Various Positions (23 page)

Recording the album was no simple task. Cohen had never been in a studio to record before and he could not read music. Hammond had
arranged for first-rate studio musicians to accompany him, but Cohen found that he paid more attention to their musicianship than his lyrics. Cohen hadn’t sung with professional musicians, and he didn’t know how to work with them. The relaxed Hammond read a newspaper behind the console, displaying what Cohen called “
a compassionate lapse of attention.” He knew Cohen had to find his own way. He thought Cohen should then lay down a simple track, just guitar and bass. He brought in Willie Ruff, a bass player who taught at Yale. Ruff was also a linguist and understood Cohen’s songs and their meanings implicitly. He was able to anticipate Cohen’s musical moves. With Ruff’s support, Cohen recorded the vocal tracks of “Suzanne,” “The Master Song,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “Sisters of Mercy.” “
Leonard always needed reassurance of some kind,” Hammond remembered, and Ruff provided it. To establish the mood for the songs, Cohen had the studio lights turned off, lit candles, and burned incense; but he needed one more object to feel at home: a mirror.

In Montreal, Cohen had always sung in front of a full-length mirror, partly because he needed to see himself perform and partly to imagine what an audience might see. He asked Hammond if a mirror could be placed in the studio. At the next session, Cohen sang while staring at a reflection of himself. But the sessions were still not coming together. Cohen visited a hypnotist to see if he could recreate his moods when he was writing the songs but it didn’t work. Cohen did not believe that his voice was commercial enough, and he was insecure about his
guitar playing.

Hammond became ill and had to remove himself from the project. A new producer, John Simon, was brought in and he added strings, horns, and “
pillows of sound for Cohen’s voice to rest on.” Cohen disagreed with Simon’s enhancement and felt he was losing touch with his own songs. Simon added a piano and drums to “Suzanne,” arguing that it required syncopation. Cohen removed both, thinking that the song should be “
linear, should be smooth.” With “So Long, Marianne,” Simon introduced a stop or blank moment, and then restarted the music. Cohen objected and changed the stop in the mix. The arrangements on Cohen’s first album remained Simon’s, but the mix is Cohen’s. He felt the “sweetening”—adding the strings and horns—was wrong, but it couldn’t be removed from the four-track master tape.
On the lyric sheets accompanying the album, the following note by Cohen appears:

Songs of Leonard Cohen
was unofficially released on December 26, 1967, although the year is always listed as 1968. For the most part, the arrangements on the album work against the songs. “Sisters of Mercy” uses a calliope and bells as background; “So Long, Marianne” contains a female rock and roll chorus; “Suzanne,” also has a chorus to deepen the sound. “Master Song” does benefit from unusual electronic sounds, as does “Winter Lady.” The most unnerving element is the scream or wail at the end of “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

In advance of the album, the folk music magazine
Sing Out
published two articles on Cohen, the first a casual biographical piece by Ellen Sander, the second an analysis of his music by the Saskatchewan-born Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. She criticized his lack of musical knowledge but celebrated his sometimes outrageous modulations, shifting keys within a song. His melodies, she wrote, were largely “
unguessable,” while his musical figures repeated themselves so gradually that a casual listener could miss the patterns. Yet he lifted one off “familiar musical ground.” “
It’s like losing track of time,” Sainte-Marie wrote, “or getting off at Times Square and walking into the Bronx Zoo; you don’t know how it happened or who is wrong, but there you are.” His songs seemed to lack “roots or directions” because of his unusual chord patterns, but once absorbed they became enchanting.

Cohen had already mistakenly signed away the publishing rights to three of his most important songs: “Suzanne,” “Master Song,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” unaware of the consequences. Mary Martin knew an arranger, Jeff Chase, who also promoted himself as a music publisher and who she thought would enhance these songs. He worked with Cohen to put together a demo tape for promotion, but Cohen soon realized that he and Chase had conflicting ideas. But he convinced
Cohen that it would be useful for him to sign certain documents that “temporarily” gave Chase rights to the three songs and allowed him to represent Cohen. When things didn’t work out musically, Chase told Cohen he was contractually bound. If he pulled out, Chase would retain the publishing rights to those songs as compensation for damages. Cohen was inexperienced and unsure and sought Mary Martin’s advice. She suggested Cohen let it go. Cohen had lost the rights to Chase on a bluff of sorts, since Chase never did more than prepare the lead sheets.

In 1970, after his first tour, Cohen realized what a mistake he had made. He also realized that Stranger Music, a music publishing company he formed in 1967, was partly owned by Mary Martin, with whom by then he had become disenchanted. He went to Columbia producer Bob Johnston’s lawyer, Marty Machat, for advice, and Machat, who soon became Cohen’s lawyer, worked a deal whereby Mary Martin was bought out of Stranger Music. But that still left the matter of the song rights, which Cohen later described as having been “
lost in New York City but it is probably appropriate that I don’t own this song [“Suzanne”]. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.” In 1983–84, Chase contacted Barry Wexler, a friend of Cohen’s, to tell him that Cohen should have the rights to these songs and that he was open to offers. A meeting subsequently took place at the Royalton Hotel in New York between a nervous Chase and an angry Cohen. Asked by Cohen how much he wanted, Chase replied, “
What do you think?” Cohen thought for a second and said, “One dollar, you motherfucker!” Chase ran out of the room. But Cohen still wanted the rights to the songs and in 1987 successfully negotiated a sum that was more than his first offer but less than what Chase wanted.

Songs of Leonard Cohen
introduced Cohen to the arcane financial machinations of the music world, a dark contrast to the book publishing industry which had relatively little corruption simply because it had relatively little money. But the album remains a coherent artistic statement, and it raised issues that would be addressed in later songs. Cohen has said on occasion that an artist has only one or two songs or poems that he constantly reinvents and that his earliest work contains all his later themes and variations. This is true of
Songs of Leonard Cohen
.

The back cover of the album shows a portrait of a Joan of Arc figure
engulfed by flames. Her blue eyes and enchained hands are raised upward, while the flames reach her breasts. The unattributed image was actually a widely available Mexican postcard of a saint Cohen found in a Mexican magic store. It shows the
anima sola
, the lonely soul, seeking release from the chains of materiality. “
I sort of felt I was this woman,” he remarked years later. The reappearance of the image on the reverse of the 1995 tribute album
Tower of Song
was “closing the circle,” he explained.

“Stories of the Street” documents Cohen’s despair and dislocation during his early days in New York. As he says at the beginning of the song, “
the stories of the streets are mine,” elaborating his experiences in narrative: “I lean from my window sill / In this old hotel I chose / One hand on my suicide / One hand on the rose.”

“Sisters of Mercy” had been written in Edmonton after he ducked into a doorway during a blizzard, and encountered two young women with backpacks taking refuge. Since they had no place to stay, Cohen invited them to his hotel room. They had hitchhiked across the country the previous week and quickly fell asleep on his double bed. He sat in the armchair near the window, and as the storm abated and the sky cleared, he studied the moonlight on the North Saskatchewan River. A melody had been rattling in his head (he recalled playing it for his mother in her Montreal kitchen), and wrote the stanzas as they slept: “
It was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect, completely formed, and they were … happy about it. Barbara and Lorraine were their names.”

“The Stranger Song,” which addresses loss, departure, and the constant need to move on is essentially a confessional. Love is necessary yet also destructive; the warmth and comfort that love provides also weakens one’s will. All of Cohen’s later themes were contained here;
Songs of Leonard Cohen
became a template for the songs to come.

————

IT WAS IN NEW YORK
that Cohen met Bob Dylan in the fall of 1969. Cohen remembers being in the dressing room of the Bitter End, a
Greenwich Village folk club, where he had gone to see Phil Ochs or Tim Buckley perform. Dylan had returned to live in the Village after spending several years secluded in Woodstock, N. Y., following his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966. Dylan heard Cohen was at the club and sent Paul Colby, his assistant and friend, to summon Cohen, who then met Dylan at the Kettle of Fish, Dylan’s hangout on MacDougal Street.

Cohen’s talent had some of the same elements as Dylan’s: both wrote sophisticated lyrics, surprisingly elegant melodies, and neither had much of a voice. Dylan drew heavily from two of the same sources that Cohen did; the bible and Hank Williams.

Cohen has stated his appreciation of Dylan’s work many times, calling him, at one point, “
our most sophisticated singer in a generation … nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso—that exuberance, range and assimilation of the whole history of music.” And Dylan has said that one of the people he would not mind being for a minute is Leonard Cohen (two others were Roy Acuff and Walter Matthau).

————

WHILE LIVING
in New York, Cohen began to make appearances on Canadian television. He was the perfect Canadian cultural commodity; articulate, sexy, and living outside the country. His first show was CBC’s
Take 30
, hosted by Adrienne Clarkson. He appeared with the Toronto folk group The Stormy Clovers, who had been singing his songs in Montreal and Toronto clubs. On
Take 30
, Cohen sang “Traveller” (an early version of “The Stranger Song”), “Suzanne,” and “So Long, Marianne.” Afterwards, Clarkson asked if he now wanted to sing rather than write poetry. Cohen replied, “
Well, I think the time is over when poets should sit on marble stairs with black capes.”

In 1967, Cohen began a romantic relationship with Joni Mitchell, whom he first met at the Newport Folk Festival. He would visit her at the Earl Hotel on Waverly Place in the Village and since Mitchell frequently played in Montreal, she would spend time with Cohen there, writing the song “Rainy Night House” about their visit to his mother’s
home. When Cohen went to Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, he spent nearly a month with her at her new Laurel Canyon home. Cohen, Mitchell acknowledges, inspired her, giving her another standard in songwriting, although sometimes his presence surprised her—as when she found his name inscribed on the back of a heavy pendulum that fell off an antique clock she owned. He and Dylan, she has remarked, were her “
pace runners,” the ones that kept her heading to new and higher musical ground. Cohen characterizes their relationship as “
the extension of our friendship,” a friendship that has endured.

Based on the belief that he was the voice of the new counterculture, Cohen was flown out to Hollywood in 1967 by a producer to score a film that was to be directed by John Boorman. It was his first time there, and what he remembers most distinctly were the matchboxes with his name on them in his hotel room. The producer thought Cohen would be a kind of authority on the new movement in music and the culture. It didn’t work. “
They showed me the film but I couldn’t relate to it.” He went out again a year later to score a movie tentatively called “Suzanne,” an art film based loosely on his song. The filmmakers were unaware that Cohen had lost the rights to the song and the project didn’t work out. But Cohen took the opportunity to spend time with Joni Mitchell, who was becoming an important part of the west coast music scene, and then rented a car and drove up to northern California to visit his friend Steve Sanfield, whom he knew from Hydra.

Back in New York, Cohen began to perform more. On April 6, 1967, he was introduced to a standing-room only crowd at the State University in Buffalo, New York, with these words: “
James Joyce is not dead; he lives in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” He read from
Beautiful Losers
and sang “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “The Master Song,” “Love Calls You by Your Name,” and “The Jewels In Your Shoulder” and did three encores. On April 30 he had his Town Hall debut for sane and, shortly after, performed at expo ’67 in Montreal in a small pavillion with a club-like setting. Walking out with his guitar and a handful of candles, Cohen engaged the audience by announcing that “
I cannot sing unless you all agree to take a candle and put it in the middle of your table and light it.” The audience thought this was pretty tacky but humored the singer. A guest that night recalled that Cohen’s “guitar
playing was terrible and his voice was not much better. But he got to you and the women were quickly taken in; the men were less sure of him, but the mood was fabulous.”

Cohen also performed at the Rhinegold Music Festival in Central Park and the Newport Folk Festival on July 16, where he joined Joni Mitchell, Mike Settle, and Janis Ian at the first singer-songwriter afternoon, which had been arranged by Judy Collins. In the car to Newport, Cohen confided to his lawyer Marty Machat that he had little confidence in his singing. “
None of you guys know how to sing,” Machat replied, “When I want to hear singers, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.”