Various Positions (32 page)

The appearance of
The Best of Leonard Cohen
and dropping sales led some to think that Cohen’s recording contract with Columbia had ended. The release of his next album on Warner Brothers seemed to confirm this, although Cohen said that he received a release to work with legendary producer Phil Spector under the Warner Brothers label, although the album finally came out on CBS International. Spector’s reputation as a songwriter and producer came from another era. He was responsible for the “wall of sound” that characterized “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” “Be My Baby,” “River Deep, Mountain High,” and “He’s a Rebel.” Joni Mitchell warned Cohen about working with Spector, who she thought was difficult and past his prime. She had seen the struggle John Lennon had had recording with him, since she had been across the hall in the same complex at the time, recording her album
Court and Spark
.

Stories differ as to how Cohen and Spector became partners. The liner notes on the album state that Marty Machat, who was Spector’s lawyer as well as Cohen’s, introduced them. According to Cohen, this occurred backstage after one of his performances at the Troubadour in L.A. Spector had uncharacteristically left his well-protected home to see Cohen, and at the show was strangely silent. Spector then invited Cohen back to his home, which, because of the air-conditioning, was very chilly, about “thirty-two degrees,” Cohen recalled. Spector was also very loud, and the more people he had around him, the more wild and theatrical he became. Spector locked the door and Cohen reacted by saying, “
As long as we are locked up, we might as well write some songs together.” They went to the piano and started that night. For about a month they wrote (and drank) together and Cohen remembers it as a generous period, although he had to wear an overcoat almost constantly to work in Spector’s freezing home.

Cohen accepted Spector’s eccentricities, and found that period “
very charming and hospitable.” As for Spector’s genius? “
I thought the songs were excellent,” Cohen said. In the studio, however, it was a nightmare. Spector was menacing and paranoid. “
He kept a lot of guns around, armed bodyguards; bullets and wine bottles littered the floor.” With Spector brandishing a bottle of wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, the atmosphere was tense. At one point Spector pointed the loaded pistol at Cohen’s throat, cocked it, and said, “
I love you, Leonard.” Quietly, Cohen responded, “I
hope
you love me, Phil.” At another session, Spector pointed a revolver at the violinist, who quickly packed up and ran out. Songwriter Doc Pomus, who was there, reported that Cohen was actually pushed aside and ignored during the sessions and that Spector was so paranoid about the tapes that he took them home each night with an armed guard.

One night, Cohen and Spector were unexpectedly joined by Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, who sang backup on “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On.” The night before, Cohen and Harvey Kubernik from
Melody Maker
had gone to the Troubadour for a poetry reading by Ginsberg. The next evening, Ginsberg and Dylan were eating with Ronee Blakley at Cantor’s delicatessen on Fairfax when they learned that Cohen was recording with Spector at the Gold Star studios. They
dropped by and before long Hal Blaine, the drummer, was directing Ginsberg and Dylan in backing vocal parts. Spector also joined in on the song. However, Dylan wasn’t an influence on Cohen’s songwriting for this album; as Ginsberg noted, “
Dylan blew everybody’s mind, except Leonard’s.”

The recording of the song “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” was indicative of the album’s creation. The session began at 7:30 in the evening, but by 2:30 in the morning a complete take had not yet been made. The musicians were on double time after midnight; it escalated to quadruple time at 2:00 a.m. By 3:30 in the morning they had not even played the song all the way through yet. Spector took away the charts and prevented the musicians from playing more than six bars. Cohen sat crosslegged on the floor through most of this until around 4:00 a.m., when Spector clapped his hands and told Cohen to do the vocal. Approaching the microphone, a very tired Cohen sang the song flawlessly. Cohen has since said of the song, “
It’s direct and confessional. I wanted the lyrics in a tender setting rather than a harsh situation. At times that fusion was achieved. Sometimes the heart must roast on the fire like shish kebab.”

Cohen expected to find Spector in his Debussy period; instead, he found him in “
the full flower of his Wagnerian tempest.” Personally and musically he was out of control; he locked up the master tapes of the album and mixed them without Cohen’s knowledge or permission. Cohen had done only one take on the songs, what’s known as a scratch vocal (a simple one-track vocal to be replaced later with a more enhanced and prepared sound) and wanted to put on different vocals, but Spector went into hiding with the tapes. He added strings, horns, and a female choir, with Cohen’s groaning voice heard distantly in the mix. On “Iodine,” an enormous percussive Motown styled back beat thrusts itself between the lyrics and Cohen’s droning voice. “Fingerprints,” which on the lyric sheet looks like a conventional, downbeat complaint, becomes a primeval hoedown with long fiddle and steel-guitar breaks. “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On” is pure burlesque, pushing the sardonic lyric to new lows by using a punchy rhythm-and-blues style horn section. Purists objected to the overproduction, which buried Cohen’s lyrics.

The cover photograph showed a youthful Cohen in a white suit sitting between two attractive women in a Montreal Polynesian restaurant. One of the women is Suzanne and the other is Eva La Pierre, a French-Canadian model Cohen had met on Hydra some years earlier. Cohen disassociated himself from the album before its release in November 1977. He had initially agreed to the project because Spector liked his songs and he thought he might, with Spector’s help, break through to a wider audience. “
I know my work has a popular element but somehow it can’t readily manifest it,” he has remarked. In the press, he called the mix of the album a “catastrophe” and said that Spector had annihilated him. Cohen said he would shortly pay twenty thousand dollars to release himself from any promotion of the album. He did, however, conduct several New York interviews in the 54th Street offices of Warner Brothers to discuss the album. But in a February 1978
Crawdaddy
interview, he was critical of Spector: “
The listener could have been invited
into
the track rather than be prohibited from entering it … there is something inaccessible, something resistant about those tracks that should not have been there.” Still, Cohen admitted that Spector was “
capable of stunning melodies and production.” But music, he added, “does not come out of the mansion and the kind of tyranny he wants to impose.” Cohen later called the orchestrations “brilliant,” although he still criticized the use of the first voice takes and secret mixing. At one point, he thought, “
I should get myself some bodyguards and settle the whole affair on Sunset Boulevard.” Cohen sent Spector a pair of red holsters as a comic gesture of reconciliation.

Reaction to the album was largely negative.
Rolling Stone
headlined its review with
“Leonard Cohen’s doo-wop Nightmare.” The
Toronto Star
was less generous, declaring in large type, “
Leonard Cohen is for Musical Sadists.” An English paper described the union of Cohen and Spector as,
Doyen of Doom meets Teen Tycoon.
Saturday Night
, however, was more welcoming, saying the album was Cohen’s “
most significant step forward as a recording artist since his disc debut in 1967.” The album,
Rolling Stone
pronounced, is “
either greatly flawed or great
and
flawed.”

In the title song, “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” Cohen described a powerful but destructive love:

The song was a revealing coda on the death of longing, an update of his relationship with Suzanne. It was a time when “
every relationship I had broke down.
Every single relationship broke down
. There was nothing left standing.”

    I
N MARCH
1976, Cohen submitted the manuscript for what would become
Death of a Lady’s Man
, originally titled “My Life in Art.” He chose the singular rather than plural form of “lady’s” to emphasize his focus on an individual woman; for his album, with its similar title, he wanted to stress a multitude of women that may have caused his demise. After reading the work, one editor at McClelland & Stewart wrote, “
I must say that it is truly-to-God the most depressing thing I have read in a very long time.” But the editor did add that it was publishable and in many ways “superb.” Another editor, Lily Miller, began her report by saying that “Leonard Cohen was one of the reasons why I came to Canada.” She thought that the manuscript marked a new phase in his work, since each significant sequence ends with an expression of inadequacy, replacing the “constant
bragging” of his earlier work. There was a new depth of thought and self-criticism. “
I suggest,” she wrote, “that long discussions will be necessary to either justify or eliminate this turn of a new leaf.” Miller thought that “the earlier arrogance, the more recent sense of doom and impotence, seem here to have given way to something more mellow: an acceptance of human limitations, foibles, failures—and a love which can rise out of these very
weaknesses.” She wanted to publish it.

The manuscript went back to Cohen for revision, and six months later he returned it, retitled “The Final Revision of My Life in Art.” Plans had been made for a fall publication, and announcements and advance press galleys began to circulate. Initially, there were delays with the printers. Cooper & Beatty turned down the job “
because of language in the manuscript.” A second printer said that it could not meet the McClelland & Stewart schedule. A third printer, Accutext, finally set galleys for a September publication. But Jack McClelland was becoming frantic because he could not contact Cohen to finalize last-minute changes. Cohen had originally drawn illustrations for the back cover and the endpapers, but Miller had now rejected the use of Cohen’s illustrations and criticized the photo intended for the front cover. She wanted a strong front cover, possibly a drawing, and a photo of Cohen on the back: “
His drawings will only diminish the power of the book,” she wrote in a June 1977 memo. A subsequent memo said that without Cohen’s illustrations, they would be left with four blank pages. She suggested they get more poems from Cohen and, because of layout problems, four more lines for “The House.” The manuscript was again revised and resubmitted in November 1976 with a new title:
Death of a Lady’s Man
.

On August 10, 1977, Cohen notified Lily Miller that he was again delaying the book. In reworking it, he had written as much new material as they presently had. “
He feels very excited about the new work,” Miller wrote in a memo, “He feels it would add a whole new dimension to the book. However, it could not be available for another month’s time …” Written on the bottom of the note in Jack McClelland’s handwriting is the following: “
This is a grim development. I am most reluctant to postpone. He called and left number. Naturally, no answer when I called back. Will do my best.”

The following week a new problem emerged with the title: a prospective co-publisher objected to Cohen using the same title for his book and record album. Cohen was also “
pulled apart and uptight,” requiring a further delay. While McClelland told Cohen he would slow production for a while, he vented his frustration in an internal memo: Cohen “
says he is re-writing the God-damn book which is nice news at this stage…. I should tell you this is typical Cohen, [but] we’ll have to live with it. The book will be late but
I don’t think there is any point putting the pressure on him now.”

On August 11, McClelland reported that he had spoken to Cohen in California where he said that he hoped to finish the manuscript in less than a month. “
He says he is writing a 90-page commentary on the book itself. What ever the hell that means. I fear the worst.” Promotion plans remained incomplete, since a fall publication was now impossible. On August 18, a telegram arrived from Mt. Baldy, announcing, “
I DOUBT THAT I CAN FINISH BOOK IN 2 WEEKS OR EVEN 4 WEEKS. THERE HAS BEEN A FICTITIOUS URGENCY CONNECTED WITH THIS PROJECT FROM THE BEGINNING.
” Cohen told McClelland that he would simply have to wait for the finished book. McClelland replied the next day:

By October, McClelland was becoming less patient. In a long and detailed letter, he told Cohen that he had been forced to make an announcement to the book trade that the volume had been postponed again. The reason for the notice was that
Saturday Night
was about to do an article on Cohen and the delay of the book. McClelland pleaded with Cohen to tell him “
where we are heading so we can deal with the story.” The problem is that “the whole goddamn situation is in the public arena and we have to have some answers.”

The November 1977 article by Sandra Martin reviewed the situation, beginning with a November 1976 night in New York when Cohen gave McClelland the manuscript of the poems after sipping vodka and watching hockey on TV. “
Christ, Leonard,” McClelland was reported as saying,
“Death of a Lady’s Man!
With a title like that we don’t even need a manuscript.” Twice since that evening, McClelland had advertised the book in his catalogue of forthcoming books and twice had withdrawn it. By June, Cohen had finished his second version and appeared at a McClelland & Stewart sales conference to promote the book and the new album. A day later he was at the Courtyard Cafe in Toronto, pulling out a tape recorder and playing a few of the tracks from the album for his friends. In mid-August, with the second manuscript typeset, and at least three magazines ready with advance reviews from galleys, Cohen called and then cabled McClelland with the request to delay.
M&S
stopped its promotion of the book and put aside nearly ten thousand orders for the title. McClelland defended his position by saying, “
If Leonard were a normal author, I would be phoning once a week. But he always has been and always will be special.”