Various Positions (25 page)

One of Cohen’s neighbors was Willie York, a notorious figure who had an illegal still and had once shot a revenue officer. He became the subject of a hit song called “Willie York, Big East Fork, Franklin, Tennesssee” by country singer Johnny Paycheck. York looked after Cohen’s cabin and land while he lived there, but he also made off with a variety of goods, including Cohen’s rifle. An erratic neighbor, he would pound on Cohen’s door in the middle of a raging storm, demanding twenty dollars, and Cohen would give it to him. Yet his individualism appealed to Cohen and he enjoyed his company.

For the most part, Suzanne felt comfortable in Tennessee, although she made regular trips back to New York or Florida. “
Diamonds in the Mine,” from Cohen’s third album, refers to her failure to write to him and his disappointment at not finding any letters from her in his mailbox on the farm. But in composing, recording, and living far from the pressures of Montreal or the intensity of Hydra, he was content: “
I moved there. I had a house, a jeep, a carbine, a pair of cowboy boots, a girlfriend… A typewriter, a guitar. Everything I needed.” Suzanne’s view of their life there, however, was touched with cynicism: “
As long as someone
like him [Cohen] was in the universe, it was okay for me to be here. I was walking on tiptoe—anything for the poet. Our relationship was like a spider web. Very complicated.”

In rural Tennessee, Cohen had successfully transposed what he had in Hydra—the romantic isolation that allowed him to work. Yet he never quite escaped his melancholy, as a poem from the “Nashville Notebook of 1969,” entitled “The Pro,” makes clear. It is a serio-comic poem of departing:

The recording of
Songs from a Room
went well. Bob Johnston understood the fragility of Cohen’s songs and their blend of poetry with music and, like John Hammond, helped him to overcome his nervousness in working with other musicians. They worked in Columbia’s large, new 16th Avenue studio, which Johnston had had refitted. Johnston chose the sidemen, including Charlie Daniels, an imposing Texan and a fiddle player who had worked with Dylan and would go on to his own successful career. The first session though, was unfocused. Cohen came in and asked, “
What do you want to do?” Johnson said, “Let’s get some hamburgers and beer.” When they returned, Cohen again asked, “What do you want me to do?” Johnston replied, “Sing.” After the first taping, Cohen came into the control room and asked, “Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?” “Yeah,” said Johnston.

Charlie Daniels recalled the way Cohen appreciated the musicianship of the players but also brought his own unique talents to bear. In the studio, Daniels and the other sidemen were told to listen to Cohen in order to get into the songs. It was like mixing colors; you had to be one of the colors for it to work. Johnston later referred to the album as a painting, not a record, and described his role as “
a musical bodyguard,” protecting Cohen and his music from artificial intrusions and falsification of sound. There was a fragile, gentle feel to the album. Johnston
attempted “
to make his voice sound like a mountain” without sacrificing the purity of his sound. When Cohen sang “The Partisan,” one of the few songs he has recorded that he didn’t write, Johnston felt that French voices would enhance it. So he and Cohen went to France and overdubbed three female French singers.

The music on
Songs from a Room
was produced in such a way as to enhance the language; no drums were used, and an electric guitar only sparingly. The sessions were quite loose, with plenty of time allowed for each take. Johnston had recently done
Blonde on Blonde
for Dylan, as well as
Folsom Prison
for Johnny Cash, so he was prepared for the new sound that Cohen brought.

Johnston has said that Cohen swept one’s psychic energy away. “
Leonard has always had his finger on the future, Dylan his eye on tomorrow,” Johnston explained in an interview. He described Cohen’s guitar playing, with its beautifully constructed chords, as a black widow spider. Johnston recognized the offbeat power of Cohen’s voice, its ability to mesmerize.

Cohen himself maintained doubts about his voice. Of one song, “Lady Midnight,” he wrote, “
The voice is uncertain. In those days it took me fifteen minutes to decide whether or not I should wear my cap when I went outside and a half hour whether or not I should take it off when I came back.”

Yet in the studio, Cohen was sure of what he wanted. Johnston “
created an atmosphere in the studio that really invited you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgement, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation.” It was the way he moved while you were singing; “he’d dance for you” and “sponsor a tremendous generosity in the studio.” The recording process was becoming easier for Cohen and he was relaxed. In his journal he wrote, “
read [the] Zohar, exercised, slowly came alive.”

The album was released in March 1969. Grim, hard, and emotionally powerful, it did nothing to dispel his reputation as the crown prince of pessimism. In “You Know Who I Am,” he sings:

“Bird on the Wire” became an anthem and Cohen used it to open his concerts, explaining that it “
seems to return me to my duties.” Kris Kristofferson, who had begun selling his own songs, told Cohen at a Nashville party that Cohen had stolen part of the melody from Lefty Frizell’s “Mom & Dad’s Waltz.” But Kristofferson admired the song and said that the first three lines—“
Like a bird on the wire, / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free”—would be his epitaph.

“Bird on the Wire” began in Greece: when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones, and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires: “
I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning.” Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. Often you’d see “
three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds.” He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.

A single, “The Old Revolution,” hit #63 on the U.S. charts and did surprisingly well in England. In France the popularity of the album led to Cohen being named
le folksinger de l’année
by
Le Nouvel Observateur
. Cohen entered the cultural grammar; it was remarked that if a Frenchwoman owned but one record, it was likely to be by Leonard Cohen. It was later reported that the president, Georges Pompidou, often took Cohen’s records with him on vacation.

While still living in Nashville, Cohen made a trip to Italy. In June of 1969 he joined Franco Zefferelli and Leonard Bernstein at a villa outside Rome to score a movie on St. Francis of Assisi, titled
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
. Music was to play a leading part, with Bernstein composing the music and Cohen writing the lyrics. With Zefferelli, Cohen visited the
tomb of St. Francis, taking away some small metal birds blessed by the abbot. There were long meetings and luxurious Italian meals served by attractive young men but little real work. Cohen was unhappy with the scene and left for Rome, where he unexpectedly ran into Nico. He was seized with his old obsession but nothing came of it. Zefferelli eventually made his film but Cohen was not a part of it. He was replaced by Donovan.

After several false starts, Cohen did get involved in scoring films, providing songs for Robert Altman’s
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. Cohen was in Nashville recording some tracks for his third album,
Songs of Love and Hate
, and ducked into a theater to see Altman’s film
Brewster McCloud
. That night he was back in the studio again when, by coincidence, Robert Altman called him, telling him that he had built a film around Cohen’s songs from his first album. He said he had been writing the script while listening to Cohen’s record. Cohen said, “
Who are you?” Altman replied, “Well, I did
M*A*S*H
, that’s my film.” “I don’t know it,” Cohen replied, asking if there was anything else he had done. “Well, I did a picture that’s been completely buried, that you wouldn’t know about; it was called
Brewster McCloud
.” T
o
that replied Cohen, “Listen, I just came out of the theater. I saw it twice; you can have anything of mine you want!”

For
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, Cohen did some additional instrumental music, although eventually the only piece used was guitar background for a soliloquy by Warren Beatty. The soundtrack for the movie, released in 1971, included “The Stranger Song” (the opening piece), “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Winter Lady,” with various instrumentals added. When he saw the finished picture—without the music—Cohen candidly told Altman he didn’t like the film. Several months later, however, when he saw the completed film with the soundtrack in Montreal, he managed to reach Altman in London. “
Forget everything I said; it’s really beautiful!” he shouted into the phone.

Reaction to the film itself was mixed. Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
thought that its intentions were “
not only serious, they are meddlesomely imposed on the film by tired symbolism, [and] by a folksong commentary on the soundtrack that recalls not the old Pacific Northwest but San Francisco’s Hungry i.” Several months later, John
Simon complained in the same paper that the dialogue was “
delivered sotto voce out of the corners of people’s mouths in a remote corner of the screen or entirely off it.” He continued, “There is not much to see in the film and even less to hear—often no more than a pretentious ballad by Leonard Cohen, the Rod McKuen of the coach trade, which has nothing to do with the matter at hand.”
Time
said that Cohen’s craggy voice sounded “
like Villon with frostbite.” The movie did poorly at the box office, and Altman has called it “the biggest failure of all my films.”

————

WHILE LIVING IN NASHVILLE
, Cohen went to Los Angeles for the wedding of his friend
Steve Sanfield. It was Sanfield who introduced Cohen to his Zen master. An American from Massachusetts, Sanfield had been involved with LSD, Tibetan Buddhism, and mysticism. On Hydra he had peddled antique comic books and hashish. Planning to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, Sanfield left Hydra and went first to California where he learned of a Japanese Zen Buddhist missionary, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who had come to the United States in 1962 to establish a militaristic brand of Zen known as Rinzai. Unlike Soto Buddhism, which emphasizes gradual enlightenment, Rinzai stresses sudden, explosive enlightenment earned through austere regimes of
zazen
(meditation),
sanzen
(meetings with the master where a
koan
, or a question, is posed), and daily rituals of work and rest.

Sanfield met Roshi when the Zen master was fifty-seven. He had spent forty-one years as a monk in Japan, fifteen of them as a Zen master, and was now leading a small but committed Zen group in Gardena, a Los Angeles suburb. He had transformed his garage into a
zendo
, or meditation hall, and the bedroom into the
sanzen
, or spiritual examination room, and was sleeping on a mattress in the living room. After an excruciating session of
zazen
the evening of his first visit, Sanfield was unexpectedly admitted to
sanzen
and presented with his first
koan: “Show
me the voice of God.” Unable to answer, he was immediately shown out. He returned the next day and stayed for three years, soon moving into the attached
garage/zendo
to sleep.

In order to raise funds for Roshi’s growing roster of students and the expanding
zendo
, Sanfield went to New York in the fall of 1967 and there, at the Penn Terminal Hotel, re-met Cohen, then recording his first album. Cohen suddenly became very interested in learning about Sanfield’s teacher. Judaism was still important for both men, and one Sunday, Sanfield, Cohen, and Mort Levitt traveled downtown to visit a group of young Hasids. As they crossed Washington Square Park, they saw a large circle with Swami Bhaktivedanta seated in the center leading a mantra. This was his first visit to America, and the Hare Krishna movement was just beginning. Allen Ginsberg soon joined the growing circle of dancing, chanting figures. Cohen stayed while Sanfield and Levitt continued to their meeting. When they returned, the circle was just breaking up and Cohen offered his only comment: “
Nice song.”

After his return from New York, Sanfield fell in love with the wife of a fellow student and was ordered by Roshi to leave the
sangha
, or community, for six months. He and his lover moved to the Santa Ynez mountains south of Santa Barbara. Several weeks later Roshi sent word that he wanted to see him; he expressed hesitant approval of the match. Thirteen months later, in 1969, the two were married in a ceremony presided over by Roshi at the Cimarron Zen Center in south central Los Angeles. A former home built within a compound, the Cimarron center quickly became the new focus of the Rinzai movement and is still the home temple of Rinzai-ji in America. Sanfield asked Cohen to be his best man.

Cohen, who was now in Nashville, never replied to his request. He did, however, send Sanfield an unusual photo of himself apparently hunting; hanging from his belt were the guts of some animal. But when Sanfield walked into the Cimarron center on the day of the wedding, Cohen was there. In the kitchen before the ceremony, Cohen was helping with the dishes when a small Japanese monk came in, took some food from the refrigerator, propped up his feet and ate. He then left and in hushed tones Cohen was told that that was the Roshi. At the ceremony there was much celebration of the Ten Precepts of Zen—a decalogue that includes no killing, no misuse of sex, no lying, and no indulgence in anger—but after the fifth precept, which states no dealing in intoxication, they broke out the saki and enjoyed themselves. Cohen’s
twenty-eight-year relationship with Zen was baptized on this ambiguous note, one that would define his continued involvement.