The Curious Case of a Canadian Crooner,
Or
Leonard Cohen, Find Me, I am Almost Thirty
(This article was published in the Equator Line Magazine, Issue 12 July-Oct 2105)
Some touch other parts.
Someone said
to me
That old man
burns a hole
Right inside
in your soul.
He drags
your pain out of your heart
And then
draws an anatomical chart
Dissects you
for fun
And some
lazy pun
The old
surgeon is so ruthless
He leaves no
scar
He should
have been dead
or at least
toothless
But look
he’s laughing at the bar.
Ladies and
gentlemen,
Mister
Leonard Cohen.
Mister Cohen
also has a sister Cohen. Esther Cohen. She passed away last year. I recently
realized this, that she had passed away, and that the writer Esther Cohen who’s
very much around, is not sister Cohen. I would have known this had I been a
true Cohen fan, following the threads on the Leonard Cohen Forum. But I’m not.
I am a lazy listener who listens to his songs, and tries lazily to write songs
like him. I even wrote lazy emails to Ed Sanders, his manager, who lazily wrote
back to me that he will try to show my poems to Leonard. Leonard never lazily
read my poetry, or if he did, he never lazily wrote back to me. I have all the
time, and I am sure he has all the time to reply. Time is always full, it’s us
who goes into a lull. Of course ‘full’ and ‘lull’ don’t rhyme but at least they
seem to, on paper. If Cohen can make ‘Marianne’ and ‘began’ rhyme in the song,
‘So Long Marianne’, I can try some odd
combinations too.
Coming back
to the matter of deceased sister Cohen, the writer Esther Cohen must have been
flummoxed, for there must have been anonymous readers of hers who thought it
was her. For the writer Esther is quite Cohenesque – her style of writing. She
writes on her blog that she receives Google updates about her name, and there
were quite a few when sister Cohen died. She also received a recent update
about another namesake having written a book called ‘Epidermis’. So many
homonyms, namesakes floating around in the sea of information overload.
Sometimes it feels that isn’t worth working for one’s name, for the number of
namesakes and gamesakes floating on the web.
Needless to
say, there is only one Leonard Cohen - Mister Leonard Cohen who has lasted from the
age of LPs to that of MP3s, from the age of being a radio star who has lasted
from a time when he sang a song about getting a fellatio from Janis Joplin
(Chelsea Hotel #2, New Skin for Old Ceremony, 1974), to when he sang a song
saying, “I ache in the places where I used to play” (Tower of Song, I’m Your
Man, 1988). Of course, our man did not age that fast between 1974 and 1988, but
it’s a prophetic song. Cohen turned 80 last year, and has come out with a new
album “Popular Problems” only last year. “Almost like the blues” from this
album is a rage. When he turned 70, ten years ago, Tim de Lisle came up with an
article, “Hallelujah: 70 things about Leonard Cohen at 70” in which he says
with wry and celebratory Cohenesque humour,
“His vocals have gone from a limited but appealing wail to a heroically smoky
rumble. Soon, he may be audible only to dogs.” Cohen himself has said that his
voice can barely carry a tune. There are hundreds of cover versions of his
songs, and yet somehow it’s his deep baritone, in which they sound perfect.
Cohen has
perfected the art of using the word “perfect.” The places where the word
appears, the usage is expectedly ironical, but there’s something more to it. In
a literary sense, it is a deconstructionist usage, or in Cohen’s own famous
words, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (One must
mark the offbeat rhyme here too – thing and in). Let’s take a look at some of
the perfect use of “perfect.”
·
“Ring the bells that can still ring/ Forget your
perfect offering/ There’s a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.”
(Selected Poems, 1956-1968, and the
song “Anthem” from the album ‘The Future’, 1992)
·
“The candles burned/ The moon went down/ The polished
hill/ The milky town/ Transparent, weightless, luminous/ Uncovering the two of
us On that fundamental ground/ Where love's unwilled, unleashed, Unbound/ And
half the perfect world is found” (Anjani and Leonard Cohen, ‘Half the Perfect World’, Blue Alert, 2006)
·
“It was only when you walked away I saw you had
the perfect ass. Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your
conversation.” (Poetry collection – The
Energy of Slaves, 1972)
There are
three distinct flavours to the quotes above, and yet each of these “perfects”
is about imperfections, about cracks. For the last quote and for many like that
(For example, “they don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song”)
Cohen has never been accused of being a misogynist. This may be because there’s
a certain gender neutrality to his loneliness, to his desolation.
Another
favourite Cohen word of mine is “almost”. He has, however, never used the
phrase “almost perfect”. Tautology is
not Mr Cohen’s business. Let’s begin
with the latest – “Almost Like the Blues.”
In his
almost five decade long public career, there have been shifts in Cohen’s style,
and that’s how he has almost survived, or may be survived perfectly. His voice
turns very political, intertwines the personal and the political, from an
intensely personal one from his album ‘The Future’ (1992) in which his dystopic
vision condemns the culture of conspicuous consumption and the rapacity of the
powers that be. “Almost like the blues” is a part of this style shift – “I saw
some people starving/There was murder, there was rape/Their villages were
burning/They were trying to escape/I couldn't meet their glances/I was staring
at my shoes/It was acid, it was tragic/It was almost like the blues.” (Leonard
Cohen and Leonard Patrick, Popular
Problems, 2014).
Another place where “almost” is almost
unforgettable in “So Long Marianne” – “We met when we were almost young/ Deep
in the green lilac park/ You held on to me like I was a crucifix/ As we went
kneeling through the dark.” The “almost young” haunts the listener here – it
calls out to the young and the old, and maybe the dead. Also, the shift in the
imagery from lilac park to crucifix is typically Cohen. The Sufis celebrated
the intertwining ishq majazi and ishq hakiki, that is the carnal and the
spiritual, but Cohen turns that idea on its head. He weds the Eros and the
Thanatos, while retaining the tradition of wedding the secular and the
mystic.
The packing
of this intense energy is his signature – the man is notorious for spending
years and years editing one song. He is clearly conscious of the irony of
Wordsworth’s idea of poetry being “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings….emotions
recollected in tranquility.” The song that I have consciously avoided till now
– “Hallelujah”, the most celebrated Cohen song, took five years and eighty
drafts to reach a studio version. Cohen says, “There are two schools of
songwriting, the quick and me.” That he has only 13 studio albums in a career
of fifty years is testimony to this claim. In an interview, he says that being
a poet is like daily wage labour; one goes to seek something every day, but one
is not sure if one will find something every day.
Another
place where Cohen uses “almost” and which is most memorable for me, is a poem
in Select Poems (1956-68). It goes like this – “Marita/ Please find me/ I am
almost 30
This is my
voice/ but I am only whispering/ The amazing vulgarity of your style/invites
men to think
of torturing
you to death”.
I do not
remember this from this poetry collection, but from a documentary about Leonard
Cohen, made way back in 1965. The documentary titled “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr
Leonard Cohen,” was produced by National Film Board of Canada, and directed by
Don Owen and Donald Brittain. The idea was a series of documentaries about
contemporary poets, but the project was abandoned after the first film, for the
others were allegedly not as charismatic as Cohen. In the documentary it’s
shown that Cohen has scribbled these lines – ‘Marita/ please find me/ I am
almost thirty’ on the wall of Le Bistro on Rue de la
Montagne. The poets would gather at a lot of these pubs and bistros. Of Le
Bistro, Cohen says in the documentary, "Le Bistro's like an irresponsible
sanctuary - you aren't sure whether the hounds are waiting inside, or whether
you've just left them".
It was 2010.
Cohen’s world tours had been on for a couple of years. His one-time secretary
Ms Kelley Lynch had defrauded him of millions of dollars. (Eventually she was
sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2013, on grounds of harassing him with
intimidating calls and emails.) Cohen who had retired from public life, had to
start singing at concerts in 2008. They were a runaway hit contrary to his
expectations, and his managers decided that this could be expanded to a world
tour. So, in 2010, I was in Sydney on a scholarship busy waking up Australians
named John Lang(1816-64) and Alice Richman (1856-81) and who the world had
quite forgotten. My scholarship and visa were both to end in October 2010. In
mid-October I got know from Nathan that Mr Cohen is coming to Sydney in
November (like I said earlier, I am a lazy fan). Nathan and I shared a very
special relationship – I used to tell him about Lang, and he narrated stories
about his eccentric great grandfather Sir Horace Eldred. He was doing a
photography project of shooting people at dawn and dusk every day, and I was
one of his models. We would share our love and life stories – he about his
wife, I about my girlfriend - listening to Leonard Cohen on a cliff at the
Coogee beach, missing certain words of the sonorous man because of the crashing
waves. So Nathan told me, and I said we could not miss this. I went to the visa
office to apply for an extension, a new tourist visa. The lady at the counter
asked me why I wanted to stay on. I said that I had been busy with work all
this while, and would like to indulge in some ‘tourism.’ She wasn’t convinced
and gave me another date for another interview. The next time her probing
questions made it clear that she suspected that I wanted to hang around for
some time to vanish or find some odd job. The lady in question herself was of
Indian origin by the way. After her thoughts were clear to me I looked straight
in her eye and told her, “Look it’s not about Australia. It is about a Canadian
singer called Leonard Cohen who is coming here. I need just nine days, I have
been here nine months.” Her eyes dropped, and the visa was stamped. So there we
were – Nathan, Liz and me at the Olympic arena, sipping on wine and cheering Mr
Cohen. Nathan said to me after a couple of glasses, “We are the biggest fans of
this man who keeps singing ‘I’m your man’. We need to do something about it.” I
nodded. It was quite an experience to see the old man croon away for over three
hours. He matched the chorus girls who would also break into some acrobatics
every now and then, in his energy and enthusiasm. There was an interval in
between. The crew packed up, Leonard Cohen put down his mic. Nathan and I
looked at each other, we both got up without exchanging words and shouted,
“Leonard Cohen, find me, I am almost thirty.” In the glare of those lights I
wonder if he spotted us. But he stopped his colleagues with a wave, took a bow,
and sang, “So Long Marianne” which of course also features a line with “almost”
– “we met when we were almost young.” He did not find us, but we had almost met
him.
My memory
may not serve me well, we all make up stories in hindsight. However, when I
went to Sydney this year and asked what had happened that night, Nathan came up
with a similar story as I have just told.
I am almost
aware that this essay is almost coded, that it assumes a pre-knowledge of Cohen
and the Cohenesque. However, given that a thousand websites will tell you a
thousand things about him, I thought it best to peep than leap in linearity. This
is ironic, because despite spending time in a college heavy on music with Dylan
or Lennon or Floyd spouting out of every window, I did not know Cohen. I liked
him precisely because he was not known, he was not Che Guevara or Zimmerman of
the tee shirts. Cohen’s world tours begin in Canada, go to USA, Europe and
Turkey and then take a leap to Australia. His underdoggedness in this part of the world has its own appeal.
A senior had fought bitterly with his girlfriend, and was sulking listening to
a cassette, the lyrics of which caught my attention. I suddenly asked him,
“What is this music?” He snapped back, “You are not interested in what I am
saying. Take the cassette and bugger off. It is a tribute album to someone
called Leonard Cohen. Obscure, depressing man.” The album was “Tower of Song”
(1995) with amazing renditions of ‘Hallelujah’ by Bono, ‘Coming back to you’ by
Trisha Yearwood, and ‘If it be your will’ by Jann Arden. I recently found a
book gifted to me by someone some years ago, with an inscription, “I can’t
believe you made me like the voice of that Bono guy in Hallelujah.” I am
contemplating suing Mr Cohen for stunting my musical growth. His laziness made
me too lazy to listen to many other people.
Leonard
Cohen was almost a novelist. Some of his listeners, who are not readers of him,
may have missed that. I often lapse into using the full name because of the
documentary ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen’ and also because I read
once in my searches for Cohen news, on Daily New NY, someone said she has two
dogs – one is called Leonard Cohen and the other Jennifer Lopez, and that they
answer only to their full names, and that people turn around to see if
celebrities are around. It’s quite a leap from naming pets after lions and
extinct tribes. So Leonard Cohen wrote The
Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful
Losers (1966) apart from various books of poetry. He was a very successful
poet; the documentary that’s been mentioned was made because of his poetic
prowess – he wasn’t a singer yet. He had enough money to buy a mansion in
Hydra, a Greek island, and spend time there writing his poetry. The Favourite Game is a coming-of-age
novel , with a boy besotted with words and women. It has got Cohen’s satire,
dry humour, fine use of language. Pity that we lost a novelist to a
singer-songwriter. Beautiful Losers
is another story. It is so heavy that it
took me several restarts and stops to finish it. Apparently, Cohen had written
it in a couple of spurts at Hydra, fasting and leading an austere life to
concentrate. And it resulted in a harsh, dense concentrate of symbolism. A folk
singer, his native wife and his best friend, a member of parliament are a
triangle – they are all sexually involved with each other, with the shadow of a
lost figure from history, Catherine Tekakwitha, looming in the background. The
novel received hostile reviews, and became successful only posthumously, that
is when Cohen left novel writing to become a singer. Good sense prevailed over Cohen and he became
a singer at the age of 35. He wore dapper suits, unable to change at that age,
and was accused of abetting suicides with his profoundly cynical lyrics, but
himself did not commit it, because he was no longer 27, the age that is
famously the pocket hole of suicide for celebrities.
In the
meantime, we have almost forgotten the matter of ‘sister Cohen’. There are
other sisters Cohen. Felicity Bruiski and Tanita Tikaram have been called
‘female Leonard Cohen’ by his fans. I am sure both of them despise the idea.
And then there are the “Sisters of mercy” – the song whose lyrics have been
quoted in a million places, a song from Cohen’s debut album. Cohen packs
romance, jealousy, grief, despair, empathy, self-critique and may be something
else into this short song with lines like these -
“When I left
they were sleeping, I hope you run into them soon/ Don't turn on the lights,
you can read their address by the moon./And you won't make me jealous if I hear
that they sweetened your night:/We weren't lovers like that and besides it
would still be all right.” Robert Altman, the filmmaker, had heard this song
and others of Leonard’s debut album, and loved it. He had worn out a Cohen LP,
and got another one, and then forgotten about the matter. He had finished
shooting McCabe and Mrs Miller, when
he heard Cohen’s music at a party again. It struck him like lightning that this
was the music for his film. He called up Cohen and tried to cajole him by
mentioning his hit movie MASH. Cohen hadn’t heard of MASH, but had seen his
flop movie Brewster McCloud and had
loved it. He agreed to give his music, but the movie was of Warner and Cohen’s
record on Columbia. Mr Cohen arranged for everything just fine, and also
ensured royalty for Altman on the music. This is a famous story -and there’s
more to it as well - but there should be at least one famous story. Leonard
Cohen’s songs have lifted many films, and it almost appears these pre-written
songs were meant to be in these movies. Whether it be McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971),
Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana (1971) , “Waiting for a miracle” in Natural Born Killers (1994), or Duck
(2005) or many others, the songs are perfectly in sync with cinematography.
Apart from
being a singer and one sung about, apart from being a lover and a beloved,
Leonard Cohen also almost stopped a riot forty five years ago. On August 31,
1970, at the Isle of Wight festival , the winds were blowing fast and
distorting the sound system, and Jimi Hendrix did something in his aggressive
performance to upset some of the audience. They started tearing down equipment
and putting things on fire. Leonard Cohen was woken up from his slumber and he
put the rioting audience to slumber. Stacey Anderson says in Rolling Stone in
2011, “The sleepy musician grabbed
his guitar and took the stage; his gentle, courteous attitude toward the
audience and elegantly spare takes on his poetic tunes (including "Bird on
the Wire" and "Suzanne") worked quiet magic on the mob. The
35-year-old Cohen kept the crowd spellbound, preventing further destruction and
danger to all present.”
The one song that can almost sum up
Leonard Cohen’s life is “Tower of Song”. He says, “I said to Hank Williams: how
lonely does it get?/ Hank Williams hasn't answered yet/ But I hear him coughing
all night long/ A hundred floors above me/ In the Tower of Song.” Cohen is
aware of his position in the history of literature and music, and he’s also
aware of the eternal loneliness of creative pursuit. He knows that the human
condition is that of being born in a hole of memory – “I was born like this, I
had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” And he knows that
this hole of memory is not going to be disturbed by anything – “And you can
stick your little pins in that voodoo doll/ I’m very sorry baby/ Doesn’t look
like me at all.” His secretary making him bankrupt, the heartbreaks, the changing market of music –
nothing dethroned Cohen, for he kept changing. The doll never looked like him
at all.
I have almost betrayed the epigraph that
this essay began with. One never really got around to discussing how the old
man burns holes in people’s souls. He does, “everybody knows,” as Cohen says.
Almost at the end, let us look at the beginning of Beautful Losers. Cohen begins the text with
“Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are
you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you Iroquois Virgin?” He goes on to ask
more.
Let us put him through the same.
Leonard Cohen, who are you? Are you
(1934-ruthless, but not toothless?)? Is that enough? Are you the Canadian
Casanova? Are you Ladies’ Man? Or are you the Death of A Ladies’ Man? You do
not discuss your ladies or tailors with people. But do you discuss your ladies
with your tailors, and your tailors with your ladies? Are you a Zen Monk? Or a
monkey with a plywood violin? Did you not run away from Roshi having drawn a
silly caricature with a silly excuse scribbled underneath? Have you led a
wayword life to have a way with words? Did you make your secretary steal your
money so that you could wander again? Will you only make me listen to your
songs, or will you listen to my songs as well? Is it almost like the blues?
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen.