10
WITH ITS EMPHASIS on suffering, Zen remained a constant attraction for Cohen. Concentrating on meditation and rejecting materialism, Zen complemented the austerity he had pursued in Greece. “I needed so much / To have nothing to touch / I’ve always been greedy that way,” he sings in “The Night Comes On.” He also valued Zen’s focus on the individual as the key to salvation: “If you want to see God, you must realize the basis of your self,” Roshi had proclaimed.
Cohen sought Roshi’s counsel in all things, including his music. He invited his Zen master to a recording session of New Skin for the Old Ceremony. The next day at breakfast Roshi told Cohen, “You should sing sadder.” Cohen felt that he lacked the courage or the ability to explore his malaise. “I need to go deeper, always deeper,” he said in 1991. One of his attractions to Zen was that it forced him to go deeper and discover new truths about himself. It also allowed him to write with greater simplicity and purity. Although Cohen doubted the strength of his material, he did believe that from the mid-seventies through the early eighties at least his voice was true. Zen, he thought, would make his work accessible to himself.
On his earliest visits to Mt. Baldy, Cohen found the regime too difficult. But if the discipline was too much, the ideas were seductive and he perservered. During the mid-seventies Cohen made regular visits to the Zen retreat, where he immersed himself in the rigors of Zen practice. From the 3:00 a.m. rising to the hours of sitting, zazen, and then sanzen, and personal interviews with Roshi, Cohen gained the spiritual vocabulary he sought. He learned how to get rid of the baggage that prevented him from deepening his work. “When I go there,” he reported in 1980, “it’s like scraping off the rust.”
While Zen was helping him with his work, he was still struggling with love, as a passage in Death of A Lady’s Man outlines. In a sunlit suite of the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, Cohen describes himself in the arms of a beautiful American woman, agitated and staring at the clock. His desires are fulfilled, but he is also at “the end of [his] life in art.” At forty-one, love has brought death, not life, to his creativity: “Six-fifty [a.m.]. Ruined in Los Angeles … I want to die in her arms and leave her.” The desire for women no longer satisfies him; the reality of their being possessed tarnishes his idolatry of them. “I swim in your love but I drown in loneliness.” As he would later sing, “I came so far for beauty / I left so much behind / My patience and my family / My masterpiece unsigned.”
A contradiction remained at the center of his life expressed by the idea of “Tibetan Desire.” The phrase, appearing in Beautiful Losers, represents the unholy union between renunciation and longing and the difficulty in divorcing one from the other. For Cohen, they do not cancel but complement each other. Intensifying the need for denial is the determination to possess by pleasure what cannot be attained by sacrifice. The two forces interact rather than collide, creating a desperate synergy that drives his work. The spiritual feeds the physical; the physical nourishes the spiritual. Zen and passion are the twin points of this condition in which there are no victors.
Throughout the summer of 1974, Cohen attempted to resolve these issues in a new work, conceived as a novel but experimental in form. It included prose, poetry, memoir, and journals. A remarkable, unpublished document, it contained three separate divisions: “The Dictation,” “Among Yellow Daisies, Summer 1975,” and “Random Evidence and Subtle Visitors, 1972–1975.” The sections dealt with his visit to Israel, with Hydra, and with Montreal.
He began the text in the stone basement of his Hydra home during a four-day fast and with only oil lamps to light the page. “I am growing sick in the monastery of marriage. This book is the mind of marriage,” he declares at the outset. Despite Cohen’s anger with both the marriage and Suzanne, it was she who helped Cohen arrange the materials of the first draft.
The text is constantly self-referential and critical of Suzanne:
Once I walked across the polished stages of all Europe. The girls waited, lined up in hallways. But you took away their beauty. You put beauty beyond my reach. Night after night you locked me against the woman of unbeauty. Bite into this one. This is where you break your teeth and amaze yourself with hopelessness.
Cohen’s anger in the work grows into a rage: “Goodnight once again, you fucking plagiarists. All your stolen girlfriends don’t make up for my songs’ disgust under your headline names. Trees and photographs. The last night of a real poet.” Cohen saw himself as trapped, while Suzanne had what she needed:
The man in chains looked down at her hair as she snuggled in his shoulder like a rifle-butt. Toward the horizon mist fumed out of the water changing clearly into the eternal shapes of comfort and poetry. I will bring thee down, I said to myself. She has given me the bullet.
In the book, Cohen revisits themes in his life, their significance and their passing. Of hypnosis, he writes, “I lost that when I was fourteen. I had it for two years. I had music for about the same time. I should turn my back on it.” He thinks of falling in love again with Suzanne, “It’s the least painful thing.” But it doesn’t happen. A letter from Roshi suggests he give up performing and touring and come to the desert to write for two years and Cohen is tempted. But his work gets progressively bleaker:
Too early for the rainbow,
Too early for the Dove
These are the Final Days, this is
The Darkness, this is the Flood.
Cohen was again returning to the inescapable theme of life versus art. One of the attractions of art was that it is equated with sex. Marriage is death.
So the Chinese girl is unmolested
and her life turns out okay without me,
my slow erection unmanifested
except within the pants of poetry.
Despite Cohen’s ongoing and serious doubts, an inner confidence or artistic vanity still surfaced. “It will become clear that I am the stylist of my era and the only honest man in town. I did not quarrel with my voices.”
While he was working on his memoir, his album New Skin for the Old Ceremony was released, his first collection of new material since Songs of Love and Hate in 1971. Recorded in New York, the album reflects the military experience of Israel and his constant flirtation with personal and political disaster. He reworked an early song, “The Bells,” recording it as “Take This Longing.” The quest for lost love pervades the album. “You got old and wrinkled / I stayed seventeen,” he sings in “Is This What you Wanted?” “There Is A War” summarized Cohen’s own condition rather than Israel’s, one where love itself has been devalued: “I rise up from her arms, / She says, ‘I guess you call this love, / I call it Room Service.’” He admits that in the past he had been easily defeated, but now he understands that to survive as an artist, he must fight.
In “A Singer Must Die” and “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Cohen illustrated the links between his life and his art. These goals coincided with his renewed commitment to Zen, and the quest for purity. When his art deceived this purity, it wasn’t art. What he must obtain is purity, clarity, purpose: the condition of zero.
New Skin for the Old Ceremony was enhanced by a new sound, the result of John Lissauer’s production. Although Cohen lists himself as co-producer, it was Lissauer who made the difference. Cohen had first heard him in a Montreal club, playing with Lewis Furey, a Montreal friend and musician with whom Cohen would later write an opera. On the album Furey plays viola. Cohen and Lissauer talked, and then Cohen played him a number of his half-finished songs. Lissauer, he says, “has the deepest understanding of my music,” and by early 1976, he and Lissauer were collaborating on new songs, something Cohen had never expected to do with anyone. On New Skin, individual strings, horns, and woodwinds extended but didn’t overwhelm Cohen’s voice. The album art created a minor controversy, however. It originally consisted of a symbolic representation of the coniunctio spirituum, or the spiritual union of the male and female principle from a sixteenth-century alchemical text entitled Rosararium philosophorum. But the arcane information on the engraving did not defuse its overt sexual imagery. In the U.S., Columbia Records thought the image was too explicit and replaced it with a photograph of Cohen on some copies, although Cohen wasn’t informed of the change. In England they adjusted the wing to cover the genital area because the record company thought naked angels might offend a church-going public. Regardless of the cover, the album was not well received, failing to break into the charts in the United States and doing only moderately well in the United Kingdom, despite a promotional tour to support it. In Europe, however, it sold two hundred and fifty thousand copies in its first six weeks.
After the record appeared, Cohen and Lissauer began work on another album. Tentatively called “Songs for Rebecca,” six or seven songs were recorded, but Cohen chose to kill the project, and it was never released. Only one song was salvaged, “Came so Far for Beauty,” which later appeared on Recent Songs (1979).
In the fall of 1974 Cohen began his third and longest European tour: thirty-three concerts in fifty days, opening in Brussels and ending in Paris. He played two concerts in Barcelona and dedicated one of the concerts to Lorca. Because Cohen was so popular in Spain, his work was almost immediately translated into Spanish. In London he concluded his concert by saying, “Thank you for remembering the songs which I wrote, all those years ago, in a room.” Part of Cohen’s great stage appeal was the humility he projected.
In late November 1974, Cohen began a small North American tour, performing to sold-out crowds at the Bottom Line in the Village. He was interviewed by Danny Fields who asked him why he was so popular in Europe. Cohen replied, “Maybe it’s because they can’t understand my lyrics.” He outlined the link between his private and performing life. “When I stand on a stage, I feel I bring my private life with me there and that that’s what’s interesting or amusing. That’s what’s entertaining about me.” In December he played the Troubadour in Los Angeles for three nights, and received “one of the strongest standing ovations one has ever witnessed at the club.” Four encores were necessary to close out the show and, after the performance, Dylan came by.
Cohen was now spending part of his time with a woman named Lauren, a woman he called “the first lover in my new life … we are the beginning of an army. To whom can we offer our victory. I do bow down and kiss your nipples. Or was that the girl I saw last night [?]” He continued to tour, taking the show to Canada. He played at a psychiatric hospital in London, Ontario, and at Toronto’s Massey Hall, before returning to Avery Fisher Hall in New York. The New York Times opened its review with: “There is a lot one could dislike about Leonard Cohen.” However, the review was largely a celebration of Cohen’s uniqueness: his language was imaginative and his tunes hypnotic, their repetitiveness recalling medieval music and ancient folk tunes. “If Mr. Cohen’s voice is limited in its range, it is quite evocative in color.”
The tour was interrupted in late 1974 to attend a recording session in Nashville for the Earl Scruggs Anniversary Special, where “Passing Thru” was recorded with Billy Joel, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, the Pointer Sisters, and Cohen.
In April he returned to Montreal to give his first concert there in four years. It was only partially successful. He performed in the small Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, which held just over a thousand people, and projected a sense of weariness as he began the first of his two concerts with a tired smile and “Bird on the Wire.” One critic wrote, “he looks like an overworked boutique owner” and complained that there was “a mechanical manner to his movements, the manner of a hospitalized hyper-depressive.” He sang a second version of “Bird on the Wire” in French and did six encores.
After his tour, in the spring of 1975, Cohen returned to Hydra, newly troubled and despondent. His success and his family brought him no comfort. Writing in the cool darkness of his basement room or on the terrace, he dissected the present and recalled the past:
It is not exactly a foam of daisies. It is something less than opulence. I remember it all as richer and yellower … Negotiations with the woman. Careful words. Countless adjustments to keep the balance and the floor away from your face … Ten years ago, I made a speech to these daisies and they are all turned toward me. It was pretty bad ten years ago, before the world knew me, but now it’s a lot worse … Those beautiful mornings, empty of bowel and honored by amphetamine, they gone, baby, they gone … all this looked a lot more interesting ten years ago on acid. I addressed them [the daisies on his terrace] then in the style made popular by St. Francis.
He planned to marry Suzanne in Jerusalem, thinking this would save their relationship. But he also planned to sit an hour each day with Anthony Kingsmill and fish with Don Lowe, to go on the road again, to be “street father to the young writers in Montreal, using the harsh style,” “to overthrow my life with fresh love,” and:
to teach my son that there is no light in this world. The plan to follow my true song no matter where … The plan to make my face noble and attractive through hard work and brave decisions. The plan for my body… the plan to be thin and fast and kind. My plan for you. My throne for you. My cunning toward God …The plan to escape. The plan not to witness.
But all of these plans remained unrealized. He was at war with himself and with Suzanne: “I am going to tune you until the string breaks … I have declared war on you forever and forever.”
He spent his time analyzing his career as artist and lover. Memories of his life eight years ago with another woman returned and “then the obscene silence of my career, while the butchers climbed on the throne, and they hacked the veil away, and they stood there above us grinning … I was divided into three parts. One part was given to a wife, one part was given to money, one part was given to the daisies … I broke under the sentence of loneliness and the wound of my beautiful twin.” Women, he told Kingsmill, have no sense of measure and are “created so much tougher and wilder than we are … they want to destroy the system” and their “primitive souls” become intoxicated with “the sense of shame and opportunity.”
His own relationships with women had been largely on his own terms but Suzanne had demanded hostages to his future. “I gave a woman a house and babies just because she insisted,” he wrote. Cohen’s introspection culminated in a landscape that was simultaneously external and internal:
The moon is over the windmill. I sit here with a blanket around my shoulders. The daisies are all collapsed. It is very quiet. A dog is barking. I hope I can leave the garden soon. A clicking insect measures out a portion of the lightest breeze … A wave bends me over the blue table, and a dream of the mountain rolling down over the roofs and the daisies.
Cohen resolved to rebel “against Domestic Conversations,” the repressive relationship that had lost its love, and the home that had lost its meaning. Referring to both Marianne and Suzanne, he wrote:
The first woman spun it around her like a skirt, faster and faster, brighter and brighter, until I fell off the edge of her hem and the next one turned the other way, dark and silent and greedy, gathering everything in, and I went into it, like a canoe into a windspout, but she was not at the center, she didn’t know how to be there … I can’t flourish the old table like a banner of order and solitude. I am here to work in the garden. I am no longer your host.
Empty, he awaited the salvation that might rescue him from this purgatory. “Without the Name, I am a funeral in the garden. Waiting for the next girl.” He expanded this theme in “I Should Not Say You,” a prose poem from Death of Lady’s Man: “My heart longs to be a chamber for the Name … Without the Name the wind is a babble, the flowers are a jargon of longing … Without the Name sealed in my heart I am ashamed.”
Throughout his life Cohen has preferred the more formal Leonard to any other form of address because it defines his identity as a writer. “Names preserve the dignity of Appearance,” F. declares in Beautiful Losers. Earlier, in Parasites of Heaven, Cohen writes of himself that “Leonard hasn’t been the same / since he wandered from his name,” implying that his life in England and Greece has undermined and altered the anticipated plan of a middle-class life in Montreal. Cohen’s signature, on letters, documents, or autographs, always reads, in clearly printed script, “Leonard Cohen.” Yet he mocked his own formality in “The Other Village:”
When it comes to lamentations
I prefer Aretha Franklin
to, let’s say, Leonard Cohen
Needless to add, he hears a different drum
The final poem of Death of A Lady’s Man extended Cohen’s self-portrait:
I am almost 90
Everyone I know has died off
except Leonard
He can still be seen
hobbling with his love
Cohen’s relationship with Suzanne was deteriorating in a more graphic way than his relationship with Marianne had. “We will go back to that creek in Tennessee,” he wrote, “and she will shoot me with a .22.” His frustration increased: “I should have killed you in the war. I didn’t know that you would turn black and play the trumpet…. In a corner of my heart, I planted and watered and sang to the seeds of revenge … the garden is ruined and this vigil is coming to an end.”
Suzanne felt abandoned by Cohen, who was always either traveling or writing and had little time for her. She retaliated by acting like Cohen, staying out until 4: 00 a.m. Cohen was angry and replaced Suzanne with others: Stephanie, who was sixteen, and Sherry, “who loves me for something I said ten years ago.” There was “a blonde giant” named Vala who bit him all over his body, and one named Danae, who stayed with him a week at the Athens Hilton: “Did I know she was only fifteen? I thought she was only thirteen. I tried to seduce the mother and she calmed down a little.” A bout of gonorrhea caught from an Australian woman required a trip to Athens and a penicillin injection but it did not deter him. While undergoing treatment in Athens, he pined for the women he couldn’t have:
Desire in Athens disordered me. I saw a woman on a motorcycle, her thigh exposed. The buttocks of the telephone operator. Stephanie somewhere in the neighborhood. The girl from Radcliff reclining on a bed of ideas where I did not join her. All this fed my hatred and I could not welcome her [his dark companion]. As soon as I came back to my blue desk, my heart welcomed her. She does not give me songs but she is the muse of discipline.
His Greek friend George Lialios said that he and Cohen had a “thirst for, and attraction to, the opposite sex in all of its varieties, and with it the dream of some ideal woman that belonged to the sphere of metaphysics rather than to reality. All of Leonard’s erotic poetry bears the seal of this longing.”
In a 1980 film interview, Cohen admitted that he had been completely obsessed with women ever since he could remember. As he became more well known, this obsession was reciprocated. His aura of “spiritual poverty” made women want to help him. Once, at a Montreal party Cohen approached a tall, beautiful woman with long, dark hair. He took a piece of her hair, dipped it into his wine glass, and slowly proceeded to suck it dry. He then let it fall and walked away without uttering a word.
Awaiting another woman at the Athens Hilton, Cohen meditated on power and beauty:
To see me you must leave your consolation. You must forsake your mediocre ecstasy, your mediocre exercise of bliss. Put on your muscles and step out of the perfumed shower which has shriveled and softened you…. I go without a name from heart to heart, saying Courage, courage, you are already brave, knowing full well that they will die without the sight of her beauty.
By the summer of 1974 the woman from the Athens Hilton was with him in Hollywood, where Cohen realized that he “had not been denied the full measure of beauty … When we make love in the morning, the whole day is like coming off acid.” But with such beauty came fear and the inability to create: “If I could write a song for her I could pay for this suite.…The table, the climate, the perfect physique for a forty-year-old artist, famous, happy, frightened.”
In 1975 Cohen took a trip with Roshi to visit Zen monasteries in Japan and witnessed a monk slithering on his belly to the feet of a Zen master to present him with tea. Invited to ask the Master a question, Cohen was surprisingly silent. He remembered the beautiful calligraphy on the wall and thinking that “we didn’t get this one,” referring to the American bombardment of Japan and the untouched monastery. Upon returning, his religious convictions, always transient, shifted once more. “I decided to worship beauty the way some people go back to the religion of their fathers.”
A reading tour of Italy to support the translation of several of his books followed. He went to Milan, then to Florence and Rome for readings and talks and was captivated by the women. In Milan there was a female doctor, and a woman named Lori; in Florence, Hugette; in Rome, Patricia. Sitting with Patricia at an outdoor cafe, he saw two doves fly toward him “in the style of the Holy Spirit descending…. I have been sitting in a cafe for twenty-five years waiting for this vision. I surrender to the iron laws of the moral universe which make a boredom out of everything desired. I will go back to my dark companion [Suzanne]. I don’t think I will.” In Rome he had a vivid fantasy about joining the Communist Party, which caused the rivers of his childhood to rise up, with snakes and sailboats, and his memory to fail as a series of ghosts spoke to him, including W.B. Yeats, “who lighted up a stick of sandalwood for my blurred soul, and the factories stamped out ten million hearts as false as mine … The ghosts of many crickets sang Another Man Done Gone, and little pebbles flew from my forehead against the stained glass windows of the CIA.” Yet he could not write, and longed passionately for the embrace of young women. On the train from Florence to Rome, he sang into the open window but “the song could not redeem me.”
Following a brief return to Hydra, and then to Montreal, Cohen headed on to California where Suzanne, Adam, and Lorca joined him. They were still trying to make the relationship work. But he wanted to escape, to write, and to sing. Roshi wanted him to move to Mt. Baldy with Suzanne and the children so that he could study with him. But Cohen felt it was the wrong time; he had work he wanted to do. By December he was back in Montreal attending Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review at the Montreal Forum. Throughout the winter he prepared new songs, and his commitment to Zen was again tested.
Columbia Records was planning to release The Best of Leonard Cohen, a compilation of twelve of his best-known songs, including “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Bird on the Wire,” and “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Cohen had agreed to do the album because there was a new generation of listeners and because he was given complete artistic control. He picked the songs, designed the package, and insisted the lyrics be included. Cohen compiled the album in London, writing new liner notes for each song, identifying its origin. He also offered a personal critique of “Last Year’s Man”:
I don’t know why but I like this song. I used to play it on a Mexican twelve-string until I destroyed the instrument by jumping on it in a fit of impotent fury in 1967. The song had too many verses and it took about five years to sort out the right ones. I like the children in this version. I always wait for them if I have to listen to it.
By April 1976 he was on the road again with his most extensive European tour, to support the new album. Unsuccessful in the United States, The Best of Leonard Cohen was a hit in Europe, his major market in the seventies. He began the tour in Berlin on April 22 and ended in London on July 8. Roshi was lecturing in Europe at the time and appeared at the Munich concert. Backstage before the performance, he saw Cohen quickly down a tumbler of cognac and offered this observation: “Body important.” A London critic remarked that the band had a definite rock quality and that a new up tempo but unrecorded song, “Do I Have to Dance All Night,” was a great success. It is “surprising how he sings with so much more life outside a studio.” In Paris Cohen gave four sold-out concerts with as many as twelve encores at some performances.
After the tour, Cohen and Suzanne spent the summer in Hydra, where he shared stories with Anthony Kingsmill and adventures with Pandias Scaramanga: “He told me about a whorehouse he had been to in Paris. I told him about a private club in New York.” But Cohen’s state of mind was fragile: “When I’m not plotting against everyone I know, or making myself look good in the eyes of the weak, my head is a din with the various commands of self-reform.” He could neither write nor sing, yet he believed that “life is not perfectable, but work is.” The only summer event that absorbed him was a play about the last days of Lorca written by a South African poet and performed in the lounge of a small hotel on Hydra. “Bitterly,” he wrote, “I held on to my own barrenness all through the evening, doubting I would ever speak again in the old high way.” However, Irving Layton’s presence on the island temporarily evoked his good spirits and imagination.
Throughout 1976 Cohen increasingly found in Zen what he felt Judaism lacked: a focus on the methods of prayer and meditation. “I wanted to go into a system a little more thoroughly,” he later explained. Meditation provided a respite from the turmoil of his private life. But an accident at Mt. Baldy in 1976 prevented him from sitting at any length in the zendo: late one night, he ran into a low wall and tore some cartilage in his knee. After treatment, it was still too painful for him to sit, so he returned to Judaism for spiritual sustenance, beginning a more deliberate, if private, study of the religion on his visits to Montreal. He prayed daily and put on tefillin. He made contact with several Hasidic rabbis and used a bilingual Hasidic prayer book obtained through the Lubavitcher movement. The two religions worked in juxtaposition. “I came upon texts and attitudes that I wouldn’t have been able to understand if I hadn’t studied with my old Japanese teacher…. I did get one or two things from Roshi that enabled me to penetrate, superficially, at least, the Jewish tradition [but] without his instruction, I don’t think I would have had the attitude that allowed me to enter the tradition.”
In California, Cohen continued to visit Roshi at Mt. Baldy or to get up early to drive to the Cimarron Zen Center from the ranch house he and Suzanne had rented in Brentwood. Anthony Kingsmill came to visit and Bob Dylan, estranged from his wife, stayed for a while. But Roshi increasingly commanded Cohen’s life. On New Year’s Eve Roshi, Suzanne, Cohen, and Joni Mitchell met at Cohen’s house, Mitchell delayed by viewing Mae West’s entrance with two bodybuilders at Ringo Starr’s New Year’s Eve party, her first stop. Suzanne led the conversation to a favorite topic, sex. Cohen asked Roshi, “How do you get rid of jealousy?” Before he could answer, Joni Mitchell said: “You quit it like you quit smoking,” and mimicked the crushing of a cigarette in an ashtray. Cohen gave her a hostile glance, thinking perhaps that she had intruded on Roshi’s territory. But Roshi didn’t seem to mind; as he prepared to leave, he hugged Mitchell and told her he wanted to move in with her.
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 Stonepronounced, is “either greatly flawed or great and flawed.”
In the title song, “Death of A Ladies’ Man,” Cohen described a powerful but destructive love:
She took his much admired oriental frame of mind
And the heart-of-darkness alibi
His money hides behind
She took his blonde madonna
And his monastery wine
“This mental space is occupied
and everything is mine.”
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.”