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Because the army seems to have kept no account of Cohen’s tour in the war and Cohen himself didn’t keep a detailed journal, it’s hard to pin down precise dates for the concerts. We have undated photographs, and Cohen’s point-form list, and the memories of people who remember seeing him “early” or “late” in the fighting. We know the concerts happened, but we rarely know exactly when. It’s possible, however, to come up with a rough order. Because Oshik’s contacts were in the air force, the improvised band started there, beginning far from the front at an airfield called Hatzor, a drive of just an hour or two from Tel Aviv.
Ofer and Momo, the green navigator and pilot who’d just lost their commander at the northern air base Ramat David, had a friend at this other base whose name was Moshe, but who everyone called by a girl’s name, Shoshi. He flew a Super Mystère, an old French plane on its way out of service. It lacked radar, and the bombsight was just a simple cross projected on glass. A neighbouring Phantom squadron, the 201st, was the hardest hit of all the squadrons in the war, and the list of missing pilots at the base grew longer and longer. Shoshi had seen the SAMs exploding in the air. He’d already heard that two kids from his kibbutz had been killed in their tanks.
In one mission over Suez a friend of his named Hagai, an artist by inclination, was patrolling at twenty thousand feet, looking out for SAMs rising from the desert floor as Shoshi dive-bombed the Egyptians. It was a tactic the pilots had developed to compensate for the lack of warning systems in their old aircraft. Shoshi dove toward an Egyptian invasion bridge, released his bombs, and had pulled up and away when someone on the radio said, “Number 3 is hit.” Three was Hagai. There was no parachute, no airplane debris, nothing. He was just gone.
A few minutes passed, maybe less, it’s hard to remember. Shoshi struggled to grasp how someone he knew could just vanish in an instant. A disembodied voice came on the emergency frequency. It was Hagai, back from the dead, speaking on the portable radio attached to his flight suit. He was floating far above them with his parachute at twenty thousand feet—he was in the sky above the planes, above the desert and the canal, looking down at the whole war like God himself. It was a time of wonders.
Because the primitive French planes couldn’t do much at night, when darkness fell the pilots killed time on the ground, which is what Shoshi was doing when someone came out of nowhere and said Leonard Cohen was in the base’s movie theatre. It was like news of an alien landing. What was Leonard Cohen doing here?
Shoshi knew Cohen’s songs because on his kibbutz in southern Israel he and his friends used to put them on speakers and sprawl on the grass—“Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire.” He also played them to girls for romantic purposes. But they were transmissions from the great world, not from here. He walked over to the theatre with a friend and found it packed with a few hundred people from the base’s air and ground crews. Cohen was really there. He was already singing.
This first concert is the one Oshik remembers best. He opened by performing his own hits, which all the soldiers knew from the radio. Then he ran through a few comic skits with Pupik—these, to judge from one Pupik recorded around this time, were mostly funny voices, ethnic accents, and army jokes. In the recording, Pupik plays a senior officer surprising an addled new recruit on guard duty. Recruit, with rifle: “They said keep watch—how should I know how to keep watch? I don’t know how to use this thing, where’s the clutch?” Pupik, sternly: “Are you the patrol?” Recruit: “No sir, I’m Moshe.” After that, the young Matti Caspi got up and played his songs, staring out at the crowd with his cryptic half smile and glassy eyes under curly hair. Then Leonard Cohen came out. “The audience went crazy,” Oshik said. “They didn’t believe it.”
Matti Caspi accompanied Cohen on the guitar, and there was tension between Cohen’s deceptively simple chords and Caspi’s more ornate style. When the Israeli started elaborating on Cohen’s song, taking it off in some direction of his own, Oshik remembered, Cohen mugged a surprised face and the crowd cracked up. When the show was over, an air force cultural officer came over and begged them to play again for the soldiers who hadn’t been able to get in.
In the break before the second show, the Hatzor air base entered music history. It was then, on the first day of the war tour, that Cohen wrote a song. This is borne out by the notebook that Cohen had with him, an orange one with a doodle of three old-fashioned keys on the back cover. Inside are scribbles, half thoughts, and a few drafts of songs and poems. The first page reads:
HYDRA OCTOBER 1973
How lovely to be totally bankrupt
Then, on the next page:
TEL AVIV
who is what is speaking
from the fur on the floor of the sea
And then a full poem that starts (and your breath catches, if you know Cohen’s work, because you’re watching the birth of something famous):
I asked my father I asked
him for another name
I said the one I’ve got is soiled with fear and shame
It’s an early version of “Lover Lover Lover,” from the album Cohen would release after the war. He’d still be playing it in concerts decades later.
The subject of this first verse is interesting, considering the audience, the artist, and the time. Many of the Israelis in the room had exchanged Jewish names associated with the helplessness of the Diaspora for new Hebrew ones. Matti Caspi’s father, for example, chose that Hebrew family name to replace Argentero, the name he’d brought with him from Serbia. Momo, the Skyhawk pilot, whose first name was really Shlomo, changed his family name from Zaltzman to Liran. The prime minister, Golda Meir, was previously Golda Meyerson. A lot of Jews, not just Israelis, were trying escape names like “Leonard Cohen.” Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas. Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.
Cohen introduced “Lover Lover Lover” in the second show at the air base, according to both Oshik, who was standing by the stage listening, and Matti Caspi, who played guitar on the very first performance of the song. Caspi remembers Cohen still working on the song during the show and fine-tuning it as the band progressed through the war. Part of the evolution is visible in the notebook, where not all the verses are similar to the final version. The most striking difference involves a verse that stood out to the Israeli audience more than the others and which later vanished entirely. But some of the verses in the first draft, like this one, are close to the version we know:
He said I gave you this body for a trial
you can use it as a
weapon or to make
a woman smile
If these lyrics are a conversation with a specific audience—Israeli pilots and soldiers engaged in bloodshed—you might sense judgment in that line: God is testing humans, seeing which choice they’ll make, war or love. The audience was engaged in the first, and Cohen the second. But of course the audience didn’t really have a choice, as Cohen knew. It makes more sense that Cohen meant both uses were possible at different times. In any case, the singer wished them well as they flew out to face the SAMs, and in subsequent versions the song became a kind of talisman:
And may the spirit of this song
May it rise up pure and free
May it be a shield for you
A shield against the enemy
Did Cohen really think a song could protect these young people? He mentions the same idea in his manuscript about the war. “I said to myself, Perhaps I can protect some people with this song,” he wrote. Perhaps he thought that if your spirit is fortified in battle at the crucial moment—by deep wisdom, a blessing, a love letter, a song—you’ll know to dive, or swerve, or pull the trigger when necessary. There are ideas like that woven around the character of Arjuna, the warrior, in the Hindu tradition. But a simpler explanation for this verse is closer to Cohen’s own upbringing. One of the duties of a priest, a Cohen, in Judaism is to stand in front of the congregation and call down divine protection: “May God bless and guard you.” Invoking this shield is what a Cohen does.
Absent in the notebook draft is the chorus, “Lover lover lover lover lover lover lover come back to me.” In fact, it’s not immediately clear what links that chorus and the verses. Maybe the word lover appears here in the sense of the Song of Songs, where God’s presence is described in terms of erotic love. Few require this presence as urgently as soldiers. Or maybe it’s just a classic war chorus, an expression of longing for someone far away, like Konstantin Simonov’s “Wait for Me,” the favourite poem of the Red Army frontoviki of World War II. Each verse starts, “Wait for me and I’ll come back.” Cohen’s mother, Masha, was a native Russian speaker, and maybe she sang him one of the musical versions of the poem when he was a child in the years of the world war. That sentiment, longing, is the one most likely to strike a chord with soldiers, far more than patriotism, anger, or despair. Researchers studying the music of GIs in Vietnam found that although movies after the war made it seem like the in-country soundtrack was political, with songs like “For What It’s Worth” and “Fortunate Son,” the songs the troops actually loved were the ones about loneliness and yearning, like “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Cohen’s text worked on different frequencies, like the best prayers. The melody served the function ascribed to music by the Hasidic rabbis, that is, to make feeling and meaning available to those unable or unwilling to understand the words, or even to suggest feelings and meanings for which words fall short.
The young Mystère pilot Shoshi, who arrived late in his dirty flight suit amid the most frightening and exhilarating days of his life, doesn’t remember “Lover Lover Lover,” or anything else that Cohen played that night. He doesn’t know if he was at the first show or the second. But he never forgot what it was like to be there.
When he squeezed into the theatre with his friend, the only place left was on the floor right in front of Cohen, between the front-row seats and the low stage. Cohen was in the middle of a song, so they sat down as quietly as they could. But the singer noticed. “He saw us, I saw that he saw us. We were close to him and maybe there was a bit of light,” Shoshi said. “We were two kids in flight suits. I remember him looking at us a lot—at least that’s what I remember. I don’t know if that’s what he’d remember. The war was at its height. We had losses. It spoke to me. The melodies were familiar. We didn’t understand all the words, but it penetrated the heart.”
At the second air base, Ramat David in the north, Shoshi’s green friends from flight school remember a plane limping home from the front full of holes, and when it seemed about to touch down it blew up instead, scattering parts over the runway. There was a crippled Skyhawk that made it all the way back from the canal and came within sight of the runway before the pilot gave up and ejected, firing himself up into the air as the huge machine crashed into a shower and killed a few men from one of the ground crews. The pilots at the southern base, Hatzor, bragged over the telephone that they’d just seen Leonard Cohen. The pilots at the northern base were proud of the Israeli acts that had showed up to play for them—the Beehive, the Pale Tracker Trio, the local A-list—but Leonard Cohen was a celebrity of a different order. They were jealous. More missions went by, and more deaths, before Ofer, the Phantom navigator, heard someone shouting at him to run across the base to the lawn outside the 110th Skyhawk squadron. Cohen was here.
When Ofer arrived, someone else was playing. It wasn’t Cohen. Maybe there had been a mistake. He pushed his way through the crowd and stopped close to the front, next to a man in a black sweater. After a moment he realized the man was Leonard Cohen, waiting his turn to sing.
There was no stage, just mikes set up on the grass and a small amplifier that had seen better days. Matti Caspi stood next to Cohen in light slacks and a plaid shirt.
“He announced ‘Lover Lover Lover,’ and said it was a new song,” Ofer remembered. “We were surprised that he’d play a new song, we thought he’d only play the familiar ones, but he said, ‘I want to play you something new.’ ” Someone standing behind Matti Caspi snapped a picture of the audience.
Ofer’s friend Amos, a Skyhawk pilot, never forgot the mood of the show. “The experience, as I remember it, was forgetting everything and going to another world, one that wasn’t all of us racing around, and the dead people, and the fear,” he said. “I recall it as a formative event—one of the world’s greatest singers coming in the middle of the war, amid all the chaos, bringing us some quiet and the sound of something else.”
In the photograph, Amos can be seen in a striped shirt, sitting on the far left. Ofer is in the centre in a light-coloured shirt, arms draped over his knees. Behind him and to the left, looking intently at the performers with a half smile, is Momo, who on his first mission saw the base commander fly into the waves and disappear.
