Various Positions (41 page)

In August 1996 Cohen became ordained as a Zen monk, taking the name “Jikan” (“Silent One”) as an expression of his almost thirty-year
involvement with the rigorous Rinzai Zen movement and continuing commitment to its leader, Joshu Saski Roshi. That same month, Cohen and his sister gave up their Montreal home, severing their familial tie with Westmount, although the opening that year of the Centre Zen de la Main in downtown Montreal established a new connection with the city for Cohen. While generally keeping a low profile, he did make a surprise appearance in March 1997 at Irving Layton’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal.

In his remarks, Cohen reiterated the nature of their relationship, summarizing their often marathon conversations when Cohen would unveil his aspirations, and Layton would always respond with, “Leonard, are you sure you’re doing the wrong thing?” Cohen then recounted how they negotiated a fruitful exchange. Cohen would offer his sartorial expertise to Layton, who replied, “I’m going to make you a deal. You teach me about clothing and I’ll teach you how to live forever.” The deal lasted until Layton died at the age of ninety-three on January 4, 2006, after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Cohen was a pallbearer for his mentor, looking grim-faced and distressed. He dedicated
Book of Longing
, published just three months later, to Layton, and included several poems about their long relationship in the volume.

While Cohen the man kept largely out of sight, his artistry continued to permeate popular culture, exerting a powerful influence on younger singers and artists. In Bruce Wagner’s 1996 Hollywood noir novel,
I’m Losing You
, Cohen apparently even had the power to redeem an entire Canadian city:
“Hate
Toronto, always have,” says a character. “The only good thing about it is Leonard Cohen, and he’s from Montreal,
n’est-ce pas?” Breaking the Waves
, an erotic/metaphysical movie by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, which won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes in 1996, features “Suzanne,” a song also highlighted in a March 1997 episode of the successful CBC-TV satirical series by Ken Finkelman
The Newsroom
. And Armelle Brusq, a young French artist, created a documentary about his life in retreat that aired on European TV in March 1997 with important footage of Cohen at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center and in Los Angeles. It shows Cohen composing on his synthesizer and computer in his cabin and ends with him singing “(I was) Never Any Good (at loving you),” released in October 1997 on the
More Best of Leonard Cohen
compilation.

Cohen continued to have his work reissued and new work recorded. But after the release of
More Best of Leonard Cohen
, which marked thirty years with his record company, he felt it was time to ensure his financial future. With the help of his longtime manager Kelley Lynch, he sold his music publishing company to the Sony Music Corporation in a deal that gave him a staggered payout of nearly $5 million in 1997 and then almost $8 million in 2001. It was a move that would prove to have both surprising and disastrous repercussions for him.

But Cohen’s focus at the time was more concentrated on the spiritual side of life. In January 1999, he made a decision to leave Mt. Baldy to make a pilgrimage to Mumbai to study with Ramesh Balsekar. A retired bank president educated in England who became a guru, Balsekar, who was then eighty-two, held dialogues seven days a week at his home in the Breach Candy district of Mumbai, near the Mahalaksmi Temple. Balsekar espouses a philosophy that “consciousness is all there is” and that there is “thinking but no thinker, doing but no doer, experience but no experiencer,” as he told Cohen in a set of dialogues recorded amid a background of birds, trucks, street noise, and laughter. In seeking to remove the ego—“there has never been a me” Balsekar teaches—Cohen found spiritual sustenance and a direction that supplemented the teachings of the Rinzai Zen movement. He found great meaning condensed in Balsekar’s statement that “understanding is consciousness disidentifying with me as the doer.”

The concept that so attracted Cohen was that creativity comes from outside the self: a poem, a song, a thought just happen—although in his case, slowly. Things “do” themselves and are not generated from within the self. Cohen’s humbleness concerning his “gift” reflects his acceptance and appreciation of inspiration as it moves him to write, to sing, or to draw. As he remarked in a recent interview, “I don’t operate at a buffet table where I can choose among the delicacies, a poem today, a sandwich tomorrow.” Art happens, although never easily: “Most of the time, you’re scratching the bottom of the barrel and nothing is coming.” Cohen initially went to Ramesh Balsekar because he found “resonances” between his teachings in such books as
Ultimate Understanding
and the teachings of Roshi. What Cohen didn’t know was that he was soon to face a personal crisis of potential ruin and deep betrayal in which Balsekar’s essential
message—what happens, happens, and is to be accepted—would help him enormously. Cohen returned to Los Angeles to resume his writing.

Ten New Songs
, his first album of original material since 1992’s
The Future
, came out in 2001. Within a week of its release, it was the #1 album in Denmark, #3 in Israel and #4 in Italy. In Canada, it went platinum. In all of these markets, his sales showed that he had more than a cult following. A minimalist work,
Ten New Songs
is a spare and musically direct album, beginning with its unadorned title, his most understated since
Songs from a Room
(1969). The songs, however, are lyrically rich, complex expressions with new favorites such as “In My Secret Life,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” “Here It Is,” “By the Rivers Dark,” and “Boogie Street.” They reflect an intensity that grows in clarity and force as a lyric from “In My Secret Life” expresses: “I know what is wrong, / And I know what is right./ And I’d die for the truth/ In My Secret Life.”

The recording method was unusual for Cohen. He gave Sharon Robinson, a former backup singer and now record producer, some demo tracks he’d recorded at Mt. Baldy, and she selected material she thought might form songs. She then began to write melodies, creating instrumental tracks from samples and adding her own scratch lead vocals. She then transferred the songs to an eight-track recorder for Cohen to work on; songs were literally built up in layers by the two of them.

A rough mix was put on two tracks with the other six tracks left open for Cohen’s vocals, which he added in the studio he built above the garage of his L.A. home. Recording at home in the early hours allowed Cohen to do the vocals in “a luxurious way,” he says. “I was able to take the time to find exactly the right mood for the narrator, until the vocals married with the track and the song’s content so the voice represented the song rather than simply unfolded it.” Cutting vocals at home was also a lot cheaper than renting a studio. And the vocals, he added, are not as spare as they first sound: “You can lean on it, relax into it. There are doors and windows you can enter if you have the time.”

When Cohen was satisfied with a vocal track, he would send it back to Robinson, and she would complete the arrangements by adding sampled instruments and her background vocals. In keeping with his desire to contrast his gritty voice against a lush background, some of the songs feature
as many as twenty backing vocal tracks, all performed by Robinson. Occasionally, she found herself singing doubled three-part harmony.

Originally, Cohen and Robinson intended to use other musicians and backup singers to complete the songs; her vocals were only to sketch out ideas to be sung in sessions by others. But Cohen fell in love with the sound of the sampled instruments and Robinson’s layers. Additional singers, they decided, were not necessary. Also, most of Cohen’s vocals were contiguous performances with little overdubbing of words or phrases. The sound engineer, who had to edit out nighttime noises of dogs barking and cars driving by Cohen’s garage studio, used very little compression on his voice, creating a translucent sound best described as “cool,” a term often applied to the techniques of such minimalists as Steve Reich or Philip Glass.

The reissuing of Cohen’s earlier work continued in the new millennium, notably with a Chinese edition of his novel
Beautiful Losers
in 2000. For the translation, Cohen composed “A Note to the Reader,” beginning with explaining how honored he felt on seeing “the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters.” He then disarmingly instructs his future readers to skip the parts they don’t like and read only the passages that “resonate with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.” He ends by thanking readers for any interest in “this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer,” and admits that when he wrote it outside at his house on Hydra, he never covered his head, so “what you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.”

Another early work newly available was
Field Commander Cohen
(2001), a recording of twelve songs from a 1979 British concert. It includes “Field Commander Cohen,” “Lover, Lover, Lover,” and “Why Don’t You Try,” an early duet with Sharon Robinson. A double album of thirty-one songs,
The Essential Leonard Cohen
(2002) followed and then a UK double album,
Mojo Presents An Introduction to Leonard Cohen
, in which the editors of the British rock magazine picked their twenty-three essential Cohen tracks. One measure of his artistic vitality was his nomination in February 2002 for four Canadian Juno Awards—Best Artist, Best Songwriter, Best Pop Album, and Best Video (“In My Secret Life”)—for
Ten New Songs
. In October 2003 he was elevated to Companion of the Order of Canada
(Canada’s highest civilian honor) at a ceremony conducted by the then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson at Rideau Hall in Ottawa.

Cohen released his eleventh album,
Dear Heather
, in 2004, a collection of thirteen studio songs plus a live track of “Tennessee Waltz.” Dedicated to his late book publisher Jack McClelland,
Dear Heather
tied together poetry and song in a mix of music and verse recital. Its uneven reception—
Stylus
magazine called it “an album of eulogies” and cited “dated keyboard effects” and “obscure lyric repeats”—reflected his approach to the material. He told a reporter in 2006 that the album was more like a “preface, or display of the palette of all the circumstances and influences in my life” than a finished work. While it feels like a sketch of an as-yet-unfinished album, several songs do stand out, including “There for You,” written by Cohen and Sharon Robinson and “On That Day,” a meditation on 9/11 written with Anjani Thomas. Cohen frequently and graciously lets his female collaborators share the limelight, going back to Jennifer Warnes, Perla Batalla, Julie Christiansen, Sharon Robinson, and now Anjani Thomas. He also included a musical nod to his literary past on the album: “To a Teacher” is a song in praise of the Canadian poet A.M. Klein.

Cohen’s seventieth birthday on September 21, 2004 was a time for rejoicing, with Finland leading the way by issuing a stamp in his honor, and Canada lagging behind with only a CBC radio testimonial and the occasional newspaper article. But there was universal praise for his work, influence, and importance and various tribute albums appeared.

But in that same year, Cohen learned that he had been duped by both his longtime manager and a Colorado financial advisor. As Cohen stated in an email message, his new occupation became “fighting crime in tinsel town.” His attitude, however, remained philosophical. Referring to what he called his “pesky troubles,” he remarked that “it’s all enough to put a dent in one’s mood but fortunately it hasn’t, [although] certainly it’s an enterprise I could have done without.” He also offered an interesting insight: “The troubles have proved very nourishing in their way. In its fashion, my dilemma has created a landscape that has allowed me to do a great deal of work [and] the work itself has brought some blessings.”

His “pesky troubles” made the cover of
Maclean’s
magazine’s August 22, 2005 issue, confirming the severity of the situation and his willingness, quite uncharacteristically, to go public with his story. The article details the legal
battle of suits and countersuits following his discovery that he had been defrauded of almost all of his savings. “I was devastated” he told
Maclean’s
senior writer Brian D. Johnson, but “you know, God gave me a strong inner core, so I wasn’t shattered. But I was deeply concerned.” Since that time, Cohen has won a $9.5 million decision against his former manager in a civil suit, but is still facing a long battle to actually restore his funds.

Other events have offset the situation, including an effort in March 2005 by the Canadian media to nominate Cohen for a Nobel Prize. Articles, letters, and essays in support of the nomination brought renewed attention to his work. And in the summer of 2005 there was the discovery by several energetic Edmonton “Cohenites” of new details concerning the origin of the song, “Sisters of Mercy,” something I had got wrong in my original biographical account. I had claimed that in 1966 Cohen met two young women in a snowstorm and brought them back to his room as he described on
The Best of Leonard Cohen:
“This was written in a few hours one winter night in a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta. Barbara and Lorraine were sleeping on the couch. The room was filled with moonlight reflected off the ice of the North Saskatchewan River. I had it ready for them when they woke up.”

The full story was pulled together from formerly overlooked articles published in the University of Alberta student paper,
Gateway
, in anticipation of Cohen’s visit there, and several recent interviews.

In the fall of 1966, Cohen was near the height of his notoriety, having already published three books of poetry and his first novel. He was receiving much attention as a Beat-styled Canadian poet in the mold of Allen Ginsberg, and he added to his mystique by living part of the year in Greece on the island of Hydra and projecting himself as the bohemian of Canadian letters in films such as the National Film Board’s
Ladies and Gentlemen …Mr. Leonard Cohen
(1965).