8
LEONARD COHEN met nineteen-year-old Suzanne Elrod in an elevator at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Cohen was there to attend a Scientology session, one of the potholes on his road to enlightenment, and Elrod was living at the Plaza, supported by a businessman. Elrod stepped out of the elevator as Cohen was going in. He looked at her, spun around and quickly introduced himself. Their relationship began almost immediately. She soon left the Plaza and moved into Cohen’s downscale apartment at the Chelsea.
Suzanne was radically different from Marianne; whereas Marianne was domestic and protective, Suzanne was direct and domineering. With her dark, sultry beauty and aggressive sexuality, she sustained Cohen’s interest for nearly a decade, and he never learned to refuse her various demands, whether they were for clothes or homes. A longtime friend from Greece commented that both women “had catlike characters”: Marianne was “a puma,” whereas Suzanne was “a Persian in a lady’s parlor” who could jump with claws at any instant. Marianne seemed difficult to get to know, as if she had a wall of glass around her. She was loving, compliant, and understanding. With Suzanne, Cohen felt he had found an equal, someone who could meet him at the same level of intensity. He found her beauty inescapable and her sensuality irresistible. She hung erotic woodcuts beside religious icons on the white-washed walls of his house on Hydra. She was Jewish, from Miami, a beautiful, difficult woman. “God, whenever I see her ass, I forget every pain that’s gone between us,” he once remarked. When he discovered that she had small handwriting much like his own, he said, “I fear we are to be together for a long time.”
Their difference in age never affected their relationship, although once when Cohen was doing an interview and gave his real age, thirty-four, she interrupted to say, “Leonard, don’t say how old you are.” He laughed and quoted John, 8:32: “The truth shall set you free.” In their first year together, Cohen and Suzanne were itinerant, living on Hydra, at the Chelsea in New York, and briefly in Montreal where, after a short stay with Robert Hershorn, they rented a small house in the Greek section near Mount Royal. He wrote and composed, while she dashed off a pornographic novel, written “to make us laugh.” He gave Suzanne a filigreed Jewish wedding ring, although they never actually married. They eventually settled in Nashville.
Cohen decided to go to Nashville to record his second album, Songs from a Room, after meeting Bob Johnston, Columbia’s leading producer of folk rock, in Los Angeles in 1968. Johnston, who had produced Dylan, had heard Cohen’s debut album and was interested in producing his next.
Nashville was the bible publishing capital of America, referred to as the “buckle of the Bible belt” and seen by many as a Christian, largely Republican theme park. The juxtaposition of a lugubrious, urban Jew and the rural, country backdrop of Nashville seemed odd. Musically, Nashville leaned toward bad puns and cloying musical arrangements. The television show Hee Haw debuted in 1969 and Merle Haggard’s anti-protest song “Okie From Muskogee” was a number one hit. But its aw-shucks, hillbilly veneer belied the level of musicianship and innovation that thrived in Nashville. Chet Atkins and producer Owen Bradley were pioneering new sounds. Johnny Cash was doing interesting work. Kris Kristofferson was writing songs and working as a night janitor at Columbia Records. Elvis was recording at the RCA studios. Bob Dylan had recorded two albums there (John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline) and Buffy Sainte-Marie was developing one. Ever since his first band, the Buckskin Boys, Cohen had had an odd fondness for country music, and saw himself, incongruously, as a country singer.
When he arrived in Nashville, a pop/country crossover trend was beginning, blurring the distinction between the two. Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” had been a number one hit on both the country and pop charts. Glen Campbell had recorded “Witchita Lineman” and Ray Charles, a longtime favorite of Cohen’s, issued Volume 2 of “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” More experimentally, a series of twelve duets between Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash was recorded in March 1969. The crossover philosophy would be revived in cycles through the ensuing years, with varying degrees of success. In Nashville, Cohen found enthusiastic, professional musicians who were ready to accept him as a slightly older poet and budding folk-rock singer.
When Cohen decided to go down to Nashville in 1968, he was initially opposed to Suzanne coming with him. She spent the night before his departure carousing with several men, an unsubtle message. Cohen was upset but slightly overpowered. He was in thrall and it was decided that she would go with him. They stayed briefly in the Noel Hotel but decided to move to a small cabin in Franklin, Tenneessee, a rural town twenty-five miles southwest of Nashville. It was their home for the next two years. Producer Bob Johnston rented the place from Boudleaux Bryant, songwriter of “Bye, Bye Love” and other hits for the Everly Brothers, but let Cohen have it for seventy-five dollars a month. It came with twelve hundred acres of virgin forest filled with hickory, chestnut, oak, beech, and black ash trees. It also had a stream. Wild peacocks roamed the area and Cohen would amuse his occasional guests by imitating their cry.
He and Suzanne led a quiet rural life, driving in to Nashville only to record or to meet friends. Suzanne made long dresses, worked at her loom and dabbled with pottery. Guests to the farm found it isolated and Cohen’s life there simple. At the time he was continuing with his macrobiotic diet (between 1965 and 1968 he was a vegetarian). Cohen often had nothing to offer guests but soy tea.
In Tennessee, Cohen was able to fulfill his fantasy about being a cowboy. One of his favorite places in Nashville was the Woodbine Army Surplus store. A journal from that period contains photographs of various gun counters; he became the poet with a gun. On one occasion, friends came over for an afternoon of shooting, bringing a carload of weapons. Leonard joined them with the largest weapon he had at the time, a Walther PPK pistol. He noted the comic imbalance in firepower, commenting that he was impressed with the way the South protected its women.
Cohen decided he needed a horse, and he bought one from Kid Marley, a sometime cowboy and full-time drinker. A legend in the area, Marley could sing and play the harmonica and did so often with Cohen. The horse was lame and consistently uncooperative, spending most of its time in the pasture avoiding the Montreal cowboy, although Cohen did eventually learn to ride him.
One of Cohen’s neighbors was Willie York, a notorious figure who had an illegal still and had once shot a revenue officer. He became the subject of a hit song called “Willie York, Big East Fork, Franklin, Tennesssee” by country singer Johnny Paycheck. York looked after Cohen’s cabin and land while he lived there, but he also made off with a variety of goods, including Cohen’s rifle. An erratic neighbor, he would pound on Cohen’s door in the middle of a raging storm, demanding twenty dollars, and Cohen would give it to him. Yet his individualism appealed to Cohen and he enjoyed his company.
For the most part, Suzanne felt comfortable in Tennessee, although she made regular trips back to New York or Florida. “Diamonds in the Mine,” from Cohen’s third album, refers to her failure to write to him and his disappointment at not finding any letters from her in his mailbox on the farm. But in composing, recording, and living far from the pressures of Montreal or the intensity of Hydra, he was content: “I moved there. I had a house, a jeep, a carbine, a pair of cowboy boots, a girlfriend… A typewriter, a guitar. Everything I needed.” Suzanne’s view of their life there, however, was touched with cynicism: “As long as someone like him [Cohen] was in the universe, it was okay for me to be here. I was walking on tiptoe—anything for the poet. Our relationship was like a spider web. Very complicated.”
In rural Tennessee, Cohen had successfully transposed what he had in Hydra—the romantic isolation that allowed him to work. Yet he never quite escaped his melancholy, as a poem from the “Nashville Notebook of 1969,” entitled “The Pro,” makes clear. It is a serio-comic poem of departing:
I leave to several jealous men a second-rate legend of my life.
To those few high school girls
who preferred my work to Dylan’s
I leave my stone ear
and my disposable Franciscan ambitions.
The recording of Songs from a Room went well. Bob Johnston understood the fragility of Cohen’s songs and their blend of poetry with music and, like John Hammond, helped him to overcome his nervousness in working with other musicians. They worked in Columbia’s large, new 16th Avenue studio, which Johnston had had refitted. Johnston chose the sidemen, including Charlie Daniels, an imposing Texan and a fiddle player who had worked with Dylan and would go on to his own successful career. The first session though, was unfocused. Cohen came in and asked, “What do you want to do?” Johnson said, “Let’s get some hamburgers and beer.” When they returned, Cohen again asked, “What do you want me to do?” Johnston replied, “Sing.” After the first taping, Cohen came into the control room and asked, “Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?” “Yeah,” said Johnston.
Charlie Daniels recalled the way Cohen appreciated the musicianship of the players but also brought his own unique talents to bear. In the studio, Daniels and the other sidemen were told to listen to Cohen in order to get into the songs. It was like mixing colors; you had to be one of the colors for it to work. Johnston later referred to the album as a painting, not a record, and described his role as “a musical bodyguard,” protecting Cohen and his music from artificial intrusions and falsification of sound. There was a fragile, gentle feel to the album. Johnston attempted “to make his voice sound like a mountain” without sacrificing the purity of his sound. When Cohen sang “The Partisan,” one of the few songs he has recorded that he didn’t write, Johnston felt that French voices would enhance it. So he and Cohen went to France and overdubbed three female French singers.
The music on Songs from a Room was produced in such a way as to enhance the language; no drums were used, and an electric guitar only sparingly. The sessions were quite loose, with plenty of time allowed for each take. Johnston had recently done Blonde on Blonde for Dylan, as well as Folsom Prison for Johnny Cash, so he was prepared for the new sound that Cohen brought.
Johnston has said that Cohen swept one’s psychic energy away. “Leonard has always had his finger on the future, Dylan his eye on tomorrow,” Johnston explained in an interview. He described Cohen’s guitar playing, with its beautifully constructed chords, as a black widow spider. Johnston recognized the offbeat power of Cohen’s voice, its ability to mesmerize.
Cohen himself maintained doubts about his voice. Of one song, “Lady Midnight,” he wrote, “The voice is uncertain. In those days it took me fifteen minutes to decide whether or not I should wear my cap when I went outside and a half hour whether or not I should take it off when I came back.”
Yet in the studio, Cohen was sure of what he wanted. Johnston “created an atmosphere in the studio that really invited you to do your best, stretch out, do another take, an atmosphere that was free from judgement, free from criticism, full of invitation, full of affirmation.” It was the way he moved while you were singing; “he’d dance for you” and “sponsor a tremendous generosity in the studio.” The recording process was becoming easier for Cohen and he was relaxed. In his journal he wrote, “read [the] Zohar, exercised, slowly came alive.”
The album was released in March 1969. Grim, hard, and emotionally powerful, it did nothing to dispel his reputation as the crown prince of pessimism. In “You Know Who I Am,” he sings:
Sometimes I need you naked
Sometimes I need you wild
I need you to carry my children in
And I need you to kill a child.
“Bird on the Wire” became an anthem and Cohen used it to open his concerts, explaining that it “seems to return me to my duties.” Kris Kristofferson, who had begun selling his own songs, told Cohen at a Nashville party that Cohen had stolen part of the melody from Lefty Frizell’s “Mom & Dad’s Waltz.” But Kristofferson admired the song and said that the first three lines—“Like a bird on the wire, / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free”—would be his epitaph.
“Bird on the Wire” began in Greece: when Cohen first arrived in Hydra, there were no wires on the island, no telephones, and no regular electricity. But soon telephone poles appeared, and then the wires: “I would stare out the window at these telephone wires and think how civilization had caught up with me and I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all. I wasn’t going to be able to live this eleventh-century life that I thought I had found for myself. So that was the beginning.” Then he noticed that the birds came to the wires. The next line referred to the many evenings Cohen and friends climbed the endless stairs up from the port of Hydra, drunk and singing. Often you’d see “three guys with their arms around each other, stumbling up the stairs and singing these impeccable thirds.” He finished the song in a Hollywood motel on Sunset Boulevard in 1969.
A single, “The Old Revolution,” hit #63 on the U.S. charts and did surprisingly well in England. In France the popularity of the album led to Cohen being named le folksinger de l’année by Le Nouvel Observateur. Cohen entered the cultural grammar; it was remarked that if a Frenchwoman owned but one record, it was likely to be by Leonard Cohen. It was later reported that the president, Georges Pompidou, often took Cohen’s records with him on vacation.
While still living in Nashville, Cohen made a trip to Italy. In June of 1969 he joined Franco Zefferelli and Leonard Bernstein at a villa outside Rome to score a movie on St. Francis of Assisi, titled Brother Sun, Sister Moon. Music was to play a leading part, with Bernstein composing the music and Cohen writing the lyrics. With Zefferelli, Cohen visited the tomb of St. Francis, taking away some small metal birds blessed by the abbot. There were long meetings and luxurious Italian meals served by attractive young men but little real work. Cohen was unhappy with the scene and left for Rome, where he unexpectedly ran into Nico. He was seized with his old obsession but nothing came of it. Zefferelli eventually made his film but Cohen was not a part of it. He was replaced by Donovan.
After several false starts, Cohen did get involved in scoring films, providing songs for Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Cohen was in Nashville recording some tracks for his third album, Songs of Love and Hate, and ducked into a theater to see Altman’s film Brewster McCloud. That night he was back in the studio again when, by coincidence, Robert Altman called him, telling him that he had built a film around Cohen’s songs from his first album. He said he had been writing the script while listening to Cohen’s record. Cohen said, “Who are you?” Altman replied, “Well, I did M*A*S*H, that’s my film.” “I don’t know it,” Cohen replied, asking if there was anything else he had done. “Well, I did a picture that’s been completely buried, that you wouldn’t know about; it was called Brewster McCloud.” To that replied Cohen, “Listen, I just came out of the theater. I saw it twice; you can have anything of mine you want!”
For McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Cohen did some additional instrumental music, although eventually the only piece used was guitar background for a soliloquy by Warren Beatty. The soundtrack for the movie, released in 1971, included “The Stranger Song” (the opening piece), “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Winter Lady,” with various instrumentals added. When he saw the finished picture—without the music—Cohen candidly told Altman he didn’t like the film. Several months later, however, when he saw the completed film with the soundtrack in Montreal, he managed to reach Altman in London. “Forget everything I said; it’s really beautiful!” he shouted into the phone.
Reaction to the film itself was mixed. Vincent Canby in the New York Times thought that its intentions were “not only serious, they are meddlesomely imposed on the film by tired symbolism, [and] by a folksong commentary on the soundtrack that recalls not the old Pacific Northwest but San Francisco’s Hungry i.” Several months later, John Simon complained in the same paper that the dialogue was “delivered sotto voce out of the corners of people’s mouths in a remote corner of the screen or entirely off it.” He continued, “There is not much to see in the film and even less to hear—often no more than a pretentious ballad by Leonard Cohen, the Rod McKuen of the coach trade, which has nothing to do with the matter at hand.” Time said that Cohen’s craggy voice sounded “like Villon with frostbite.” The movie did poorly at the box office, and Altman has called it “the biggest failure of all my films.”
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WHILE LIVING IN NASHVILLE, Cohen went to Los Angeles for the wedding of his friend Steve Sanfield. It was Sanfield who introduced Cohen to his Zen master. An American from Massachusetts, Sanfield had been involved with LSD, Tibetan Buddhism, and mysticism. On Hydra he had peddled antique comic books and hashish. Planning to work at a Tibetan refugee camp, Sanfield left Hydra and went first to California where he learned of a Japanese Zen Buddhist missionary, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who had come to the United States in 1962 to establish a militaristic brand of Zen known as Rinzai. Unlike Soto Buddhism, which emphasizes gradual enlightenment, Rinzai stresses sudden, explosive enlightenment earned through austere regimes of zazen (meditation), sanzen(meetings with the master where a koan, or a question, is posed), and daily rituals of work and rest.
Sanfield met Roshi when the Zen master was fifty-seven. He had spent forty-one years as a monk in Japan, fifteen of them as a Zen master, and was now leading a small but committed Zen group in Gardena, a Los Angeles suburb. He had transformed his garage into a zendo, or meditation hall, and the bedroom into the sanzen, or spiritual examination room, and was sleeping on a mattress in the living room. After an excruciating session of zazen the evening of his first visit, Sanfield was unexpectedly admitted to sanzen and presented with his first koan: “Show me the voice of God.” Unable to answer, he was immediately shown out. He returned the next day and stayed for three years, soon moving into the attached garage/zendo to sleep.
In order to raise funds for Roshi’s growing roster of students and the expanding zendo, Sanfield went to New York in the fall of 1967 and there, at the Penn Terminal Hotel, re-met Cohen, then recording his first album. Cohen suddenly became very interested in learning about Sanfield’s teacher. Judaism was still important for both men, and one Sunday, Sanfield, Cohen, and Mort Levitt traveled downtown to visit a group of young Hasids. As they crossed Washington Square Park, they saw a large circle with Swami Bhaktivedanta seated in the center leading a mantra. This was his first visit to America, and the Hare Krishna movement was just beginning. Allen Ginsberg soon joined the growing circle of dancing, chanting figures. Cohen stayed while Sanfield and Levitt continued to their meeting. When they returned, the circle was just breaking up and Cohen offered his only comment: “Nice song.”
After his return from New York, Sanfield fell in love with the wife of a fellow student and was ordered by Roshi to leave the sangha, or community, for six months. He and his lover moved to the Santa Ynez mountains south of Santa Barbara. Several weeks later Roshi sent word that he wanted to see him; he expressed hesitant approval of the match. Thirteen months later, in 1969, the two were married in a ceremony presided over by Roshi at the Cimarron Zen Center in south central Los Angeles. A former home built within a compound, the Cimarron center quickly became the new focus of the Rinzai movement and is still the home temple of Rinzai-ji in America. Sanfield asked Cohen to be his best man.
Cohen, who was now in Nashville, never replied to his request. He did, however, send Sanfield an unusual photo of himself apparently hunting; hanging from his belt were the guts of some animal. But when Sanfield walked into the Cimarron center on the day of the wedding, Cohen was there. In the kitchen before the ceremony, Cohen was helping with the dishes when a small Japanese monk came in, took some food from the refrigerator, propped up his feet and ate. He then left and in hushed tones Cohen was told that that was the Roshi. At the ceremony there was much celebration of the Ten Precepts of Zen—a decalogue that includes no killing, no misuse of sex, no lying, and no indulgence in anger—but after the fifth precept, which states no dealing in intoxication, they broke out the saki and enjoyed themselves. Cohen’s twenty-eight-year relationship with Zen was baptized on this ambiguous note, one that would define his continued involvement.
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IN APRIL 1969, Cohen received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his Selected Poems, 1956–1968. Over two hundred thousand copies were sold in the United States. It was his first book of poetry to be published in the U.S., but his second album had just appeared and he was becoming well known as a singer. A full-page ad for the album reads in part, “What makes Leonard Cohen a very different poet is that he turns his poetry into songs … now there’s actually a demand up front for Leonard Cohen.”
Selected Poems also sold well in Canada, although the numbers did not equal those in the United States. Including selections from his first four books and twenty new poems, the collection presented a timely overview of Cohen’s work. It was published in England in 1969 and in the following four years in Germany, Israel, Sweden, France, and Spain. When Cohen learned that he had received the award, he sent a telegram from Europe: “May I respectfully request that my name be withdrawn from the list of recipients of the Governor General’s Award for 1968.I do sincerely thank all those concerned for their generous intention. Much in me strives for this honor but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely.” No one in English Canada had ever before turned down Canada’s most prestigious literary award (and the accompanying twenty-five-hundred-dollar prize money), although the previous month Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin had rejected the award because accepting it “would not conform to [his] political beliefs.” As a separatist and member of the Rassemblement pour l’independance nationale, Aquin felt he had to reject it. After the embarrassment caused by two recipients declining the award, winners in subsequent years have been asked whether or not they would accept the award before the public is informed.
Unexpectedly, Cohen turned up with Quebec novelist Diane Giguere at the party Jack McClelland gave for the Governor General winners at the Chateau Laurier the night of the Ottawa ceremony. Upon seeing him, an angry Mordecai Richler motioned him into the bathroom with the words “C’mere. I want to talk to you,” closed the door, and then pointedly asked him why he had turned down the award. “I don’t know” was Cohen’s halting protest. “Any other answer and I would have punched you in the nose,” Richler heatedly replied. Cohen believed that it wasn’t necessary to “get behind Canada then.” In 1969 the country did not seem, as it does today, an entity that needed such support, he later explained. And he felt that receiving an award from the federal government at a time when the separatists were crying for recognition was, for someone from Quebec, not quite timely. He had friends in the separatist movement, and he couldn’t divorce himself from it so easily. “I have no idea why he came to the party,” McClelland remarked.
Most of the material in Selected Poems was first chosen by Marianne. The collection reflected the changing focus of Cohen’s writing, from his early concentration on religion and identity to a lyrical celebration of love and then the pain of history and loss. One of the best known of the new poems in the collection was a comic plea entitled “Marita.” It reads:
MARITA
PLEASE FIND ME
I AM ALMOST 30
Cohen had scrawled it on a wall behind one of the outdoor tables of a famous Montreal cafe/bar on Mountain Street, Le Bistro chez Lou Lou les Bacchantes, located under the old Crêpe Bretonne. The bistro was open from 1962 to 1982, and was a gathering place for journalists, writers, artists, politicians, and riff-raff. Pierre Trudeau, René Lévesque, Jack Kerouac, Genevieve Bujold, and Harry Belafonte were likely to turn up around the famous zinc bar or at the marble-topped tables set outside. The Marita in the poem is Marita La Fleche, a petite, attractive brunette from Manitoba who managed three Montreal women’s dress shops. After leaving her shop on Mountain Street, she would go to “Le Bar Zinc,” as it came to be called. Cohen was a regular himself and tried unsuccessfully to pick Marita up one evening. She patted the young poet on the head, and said, “Go on your way, young man and come back when you’re thirty.” Cohen’s poem was his response, although he recently admitted to no recollection of Marita in the flesh.
Critical praise for the book was strong in both Canada and the United States, although the love poetry rather than the spiritual searchings received the greatest attention. An ad for the book in the New York Times included “a modern housewife’s lament,” plucked from the New York magazine: “It’s so difficult, you know, wearing miniskirts and keeping up with Leonard Cohen, and not going insane when the diaper service doesn’t come!” In an interview in the Times from April 13, 1969, Cohen explained that there was no difference between his poems and songs. “Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were situations. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.” He was fond of citing Ezra Pound’s dictum: “When poetry strays too far from music, it atrophies. When music strays too far from the dance, it atrophies.”
A hiatus in his writing followed Selected Poems; The Energy of Slaves did not appear until 1972, Death of a Lady’s Man was published in 1977, and Book of Mercy came out in 1984. His singing took precedence, and he recorded seven new albums between 1971 and 1985. His personal life underwent dramatic changes; he became a father, committed himself to Zen, and renegotiated his life with Suzanne. A number of friends and critics felt that he had compromised his artistry by moving into music, but it was music that gained him his audience.
In June 1969, Saturday Night magazine devoted ten pages “in celebration of Leonard Cohen.” Cohen was on the cover, staring out at the reader with his large dark eyes. Type running down the left side of the cover declared, “Leonard Cohen: the poet as hero.” The headline across the top read “Mordecai Richler on the Frightened WASPS of Westmount.” Jack Batten, the new associate editor of the magazine, discussed Cohen’s popularity as a singer among the young, and the significance of his poetry and lyrics in capturing the times. One eighteen-year-old told of a visit to Cohen’s motel room, after which she remarked that, “he acts taller than he really is. I’ve heard other women say the same thing.”
Cohen was included in a series of writers featured on thirty billboards displayed in Toronto subway stations. The brainstorm of Max Layton, son of Irving, it was an original way of promoting Canadian writing and culture. Entitled “Poetry Underground,” the Cohen billboard featured a large portrait of him taken by Canadian photographer Sam Tata and the romantic lyric of “Go by Brooks,” from Selected Poems.
During 1969 Cohen was criticized for continuing to live in Greece, following the April 1967 coup by the Greek colonels who then initiated a repressive rule. He defended himself by saying that he did not see it as “a betrayal of mankind to vacation in a country ruled by fascists … I had a house there, friends; I didn’t consider my presence there a collaboration. It was the contrary.” Two poems, both entitled “I threw open the shutters” in The Energy of Slaves, confront the cost to others who were there, however, and the torture they underwent. The second version ends with these lines:
I swore by the sunlight
to take his advice:
remove all evidence from my verse
forget about his punctured feet
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THE SUCCESS of Songs from a Room in 1969 led to Cohen’s decision to go on his first tour. It was exclusively in Europe, as were his 1972 and 1974 tours. Cohen didn’t tour North America until November 1974, beginning in New York at the Bottom Line and ending in Phoenix at the Celebrity Theater in March 1975. He would not play in New York again for ten years.
Bob Johnston put together the band, which consisted of Charlie Daniels, Ron Cornelius, Bubba Fowler, and Johnston himself (he wanted to stay at home because he did not consider himself a keyboard player, but Cohen insisted), plus Corlynn Hanney and Sue Mussmano as vocalists. They began in Hamburg on May 4, 1970, and played six cities. At the opening concert in Hamburg, Cohen exhibited an odd showmanship by greeting the stomping German audience with a raised arm and the cry, “Seig Heil!” In Paris, he invited the ardent crowd to join him on the stage. They did, and the management called the police, although Cohen was able to control the crowd. He began the concert with “Bird on the Wire,” reciting rather than singing. In Copenhagen, he led the audience out into the street and back to his hotel. In London he played before ten thousand fans at the Royal Albert Hall. A critic said that Cohen exhibited a “captivating self abasement leaving deep impressions of a sad and tortured wasteland.” Cohen’s peculiar melancholy earned him a loyal British audience. “Word gets around that Cohen is coming and it’s a sellout, just like that,” a London paper reported. “He sneaks onto the stage whilst you’re still discussing how uncomfortable the seats are …To be alone, he tells us, is not necessarily to be lonely.” Cohen had “a unique gift for juxtaposing natural speech with formal metaphor.”
On July 25 the band played a festival at Forest Hills, New York, memorable for the rainy weather and poor sound, although one reviewer remarked that the “cut of his voice” was more impressive than his poetry: “Mr. Cohen sings in a dry manner, flat like a wall but textured like stucco.” Another critic found that the effect wore off after a while. Dylan, unrecognized and stopped by security, came backstage to congratulate Cohen and his band on their performance. In August the group returned to Europe to play a festival in Aix-en-Provence and the Isle of Wight.
In Provence they encountered a massive traffic jam en route to the concert. Bob Johnston told Billy Daniels, the road manager, to get some horses, since most of the musicians were from Tennessee or Texas. There were horses at the stable attached to the country inn where they were staying, so they mounted up and with a guide headed through the countryside to their destination. To their astonishment, along the way they found a French steakhouse done up as a “Texas Bar.” Ten cowboys and one Montreal Jew who had learned to ride at summer camp pulled in and roped their horses to the only hitching post in southern France. They marched in wearing their western garb, surprising the few patrons and fulfilling the fantasies of the owners. After several bottles of wine, they remounted and headed off to the concert. They decided the best entry would be to ride their horses onto the stage, and they did, despite Charlie Daniels’ fear that that the wobbly stage would collapse. Cohen attempted a gala entrance on his white horse, which needed to be coaxed up a steep ramp; at the appropriate moment, it reared back as he saluted the crowd.
A group of Maoists in the crowd objected to paying because it reeked of capitalist domination and shouted that Cohen was a fascist. Bottles were thrown and the band thought someone had taken a shot at them, knocking out a stagelight. Cohen took the microphone and challenged the people to come on stage if they were unhappy, intimating that the singers were also armed, an expression of western bravado from a group of horse-riding musicians from the gun-totin’ south. “If you don’t like what you hear, come take the microphone. Until then we’ll keep singing,” Cohen said. The concert went on, although with difficulty. That night his backup band was named The Army.
The Isle of Wight concert on August 31, 1970, wasn’t any easier. They came on at 4: 00 a.m., following Jimi Hendrix, who had just set the stage on fire. The audience of three hundred thousand was exhausted. Someone had also set fire to the concession stands just before Cohen was to perform. The promoters woke up a sleeping Cohen, who first appeared in a raincoat and pyjamas, taking twenty minutes to tune up. After changing into safari jacket and jeans, he began the performance. The group played seventeen songs, mostly in 1/4 or slow time, partly the result of Mandrax. Cohen also recited three poems, slowly.
Then Cohen did a fourteen-minute encore, and Kris Kristofferson recalls that Cohen “did the damndest thing you ever saw: he Charmed the Beast. A lone sorrowful voice did what some of the best rockers in the world had tried to do for three days and failed.” Kristofferson told Zal Yanofsky, his fellow musician, that that was the type of background he wanted for his own songs. “‘Boss,’ Zal said, ‘Leonard is an angst poet. You’re an alcoholic.’”
Melody Maker, the British paper, was less enthusiastic. “Leonard Cohen is an old bore who should just return to Canada which he never should have left to begin with!” Ricki Farr, a concert official at the Isle of Wight was upset about the fee Cohen had negotiated and said, “Cohen lays on this trippy thing about love and peace and all that crap. I think Leonard Cohen’s a boring old crone and he’s overpaid. I think he should go back to Canada.”
Despite some negative feedback, the tour was a success. Part of this had to do with Cohen’s realization that after years of separating himself from the world, he could join it. “I decided I couldn’t live as a coward. I had to sing or I was nothing. I also started to accept guidance and to allow people to love me … I knew all about solitude and nothing about cohesion and unity.” The I Ching was instrumental in this transformation. He had been studying the book of changes on Hydra, focusing on the phases of arrangement, the splitting apart and decay that occur in the world and what may affect a given moment. “The book has been a sort of teacher for me,” he remarked to a journalist, and he thought that it was “time now for me and others to get together. I feel there’s a great getting together in the world again … I want to lead the world to a new sensibility.” The response of the Paris audience to his pleas for order in the midst of chaos was a sign to him that communication and unity were possible. And if suffering was responsible for leading him to where he was artistically, singing relieved him from its pain.
Accompanying him for part of the tour was his lawyer and advisor, Marty Machat. From 1969 until his death in 1988, Machat represented Cohen and looked after his recording interests. In 1973 Machat became involved in theater as well, producing an off-Broadway musical revue entitled Sisters of Mercy, A Musical Journey into the Words of Leonard Cohen. The show was partly funded by Columbia Records, although the company withdrew its support when Clive Davis, a Cohen fan, was ousted as president.
In Paris, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performed The Shining People of Leonard Cohen, the first of several theatrical and dance productions of his work. Brian MacDonald conceived the dance, based on a group of nine love poems by Cohen recited during the ballet. Between the poems are interludes of dance, alone or with a soundtrack constructed from sound sources: laughing and words electronically distorted from the texts. A rumor circulated that Cohen was in Paris and might show up; he did not. The work was praised in the French press and in late July, it was presented at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
At home, Cohen received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax, the citation stating that he had become, for many, “a symbol of their own anguish, alienation, and uncertainty” and that Beautiful Losers had “established him as the mouthpiece of the confusion and uncertainty felt by a whole generation.” The Globe and Mail hailed him as “Entertainer of the Year.” His intelligence and presence justified the award, the paper wrote, both more than making up for his voice. In turn, Cohen quipped that although his voice was not the finest, he did have a certain way of delivering a song.
After the tour, Cohen returned to Nashville, where he had started to record his third album, but he seemed to lose his center. As he began recording again in the studio, “absolutely everything was beginning to fall apart around me: my spirit, my intentions, my will. So I went into a deep and long depression.” In addition, “I began to believe all the negative things people said about my way of singing. I began to hate the sound of my voice.” His now regular use of drugs, insecurity about his work, and the unstable relationship with Suzanne were at the root of this depression. Her scorn of his work generated a distrust of her love for him. He wrote of her unpleasantness and how she blamed him for her shortcomings. “I fell in love with her imagination,” he wrote, but she was looking for something else: security, success, and materialist survival. Sitting across from her in a hotel dining room, all he could think about was “familiar poison, dependence and love. … The fascination of her unbeauty.” His marriage was becoming a prison. A period of decline and withdrawal followed, captured by the dejected tone of Songs of Love and Hate, his third album. “Sometimes I feel that my life is a sell-out and that I’m the greatest comedian of my generation,” he told a French journalist.
But I have to keep going. I can’t remain fifteen and a virgin. So now I’m thirty-six and greedy. I’m willing to be this.
I was once never able to stay in the same room with four people. Only a girl who adored me. I feel better now. The more vulgar I get, the more concerned with others I get. I’m trying to cure myself and the only way to cure myself is to take over the world.
This is my adventure. My greatest need is to be interesting to myself.
“Suffering,” he admitted, “has led me to wherever I am. Suffering has made me rebel against my own weakness.” For nearly a decade he would be unable to free himself from the new pain that was about to descend on him. He tried various cures, from LSD and cocaine, to Scientology and the I Ching. He felt that a certain amount of suffering was educational. “You’ve got to recreate your personality so that you can live a life appropriate to your station and predicament.”