7

BLACK PHOTOGRAPH

COHEN BEGAN a serious singing career in 1966, when he realized that he couldn’t earn a decent, or even an indecent, living as a writer. In January of that year he had become interested in the work of Bob Dylan. At an all-day poetry party organized by F.R. Scott, and attended by Layton, Dudek, Purdy, A.J.M. Smith, and Ralph Gustafson, Cohen played his guitar, sang, and raved about Dylan. No one had heard of him, but Scott rushed out to buy Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. He returned and to the chagrin of everyone, put them on. After a few minutes, Purdy “bounded out of the room as though booted from behind,” shouting, “‘It’s an awful bore. I can’t listen to any more of this.’” Only Cohen listened intently, solemnly announcing that hewould become the Canadian Dylan, a statement all dismissed. The remainder of the afternoon was spent watching two new NFB films: A.M. Klein: The Poet as Landscape and Ladies and Gentlemen … Mr. Leonard Cohen, which Cohen did not view. At 10:00 p.m. Scott replayed one of the Dylan records, and this time the result was dancing, not criticism.

At Dylan’s concert at the Place des Arts in Montreal the following month, Layton announced Cohen’s decision to start a singing career to a group of students. At the intermission he said, “Do you know that Leonard is going to start singing?” The students replied, “He can’t sing!”

Cohen had little choice but to try another career: Beautiful Losers had had good reviews but marginal sales, selling only one thousand copies in Canada and three thousand in the U.S. The Favorite Game had sold approximately two hundred copies in Canada and one thousand in the United States. Cohen realized that unless he chose the unattractive path of a university post, he could not survive as a writer, despite the critical praise. So he thought of music as his financial salvation. “In hindsight, it seems like a very foolish strategy, but I [said] to myself, I am a country musician, and I will go down to Nashville…. I have songs, and this is the way I’m going to address the economic crisis. It seems mad.” On his way to Nashville, Cohen stopped in New York and ended up staying, off and on, for two years. The mood of the city echoed Cohen’s own and he reveled in its energy and bleakness.

His friend Robert Hershorn provided Cohen with some funds and an introduction to Mary Martin, a Canadian living in New York and an assistant to Albert Grossman, who managed Dylan, as well as Peter, Paul, and Mary. Martin had previously arranged for The Hawks, with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, to be hired as Dylan’s backup group. They were renamed The Band in 1968 and toured with Dylan before going on to become seminal rock figures themselves. For a short while, Martin also managed Van Morrison.

Cohen arrived in New York in the fall of 1966 with no sense of the folk renaissance that had occurred during his years in Greece. He had no idea of the sudden fame of Judy Collins, Joan Baez, or Phil Ochs. But he found a sensibility with which he was compatible: “I felt very much at home,” he remarked years later. In New York Cohen first stayed at the Penn Terminal Hotel on 34th, then at the Henry Hudson Hotel near Eighth Avenue, and finally, at the Chelsea on West 23rd. At the Henry Hudson Hotel, where he stayed just before taking up residence at the Chelsea, he was surrounded by drugs, down-and-outers, and dope addicts. Life in a hotel was losing its glamour. But it was there that he met an intriguing Swedish woman who was part hooker and part teacher. In an elevator a few days later, she told him that he was dead but that she could restore him to life. She undertook a therapy that involved yoga and an odd psychology. He became fascinated by her teaching and gave her nearly six hundred dollars. He decided to record her, with the idea of perhaps writing a book about her. But when the machine was on, she stopped talking. Their relationship continued for some time, Cohen frequently singing songs to her before he recorded them for his first album.

“Once I hit the Chelsea Hotel, there was no turning back,” he said. The place was “rich in character and opportunities,” and it was possible for him to establish “the rudiments of a social life.” In between forays to New York, Cohen would return to Montreal, living either at his mother’s or in downtown hotels such as the Hotel de France on Ste-Catherine Street.

In 1966 the Chelsea was notorious as the residence for the emerging underground music and writing scene, with its thick walls, high ceilings, and a management that had an “iron regard for privacy.” Its marble halls and elegant wrought-iron central staircase contrasted with the slow, rickety elevators. It had a faded elegance, a romantic decay. In the sixties, the Chelsea also had a flourishing drug culture; Cohen has commented that one went “on a lot of involuntary trips [there] just accepting the hospitality of others.”

The Chelsea had a diverse bohemian history that included Mark Twain, Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Miller, Virgil Thomson, and Thomas Wolfe. While Cohen was at the Chelsea, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Allen Ginsberg, Kris Kristofferson, and Janis Joplin all stayed for varying periods. Harry Smith was one of the figures in residence at that time, a filmmaker, anthropologist, ornithologist, and mentor to Allen Ginsberg, an intriguing man, Cohen recalled. Stanley Bard, the appropriately named manager/owner, encouraged the experimental and the offbeat. Cohen once witnessed the arrival of a virtual zoo on the upper floors, as a dress rehearsal of Katherine Dunham’s production of Aïda, with lions, tigers, and other animals took place; acrobats limbered up in the hallways and singers practiced in the elevators. Cohen’s small, cupboard-sized room on the fifth floor held two single beds and his guitar. From the lobby the guests walked directly into a Spanish restaurant that was open all night; a few doors to the east was a synagogue. His affection for the hotel remained, and even during his time in Nashville, he would frequently return to the Chelsea.

Cohen recounts his most famous meeting in the hotel in “Chelsea Hotel #2” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). In his well-known concert introduction to the song, he outlines his first encounter with Janis Joplin:

Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel. I didn’t know who she was. Turned out she was a very great singer. It was a very dismal evening in New York City. I’d been to the Bronco Burger; I had a cheeseburger; it didn’t help at all. Went to the White Horse Tavern, looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead. Dylan Thomas was dead. I got back in the elevator, and there she was. She wasn’t looking for me either. She was looking for Kris Kristofferson [laughter]. “Lay your head upon the pillow.” I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Lily Marlene. Forgive me for these circumlocutions. I later found out she was Janis Joplin and we fell into each other’s arms through some divine process of elimination which makes a compassion out of indifference, and after she died, I wrote this song for her. It’s called the Chelsea Hotel.

During a more recent performance in Norway, Cohen revised the story of the original meeting between Joplin and himself: in the elevator Cohen asks, “Are you looking for someone?” “Yes,” she replies, “I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.” “Little Lady—you’re in luck. I’m Kris Kristofferson.” He was significantly shorter than Kristofferson, but as he says, those were generous times. Yafa Lerner recalls that at the Chelsea it was common for women to offer themselves to Cohen as he rode the elevator. Cohen began writing “Chelsea Hotel #2” in a Polynesian bar in Miami in 1971 and finished it at the Imperial Hotel in Asmara, Ethiopia, in 1973.

There was also a “Chelsea Hotel #1,” which had different lyrics and a much slower beat. Cohen performed “Chelsea Hotel #1” on his 1972 tour, often on Mandrax, which tranquilized both him and the song. It had a deadening beat; he realized that it had to be rewritten, and his guitarist, Ron Cornelius, provided him with a chord change that made the new version possible. But the song embarrassed him, and he later felt that it was indiscreet of him to reveal that Janis Joplin was the subject.

Cohen encountered Joan Baez at the Chelsea one night and she and Cohen got into an argument about Gandhi. Cohen had read a biography of the Indian leader and discovered that he regularly chewed rauwolfia, an Indian weed that is the active ingredient of Valium and other tranquilizers. Cohen had a vision of the nonviolent movement as an army of people stoned on Valium. Baez, who has called herself the only straight one at the party of the 1960s, took offense at Cohen’s suggestion that drugs were an integral part of the movement. “She had this deep investment in being the straight girl,” Cohen remarked. Baez also had an antipathy to mysticism and the occult and couldn’t accept the last line of “Suzanne”: “And you know that you can trust her / For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.” Whenever she sang the song, she altered the last line because she found the action unreal. Only when she and Dylan came to Montreal in 1975 with the Rolling Thunder Review and sang at the Montreal Forum did she sing the correct line. Backstage she told Cohen, “I finally got it right.”

Since his arrival in New York, Cohen had been on the edge of what he called the New York Renaissance of folk music. Clubs like the Bitter End were showcasing new and important talent. But until Mary Martin took him on, visits to several agents led only to the criticism that at thirty-two Cohen was a little old for this gig. Cohen was distressed, thin, and disappointed. He recalls sitting over a cup of coffee in a Greenwich Village cafe, feeling lonely and unwelcome, writing in frustration on a placemat, “KILL COOL!” He then held it up for the patrons to see.

Cohen’s problematic professional life was mirrored by his equally complicated personal life. Marianne and her son Axel had come to New York at Cohen’s request. He was living in the glorious chaos of the Chelsea Hotel, an inappropriate setting for a family, even one as loosely structured as theirs. He rented a loft space for Marianne and Axel on the lower east side, near Clinton Street. But he remained at the Chelsea, although his romantic energies were directed elsewhere. He and Marianne’s life made sense on Hydra, within that simple, ancient context. In New York they didn’t have a foundation, they didn’t have a pattern that worked.

At times they still operated as a family, going to Montreal to attend the wedding of Carol Moskowitz, a friend of Cohen’s. Cohen was dressed in a beautiful gray suit that he had had made and spent his time leaning in a doorway looking “professionally tortured,” as someone noted. As well as the difficult romantic tribulations, Cohen also had to deal with the fact that several of his friends had recently been charged with drug dealing.

Cohen kept a sporadic journal in which he recorded hexagrams of the I Ching, which he was throwing, and the occasional poem that expressed self-criticism or desire, two favorite subjects. A poem from March 1967 offered this assessment:

I am so impatient, I cannot

even read slowly.

I never really loved to learn.

I want to live alone

in fellowship with men.

I’m telling you this because

secret agreements bring

misfortune.

The romance and sunsets of Greece evaporated into the realities and exhaust of New York. The order he had established with Marianne in Hydra had disappeared, replaced by darkness and chaos. He was taking more drugs, finding temporary refuge from a singing career that was not taking off. His behavior was skittish. Staying for a few days with a friend, he would unexpectedly disappear for a day or two if someone he didn’t like arrived, even for a short visit. He would often leave a party moments after arriving. He was depressed but he still worked and wrote and sang. “Everything serves his work,” his friend Yafa Lerner remarked, “which is arrived at only by tearing at the skin.”

In 1966, Cohen walked into the silver foil-lined La Dom, Andy Warhol’s club on 8th Street in the East Village, in search of “the scene.” He saw, and instantly fell for, a statuesque blonde with a misty, wavery voice and a German accent who was singing in a monotone. She was Nico, “the perfect Aryan ice queen.” Amid the looped projections of parachutists on the walls, “I saw this girl singing behind the bar. She was a sight to behold. I suppose the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen up to that moment. I just walked up and stood in front of her until people pushed me aside.” The art critic David Antrim described Nico as possessing a “macabre face—so beautifully resembling a memento mori, the marvellous death-like voice coming from the lovely blonde head.” Cohen visited La Dom every night she sang and finally introduced himself. Accompanying her on guitar was a handsome young man, Jackson Browne, then just eighteen years old.

Nico had lived in New York since 1959, modeling and then taking acting lessons with Lee Strasberg; Marilyn Monroe had been one of her classmates for a short time. Dylan, who was a lasting influence on Nico, had introduced her to Warhol, suggesting that he make movies with her. Warhol decided to let her sing instead and foisted her on his rock band, the Velvet Underground, which included John Cale and Lou Reed. Paul Morrissey saw that the group needed something beautiful to counteract “the screeching ugliness they were trying to sell.” The critic Richard Goldstein described it as a “secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade.” Nico was soon singing with the group, and in 1967 their first album was released. Its signature image was an erotic banana drawn by Warhol.

Nico made it clear that nothing would happen between her and Cohen; she preferred younger men. But she introduced Cohen to Lou Reed, who surprised him with his knowledge of his work. Reed had a copy of Flowers for Hitler, which he asked Cohen to sign, and was an early reader of Beautiful Losers. Cohen confided, “in those days I guess he [Reed] wasn’t getting very many compliments for his work and I certainly wasn’t. So we told each other how good we were.” One night at Max’s Kansas City, someone insulted Cohen, but Reed told him not to pay any attention to it since he was the man who had written Beautiful Losers.

The infatuated Cohen followed Nico around the city, but she was clearly not interested in him. He was madly in love with her though, and persisted: “I was lighting candles and praying and performing incantations and wearing amulets, anything to have her fall in love with me, but she never did.” A journal entry from the Chelsea Hotel dated March 15, 1967, highlights Cohen’s fascination with Nico, his entanglement with depression and his art: “Terrible day, hopeless thoughts of Nico. The guitar dead, voice dead, tunes old and fake … Nico in terrible mood. Tried to reach her, tried to make her stay beside me for a second, impossible.” The journal that day also records a visit by Phil Ochs, Henry Moscovitch, a young Montreal poet, and the advice of a friend to see a psychiatrist, prompting this notation: “poet maudit ca. 1890. Cut the call short. Visited Judy Collins, taught her ‘Sisters of Mercy.’”

Overwhelmed by Nico’s beauty—she had modeled in Paris and had had a bit part in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—Cohen wrote “Take This Longing” for her. She sang it to him several times but never recorded it. He also wrote a confessional prose piece about his longing for her. After defending his writing as the result of “too much acid,” too much loneliness, or an education beyond his intelligence, the narrator offers the following self-defense:

It’s a pity if someone … has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it…. it is really amazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what I’m about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be consoled.

The speaker then identifies himself as “the creator of the Black Photograph,” the photographer who after the setup puts his hand over the lens and takes the picture. Only Nico, he writes, could understand his black pictures. “My work among other things, is a monument to Nico’s eyes.” He continues:

That there was a pair in my own time, and that I met them, forehead to forehead, that the Black Photograph sang to other irises, and yes, corneas, retinas and optic nerves, all the way down the foul leather bag to Nico’s restless heart, another human heart, that this actually happened constitutes the sole assault on my loneliness that the external has ever made and it was her.

Only after many weeks of being with Nico did Cohen finally understand her mysterious manner of speaking and singing: she was partially deaf. He was “perplexed by her conversation and paralyzed by her beauty” and thought that she was a terrific singer. “Completely disregarded … but she’s one of the really original talents in the whole racket.” Years later they re-met accidentally at the Chelsea, by then a dangerous place: the previous week a murder had occurred, and hustlers and drug dealers were everywhere, as were the police. Whether it was the drink or old times remembered, Nico suggested that the two of them go up to his room to talk because the bar was closing. They sat close to each other on his bed, and “I put my hand on—I think it was her wrist—and she hauled off and hit me so hard it lifted me clean off the bed, and she screamed and screamed. And suddenly the door came down and about twenty policemen came in, thinking I was the killer they were looking for. …” Several lines from “Memories” on Death of a Ladies’ Man refer to her:

I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel

I walked up to the tallest

and the blondest girl

I said, Look, you don’t know me now

but very soon you will

So won’t you let me see

Won’t you let me see

Won’t you let me see

Your naked body.

“Once in my room,” Cohen said, Nico whispered “I can’t bear anything that isn’t artificial.” Nico’s sad decline into drug addiction later troubled Cohen; she died in Ibiza in 1988.

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COHEN PLAYED some of his songs for Mary Martin. Martin, who would become his first manager, introduced him to Judy Collins. In the fall of 1966, Cohen visited Collins and sang several of his songs for her. “She said she loved the stuff, [but] there wasn’t anything there [for her], but if I ever did anything else, would I keep in touch with her,” Cohen recalled. Several months later, Cohen sang “Suzanne” to her over the telephone from his mother’s house. Collins liked it immediately and recorded it for In My Life, which was released in November 1966. He knew he was on to something, telling Sam Gesser, a Montreal producer, “I’m really in the middle of writing a wonderful song and I never said that before or since to anybody. I just knew. It sounded like Montreal. It sounded like the waterfront. It sounded like the harbor.” Gesser replied, “There are a lot of songs like that around, Leonard.”

On December 2, 1966, Cohen received a copy of Collins’ album at his small Alymer Street apartment in Montreal. He couldn’t stop playing “Suzanne” over and over, as three McGill students reported when they arrived that afternoon to interview him. Cohen talked about Dylan and how pop music would be the future of poetry. He noted that the local community had dropped the word “pseudo” from his poetry only when he gained a sizable reputation. Cohen remarked on the spiritual division between the old and young, and supported any belief system that would work: “Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, lsd.” The students asked about his singing and Cohen explained that even if you don’t have a voice or play well, “just speak from the center, tell people where you are and you’ll reach them.”

Collins’ next album, Wildflowers (1967), included three of Cohen’s songs—“Sisters of Mercy,” “Priests,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”—as well as Joni Mitchell’s hit, “Both Sides Now.” Collins acknowledged that it was Cohen’s example that encouraged her to try her own songwriting. Until she met him, she had not written any of her own songs. In turn, Collins encouraged Cohen’s first major singing performance, on April 30, 1967, at a Town Hall rally in New York for sane, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Cohen walked out and played a few bars of “Suzanne,” but then froze and walked off stage, a combination of stage fright and the fact that his Spanish guitar had gone out of tune because of the temperature change between the overheated backstage and the frigid stage out front. However, the audience shouted for him to come back and, with Collins encouraging him, he returned to finish the song.

After Cohen’s success with Judy Collins, Mary Martin called John Hammond, Columbia Records’ leading artist and repertory executive. Hammond had discovered and signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and, later, Bruce Springsteen. On the advice of Martin, Hammond viewed the 1965 NFB film about Cohen and then invited Cohen to lunch. They ate at White’s on 23rd Street, and later went back to Cohen’s room at the Chelsea, where Hammond asked to hear a few songs. Cohen played “Master Song,” “The Stranger Song,” “Suzanne,” “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and a still-unrecorded song about rivers. At the end of six or seven numbers, Hammond simply said, “You got it, Leonard.” Cohen didn’t know if he meant he had talent or a contract. Hammond thought that Cohen had a “hypnotic effect;” he was “enchanting” and unlike anyone he ever heard before: “Leonard set his own rules and was an original.”

Columbia Records, however, was not so keen, and Bill Gallagher, acting head of the record division, opposed the deal on the grounds that a thirty-two-year-old poet was not a good bet to become a singing sensation. Over the years the relationship between Cohen and Columbia reflected this ambivalence. In 1984 Walter Yetnikoff, then president of CBS Records, said to Cohen, “Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” Columbia had sensed the problem eighteen years earlier: Cohen had talent but would he sell? They decided to take a chance. Within a week of Hammond’s meeting him, Cohen was in Columbia’s Studio E on 52nd Street.

Recording the album was no simple task. Cohen had never been in a studio to record before and he could not read music. Hammond had arranged for first-rate studio musicians to accompany him, but Cohen found that he paid more attention to their musicianship than his lyrics. Cohen hadn’t sung with professional musicians, and he didn’t know how to work with them. The relaxed Hammond read a newspaper behind the console, displaying what Cohen called “a compassionate lapse of attention.” He knew Cohen had to find his own way. He thought Cohen should then lay down a simple track, just guitar and bass. He brought in Willie Ruff, a bass player who taught at Yale. Ruff was also a linguist and understood Cohen’s songs and their meanings implicitly. He was able to anticipate Cohen’s musical moves. With Ruff’s support, Cohen recorded the vocal tracks of “Suzanne,” “The Master Song,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “Sisters of Mercy.” “Leonard always needed reassurance of some kind,” Hammond remembered, and Ruff provided it. To establish the mood for the songs, Cohen had the studio lights turned off, lit candles, and burned incense; but he needed one more object to feel at home: a mirror.

In Montreal, Cohen had always sung in front of a full-length mirror, partly because he needed to see himself perform and partly to imagine what an audience might see. He asked Hammond if a mirror could be placed in the studio. At the next session, Cohen sang while staring at a reflection of himself. But the sessions were still not coming together. Cohen visited a hypnotist to see if he could recreate his moods when he was writing the songs but it didn’t work. Cohen did not believe that his voice was commercial enough, and he was insecure about his guitar playing.

Hammond became ill and had to remove himself from the project. A new producer, John Simon, was brought in and he added strings, horns, and “pillows of sound for Cohen’s voice to rest on.” Cohen disagreed with Simon’s enhancement and felt he was losing touch with his own songs. Simon added a piano and drums to “Suzanne,” arguing that it required syncopation. Cohen removed both, thinking that the song should be “linear, should be smooth.” With “So Long, Marianne,” Simon introduced a stop or blank moment, and then restarted the music. Cohen objected and changed the stop in the mix. The arrangements on Cohen’s first album remained Simon’s, but the mix is Cohen’s. He felt the “sweetening”—adding the strings and horns—was wrong, but it couldn’t be removed from the four-track master tape. On the lyric sheets accompanying the album, the following note by Cohen appears:

The songs and the arrangements were introduced. They felt some affection for one another but because of a blood feud, they were forbidden to marry. Nevertheless, the arrangements wished to throw a party. The songs preferred to retreat behind a veil of satire.

Songs of Leonard Cohen was unofficially released on December 26, 1967, although the year is always listed as 1968. For the most part, the arrangements on the album work against the songs. “Sisters of Mercy” uses a calliope and bells as background; “So Long, Marianne” contains a female rock and roll chorus; “Suzanne,” also has a chorus to deepen the sound. “Master Song” does benefit from unusual electronic sounds, as does “Winter Lady.” The most unnerving element is the scream or wail at the end of “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

In advance of the album, the folk music magazine Sing Out published two articles on Cohen, the first a casual biographical piece by Ellen Sander, the second an analysis of his music by the Saskatchewan-born Cree singer Buffy Sainte-Marie. She criticized his lack of musical knowledge but celebrated his sometimes outrageous modulations, shifting keys within a song. His melodies, she wrote, were largely “unguessable,” while his musical figures repeated themselves so gradually that a casual listener could miss the patterns. Yet he lifted one off “familiar musical ground.” “It’s like losing track of time,” Sainte-Marie wrote, “or getting off at Times Square and walking into the Bronx Zoo; you don’t know how it happened or who is wrong, but there you are.” His songs seemed to lack “roots or directions” because of his unusual chord patterns, but once absorbed they became enchanting.

Cohen had already mistakenly signed away the publishing rights to three of his most important songs: “Suzanne,” “Master Song,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” unaware of the consequences. Mary Martin knew an arranger, Jeff Chase, who also promoted himself as a music publisher and who she thought would enhance these songs. He worked with Cohen to put together a demo tape for promotion, but Cohen soon realized that he and Chase had conflicting ideas. But he convinced Cohen that it would be useful for him to sign certain documents that “temporarily” gave Chase rights to the three songs and allowed him to represent Cohen. When things didn’t work out musically, Chase told Cohen he was contractually bound. If he pulled out, Chase would retain the publishing rights to those songs as compensation for damages. Cohen was inexperienced and unsure and sought Mary Martin’s advice. She suggested Cohen let it go. Cohen had lost the rights to Chase on a bluff of sorts, since Chase never did more than prepare the lead sheets.

In 1970, after his first tour, Cohen realized what a mistake he had made. He also realized that Stranger Music, a music publishing company he formed in 1967, was partly owned by Mary Martin, with whom by then he had become disenchanted. He went to Columbia producer Bob Johnston’s lawyer, Marty Machat, for advice, and Machat, who soon became Cohen’s lawyer, worked a deal whereby Mary Martin was bought out of Stranger Music. But that still left the matter of the song rights, which Cohen later described as having been “lost in New York City but it is probably appropriate that I don’t own this song [“Suzanne”]. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea.” In 1983–84, Chase contacted Barry Wexler, a friend of Cohen’s, to tell him that Cohen should have the rights to these songs and that he was open to offers. A meeting subsequently took place at the Royalton Hotel in New York between a nervous Chase and an angry Cohen. Asked by Cohen how much he wanted, Chase replied, “What do you think?” Cohen thought for a second and said, “One dollar, you motherfucker!” Chase ran out of the room. But Cohen still wanted the rights to the songs and in 1987 successfully negotiated a sum that was more than his first offer but less than what Chase wanted.

Songs of Leonard Cohen introduced Cohen to the arcane financial machinations of the music world, a dark contrast to the book publishing industry which had relatively little corruption simply because it had relatively little money. But the album remains a coherent artistic statement, and it raised issues that would be addressed in later songs. Cohen has said on occasion that an artist has only one or two songs or poems that he constantly reinvents and that his earliest work contains all his later themes and variations. This is true of Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The back cover of the album shows a portrait of a Joan of Arc figure engulfed by flames. Her blue eyes and enchained hands are raised upward, while the flames reach her breasts. The unattributed image was actually a widely available Mexican postcard of a saint Cohen found in a Mexican magic store. It shows the anima sola, the lonely soul, seeking release from the chains of materiality. “I sort of felt I was this woman,” he remarked years later. The reappearance of the image on the reverse of the 1995 tribute album Tower of Song was “closing the circle,” he explained.

“Stories of the Street” documents Cohen’s despair and dislocation during his early days in New York. As he says at the beginning of the song, “the stories of the streets are mine,” elaborating his experiences in narrative: “I lean from my window sill / In this old hotel I chose / One hand on my suicide / One hand on the rose.”

“Sisters of Mercy” had been written in Edmonton after he ducked into a doorway during a blizzard, and encountered two young women with backpacks taking refuge. Since they had no place to stay, Cohen invited them to his hotel room. They had hitchhiked across the country the previous week and quickly fell asleep on his double bed. He sat in the armchair near the window, and as the storm abated and the sky cleared, he studied the moonlight on the North Saskatchewan River. A melody had been rattling in his head (he recalled playing it for his mother in her Montreal kitchen), and wrote the stanzas as they slept: “It was the only time a song has ever been given to me without my having to sweat over every word. And when they awakened in the morning, I sang them the song exactly as it is, perfect, completely formed, and they were … happy about it. Barbara and Lorraine were their names.”

“The Stranger Song,” which addresses loss, departure, and the constant need to move on is essentially a confessional. Love is necessary yet also destructive; the warmth and comfort that love provides also weakens one’s will. All of Cohen’s later themes were contained here; Songs of Leonard Cohen became a template for the songs to come.

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IT WAS IN NEW YORK that Cohen met Bob Dylan in the fall of 1969. Cohen remembers being in the dressing room of the Bitter End, a Greenwich Village folk club, where he had gone to see Phil Ochs or Tim Buckley perform. Dylan had returned to live in the Village after spending several years secluded in Woodstock, N. Y., following his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966. Dylan heard Cohen was at the club and sent Paul Colby, his assistant and friend, to summon Cohen, who then met Dylan at the Kettle of Fish, Dylan’s hangout on MacDougal Street.

Cohen’s talent had some of the same elements as Dylan’s: both wrote sophisticated lyrics, surprisingly elegant melodies, and neither had much of a voice. Dylan drew heavily from two of the same sources that Cohen did; the bible and Hank Williams.

Cohen has stated his appreciation of Dylan’s work many times, calling him, at one point, “our most sophisticated singer in a generation … nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso—that exuberance, range and assimilation of the whole history of music.” And Dylan has said that one of the people he would not mind being for a minute is Leonard Cohen (two others were Roy Acuff and Walter Matthau).

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WHILE LIVING in New York, Cohen began to make appearances on Canadian television. He was the perfect Canadian cultural commodity; articulate, sexy, and living outside the country. His first show was CBC’s Take 30, hosted by Adrienne Clarkson. He appeared with the Toronto folk group The Stormy Clovers, who had been singing his songs in Montreal and Toronto clubs. On Take 30, Cohen sang “Traveller” (an early version of “The Stranger Song”), “Suzanne,” and “So Long, Marianne.” Afterwards, Clarkson asked if he now wanted to sing rather than write poetry. Cohen replied, “Well, I think the time is over when poets should sit on marble stairs with black capes.”

In 1967, Cohen began a romantic relationship with Joni Mitchell, whom he first met at the Newport Folk Festival. He would visit her at the Earl Hotel on Waverly Place in the Village and since Mitchell frequently played in Montreal, she would spend time with Cohen there, writing the song “Rainy Night House” about their visit to his mother’s home. When Cohen went to Los Angeles in the fall of 1968, he spent nearly a month with her at her new Laurel Canyon home. Cohen, Mitchell acknowledges, inspired her, giving her another standard in songwriting, although sometimes his presence surprised her—as when she found his name inscribed on the back of a heavy pendulum that fell off an antique clock she owned. He and Dylan, she has remarked, were her “pace runners,” the ones that kept her heading to new and higher musical ground. Cohen characterizes their relationship as “the extension of our friendship,” a friendship that has endured.

Based on the belief that he was the voice of the new counterculture, Cohen was flown out to Hollywood in 1967 by a producer to score a film that was to be directed by John Boorman. It was his first time there, and what he remembers most distinctly were the matchboxes with his name on them in his hotel room. The producer thought Cohen would be a kind of authority on the new movement in music and the culture. It didn’t work. “They showed me the film but I couldn’t relate to it.” He went out again a year later to score a movie tentatively called “Suzanne,” an art film based loosely on his song. The filmmakers were unaware that Cohen had lost the rights to the song and the project didn’t work out. But Cohen took the opportunity to spend time with Joni Mitchell, who was becoming an important part of the west coast music scene, and then rented a car and drove up to northern California to visit his friend Steve Sanfield, whom he knew from Hydra.

Back in New York, Cohen began to perform more. On April 6, 1967, he was introduced to a standing-room only crowd at the State University in Buffalo, New York, with these words: “James Joyce is not dead; he lives in Montreal under the name of Cohen.” He read from Beautiful Losers and sang “Suzanne,” “The Stranger Song,” “The Master Song,” “Love Calls You by Your Name,” and “The Jewels In Your Shoulder” and did three encores. On April 30 he had his Town Hall debut for sane and, shortly after, performed at expo ’67 in Montreal in a small pavillion with a club-like setting. Walking out with his guitar and a handful of candles, Cohen engaged the audience by announcing that “I cannot sing unless you all agree to take a candle and put it in the middle of your table and light it.” The audience thought this was pretty tacky but humored the singer. A guest that night recalled that Cohen’s “guitar playing was terrible and his voice was not much better. But he got to you and the women were quickly taken in; the men were less sure of him, but the mood was fabulous.”

Cohen also performed at the Rhinegold Music Festival in Central Park and the Newport Folk Festival on July 16, where he joined Joni Mitchell, Mike Settle, and Janis Ian at the first singer-songwriter afternoon, which had been arranged by Judy Collins. In the car to Newport, Cohen confided to his lawyer Marty Machat that he had little confidence in his singing. “None of you guys know how to sing,” Machat replied, “When I want to hear singers, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.”

In September, Cohen appeared on CBS-TV’s Sunday morning cultural affairs program Camera Three, eliciting the largest audience response in the fourteen-year history of the show. In November, Judy Collins released Wildflowers, which included three of Cohen’s songs. The album became her biggest hit, reaching #5 on the charts. All of this set the stage for the release of Songs of Leonard Cohen.

A January 28, 1968, article in the New York Times captured Cohen’s state of mind. The interview took place in his hotel room in the dilapidated Henry Hudson Hotel, where Cohen was enjoying the trappings that go with being “strictly an underground celebrity.” With his album now released, he seemed “on the verge of becoming a major spokesman for the aging pilgrims of his generation, the so-called Silent Generation.” Cohen offered his views on sex, women, revolutionary movements, the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967, and suffering, an area where people increasingly looked to him for advice. He offered diet tips; three years earlier he had been a vegetarian, now he only ate meat, and even proposed a new language: “When I see a woman transformed by the orgasm we have together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left … Everybody I meet wipes me out. It knocks me out, and all I can do is get down on my knees. I don’t even think of myself as a writer, singer, or whatever. The occupation of being a man is so much more.” He praised women as mankind’s salvation: “I wish the women would hurry up and take over. It’s going to happen so let’s get it over with … then we can finally recognize that women really are the minds and the force that holds everything together; and men really are gossips and artists. Then we could get about our childish work and they could keep the world going. I really am for the matriarchy.”

Commenting on his work, Cohen says his novels “have a pathological tone. What I find out from my mail is that the best products of our time are in agony. The finest sensibilities of the age are convulsed with pain. That means a change is at hand.” Mankind, he summarizes, must “rediscover the crucifixion. The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance. It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.” The headline of the interview, taken from a statement he offers, was “I’ve Been On the Outlaw Scene Since 15.”

The next day, an unsympathetic review of the album appeared in the Times. The second sentence reads: “On the alienation scale, [Cohen] rates somewhere between Schopenhauer and Bob Dylan, two other prominent poets of pessimism.” Yet the critic believed that the album would be fairly successful, although “weltschmerz and soft rock” are not always big sellers. “Suzanne,” the critic said, “has its moments of fairly digestible surrealism.” A comparison with Dylan emphasized their differences: “whereas Mr. Dylan is alienated from society and mad about it, Mr. Cohen is alienated and merely sad about it.” However, the review concludes positively: “popular music is long overdue for a spell of neo-Keatsy world-weariness and Mr. Cohen may well be its spokesman this season.”

By the spring, Songs of Leonard Cohen was a modest hit, reaching #162 in the United States, sandwiched between the Young Rascals’ Collection and Petula Clark’s These Are Songs. In Britain that summer, he hit #13, forecasting his popularity in Europe. Columbia also released “Suzanne” as a single, but it did not reach the charts. Cohen did not support the album with a tour, largely because of his insecurity as a performer. In Canada, the national news magazine Maclean’s disliked the album, beginning its review with “Pity.” An article in the Village Voice entitled “Beautiful Creep” criticized the folk poetry movement and identified Cohen as its leading proponent. “Cohen suffers gloriously in every couplet,” the article said. Cohen’s work was characterized as depressing, dark, and despairing. Eight months later, the New York Times linked Cohen with Dylan, Paul Simon, Rod McKuen, and Laura Nyro as the new voices of folk rock poetry.

Cohen went to London to appear on BBC-TV, performing twelve songs on two of his own shows, both entitled “Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen.” The shows included “You Know Who I Am,” “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” The introduction to the last song indicated Cohen’s gloomy state. He talked about a Czechoslovakian singer who used to perform a song so depressing that afterwards people would leap out of windows. Cohen then reported that the singer himself had recently leapt to his death. “Dress Rehearsal Rag” was Cohen’s equivalent song, and he performed it only when “the environment was buoyant enough to support its despair.”

Although he was labeled a sixties poet and singer, Cohen remained aloof from the larger movements. “I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t that attractive to me. … Mostly I’m on the front line of my own tiny life. I remember that I was inflamed in the 60s, as so many of us were. My appetites were inflamed: to love, to create, my greed, one really wanted the whole thing.” In particular, Cohen felt that the folk movement had been rapidly usurped by commerce. “The thing died very, very quickly; the merchants took over. Nobody resisted. My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money. I suppose that had I moved into more popular realms, I might have surrendered some of the characteristics of my nature that are now described as virtues.”

Cohen’s dislocated situation in New York led to his exploring different sexual, spiritual, and pharmaceutical pathways, and one was Scientology. In 1968, as he was driving down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with Joni Mitchell, she spotted a building with a number of women wearing saris and handing out material. Above the door a large sign which read “Scientology.” “What is Scientology?” she asked Cohen. “Oh, some crackpot religion,” he replied. A few weeks later, he called from New York to say that he’d joined them and that they were going to rule the world. But a few months later, Cohen told Mitchell he was disenchanted and that he’d had some difficulty extricating himself from it. Initially, Scientology offered the goal of a “clear path” (“Did you ever go clear?” he asks in “Famous Blue Raincoat”). Cohen had also heard it was a good place to meet women. On June 17, 1968, Cohen received a Scientology certificate awarding him “Grade iv—Release.”

By this time Cohen’s relationship with Marianne was ending. He was seeing other women, defending his behavior as acts of generosity; he was restless in New York. He saw Marianne and Axel often, but he also knew that their future was bleak, as a number of his songs record. “So Long, Marianne” is the musical denouement to their arrangement. They finally separated in 1968. Although Marianne was still mad about him, she understood that she could never completely possess him. “My new laws encourage / not satori but perfection,” Cohen wrote. In subsequent relationships, he sought to enact this principle, building on his earlier experiences. He required a serious, monogamous relationship, but one that allowed for his need for the freedom which sustained his creativity. Marianne was both the inspiration for, and casualty of, this need.