I'm Your Man (58 page)

Rehearsals resumed in earnest; there were less than six weeks left to go. “It was an interesting way of rehearsing,” Charley remembers. “There wasn't a strong direction, Roscoe wasn't turning around and bossing anybody, and Leonard wasn't.” “I felt that they were both allowing everyone to come to the song,” says Hattie. “We would rehearse a few songs and then people would stop for tea and sandwiches, and while we were pottering Leonard would go back up just with his guitar, and play ‘The Stranger Song' or ‘Avalanche.' I felt he was just getting his bearings at this new time and in this environment.” At the end of the week the sisters were dispatched to England to pick up work visas. They stayed the weekend, then flew straight back again for the next rehearsal on Monday.

In these last few weeks of rehearsal, Beck began noticing a change in Leonard's attitude to the tour. “The band really started taking shape and Leonard was able to conduct the rehearsals, fine-tune the band to his specifications and get exactly what he was looking for musically.” He was also working on his showmanship, “falling to his knees even in rehearsal. It wasn't just an effect for the audience, it's for the band in a way, because if he goes down on one knee and cups his microphone, he's giving us a signal which we will interpret as, ‘Play softer.' It's becoming more intimate.”

Rob Hallett was getting anxious. Leonard had been rehearsing for at least four months now and all he had was bills. “About a million dollars later, I started panicking. Then Leonard said, ‘Okay, come and see the rehearsals.' ” They set up a sofa just for Hallett in front of the instrument-and-equipment-laden rehearsal-room stage. “I was blown away,” says Hallett. “It was sublime.” The show was ready to go. “And then Leonard insisted that before doing anything serious he wanted to do all these shows in the wilds of Canada—tiny places; he named some towns I'd never heard of.” As the tour began to look like a reality, Leonard had asked Kory to set up what he called a “pre-tour tour,” eighteen small, low-key warm-up shows in the Maritimes, away from the eye of the world. The kind of places where it was less likely there would be people waiting to see him fall. He also asked Kory if he would be his manager.

The very first concert took place on May 11, 2008, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. “The joke at the time,” Hallett remembers, “was, ‘First we take Fredericton, then we take Berlin.' ” Leonard, the band and crew, and Kory and Hallett arrived several days early so that they could rehearse some more in the theater, five, six hours a day. The show couldn't have been better prepared. The tiny playhouse theater—just 709 seats—sold out in minutes; they could have sold it out ten times over, Hallett thought to himself, if Leonard had not insisted on such a small venue and Kory had not done his best to keep the show quiet.

Standing in the wings on opening night, his double-breasted suit hanging on his slight frame, Leonard still couldn't have sworn on the Scriptures that he was 100 percent sure about this tour. “He was nervous,” says Hallett. “You wouldn't have known it on the outside, but he was incredibly nervous.” If Leonard's mother had been there she would have advised him to have a shave. A few stiff drinks and a smoke would have helped as well, but this was going to be Leonard's first tour without alcohol and cigarettes. He took a deep breath; one lesson he had learned from his years at the monastery was to “stop whining.”
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Taking off his hat, he bowed his head and mumbled a little prayer. The house lights went down. Straightening his spine and pushing his fedora back firmly on his head, Leonard stepped out onto the stage.

Twenty-four

Here I Stand, I'm Your Man

T
he applause was deafening. It bounced off the walls of the small theater and resounded in Leonard's ears. The whole room was on its feet. A minute ticked by, then another. Leonard had not sung a word and no one had played a note, but still they applauded. Leonard smiled shyly. He took off his hat and held it over his heart, in a gesture of humility, but also as armor. The response was gratifying—whatever they told him, he had never been entirely confident as to what the reception might be—but also worrying, having such expectations to fulfill. Though in reality there were no expectations. It was the opening night. The audience had as much of an idea of what to expect of Leonard as he had of them. For all they knew—which was not very much, because, at Leonard's insistence, the whole thing had been kept as low-key as possible—it might be some broke and broken old man with a nylon-string guitar, singing them through their memories, accompanied by a female vocalist or two if he could afford them. Everyone had read about Leonard's money troubles and how they had forced the old monk back on the boards with his begging bowl.

But here he stood in the spotlight in his sharp suit, fedora and shiny shoes, looking like a Rat Pack rabbi, God's chosen mobster. He was flanked by three women singers and a six-piece band, many of whom also wore suits and hats, like they were playing in a casino in Las Vegas. The band started up. Leonard pulled his fedora down low on his forehead, and cradling the microphone like it was an offering, he began to sing, “
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,
” his voice a little rough at the edges, but deep and strong, “
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
” (“Dance Me to the End of Love”). On this small, crowded stage, shoehorned with musicians and instruments and equipment, the women so close to him that if he felt the need he could reach out and hold on to them so he would not fall, Leonard sang as if he had come to this place alone to tell all these people in the seats, individually, a secret. He sang as if he had brought nothing with him onto the stage but this life of songs.

He told the audience, as he would go on to tell hundreds more, that the last time he had done this he was “sixty years old, just a kid with a crazy dream.” He admitted to being nervous but chatted and joked with the audience, commiserating with them over the town's recent floods and paying tribute to its local poets—among them Fred Cogswell, who, more than half a century earlier, had published a review of Leonard's first book in his magazine
Fiddlehead
. The songs Leonard had selected for the show ranged across his career, while bypassing his darkest and most brutal material. (An exception was made for “The Future,” although its “anal sex” was changed to something less anatomically specific.) While Roscoe Beck was putting the band together, Leonard had been going back through songs he had not listened to in years in search of those he felt he could still “live in.”
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It surprised him he had found so many—and that he remembered the words. That his choices leaned toward the more stirring, later songs than the naked early ones was perhaps in part an old man's delicacy, but more likely because they worked better with a large band, and Leonard needed a large band to drown out the noise of doubt. Equally important was that those early songs were largely solo guitar based. As relatively easy as it had been to reenter his songs, he found it much harder playing the guitar; it had been so long since he had played it that it needed to be restrung. He had to practice long and hard, he said, “to get [his] chop back,”
the one on “Suzanne,” one of the few songs he played without adornment. Mostly, on the occasions when he did play an instrument, it was his synthesizer, acknowledging with a humble bow the applause for his mock-solemn, one-finger solos. But more often Leonard just sang, sometimes like a supplicant, his head bowed low over the microphone cupped in his hands, other times like a showman, the microphone cord draped casually over his arm, falling to his knees, working the crowd with meticulously choreographed moves—an intricate dance between self-awareness, irony and emotional honesty that he pulled off gracefully and well.

His band was smooth, elegant, note-perfect, its sound brushstroked, its volume turned way down. “We called ourselves the world's quietest band,” says Beck, “or at least the quietest with electric instruments. The focus was finely tuned to Leonard's voice and to making sure that the audience heard every word.” But Leonard also gave the musicians solo spots. Stepping away from the light, he would watch them, rapt, his hat over his heart, marveling along with the audience when Javier Mas played the laud or twelve-string or Sharon sang him into “Boogie Street,” as if he too was hearing this excellence for the first time and was humbled by it. They played for almost three hours that night, with a short intermission—and no one played three-hour shows, certainly not a man in his seventies who had not sung more than a handful of songs in succession on a stage in a decade and a half. Leonard's son, Adam, had tried to persuade him to keep it to an hour and a half, but Leonard was having none of it. And, remarkably, he seemed to be enjoying it. It was not simply relief that the rehearsals had paid off, the band worked and people were thrilled to see him. It was something deeper. There was some necessary rite that was being performed here, some gift being exchanged and something important being shared.

“I saw people in front of the stage, shaking and crying,” remembers Charley Webb, “not just one person and not children. You don't often see adults cry, and with such violence.” Says Hattie Webb, “The audience reaction from that first night was, ‘This is hugely momentous.' It was for us too.” With the first show behind them, everybody relaxed, even Leonard, as they headed in the bus to the next tiny Canadian venue. These shows had been booked at Leonard's insistence. His response to the tour schedule his manager had shown him was, “What have you gotten me into?”
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“He set out a series of conditions,” says Robert Kory. “I said, ‘Leonard, this is a no-compromise tour, we will do it exactly the way you want to do it or we won't do it.' Every element of the tour articulated his vision, from three months of rehearsals to the warm-up dates.”

There were eighteen of these dates in Eastern Canada. “You pick up a rock,” says Rob Hallett, “and there's a town under it. One place I remember had a sign with those clip-on letters, advertising a local brass band on Monday, Leonard Cohen Tuesday and on Wednesday an Elvis Presley impersonator.” At another of the concerts, two young women rushed the stage, prompting Leonard to comment wryly, or wistfully, or both, as security gently led them off, “If only I were two years younger.” Kory also instituted a policy of no one being allowed backstage who did not need to be there, meaning no meet-and-greets, nor even visits from celebrity friends, before or after shows. This tour, Kory declared, would be “fueled on silence and deep rest and providing the level of support that helps him to do these performances night after night.” This was quite a change from Leonard Cohen tours in the past, which had been fueled by cigarettes and alcohol or the drug du jour. (By the end of his last tour, with
The Future,
Leonard had been smoking two packs a day and drinking three bottles of Château Latour before every show.)

The official starting date of the tour was June 6 in Toronto, where Leonard had sold out four nights at the three-thousand-seater Sony Centre. This time Leonard skipped onstage—literally skipped, like a little child—the very picture of gaiety and delight. Although the Toronto crowd had a better idea than Fredericton of what to expect, they had not anticipated this. “It was a surprise to me too,” says Roscoe Beck, laughing. Leonard had also taken to dancing a light-footed shuffle during the song “The Future” whenever it reached the words “white man dancing.” The set list had also lengthened. Among the four additional songs were “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” whose words Leonard recited as a poem over Neil Larsen's hushed keyboard playing, and “If It Be Your Will,” which was sung by the Webb Sisters, accompanying themselves on harp and guitar. The room was so completely silent during the performances of the songs that you could hear the hairs stand up on people's arms. But when the music ended, there were standing ovations—so many that the
Toronto Star
reviewer described the concert as “a love-in.”
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This time the international press was welcomed to the concerts. The critic from
Rolling Stone,
having confessed to trepidation at the prospect of a comeback show by a man “older than Jerry Lee Lewis” trying to make enough money to retire on, called it “stunning.”
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Leonard told
Maclean's
magazine that he had decided—100 percent now—that the tour would go on. “As the Irish say, with the help of God and two policemen, [it] may last a year and a half, or two.”
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Four days after their last Toronto show, Leonard and the band were in Ireland, playing three consecutive nights in Dublin. There was a day off for travel, then four more concerts in a row in Manchester, followed by an appearance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and, immediately afterward, another transatlantic flight back to Britain to play at the Glastonbury Festival. This was a punishing schedule by anyone's standards, let alone a man in his midseventies. Leonard had known what he was taking on and held up without complaint. Still, he was not looking forward to Glastonbury.

Michael Eavis was. The dairy farmer who founded the UK's biggest and best-loved rock festival had been trying to get Leonard to agree to play there, he said, “for almost forty years.”
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The Webb Sisters were so looking forward to it that they showed up two days early and melted into the crowd. When Leonard and the band arrived on the day of their performance, they were stunned at what they saw. Only seven weeks after having played to seven hundred people in Fredericton, they would be playing to a hundred thousand. “It was so . . . ,” says Sharon Robinson, searching for a word to describe the magnitude of it and settling for “huge. And very exciting.” Leonard did not share the excitement. He had never much enjoyed festivals, however successful his performances had been. It was not his crowd, one never knew who one was playing to, he could not spend a couple of hours sound-checking, and they had been instructed to shorten their usual set by almost half, which drastically altered its rhythm. None of these would please a perfectionist, a creature of habit or a man who needed to feel in control, in particular when it came to performing. Leonard peered out at the audience from the side of the stage. It was still daylight. A blanket of people stretched back from the stage as far as he could see. Those at the front all seemed to be youngsters. He slipped farther back into the wings and bowed his head. He might have appeared to be praying, but he was singing—“Pauper Ego Sum” (“I Am a Poor Man”), the Latin song-in-the-round he used to sing with his band on the tour bus half a lifetime ago. The Webb Sisters and Sharon, who were beside him, took up the song, and the rest of the band joined in. They were still singing it when they came out onstage, to be met with a roar of applause.

“There will never be anything better than Leonard Cohen's performance that night, for me,” said Michael Eavis. The sun was starting to set when Leonard started singing “Hallelujah,” and “people were just lifting off the ground.”
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Some of the young people singing along appeared to be wondering what this cool-looking old guy was doing up there singing a Jeff Buckley/Rufus Wainwright/
American Idol
/
X-Factor
song, while at the same time marveling at what a great job he did of it. The response from the audience was ecstatic, and reviewers agreed with Eavis, calling Leonard's performance the highlight of the festival. Leonard and the band did not have a chance to read the reports in the next morning's newspapers before they were on their way to Scandinavia for a whirlwind tour of Europe—at one point playing three-hour concerts in three different countries on three consecutive days. Everywhere they played, they were buoyed by this massive wave of love from the audience.

In July, still only two months into the tour, and back once again in England, Leonard headlined his first big arena show. The twenty thousand tickets to London's O2 Arena, a large, round, permanent marquee by the river Thames, sold out quickly. The vast stage had been strewn with Turkish rugs, to make it appear more homey, but it still looked like Leonard was playing inside a gigantic, sterile, skewered contraceptive cap. “It's wonderful,” Leonard deadpanned, “to be gathered here on the other side of intimacy.” The
London
Evening Standard
reviewer described an audience “overpowered by a magnificent performance,” and the closing song, “Whither Thou Goest,” as “the most final of farewells.”
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Except the tour showed no sign of stopping anytime soon.

There were more concerts scheduled in the same arena in November. Meanwhile Leonard was on another lap around Europe, including a headlining appearance at the UK's Big Chill Festival and a tour of Eastern Europe. Sharon Robinson remembers everyone feeling like they were “on this ever-expanding, growing magic carpet, where it's, ‘Okay, they love us in Northeast Canada, great,' but then we'd get the same thing again and again in bigger places. It was a kind of a curious, gradual acceptance of being involved in something very special.” Leonard himself said, “I'm being sent like a postcard from place to place.” Given his statements in the past on such a circumstance, it was not insignificant that he should add, “It's really wonderful.”
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