Various Positions (24 page)

In September, Cohen appeared on CBS-TV’s Sunday morning cultural affairs program
Camera Three
, eliciting the largest audience response in the fourteen-year history of the show. In November, Judy Collins released
Wildflowers
, which included three of Cohen’s songs. The album became her biggest hit, reaching #5 on the charts. All of this set the stage for the release of
Songs of Leonard Cohen
.

A January 28, 1968, article in the
New York Times
captured Cohen’s state of mind. The interview took place in his hotel room in the dilapidated Henry Hudson Hotel, where Cohen was enjoying the trappings that go with being “
strictly an underground celebrity.” With his album now released, he seemed “
on the verge of becoming a major spokesman for the aging pilgrims of his generation, the so-called Silent Generation.” Cohen offered his views on sex, women, revolutionary movements, the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967, and suffering, an area where people increasingly looked to him for advice. He offered diet tips; three years earlier he had been a vegetarian, now he only ate meat, and even proposed a new language: “
When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left … Everybody I meet wipes me out. It knocks me out, and all I can do is get down on my knees. I don’t even think of myself as a writer, singer, or whatever. The occupation of being a man is so much more.” He praised women as mankind’s salvation: “
I wish the women would hurry up and take over. It’s going to happen so let’s get it over with … then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together; and men really are gossips and
artists. Then we could get about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.”

Commenting on his work, Cohen says his novels “
have a pathological tone. What I find out from my mail is that the best products of our time are in agony. The finest sensibilities of the age are convulsed with pain. That means a change is at hand.” Mankind, he summarizes, must “
rediscover the crucifixion. The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance. It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.” The headline of the interview, taken from a statement he offers, was “I’ve Been On the Outlaw Scene Since 15.”

The next day, an unsympathetic review of the album appeared in the
Times. The
second sentence reads: “
On the alienation scale, [Cohen] rates somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominent poets of pessimism.” Yet the critic believed that the album would be fairly successful, although “
weltschmerz
and soft rock” are not always big sellers. “Suzanne,” the critic said, “has its moments of fairly digestible surrealism.” A comparison with Dylan emphasized their differences: “whereas Mr. Dylan is alienated from society and mad about it, Mr. Cohen is alienated and merely sad about it.” However, the review concludes positively: “popular music is long overdue for a spell of neo-Keatsy world-weariness and Mr. Cohen may well be its spokesman this season.”

By the spring,
Songs of Leonard Cohen
was a modest hit, reaching #162 in the United States, sandwiched between the
Young Rascals’ Collection
and Petula Clark’s
These Are Songs
. In Britain that summer, he hit #13, forecasting his popularity in Europe. Columbia also released “Suzanne” as a single, but it did not reach the charts. Cohen did not support the album with a tour, largely because of his insecurity as a performer. In Canada, the national news magazine
Maclean’s
disliked the album, beginning its review with “Pity.” An article in the
Village Voice
entitled “Beautiful Creep” criticized the folk poetry movement and identified Cohen as its leading proponent. “
Cohen suffers gloriously in every couplet,” the article said. Cohen’s work was characterized as depressing, dark, and despairing. Eight months later, the
New York Times
linked Cohen with Dylan, Paul Simon, Rod McKuen, and Laura Nyro as the new voices of folk rock poetry.

Cohen went to London to appear on BBC-TV, performing twelve songs on two of his own shows, both entitled “Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen.” The shows included “You Know Who I Am,” “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” The introduction to the last song indicated Cohen’s gloomy state. He talked about a Czechoslovakian singer who used to perform a song so depressing that afterwards people would leap out of windows. Cohen then reported that the singer himself had recently leapt to his death. “Dress Rehearsal Rag” was Cohen’s equivalent song, and he performed it only when “
the environment was buoyant enough to support its despair.”

Although he was labeled a sixties poet and singer, Cohen remained aloof from the larger movements. “
I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t that attractive to me. … Mostly I’m on the front line of my own tiny life. I remember that I was inflamed in the 60s, as so many of us were. My appetites were inflamed: to love, to create, my greed, one really wanted the whole thing.” In particular, Cohen felt that the folk movement had been rapidly usurped by commerce. “
The thing died very, very quickly; the merchants took over. Nobody resisted. My purity is based on the fact that nobody
offered
me much money. I suppose that had I moved into more popular realms, I might have surrendered some of the characteristics of my nature that are now described as virtues.”

Cohen’s dislocated situation in New York led to his exploring different sexual, spiritual, and pharmaceutical pathways, and one was Scientology. In 1968, as he was driving down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with Joni Mitchell, she spotted a building with a number of women wearing saris and handing out material. Above the door a large sign which read “Scientology.” “
What is Scientology?” she asked Cohen. “Oh, some crackpot religion,” he replied. A few weeks later, he called from New York to say that he’d joined them and that they were going to rule the world. But a few months later, Cohen told Mitchell he was disenchanted and that he’d had some difficulty extricating himself from it. Initially, Scientology offered the goal of a “clear path” (“
Did you ever go clear?” he asks in “Famous Blue Raincoat”). Cohen had also heard it was a good place to meet women. On June 17, 1968, Cohen received a Scientology certificate awarding him “Grade iv—Release.”

By this time Cohen’s relationship with Marianne was ending. He was seeing other women, defending his behavior as acts of generosity; he was restless in New York. He saw Marianne and Axel often, but he also knew that their future was bleak, as a number of his songs record. “So Long, Marianne” is the musical denouement to their arrangement. They finally separated in 1968. Although Marianne was still mad about him, she understood that she could never completely possess him. “
My new laws encourage / not satori but perfection,” Cohen wrote. In subsequent relationships, he sought to enact this principle, building on his earlier experiences. He required a serious, monogamous relationship, but one that allowed for his need for the freedom which sustained his creativity. Marianne was both the inspiration for, and casualty of, this need.

    L
EONARD COHEN
met nineteen-year-old Suzanne Elrod in an elevator at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Cohen was there to attend a Scientology session, one of the potholes on his road to enlightenment, and Elrod was living at the Plaza, supported by a businessman. Elrod stepped out of the elevator as Cohen was going in. He looked at her, spun around and quickly introduced himself. Their relationship began almost immediately. She soon left the Plaza and moved into Cohen’s downscale apartment at the Chelsea.

Suzanne was radically different from Marianne; whereas Marianne was domestic and protective, Suzanne was direct and domineering. With her dark, sultry beauty and aggressive sexuality, she sustained Cohen’s interest for nearly a decade, and he never learned to refuse her
various demands, whether they were for clothes or homes. A longtime friend from Greece commented that both women “
had catlike characters”: Marianne was “a puma,” whereas Suzanne was “a Persian in a lady’s parlor” who could jump with claws at any instant. Marianne seemed difficult to get to know, as if she had a wall of glass around her. She was loving, compliant, and understanding. With Suzanne, Cohen felt he had found an equal, someone who could meet him at the same level of intensity. He found her beauty inescapable and her sensuality irresistible. She hung erotic woodcuts beside religious icons on the white-washed walls of his house on Hydra. She was Jewish, from Miami, a beautiful, difficult woman. “
God, whenever I see her ass, I forget every pain that’s gone between us,” he once remarked. When he discovered that she had small handwriting much like his own, he said, “
I fear we are to be together for a long time.”

Their difference in age never affected their relationship, although once when Cohen was doing an interview and gave his real age, thirty-four, she interrupted to say, “
Leonard, don’t say how old you are.” He laughed and quoted John, 8:32: “The truth shall set you free.” In their first year together, Cohen and Suzanne were itinerant, living on Hydra, at the Chelsea in New York, and briefly in Montreal where, after a short stay with Robert Hershorn, they rented a small house in the Greek section near Mount Royal. He wrote and composed, while she dashed off a pornographic novel, written “
to make us laugh.” He gave Suzanne a filigreed Jewish wedding ring, although they never actually married. They eventually settled in Nashville.

Cohen decided to go to Nashville to record his second album,
Songs from a Room
, after meeting Bob Johnston, Columbia’s leading producer of folk rock, in Los Angeles in 1968. Johnston, who had produced Dylan, had heard Cohen’s debut album and was interested in producing his next.

Nashville was the bible publishing capital of America, referred to as the “buckle of the Bible belt” and seen by many as a Christian, largely Republican theme park. The juxtaposition of a lugubrious, urban Jew and the rural, country backdrop of Nashville seemed odd. Musically, Nashville leaned toward bad puns and cloying musical arrangements. The television show
Hee Haw
debuted in 1969 and Merle Haggard’s anti-protest song “Okie From Muskogee” was a number one hit. But its
aw-shucks, hillbilly veneer belied the level of musicianship and innovation that thrived in Nashville. Chet Atkins and producer Owen Bradley were pioneering new sounds. Johnny Cash was doing interesting work. Kris Kristofferson was writing songs and working as a night janitor at Columbia Records. Elvis was recording at the RCA studios. Bob Dylan had recorded two albums there
(John Wesley Harding
and
Nashville Skyline)
and Buffy Sainte-Marie was developing one. Ever since his first band, the Buckskin Boys, Cohen had had an odd fondness for country music, and saw himself, incongruously, as a country singer.

When he arrived in Nashville, a pop/country crossover trend was beginning, blurring the distinction between the two. Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” had been a number one hit on both the country and pop charts. Glen Campbell had recorded “Witchita Lineman” and Ray Charles, a longtime favorite of Cohen’s, issued Volume 2 of “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” More experimentally, a series of twelve duets between Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash was recorded in March 1969. The crossover philosophy would be revived in cycles through the ensuing years, with varying degrees of success. In Nashville, Cohen found enthusiastic, professional musicians who were ready to accept him as a slightly older poet and budding folk-rock singer.

When Cohen decided to go down to Nashville in 1968, he was initially opposed to Suzanne coming with him. She spent the night before his departure carousing with several men, an unsubtle message. Cohen was upset but slightly overpowered. He was in thrall and it was decided that she would go with him. They stayed briefly in the Noel Hotel but decided to move to a small cabin in Franklin, Tenneessee, a rural town twenty-five miles southwest of Nashville. It was their home for the next two years. Producer Bob Johnston rented the place from Boudleaux Bryant, songwriter of “Bye, Bye Love” and other hits for the Everly Brothers, but let Cohen have it for seventy-five dollars a month. It came with twelve hundred acres of virgin forest filled with hickory, chestnut, oak, beech, and black ash trees. It also had a stream. Wild peacocks roamed the area and Cohen would amuse his occasional guests by imitating their cry.

He and Suzanne led a quiet rural life, driving in to Nashville only to record or to meet friends. Suzanne made long dresses, worked at her
loom and dabbled with pottery. Guests to the farm found it isolated and Cohen’s life there simple. At the time he was continuing with his macrobiotic diet (between 1965 and 1968 he was a vegetarian). Cohen often had nothing to offer guests but soy tea.

In Tennessee, Cohen was able to fulfill his fantasy about being a cowboy. One of his favorite places in Nashville was the Woodbine Army Surplus store. A journal from that period contains photographs of various gun counters; he became the poet with a gun. On one occasion, friends came over for an afternoon of shooting, bringing a carload of weapons. Leonard joined them with the largest weapon he had at the time, a Walther
PPK
pistol. He noted the comic imbalance in firepower, commenting that he was impressed with the way the South protected its women.

Cohen decided he needed a horse, and he bought one from Kid Marley, a sometime cowboy and full-time drinker. A legend in the area, Marley could sing and play the harmonica and did so often with Cohen. The horse was lame and consistently uncooperative, spending most of its time in the pasture avoiding the Montreal cowboy, although Cohen did eventually learn to ride him.