I'm Your Man (59 page)

The bookings kept coming; Leonard was playing to the biggest and most age-diverse audiences of his career, and every show was a sellout. Following a six-week break for the holidays, during which Leonard spent Hanukkah with Adam and Lorca, and “Hallelujah” spent Christmas dominating the UK charts (three different versions, including one by Leonard), the tour resumed in January 2009 in New Zealand and Australia. Again Leonard triumphed. But he had always done well in these countries, just as he had in the UK, where even his bleakest albums made the Top 10, and in Europe, where he was feted for the very things that had turned the North American music industry off: his dark humor, old-world romance, existential gloom and poetry. North America was the next stop—his largest U.S. tour to date, interspersed with shows in Canada. Most of the American shows were in smaller venues, theaters, but he had also been booked to play at the Coachella festival and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Sensibly, Leonard started the tour on familiar ground, in New York City, with a show at the Beacon Theatre whose audience was crammed with media and hard-core fans alerted through the fan sites.

Rolling Stone
reported a scene of “absolute chaos” outside the theater, “with hordes of people desperately looking for tickets. The few scalpers were getting upwards of five hundred dollars a seat”;
10
Billboard
said seven hundred.
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In honor of the place he had once called home, Leonard added “Chelsea Hotel #2” (which he had been practicing in his room, privately, surprising the band by picking up his guitar and launching into it onstage). The show was now more than three hours long. “Fortunately there are curfews in most places,” Robert Kory says, “or he would sing more.” Both the critics and the audience were fulsome with praise—a response that would continue through the rest of the tour, with its sold-out shows, scalpers and standing ovations. It seemed as if suddenly everyone, everywhere, was talking about Leonard, asking themselves and each other, was he always this good, this wise, this droll, this cool.

Following the first leg of the U.S. tour, Leonard and the band flew back to Europe for forty more shows, some in new locations such as Serbia, Turkey and Monaco, but many in places they had already played but could still sell. There were ten dates booked in Spain, all in large venues, all sold out, and the majority in September, the month in which Leonard would turn seventy-five years old. During the September 18 concert in a cycling arena in Valencia, while singing “Bird on the Wire,” Leonard collapsed. His bandmates, shocked, rushed over to him. His small limp body was carried gently off the stage, as fans near the front held up their mobile phone cameras to capture what looked like Leonard Cohen having sung himself out of the world, and having chosen the country of his beloved Lorca in which to do it. Farther back in the crowd, there was confusion. After some time Javier Mas came back onstage and explained in Spanish that Leonard was okay, he had regained consciousness and was on his way to the hospital, but the show was over and they would get their money back. The doctors diagnosed food poisoning. Several members of the band had apparently also been affected, but none of them was a gaunt seventy-five-year-old front man. Two days later, Leonard was back on the bus. Looking frail but unbroken, he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday playing a three-hour performance in a packed sports arena in Barcelona.

In Montreal, his birthday was marked with a book launch.
Leonard Cohen You're Our Man: 75 Poets Reflect on the Poetry of Leonard Cohen—
the most celebrated of these poets being Margaret Atwood—was a fund-raising project by Jack Locke, founder of the Foundation for Public Poetry, to establish a Leonard Cohen Poet-in-Residence program at Leonard's old school, Westmount High. In New York, it was celebrated with the unveiling of a plaque on the wall by the entrance to the Chelsea Hotel. This project, spearheaded by Dick Straub, was funded by donations from Leonard Cohen fans across the world, and the ceremony was attended by Leonard's former producer John Lissauer, his writer friend Larry “Ratso” Sloman, and Esther, Leonard's ever-loyal sister. The plaque put Leonard in good company—Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Brendan Behan, Thomas Wolfe—though none of these great writers' plaques could boast a quotation that alluded, as Leonard's did, to a world-famous blow job performed within the hotel's walls.

Three days after his birthday, Leonard was in Israel, playing his first concert in that country in more than twenty years. Ramat Gan Stadium, near Tel Aviv, held fifty thousand people and had sold out. Proceeds from what was billed as “A Concert for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace” were to go to Israeli and Palestinian organizations and charities promoting peace. “Leonard decided that if he was going to play there, he wanted the money to stay there,” Robert Kory says. Still, there was controversy. When the show was announced, there were letters in the press and protests on the Internet by those urging a cultural boycott of Israel. In Montreal, a small demonstration was held outside one of Leonard's favorite Jewish delis. Leonard responded by adding a smaller show the next night in Ramallah, on the West Bank. But the organizers, the Palestinian Prisoners Club, pulled out, as did Amnesty International, who were to distribute the proceeds; both felt under pressure, that the event had become too politicized. So Leonard founded his own charity to allocate the almost two million dollars that the Tel Aviv concert made.

It was a warm summer night; the air shimmered with the glow sticks that the crowd held aloft like thin green candles. There were screens displaying translations of the songs Leonard sang through the three-and-a-half-hour show, the words in Hebrew of “Who by Fire” reading like a page from the prayer book. Leonard dedicated “Hallelujah” to all of the families who had lost children in the conflict and expressed his admiration for those who in spite of this had resisted “the inclination of the heart to despair, revenge and hatred.” When he told the audience, “We don't know when we'll pass this way again,” they seemed visibly moved. Coming from a man of Leonard's age, his words had that sense of valediction that reviewers had also noted in his last album and his last volume of poems. When the last song was sung, Leonard raised his hands to the sky. Speaking in Hebrew, the descendant of Aaron gave the crowd the “Birkat Kohanim,” the “Priestly Blessing.”

Back in the U.S., with a few days off before the next leg of the tour, Leonard learned that Ramesh Balsekar was dead. His teacher died at the age of ninety-two on September 27, 2009, in the Mumbai apartment where Leonard had so often gone for
satsang
. Although his concert schedule had prevented him from spending much time with Ramesh, they had kept in touch by e-mail. “Just before he passed away,” Ratnesh Mathur remembers, “I had a conversation with Ramesh, who mentioned that he was in correspondence with Leonard and said that it was good to see that he was performing again.” The tour resumed in mid-October—fifteen more dates, including a return visit to New York to play Madison Square Garden.

It was getting to where past and present seemed to constantly bump into each other. While Leonard was writing and trying out new songs onstage (the first of them being “Lullaby”) his record label rereleased two old compilation albums from different periods—
Greatest Hits
, also known as
The Best of Leonard Cohen
(1975), and
The Essential Leonard Cohen
(2002)—as well as his first three studio albums from the late sixties and early seventies.
Songs of Leonard Cohen
came with two old songs released for the first time: “Store Room” and “Blessed Is the Memory,” which were recorded during the 1967 sessions and shelved.
*
The reissued
Songs from a Room
also had two additional songs, the previously unheard versions of “Bird on the Wire” (titled “Like a Bird”) and “You Know Who I Am” (titled “Nothing to One”) that Leonard recorded with David Crosby before making the album with Bob Johnston. As its sole bonus track,
Songs of Love and Hate
had one of the many early outtakes of “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” Still, it was one too many for Leonard, who disliked these additions and had not given his blessing for their inclusion. Feeling they ruined the integrity of the original album, he put a stop to the label's doing it again.

One remarkable temporal overlap was the release within weeks of each other of two new live CDs and DVDs.
Live in London
was recorded in 2008 at Leonard's first triumphant London O2 Arena show.
Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
contained recently unearthed recordings and footage of a 1970 performance. Watched side by side, these two UK concerts from each end of Leonard's touring career make for fascinating viewing. The 1970 show, outdoors, before a crowd of six hundred thousand in the early hours of a rainy morning, has Leonard—bestubbled, stoned and dressed in a safari suit—playing guitar backed by his small band, the Army; it is a spontaneous, edgy and seductive performance, with an intimacy that seems unfeasible in such a vast, inhospitable space. Four decades later, playing indoors in an arena, Leonard—silver haired, sober and in a smart suit—plays synthesizer with a nine-piece band; the show is as planned and rehearsed as a military operation, yet it is still magnificent, and once again Leonard makes a cavernous, anonymous space as small and intimate as a bedroom.

It was a reflection of Leonard's growing confidence onstage that he premiered more new material on the 2009 U.S. tour, “Feels So Good” and “The Darkness.” The set list, remarkably, had continued to expand, now featuring more than thirty songs. Even “So Long, Marianne” came with an additional verse. Leonard's showmanship had also become more polished—the skipping on- and offstage, the falling to his knees, the playful dance during “The Future,” to which the Webb Sisters had long ago added synchronized cartwheels. In November 2009, at the last show of the year in San Jose, California—which many in the audience took to be his last show, period—in “I'm Your Man” Leonard added the wearing of “an old man's mask” to the full services he offered the women gazing up at him from the metal folding chairs of the soulless Silicon Valley arena. During the extended encores, some of these women threw flimsy garments onto the stage in a mock Tom Jones tribute.

A year and a half had gone by since that first small show in Fredericton; Leonard had celebrated his seventy-fourth and seventy-fifth birthdays on the road. His 2008 tour had been named by business magazines as one of the year's most successful, and the rock press had designated the 2009 tour the best of the year. Between them, these two years of concerts had grossed well over $50 million. Not all of it went into Leonard's pocket—a band, crew and tour that size was an enormous expense—but as the promoter Rob Hallett put it, “I think it's safe to assume the garden's rosy again.” Leonard had earned back all he had lost and more. He could stop now, hang up his guitar and never set foot onstage again. But it had gone beyond a moneymaking exercise a long time ago. Leonard wanted, perhaps even needed, this tour, and—remarkably, in a business and at a time where attention spans were not long—people continued to want to see him. A 2010 tour was scheduled, due to start in Europe in May, followed by another trip across Australia and shows in Cambodia and Hawaii, before ending in a victory lap of North America.

But for now Leonard had three and a half months to himself. Very much to himself; Leonard was once again a single man. Whether it had been the distances put between them by two years of touring or that the age difference between a fifty-year-old and a seventy-five-year-old seemed more daunting than that between a forty-year-old and a sixty-five-year-old, Leonard and Anjani were too discreet to say. “Relationships are not stagnant, they change and grow,” says Anjani, who remains Leonard's close friend and collaborator. “Rather than me explaining it to you or him explaining it, I should send you something he wrote, called ‘I'm Always Thinking of a Song for Anjani to Sing.' All there is to know about our relationship is in that poem. I told him I cried when I read it. And he answered, “I cried too.”

    
I'm always thinking of a song

    
For Anjani to sing

    
It will be about our lives together

    
It will be very light or very deep

    
But nothing in between

    
I will write the words

    
And she will write the melody

    
I won't be able to sing it

    
Because it will climb too high

    
She will sing it beautifully

    
And I'll correct her singing

    
And she'll correct my writing

    
Until it is better than beautiful

    
Then we'll listen to it

    
Not often

    
Not always together

    
But now and then

    
For the rest of our lives
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I
t felt good to be back in Montreal, trudging through the December snow with Mort to the deli on the Main for bagels and beef tongue—Mort's old favorite before it was Roshi's—and listening to his oldest friend complain about the new coffee bars and boutiques that had sprung up in their old neighborhood. “He and I have been here longer than most of the people around here,” says Rosengarten. “We're the old fogies. He seems to be spending more time here now.” Leonard, as he often did, thought about staying in Montreal. It had changed a little, in ways other than Mort had mentioned—people would recognize him and approach him on the street or in restaurants in a way that they had not done in the past. Being Canadian, most were very polite about it, and Leonard had also come up with some evasive tactics, such as going for dinner in the afternoons when no one was there. One person in particular, who had come up to him in the park and introduced herself—a beautiful young singer named NEeMA—became his protégée; Leonard coproduced her album
Watching You Think
and drew a portrait of her for the front sleeve.