That's why you're shattered at the end of it.”
19

In the lyrics of the stirring “Democracy,” Leonard seems at his most sociopolitically direct. There are no Abrahams, Isaacs and butchers here:

    
It's coming . . . from those nights in Tiananmen Square . . .

    
from the fires of the homeless,

    
from the ashes of the gay . . .

    
I love the country but I can't stand the scene

    
And I'm neither left or right

    
I'm just staying home tonight,

    
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

In interviews at the time Leonard referred to democracy as “the greatest religion the West has produced,” adding, “[as] Chesterton said about religion, it's a great idea, too bad nobody's tried it.”
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There are moments of calm amid the chaos and apocalypse: “Light as the Breeze,” on the healing power of cunnilingus, and “Always”—though the latter's schmaltz is given an ironic edge by its over-the-top barroom performance, and the former's sweetness is tempered by a sense that the comfort of sex and love is fleeting, little more than a Band-Aid to get you back into the ring for another round. Leonard sings in the album's masterpiece, “Anthem”:

    
Ah the wars they will

    
be fought again

    
The holy dove

    
She will be caught again

    
bought and sold

    
and bought again

    
the dove is never free

And yet it also has hope.

    
Forget your perfect offering

    
There is a crack in everything

    
That's how the light gets in.

“The light,” Leonard explained, “is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom.”
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Leonard had spoken in the past of wanting a balance of dark and light and dark, and truth and lies, in his songs, and on
The Future
he achieved it.

Reviews of the album were resoundingly positive. The album was a commercial success, doing particularly well in English-speaking countries. It made the Top 40 in the UK, went double platinum in Canada and sold almost a quarter of a million copies in the U.S. Three of its songs, “The Future,” “Anthem” and “Waiting for the Miracle,” were included on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's 1994 movie
Natural Born Killers.
Leonard, meanwhile, was on the promotional treadmill, doing more interviews than he had in years, saying much the same things about America, the apocalypse and, very occasionally, his relationship with Rebecca, to scores of journalists. To the bemusement of the Toronto press, Rebecca—who happened to be in Toronto to make a movie with Sidney Lumet—joined Leonard in his interviews. When the journalist from
Maclean's
noted that she looked “demure and a little out of her element,” he might have been describing Leonard at the Oscars.
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Rebecca, taking over Dominique Issermann's previous role, directed the video for
The Future
's first single, “Closing Time.” Perla Batalla, who appeared in the video alongside a pregnant Julie Christensen, remembers Rebecca turning up on the set at the end of a day's shooting with Lumet “and she would bring bottles of Cristal, which we would drink out of Styrofoam cups.” To loosen Leonard up even more, Rebecca feigned a striptease and flirted with him from behind the camera.

Leonard agreed to interview Rebecca for
Interview,
the upscale celebrity gossip magazine, founded by Andy Warhol, that had once refused to run Danny Fields's Leonard Cohen story because Leonard was not a big enough star. Their interview was a mixture of insight and flirtation, and repartee of the kind that showed either that Leonard had met his match or that Rebecca had acquired something of his style. Rebecca began it by saying that the best thing about being interviewed by Leonard Cohen was that she would not be asked “what the exact nature of [her] relationship is with Leonard Cohen.” Naturally that was Leonard's first question. He asked Rebecca if she viewed acting as “a form of healing.” She answered, “If you have wounds that are bleeding I don't think acting will ever get them to stop. But I find acting is a form of illumination.” When he asked her what roles she would like to play, she said, “Joan of Arc.” Like the softest TV talk-show interviewer, or ironist, or older man in love with a beautiful young woman, Leonard asked her, “How do you maintain your pure and rosy complexion?” Did he want a beauty tip, she asked? He said, “Yes.” Rebecca said, “To be more beautiful, Leonard, you have to be happier.”
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W
ith the album done, Leonard returned to a long-unfinished book project: the anthology of his poems and song lyrics he had been working on since the mid to late eighties. Sorting through stacks of material, trying every method he could conceive of to arrange his work, he had compiled three different books—one small, one medium, one large—and abandoned all three. His publishers were getting impatient; Leonard's celebrity was at an all-time high, and it had been nine years since his last book and twenty-five since his last anthology,
Selected Poems 1956–1968.
Marianne had helped him choose the poems for that. Leonard asked his friend Nancy Bacal if she would help.

“He had been sitting with a huge pile of poems and lyrics for months, years,” says Bacal. “It was a life's work, overwhelming, impossible for him to get to. So we took a very esoteric route. We wanted only to use the poems that were more current and sparse, more elliptical than the younger man's voice. We put together a book of those, which took quite some doing, and we were really quite pleased.” One day while they were working on it, Rebecca came in. He showed her what they had done. Noticing that none of her favorite poems were there, Rebecca came up with her own list, which, like Marianne's, included his more romantic poems. “We kind of looked at each other, bewildered,” Bacal remembers, “and I could feel him begin reconsidering, ‘Well, maybe they should be there.' So it changed. And once the doors of possibility opened there was the chaos, and it was hard to make decisions. I remember the agony he was in. He faxed changes till the last minute. I'm sure the editors at the publishing company were going mad. At the very end I drifted away; it was far too confusing for my brain to handle.”

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs,
dedicated to Adam and Lorca, was published in March 1993. A substantial book—some four hundred pages—its selections are arranged chronologically, concluding with eleven previously unpublished “uncollected poems” from the eighties. Although not the authoritative collection it was presented as being, it is a fairly comprehensive cross-section of his work, but with some curious choices and omissions. There are excerpts from his second novel,
Beautiful Losers,
for example, but not his first,
The Favorite Game,
and he chooses the well-known song versions of “Suzanne,” “Master Song” and “Avalanche,” for example, over their less familiar poetic versions. Leonard also took the opportunity to make textual changes, sometimes quite drastic, to several of the pieces. But with a new generation of music fans curious about his literary background, and with so many of the books containing the original poems out of print,
Stranger Music
sold very well.

T
he tour for
The Future
was due to begin on April 22, 1993, in Scandinavia. Leonard had with him an eight-piece band—Bob Metzger, Steve Meador, Bill Ginn, Bob Furgo, Paul Ostermayer, Jorge Calderon, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla. All bar one, Calderon, were old companions of the road, and several had been with him on his successful, enjoyable
I'm Your Man
tour. Spirits were high. During the last week of rehearsals Leonard's U.S. label, marking his new status in America, had arranged for them to play a private concert in their L.A. rehearsal studio, the Complex, which was syndicated to a hundred radio stations across the country as
The Columbia Records Radio Hour Presents: Leonard Cohen Live!
In recent weeks, Leonard had also appeared in two U.S. TV shows,
In Concert
and
David Letterman
. Tickets to his sixteen U.S. concerts—which were intermingled with twenty-one dates in Canada—were selling well.

The European tour schedule included several sports arenas, stadiums and two rock festivals. As was invariably the case in Europe, the crowds were good and the critics generally favorable. A review of the Royal Albert Hall concerts in the
Independent
remarked on Leonard's new sense of showmanship and the large number of screaming women of mature years in the audience. Leanne Ungar, who accompanied her now-husband Bob Metzger on the road, recorded the shows. (Eight songs from these concerts, along with five from the 1988 tour, would make up Leonard's first live album in eleven years,
Cohen Live,
released in 1994.) Along the way, Leonard appeared on the UK TV show
Later . . . with Jools Holland,
and on TV shows in Spain and France. He recorded a duet with Elton John, for Elton's
Duets
album, choosing to sing a Ray Charles song that he knew by heart, having heard it so often on Hydra, “Born to Lose.” At the concert in Vienna, Rebecca showed up with an enormous cake. It had a hummingbird as its centerpiece and the iced inscription “R. loves L. Loves R. Loves L.” Whenever her schedule allowed, Rebecca traveled with Leonard and the band on the tour bus for three or four days at a time, in Europe and in the U.S.

The U.S. tour also brought positive reviews, with
Rolling Stone
describing him as a contemporary Brecht and the
New York Times
describing the audience reaction as “almost reverent, waiting for every phrase.”
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In Canada, Leonard narrated a two-part Canadian TV series on
The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
a book he had first encountered in Marianne's old house on Hydra. In the last poem in
Stranger Music,
“Days of Kindness,” written on Hydra in 1985, he had been thinking about

    
Marianne and the child

    
The days of kindness

    
It rises in my spine

    
and it manifests as tears

    
I pray that a loving memory

    
exists for them too

    
the precious ones I overthrew

    
for an education in the world.

Unsentimental as he said he was, something seemed to be drawing Leonard back to the past. Perhaps it was his current preoccupation with not just
The Future,
but the future. He had spoken about having a sense of mortality in terms of his work, of the end being in sight; he had also committed to spending this future with one woman. And still he had so much work left to do.

The attention and the adulation, although he was grateful for it, were beginning to get to him. Just as he thought that Canada had at last run out of laurels to bestow—in the past two years he had been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame; made an officer of the Order of Canada; won two separate Junos for Songwriter of the Year, two for Best Video and one for Best Male Vocalist; and even been awarded an honorary degree by his old university, McGill—Leonard learned he had won the Governor General's Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. It is the kind of award that makes a man feel old and finished—even a man whose last album and book were bestsellers and who was last seen with a beautiful young blond fiancée on his arm.