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BACK 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:
Because of Leonard’s facility with language and his sense of his place in the culture and his respect for traditional literature, he builds a lyric in such a way, whether it’s use of interior rhyme or an eternal quality to the language, that the songs he writes beckon the soul with just the configuration of the lyric.
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:
Sharon showed it to me later and it seemed to sum me up perfectly. ‘Here’s this guy looking cool,’ I thought, ‘in shades and a nice suit. He seems to have a grip on things, an idea of himself.’
The only thing wrong, of course, is that he was caught holding a half-eaten banana.
And it suddenly occurred to me that’s everyone’s dilemma: at the times we think we’re coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of 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.
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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 Westappeared 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.
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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.
“Jazz Police,” the most unorthodox song on the album, was Cohen’s response to his band’s effort to introduce augmented fifths and sevenths to their playing. He policed such jazz intrusions, although he admits that he wasn’t sure of the lyric’s meaning and grew to dislike the conceit. But he left it on the album because “it caught the mood of this whole period … this kind of fragmented absurdity.” “I Can’t Forget,” with its limpid language, “started off as a song about the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt. As a metaphor for the journey of the soul from bondage into freedom.” It started that way, “but in the studio I couldn’t handle it and couldn’t sing about a burden being lifted since mine hadn’t.” Originally called “Taken Out of Egypt,” which took months to write, it had to be recast, beginning with the question “What is my life?” “That’s when I started writing that lyric: “I stumbled out of bed / I got ready for the struggle / I smoked a cigarette / And I tightened up my gut.”
“Tower of Song” is the keynote work on I’m Your Man. With it Cohen wanted to “make a definitive statement about this heroic enterprise of the craft” of songwriting. In the early eighties he called the work “Raise My Voice in Song.” His concern was with the aging songwriter, and the “necessity to transcend one’s own failure by manifesting as the singer, as the songwriter.” He had abandoned the song, but one night in Montreal he finished the lyrics and called an engineer and recorded it in one take with a toy synthesizer. Jennifer Warnes added some vocals and Cohen attempted some “repairs,” which was difficult since there were only two tracks. It was intitially felt that the quality was too poor and the musicality too thin. Warnes, however, “really placed it, putting it in the ironic perspective it needed; she was a real collaborator on it more than anything she ever did—and she’s done wonderful things for me but this was the most wonderous thing she ever did for me, this doo-wop kind of perspective; she really illuminated the song with that contribution,” Cohen said.
The revised song contains a classic Cohen opener, both self-reflexive and comic, positioning the singer in a new-found posture: “Well, my friends are gone / and my hair is grey. / I ache in the places / where I used to play. / And I’m crazy for love / but I’m not coming on. / I’m just paying my rent every day / in the Tower of Song.”
When he had written the song and completed the album, Cohen realized for the first time that he was an entertainer: “I never thought I was in showbiz.” Until then, he had held on to the notion of being a writer: “Now I know what I am. I’m not a novelist. I’m not the light of my generation. I’m not the spokesman for a new sensibility. I’m a songwriter living in L.A. and this is my record.”
His own tower of song was the second-story study of his modest Los Angeles home, where he kept a fax machine, an electronic keyboard/synthesizer, and a computer on an oversized, roughly cut wooden table. He quickly adjusted to using a computer: “They say that the Torah was written with black fire on white fire. So I get that feeling from the computer, the bright black against the bright background. It gives a certain theatrical dignity to see it on the screen.” The keyboard/synthesizer allows him to “mock up” his songs with various accompaniments to test their musical possibilities.
Supporting the April release of the single “Ain’t No Cure For Love,” Cohen sent a note to the CBS sales reps that read, “I don’t really know how to do this, but I hear you’ll be working my record, so here’s two dollars.” His joke was prompted by the publication of Fredric Dannen’s Hit Men, exposing the shoddy dealings of the record industry and the importance of payola. Reaction to the album was positive; it was hailed for its accessible sound and incisive lyrics, “a sardonic last call from a ravaged roué.” The month the album was released Cohen began a forty-one concert European tour.
Rehearsals for the tour were grueling and several days spent on perfecting one song was not uncommon. Often Cohen would complain that “it doesn’t sound like music.” Arrangements would change quickly and new approaches would be tried. A backup singer, for example, suggested a funkier version of “First We Take Manhattan,” replacing the Euro-Disco sound Jennifer Warnes used on Famous Blue Raincoat. It worked and Cohen used it. He constantly reminded his singers and musicians that “what you have to go for is honesty, not complication.” By honesty he meant an openness to the music and to oneself that would transcend even a flawless technique.
Reaction to his European performances was strong. Playing in smaller halls meant that the band was in some cities for two or three nights, allowing publicity to build and the people to swarm. Once on a ship leaving Denmark for Sweden, Cohen was besieged by groups of teenage girls screaming for his autograph. He acceded to each request. In Iceland, he was received by the president, who held a reception in his honor. The band included two new vocalists, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. Batalla had performed with the Motels, Cheap Trick, and Ted Nugent; Christensen had a gutsy sound drawn from years of singing with L.A. jazz and rock bands. John Bilezikjian played oud; Bobby Furgo, violin and keyboards; Bobby Metzger, guitars; and Steve Meador, drums. Tom McMorran assisted with keyboards, and Stephen Zirkel with bass and trumpet. Roscoe Beck was the musical director.
In December 1988, Cohen was disturbed by the unexpected death of Roy Orbison, just as his career was reviving with the Traveling Wilburys. A few days later a memorial was held in the lobby of the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. Cohen and Jennifer Warnes attended. Orbison had become the musical signature for Cohen’s 1988 tour. In rehearsal Cohen would tell the band to “make it like Roy Orbison would do it,” which led to an onstage joke, “Orbisize this song.” The musicians had a picture of Orbison pasted into their chart folder.
Cohen’s North American tour included the Théâtre St. Denis in Montreal, where, after his second performance, he met privately with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Afterwards, Cohen told reporters that they discussed “what you have to do to get a good review in this town,” alluding to his mother’s comment concerning his 1971 performance in Montreal when he failed to get a single positive notice.
Cohen’s voice, like Dylan’s, had long been the subject of jokes and imitations. In “Tower of Song” Cohen defused criticism by deadpanning, “I was born like this, / I had no choice, / I was born with the gift / Of a golden voice.” In concert, cheers and applause greeted his ironic declaration. It was the unmusicality of his voice, which makes his phrasing flat and his ability to shift registers impossible, that led to his becoming a songwriter. “I think if I had one of those good voices, I would have done it completely differently. I probably would have sung the songs I really like rather than be a writer … I just don’t think one would have bothered to write if one could have really lifted one’s voice in song. But that wasn’t my voice. This is my voice.” A new self-confidence, if not happiness, began to seep through his persona of darkness. “I’ve come a long way compared to the kind of trouble I was in when I was younger. Compared to that kind of trouble, this kind of trouble [the difficulty of songwriting] sounds like peace to me … I’m a lot more comfortable with myself than I was a while ago. I’m still writing out of the conflicts and I don’t know if they’ll ever resolve.”
A 1988 BBC film, “Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen,” capitalized on his renewed profile. It combined concert footage with an interview, early film clips, and documentary footage from Hydra. The film lacked a unifying narrative, but it showed a much more relaxed and confident performer than the one seen in the 1972 film “Bird on the Wire.”
Cohen also performed on Austin City Limits, a one-hour concert filmed in Austin, Texas, for PBS television and appeared on David Sanborn’s late-night show in New York where he did a memorable duet with Sonny Rollins. When Rollins began a sensational saxophone solo on “Who By Fire,” Cohen turned his back to the camera to admire the jazz great. Taking advantage of his popularity, CBS/SONY reissued all of Cohen’s albums on CD, making Various Positions widely available for the first time and his earliest work accessible in the new digital format. At the age of fifty-four, Cohen was becoming a rock star.
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IN 1989 Cohen’s work appeared as the centerpiece of a celebration of fifty years of Canadian Poetry in English at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa. The title of the exhibit was “Let Us Compare Mythologies,” and references to Cohen appeared throughout the catalogue. The opening paragraph described Cohen’s first book and its centrality to the exhibit’s theme, the title chosen “as a tribute to Leonard Cohen and to all poets who have enriched Canada’s literary heritage over the last half century.” Cohen’s writing, the catalogue stated, “links two vital periods in the history of modern poetry in Canada,” the period of the 1940s when the work of Raymond Souster, Irving Layton, and Louis Dudek opened Canadian poetry to international influences, and the 1960s when poet and audience were united through performance. That was a time when “poetic voices became intensely personal,” challenging traditional forms. A later section highlighted Cohen’s “romantic lyricism” and explained his move into popular music as “both natural and inevitable given his lyrical and accessible style.”
Despite the success of his album and recent honors, Cohen’s personal life continued to be plagued by unhappiness. Various women arrived and left. Sean Dixon, whom he first met at Rock Steady, the L.A. recording studio where he mixed I’m Your Man, spent a good deal of time with him and became a friend. He spent time with Claudia Kim and later with an Egyptian woman from Paris. His romantic world was framed by his breakup, reconciliation, and final separation from Dominique Issermann, and he was again depressed. A female friend attributed his inability to sustain a long-term relationship to his basic mistrust of and deep anger at women, originating, perhaps, with his mother, who tried to control him with tears and guilt and food. He was still bitter over his breakup with Suzanne, who had initiated a lawsuit staking financial claims (she already had a house in France and custody of the children). The suit was dismissed in court, but added to his mistrust of women.
Cohen was always in need of a relationship but each relationship was conducted on his stringent terms. He required commitment but couldn’t always offer it in return. He wanted intimacy, but he also wanted freedom. He was depressive and vulnerable and used his charm like a switchblade. Zen and romance, or Zen and Prozac, or Zen and whatever temporarily exorcised his demons. But they always returned. Throughout the eighties Cohen continued to use drugs but they had taken the form of antidepressants and legitimate pharmaceuticals. There have been times when he could not get out of bed, when the storm in the brain, as William Styron described it in his book Darkness Visible, overtook him. Of his depression, Cohen said, “That’s what it’s all about. Every day, every morning I face it, I try to deal with it.” He has resisted control, especially by women, and has not lived with a woman since Suzanne left. Some stay for a while, but none move their things into his home, nor does he move into theirs. He cannot commit himself to anyone but Roshi.
At those moments when “he has no psychic skin,” he needs his private space. Sean Dixon recalls that in 1990 and 1991, when he was writing “The Future,” “Democracy,” and “Waiting for the Miracle,” she would often force him to leave his synthesizer to go out for food, but the company was not always pleasant. “We would go out to lunch a lot and he would sort of sit there like a little zombie, mumbling to himself. And then he would recite lyrics now and then.” When she would bring him the news that Communism was falling, or that the Berlin Wall was going down, or that the president of Romania had been deposed, he would say, “It’s hell, darling; you have no idea of what’s going to happen. It’s going to be very dark. Very bad things are going to come out of this. Believe me.” Dixon was exasperated: “Leonard, you just can’t get happy about anything!”
When he read her the opening verses of “The Future,” she told him they were appalling. “You can’t say things like that!” she exclaimed. But he didn’t listen, and gradually, she agreed with his point of view. As he predicted, “Things are going to slide in all directions / Won’t be nothing / Nothing you can measure anymore.” After completing the lyrics to a song, he would occasionally go to the mini-studio at the Record Plant to experiment with the sounds and possibilities. And when he was fighting with a lyric, he would often ask anyone to help. Dixon remembers her contribution to “Waiting for the Miracle.” A line in the final verse read “If you’re pressed for information, / That’s when you’ve got to play it dumb.” She thought “pressed” was too mild and suggested “squeezed.” He liked the change and incorporated the word.
Cohen’s work was interrupted in 1990 by his son’s serious car accident in Guadaloupe. Adam Cohen had to be airlifted to a North York, Ontario, hospital, where Cohen virtually lived for three months. The injuries were major, involving broken ribs, fractured vertebrae, and a damaged hip. The hiatus slowed Cohen’s normally stately artistic crawl to a halt, but after his son had recovered, Cohen returned to Los Angeles, eager to continue working.
Around Christmas of 1990, Cohen began his highly publicized winter-spring romance with the actress Rebecca De Mornay. Cohen says he first noticed De Mornay during a visit in the late sixties to the Summerhill school in England. He recalls a strikingly beautiful five-year-old girl who turned out to be De Mornay. She recalls that she first heard him sing when she was ten, when her mother played her one of his early albums. De Mornay went on to become tremendously adept as an athlete with skills in Tae Kwon Do, a Korean martial art, as well as horseback riding. After high school in Australia, she enrolled in Lee Strasberg’s Los Angeles acting institute and then continued her studies with Francis Ford Coppola at his Zoetrope Studios. She debuted in Coppola’s One From the Heart. Cohen was properly introduced to her in Paris in 1986 at a party given by Robert Altman and they became friends. By December 1990, they had begun a romantic relationship which lasted for more than three years, their twenty-eight-year age difference apparently no barrier.
De Mornay had been in the movie business for almost ten years before she became a star with The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, appearing in Risky Business, And God Created Woman, and Backdraft before earning attention from her role as the disturbed and violent nanny in the 1992 hit. Previously involved with Tom Cruise, De Mornay had also been married for a short time to a Los Angeles screenwriter. Cohen’s fans were startled to see him escorting De Mornay to the 1992 Academy Awards and his name suddenly appearing in numerous gossip columns. De Mornay accompanied him on his travels and video shoots and observed his recording sessions. She was eager to please, although many in Cohen’s inner circle felt she was always scrutinizing Cohen’s actions and behavior with his friends, especially his female friends. He credited her as co-producer of one song on his 1992 album, The Future, and he dedicated the album to her as Rebecca “coming forth,” referring to a passage from Genesis. “Leonard is one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met,” De Mornay has said. “He never feels the party is somewhere else.”
In an uncharacteristically cute celebrity moment, Cohen interviewed her for Interview magazine:
De Mornay: Do you want to know what the best thing is about you interviewing me?
Cohen: No.
De Mornay: It’s …
Cohen: I guess I do.
De Mornay:… that you’re the only interviewer who won’t ask what the exact nature of my relationship is with Leonard Cohen.
Cohen: I would like to know. Let’s start with that question.
When Cohen was later asked about the contradictions of his brooding lifestyle and his involvement with a high-profile actress, he answered, “Solid-gold artists would kill for this kind of anguish.” By November 1993, however, their relationship had changed; he told a journalist earlier that summer that “Rebecca got wise to me and I’m not with her anymore … but Rebecca and I will always be friends in some kind of way. We were engaged but we’re not engaged anymore.”
Through his bouts of depression, Cohen retained a sense of humor. Perla Batalla sent him a personal ad from a San Francisco weekly that asked for a man who could combine the passion of Leonard Cohen with the rawness of Iggy Pop. Cohen had recently met Pop at a recording session, and when he showed him the ad, they decided to send a photo of the two of them to the female inquirer with their phone numbers.
Cohen’s business arrangements by this time were complicated, partly because his lawyer lived in New York, while he was living in Los Angeles. For a time he rented out the downstairs of his house and lived upstairs in a sparsely furnished flat. Nearly ten years after buying the house, Cohen decided that he was ready to furnish it. He gradually acquired some rugs, tables, and chairs, a sign that he at last was feeling settled. In 1991 Kelley Lynch, a former legal assistant to Marty Machat, moved to Los Angeles and soon became Cohen’s manager, as he shifted his business affairs to California following the death of Machat. The proximity of his business did not interfere with the completion of his new album, although the word chaos often described the situation around him as he prepared for a 1993 tour as part of the album’s promotion.
His office, like his home, is furnished sparely, though it is suffused with light, which pours through large curved windows on the second floor and falls on the whitewashed wooden floors and large wooden tables. Greek or oriental rugs are scattered on the floors, but each of the four principal rooms has only a worktable, chair, and phone. The walls are white and bare. One office has a series of filing cabinets, and the fax and typewriters are tucked into a former pantry. Cohen’s own office at the back is equally spare, remarkable only in the contrast between the large wooden table/desk and his high-tech, ergonomic chair. On the first floor, an untuned piano sits alone in the former living room. On the wall is a large gold, red, and yellow banner with four brown squares, representing the four noble truths of Buddhism. Cohen designed the banner for Roshi’s eighty-fifth birthday.
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COHEN’S SONGS were enjoying a renaissance, covered by other artists and being used in movie soundtracks. The Neville Brothers had a hit with “Bird on a Wire” in 1990, the year that Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson starred in a comedy of the same name. “Everybody Knows” and “If It Be Your Will” appeared in the movie Pump Up the Volume, starring Christian Slater. Concrete Blonde sang “Everybody Knows” for the movie. A tribute album entitled I’m Your Fan featured a series of alternative bands performing Cohen’s songs. The House of Love sang “Who by Fire,” The Pixies did “I Can’t Forget,” rem performed “First We Take Manhattan,” and Nick Cave sang “Tower of Song.” The project had been initiated by Christian Fevret, editor of the influential French rock magazine Les inrockuptibles. Cohen was flattered by the attention and impressed with the original arrangements. They presented his songs to a younger generation of listeners.
Others could more lyrically convey his melodies, although not necessarily his substance. Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, Jennifer Warnes, and Johnny Cash had all covered his songs. Suzanne Vega has repeatedly acknowledged his influence on her work. The release of a third tribute album, Tower of Song, further confirmed his influence as a songwriter.
On March 3, 1991, Cohen was inducted into the Juno Hall of Fame, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys. “I am trying to stay alive and raw to the voices that speak to me,” he stated after the presentation by his friend and founder of MuchMusic, Moses Znaimer. “If I had been given this attention when I was twenty-six,” Cohen said, “it would have turned my head. At thirty-six, it might have confirmed my flight on a rather morbid spiritual path. At forty-six, it would have rubbed my nose in my failing powers and have prompted a plotting of a getaway and an alibi. But at fifty-six—hell, I’m just hitting my stride and it doesn’t hurt at all.”
In April 1991, he was honored with an even more prestigious award, appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada. At his investiture on October 30, 1991, he was celebrated as:
one of the most popular and influential writers of his generation whose work has … made Canadian literature familiar to readers abroad. Images of beauty, despair, outrage, and tenderness are found in his lyrical poetry and prose, whose themes of love, loss and loneliness touch a universal chord in us all.
That same month, Cohen was a surprise guest at a salute to Irving Layton that took place at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. His appearance was a well-guarded secret because he did not want to upstage Layton. When he appeared, Cohen told the audience that “exposure to [Layton’s] work moves us. … This is the tonic, the elixir. I salute the aching and triumphant impeccability of your life.” Lay-ton complimented Cohen on his fabulous timing. Three years later he admitted that Cohen’s songs could still make him cry—not because they moved him but because he knows he will never write anything so beautiful. Cohen, Layton emphasized, “has never been disloyal to his genius.”