Various Positions (36 page)

Depressed at the lackluster reception of his work, Cohen returned to touring. On May 5, 1985, he played Carnegie Hall, his first New York concert in ten years. A month later he performed at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, where he referred to himself as “
an old veteran of the rainbows, rambling on in his invisible trench.” Dressed in black and playing a black acoustic guitar, Cohen sang new compositions like “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and a rollicking “Diamonds in the Mine.” Afterwards, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Al Kooper visited him backstage to congratulate him.

The 1985 tour was his most extensive, encompassing Europe, North America, Australia, and Israel. In Poland, solidarity, the independent trade union that would shortly oust the dictatorial Polish government, asked him to perform and he discovered he was something of a hero to the movement. He declined, however, because of the band’s fear of the political tension that might suddenly surround the concert and their tour. When he arrived, he received a note from Lech Walesa, the trade
unionist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and would later become president of the country. A pirated double cassette from one performance circulated as
Cohen in Warsaw, 22 March 1985
with twenty-one songs from the concert.

Between January and July Cohen performed seventy-seven concerts. Women, he said, were what kept him sane on the road. Otherwise, it was just hotel rooms, the bus, and bad food.

    B
ACK IN LOS ANGELES
Cohen became involved in a fresh project: an album of his songs recorded by Jennifer Warnes. She and Cohen had remained close since the days when she had sung background vocals for his band. He had even provided “
deep rescue” for her in 1974 when her boyfriend was murdered. “
Leonard made sure I wasn’t going to sink,” she said. When her solo career began to flag, she asked Cohen if she could join him on the new 1979 tour. He discouraged her from singing back up because it might impede a solo career but Warnes said she needed to write and the tour would allow her to do that.
“Leonard’s tours are catalysts for change,” Warnes said, “and whatever is bubbling underneath comes up and you go through it on tour … the tour always pushed people to their next spot.” The reason? There was “too much fire.”

In 1984, Warnes and Cohen were walking around his neighborhood—she had been a guest in his house for several months—discussing the aids crisis, which was just reaching the public. No longer could people be casual about sex; an iron door had shut. “
This is horrible,” she confided to him. “What are people going to do; they won’t stop loving each other.” “Well, honey,” he responded, “there ain’t no cure for love.” “I think you should write something about that,” she replied. Several weeks later, he called and said, “I wrote you this song and it’s called ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love.’”

It was Warnes and Roscoe Beck of Passenger who first had the idea of Warnes making a record exclusively of Cohen songs. At first, Cohen was skeptical of the project, but Warnes was confident:
“
I
knew that I saw something within the songs that he didn’t.” The major record companies disagreed and quickly turned down the proposal. It looked as if the project would die until they met the executives at Cypress Records who decided to take a chance. Throughout 1986, recording sessions took place in Los Angeles, with Cohen flying out from Montreal, where he had been living, for a four-month stint to assist with production and the adjustment of lyrics. On “
First We Take Manhattan,” which he had recorded before he gave the song to Warnes, he rewrote the bridge several times because she disliked the two stanzas that begin with “
And I thank you for those items that you sent me, the monkey and the plywood violin.” Warnes also sings a different middle and concluding verse to “Ain’t No Cure for Love.” Cohen would often appear unannounced at the recording studio, glaring at Warnes through the glass until he felt she got the phrasing of a particular lyric right. But Warnes always felt she sang better when he was there.

After one session in the late spring of 1986, Cohen and Warnes went out for dinner at Mario’s in Hollywood and she asked him about the album cover. On a napkin he rapidly sketched a torch held by two hands and the phrase “Jenny Sings Lenny.” But Cohen’s title and drawing weren’t used; instead, the album was released as
Famous Blue Raincoat
, with the image of a battered blue raincoat on the front. Cohen, of course, preferred the torch and two hands.

The album was a hit, reaching number eight in the United States; for seven weeks it held a top spot in England, and went gold in Canada. One
critic said
Famous Blue Raincoat
had made Cohen’s voice respectable again in America. “
It has been conclusively established that I do not know how to sing,” Cohen said, “but, like the bumblebee who defies the laws of aerodynamics, I persist … and I soar.”

Famous Blue Raincoat
demonstrated a wide musical range, from the pulsating guitar work of Stevie Ray Vaughan on “First We Take Manhattan,” to the oddly grating voice of Cohen in duet with Warnes on “Joan of Arc” and the lyricism of Warnes on “Came so Far for Beauty.” With sales of over 1.5 million, the album was a commercial success and got radio play. Several critics have suggested that without this album Cohen’s re-emergence on the American scene could not have occurred, but Warnes never believed the album overshadowed Cohen or his singing.

What Warnes found so remarkable in Cohen’s songs was their ability to “
pry open your heart with a crowbar.” Cohen changed the way she regarded music. His singing and its effect on his audiences was “
the place where God and sex and literature meet … I’ve never known anyone with more courage to go where all of us are afraid to go.” And she always recalls Cohen’s remark that the divine, not the devil, can be found in the details: “
Your most particular answer will be your most universal one,” he once told her. She felt that his songwriting ability was unparalleled:

And Cohen found Warnes’ sound extraordinary: “
Her voice is like the California weather, filled with sunlight. But there is an earthquake behind it. It is that tension that I think defines Jennifer’s remarkable gift.” He often refers to her as the most underrated singer in America and has said that “
if you want to hear what a woman is thinking, if you want to hear what a woman sounds like in 1992, listen to Jennifer Warnes.”

At a Los Angeles warehouse to watch the filming of the Warnes’ video “First We Take Manhattan,” Cohen was photographed by publicist Sharon Weisz in his dark glasses, charcoal gray pin-striped suit, and
white T-shirt, eating a banana. For him, the image was precise and revealing:

The only thing wrong, of course, is that he was caught holding a half-eaten banana.

He admired the photo so much that it became the signature image for his 1988 hit album
I’m Your Man
, and the poster image of his 1988 world tour.

————

DURING
the production and release of
Famous Blue Raincoat
, Cohen kept active by writing, traveling between the east and west coasts, trying his hand at acting, and giving readings. A cameo role in the television series
Miami Vice
as the head of interpol drew more on his presence than his acting, and most of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. His role was praised but he was eventually fired, his lines rewritten for another actor. From March through May 1986, he did several readings, including one at New York’s Carnival of the Spoken Word.

He sang on a compilation album to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Lorca entitled
Poetas en Nueva York
. His contribution, “Take This Waltz,” was recorded in September 1986 in Paris; a month later he participated in a celebration of the poet’s work in Granada. In the house near Granada where Lorca was born, Cohen starred in a CBS video of his song, hopping like a kangaroo and then standing on his head for nearly four minutes. “
I thought we should do something wilder, surreal
[because] that’s what Lorca brought us—surrealism.” For his translation of the Lorca poem that became “Take This Waltz,” he reportedly worked one hundred and fifty hours. During the filming, a Japanese tourist asked Cohen if he was a famous Spanish actor. “
No, I’m a famous nobody,” he replied.

In New York, another musical based on his work appeared:
Sincerely, L. Cohen
, put on by the Medicine Show Theater Company in June 1987. Directed and arranged by Barbara Vann, it grew out of a popular set of readings of his work done in New York in 1986. Cohen assisted in the selection of material, and the success of the production marked the renewed interest in his work; he had re-emerged, and journalists noted that although Cohen might have been out of fashion, he was never far from the scene.
Chatelaine
, a Canadian women’s magazine, voted him one of the “Ten Sexiest Men in Canada” that year.

Roshi continued to animate his life. An anniversary gathering was held for him at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 4, 1987, marking Roshi’s twenty-five years in America. To commemorate the event,
The Zen of Myoshin-ji Comes to the West
appeared in a limited edition of two hundred numbered copies. In pictures and prose, it told the story of Roshi’s life as the child of farmers, his arrival in America, his efforts at establishing a vibrant school of Rinzai in America, the success of his teaching, and the many centers then in existence in California, New Mexico, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico. Cohen participated in the production of the book and the gala evening.

————

COHEN EXPERIENCED
intense depressions as he struggled with the songs for
I’m Your Man
. His relationship with Dominique was faltering. His depression was recurrent and he retried a variety of solutions from the past: travel, Zen, sex, drugs, Judaism, exercise. This time he read a book titled
The Positive Value of Depression
and consulted the work of the mystical Hasidic rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who treated depression as a “holy condition.” But recording the album became a difficult process. “
It broke down a lot,” he said, “I had to leave it many times and I spent
a lot of money and my judgments were all wrong. In the middle of recording, I realized that the lyrics were all wrong, and they’d already taken a year or two to write.” Cohen went into the studio with what he thought were finished songs, but “
I couldn’t get behind the lyrics, even though they had taken months and sometimes years to finish. Although they had a certain integrity, they didn’t represent me accurately enough. I couldn’t find a voice for them. So I had to start over almost every song.” This album, he explained, was more holistic than the others, possessing a unified vision, although it had been recorded in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Paris.

The work had paid off. The album shot to the top of the charts in England when it was released on February 14, 1988, and it was nominated for album of the year in both England and the U.S. It remained number one for seventeen weeks in Norway and for almost as long in Spain. Sales in the United States, however, were low, despite an enthusiastic critical response. He was outside the commercial system. “
Everything is public and the commercial institutions are now the landscaping of this public world,” Cohen said. “There’s nowhere else for you to exist … Unless you are in the system here, you don’t exist.” CBS Records awarded Cohen a Crystal Globe award, reserved for performers who have sold more than five million albums overseas. At the ceremony, Cohen commented that “
I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.”
I’m Your Man
helped restore Cohen’s commerical appeal and re-invent the sixties’ bohemian as an eighties’ hipster.

The album opens with “First We Take Manhattan,” originally called “In Old Berlin.” It plays with certain geo-political ideas then in the air, he explained to an Oslo interviewer: extremism, terrorism, fundamentalism. They are all attractive positions because they lack ambiguity; such dogmatism is always seductive, he added, because of its “
total commitment to a position without any qualifications, without any conditions … there is some kind of secret life we lead in which we imagine ourselves changing things, not violently, maybe gracefully, maybe elegantly in a very imaginative way and with the shake of a hand. The song speaks of longing for change, impatience with the way things are, a longing for significance; we deal in the purest burning logic of longing.” Two years later, he referred to the song as a “
demented manifesto,” although he also
reported that it became so popular in Athens that people were greeting each other in Greek by saying, “First, we take Manhattan,” the other person replying with “Then we take Berlin!”

“Take This Waltz” was an elegant rendition of the Lorca poem originally recorded on
Poetas en Nueva York
. Expanding the images and adding a stronger, surrealistic element to the original poem, Cohen augmented the verse with music. The poem as song becomes a metacommentary on the deathly tradition it possesses, clarified by the refrain: “
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz. With its very own breath of brandy and Death. Dragging its tail in the sea.” Lorca sought “
to get at the dramatic depths of the ballad and set them into action.” The basis for such evocation are the slow movements which “
ought to be the plastic algebra of a drama of passion and pain.” Lorca’s phrase “plastic algebra” is pure Cohen, an expression he could have made up. To a Spanish journalist Cohen said that Lorca’s transcendental vision taught him that poetry can be pure and profound, as well as popular.