6
Tel Aviv then wasn’t what is now. It wasn’t wealthy or international. It was a small Mediterranean city founded just sixty-four years earlier, with some crumbling old buildings that were lovely before the humidity and salt got at them, and new ones that were ugly from the start. Nearly everyone over thirty who lived there had escaped from Europe or the Arab world, and many of them screamed in their sleep. But the city had a good beach and some bohemian energy. The writers and artists hung out at a café called Casit, at another called California, and at Café Pinati, five blocks from Cohen’s hotel.
Cohen had been in the city before. His introduction to the Israeli audience had occurred there a year and a half earlier, in April 1972, when he played a sports hall at the end of that year’s troubled European tour. He was accompanied by a band he called the Army, which included Bob Johnston, the legendary producer of Dylan and Johnny Cash, roped in as keyboard player; the guitarist Ron Cornelius, with sunglasses and droopy moustache; and the backup singers Jennifer Warnes and Donna Washburn, in gypsy skirts and shawls. The chaos was caught on film by a crew shooting a tour documentary that Cohen ended up hating and wouldn’t release.
The floor by the stage had been cleared to protect new polyurethane applied to the basketball court, keeping the fans an absurd distance from the performers. Cohen—his eyes unfocused and his voice slurred, hints of the chemicals that fuelled that tour—invited everyone to move closer. They surged toward him, but orange-shirted guards began pushing them back, then using their fists, and the concert spun out of control. Cohen implored the guards to stop and tried to keep singing but had to give up. “There’s no point in starting a war right now,” he said and left the stage with the rattled band.
Two days later in Jerusalem, the last concert of the 1972 tour almost became a worse debacle. The film shows Cohen taking acid in the dressing room before the show. The audience was rapt and there was no riot. This time it was Cohen’s fault. He lost focus after a few songs and stopped the performance in the middle. The Army had been across Europe on the tour, and there had been some tough shows, like one in Berlin where Cohen taunted a rowdy audience with Nazi slogans, and a few where the sound equipment malfunctioned. But nothing like this had happened. There was something going on between the singer and the Jerusalem audience. “I felt this atmosphere once before,” he said offstage afterward, trying to figure it out for himself. “It was in Montreal. My entire family was there.”
Instead of singing, he started talking to the crowd about Jewish mysticism. “Some nights,” he said, “one is raised off the ground, and some nights you just can’t get off the ground. There’s no point lying about it. And tonight we just haven’t been getting off the ground. It says in the Kabbalah”—the ancient mystic text got a few cheers, because in Jerusalem that’s like a hometown shout-out—“It says in the Kabbalah that if you can’t get off the ground, you should stay on the ground. It says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. Somehow the male and the female parts of me refused to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem.” He walked off, and someone went out to offer everyone their money back.
Another crowd might have left or got angry. But instead the people in the auditorium starting singing “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem” (We’ve brought peace upon you). It’s a basic song taught at every Hebrew school, just those three words over and over. Maybe they sensed this was something they had in common with Cohen—he was family, he must know the song! He did know the song. The young audience was from the age group that was going to be ground up in the war the following year. When you watch them, you wonder who among them won’t see the end of 1973. They sang for a long time. Cohen heard it from his dressing room as he tried to calm down. Eventually he came back and just stood there for a while, beaming out at the people singing, like he couldn’t believe it.
He sang “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and “So Long, Marianne,” and when the show finally ended, the audience still wouldn’t go home. Cohen was crying, and the backup singers were embracing each other and crying—it’s all in the film. The crowd was begging for more, but the band was overwhelmed and falling apart. Cohen went back out. “Hey, listen, people, my band and I are all crying backstage there,” he said. “We’re too broken up to go on, but I just wanted to tell you thank you, and good night.” He walked off for the last time. “What an audience,” he was saying. “Ever see anything like that?”
Many years later, he remembered the moment he went back onstage to sing “So Long, Marianne” under the combined weight of his own history, Jewish history, LSD, and Jerusalem, which isn’t a place inclined to let you take it lightly. “I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying,” he remembered. “I turned around and the band was crying, too. And then it turned into something in retrospect quite comic: the entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, ‘What else can you show me, kid? I’ve seen a lot of things, and this don’t move the dial!’ And this was the entire skeptical side of our tradition, not just writ large but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic, because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche: Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say?”
That’s how he put it forty-three years later. It may or may not have anything to do with what he thought at the time. But it does seem clear that Cohen’s idea that this foreign country was his “myth home” made being here confusing. The relationship was powerful and tenuous, like being in love with someone you don’t really know.
Back here the following year, alone this time, with no one expecting him and no concerts to play, and with the country gripped by dread, Cohen left the hotel and walked away from the beach, headed for a café he remembered, hoping to find a certain woman. At this point in his manuscript, the pace of events picks up and forces him out of the familiar and often squalid contours of his interior landscape. He gives up on crafting a narrative and instead starts making a list.
1. I changed my clothes.
2. I walked up Frischman to the Cafe Pinoti, where I looked for Rochel.*
3. I went back to the hotel and washed my shirt. I found a place to hang it on the balcony where it would not flap against the dirty walls.
4. I forced myself to look at the Sea for some moments, trying to convince myself of the salutary effects of this effort.
5. I went to bed and slept badly because of the mosquitoes.
6. I was so happy when it was the morning.
7. I went to the Cafe Pinoti, looking for Rochel. I decided not to look for her.
8. I took a bus to the beach at Herzlia. I was so happy in the water. I promised myself to be faithful. I decided to find a shack and live by myself on this beach, not telling anyone.
9. I went back to the hotel. After I had showered and changed I walked up Frischman to the empty Cafe Pinoti and up and down the black-out streets looking for Rochel.
10. I sprayed the room and went to sleep.
11. I woke up and got into the sunshine. It was too early to look for Rochel. I went to the Cafe Pinoti to drink coffee and read the Herald Tribune. Several people seemed to recognize me.
12. I met an Israeli singer, Ilana Rovina. She had just come back from the Sinai. She was singing that night at an Air Base and the next day she and three other entertainers were going back to the Sinai. Would I like to join them?
Skip Notes
* Cohen’s archaic Hebrew pronunciation was the kind used by European Jews in synagogue, with the vowel “o” where modern Hebrew has “a”—hence “Pinoti” instead of Pinati, and “Rochel” for “Rachel.”