Authors: Ira B. Nadel
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.”
T
HE TITLE
of Cohen’s third album,
Songs of Love and Hate
, reflected the double-edged nature of Cohen’s life following his tour. As Zen was becoming more important to him, his relationship with Suzanne was becoming strained. They had a son, Adam, in 1972, and two years later their daughter Lorca was born. He adored his children but continued to leave to further his art as he had always done. Between 1971 and 1977 he released five albums, but only two books appeared. But his productivity did not bring popularity, and Cohen felt marginalized; his alienation and doubts increased. He thought that his voice wasn’t
appropriate for the material. He was depressed, and doing drugs, and there were rumors that he was about to retire. He continued to work, but his audiences dwindled and his support from the recording companies waned.
Recorded in March 1971 in Nashville,
Songs of Love and Hate
was again produced by Bob Johnston, although overdubs were added in London. Many of the songs were from earlier periods and had been reworked for the album. “Joan of Arc” had been written at the Chelsea in New York; “Avalanche” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag” dated from earlier years. Another song, “Love Calls You by Your Name,” was a minor rewrite of an unpublished 1967 song, “Love Tries to Call You by Your Name.” This practice of reshaping old material marked Cohen’s musical career and continues with his recent albums.
“Joan of Arc” was something of an experiment for Cohen, in that he both sings and speaks the lyrics on overlapping tracks. This technique was Cohen’s idea, drawn from the literary form of the palimpsest: “
I had, as the model, manuscripts that you’d see with lines written over lines. I just thought it was appropriate at that moment. It’s like the line of a Larry Rivers painting, you see the variations.” “Famous Blue Raincoat” also appears on the album, a retelling of a romantic triangle. Originally titled “The Letter,” the song outlines the dismal loss of love with no hope of recovery. Cohen based the song on a Burberry raincoat he purchased in London in 1959, later stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York. Elizabeth, his London friend, “
thought I looked like a spider in it … it hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the grayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”
His melancholic tone persisted, reflecting his unhappy situation and increasing depression. “Last Year’s Man” had taken Cohen five years to finish but its theme of paralysis and decay was timely:
But the skylight is like skin
For a drum I’ll never mend
And all the rain falls down amen
On the works of last year’s man.
Cohen was not entirely pleased with
Songs of Love and Hate
and later commented that “
with each [of my first three] records I became progressively discouraged, although I was improving as a performer.”
Franz Schubert had once noted that whenever he sought to write songs of love, he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he wrote songs of pain he wrote songs of love. Cohen found himself facing the same problem. Few people responded to the relentless despair of his songs. He had been celebrated for his melancholy, but he had crossed some commercial line into depression. Cohen’s critique of the album was, “
the same old droning work, an inch or two forward.” He also thought his voice was “inauthentic,” full of anxiety and conflict, and labeled his work the “
European blues.”
Critics warned listeners that it was impossible to listen to a Cohen album in the sunshine. In his unpublished novel
Perennial Orgasm
, Don Lowe details the adventures of a woman named Oressia who arrives on Hydra looking for Cohen but falls into the hands of an Irish poet. His attempted seduction is thwarted by the droning of a Leonard Cohen album in the background which deflates the desire of both parties. And although his first two albums went gold in Canada with sales over one hundred thousand, his third did not. Publication of the arrangements in a songbook of the same name also failed to generate new sales.
Over the next several months, Cohen continued to perform and improve his sound as he prepared to go on tour, and he received new publicity with the release of Altman’s
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
. In August 1971, Cohen formed a publishing company in London with the pop music magnate Tony Stratton-Smith, head of Charisma Records. The first book they planned, under the new Charisma Books imprint, was a selection of Irving Layton’s poetry, although the book, printed from the McClelland & Stewart plates of
Selected Poems
, didn’t appear until 1977. Earlier in 1971, Cohen had set up Spice-Box Books, Ltd. in England but had found that he needed a British connection to produce books effectively.
In March 1972, Cohen was back in Nashville rehearsing for a twenty-three city European tour. Two days before the band was to leave for Dublin, two singers, Donna Washburn and Jennifer Warnes, auditioned for Cohen in Studio A of Columbia Records. Warnes lived
in Los Angeles but was in Nashville taping a TV show. She had heard through a secretary that Cohen was looking for backup singers. Both of their voices—especially Warnes’s alto—constrasted beautifully with Cohen’s. He explained to them that “
the reason I need girls to sing with me is that my voice depresses me. I need your voices to sweeten mine.” They were both hired.
Cohen grappled with the logistics of the upcoming tour while trying to deal with his personal problems. “
I’m just reeling. Sometimes in the midst of the thing, I don’t know how I do it, you know. Like I manage to get my daily life together to get this [1972] tour together. But most of the time I’m staggering under the blows. It’s no doubt that I contrive these blows for myself. I think everyone is responsible for their own condition.”
Cohen took a shotgun approach to his malaise; he fasted, exercised, and practiced yoga and meditation. In an effort to re-establish his Montreal roots, Cohen bought a cottage on St-Dominique Street and a duplex beside it in the winter of 1972. This marked his return to Montreal, although he periodically went to Nashville to record, despite giving up his lease on the farm.
One floor of the duplex became a sculpting studio for Mort Rosengarten, another became a music studio for Cohen. Cohen made the cottage his home with Suzanne and, by September, his son Adam. He enjoyed the ethnically diverse neighborhood and three years later bought three more properties.
Bob Johnston had suggested making a film of the upcoming tour and Tony Palmer, who had made a movie about Tom Jones, was hired to direct. Cohen’s lawyer Marty Machat produced. Titled
Bird on the Wire
, it premiered in London at the Rainbow Theatre in 1974 and shows Cohen performing, clowning with his musicians, and trying to pick up women. Cohen was initially unhappy with the arty look of the film and wanted a stronger, documentary texture. He spent nearly six months editing the work, shifting its focus away from visual clichés to the deeper realities of his music. Control was crucial for him, as it was in the production of his first book of poems and his first album. What Cohen wanted was a film that showed the live context of his music and his rapport with his audiences.
Bird on the Wire
did that but it also showed
Cohen emotionally wasted. He felt exposed in the film and thought that his vulnerability was inappropriate for public viewing.
Touring remained an adventure. In Vienna their instruments had been held up at the German border and weren’t available for the concert. When Cohen was told of this (in the bath), he said, “
Oh boy, we get to do the concert a cappella.” At the theater the band asked the audience to go home and bring their instruments; after a delay, the concert began. In Copenhagen, a poor sound system upset the crowd and money had to be refunded, with Cohen himself handing out cash and dealing with disgruntled and angry fans. In Germany, where he gave six concerts, he greeted an unruly crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast with Goebbel’s own fateful words, spoken on the very same spot: “
Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?”
(“Do you want total war?”)
In Frankfurt, where he thought he played poorly, he told the following story:
Once I was walking along in a snowstorm in New York and I came up very quickly behind a man who had a sign stuck to the back of his coat. The sign said
Please don’t pass me by
I’ve been blinded totally,
But you have eyes and you can see,
Please don’t pass me by.
But when I looked at the man’s face I saw that he wasn’t really blind, at least not physically, and so I caught up with him at the next corner and asked him why he had that sign. He said to me, “Man, do you think I’m talking about my eyes?” so I wrote this song.
In London he again played at the Royal Albert Hall. “
One got the feeling,” a critic wrote, that “although the place was full to the brim, everybody sat next to an empty seat … you could have heard an unused tissue drop, such was the silence that followed. It was a silence, a concentration that
in many ways was awful with its intensity. It was a sin to cough.” Cohen left the stage, returning for the encore to thunderous applause. Surprisingly, though, he grabbed the mike and said, “
I have no more songs left in me.” The concerts usually concluded with
Cohen silently walking off stage, leaving his guitar and books behind.
In Jerusalem, at the Yad Eliahu Sports Palace, there was pandemonium when Cohen stopped mid-performance and left the stage, agitated and in tears, saying that he could not go on and that the money should be refunded to the audience. Drugs and the pressure of performing the final concert of the tour in the holy city of Jerusalem had contributed to his state. In the dressing room, a distraught Cohen rejected the pleas of his musicians and manager to return to the stage. Several Israeli promoters, overhearing the conversation, walked out to the crowd and conveyed the news: Cohen would not be performing and they would receive their money back. The young audience responded by singing the Hebrew song, “Zim Shalom” (“We Bring You Peace”). Backstage, Cohen suddenly decided he needed a shave; rummaging in his guitar case for his razor, he spied an envelope with some acid from years ago. He turned to his band and inquired: “
Should we not try some?” “Why not?” they answered. And “
like the Eucharist,” Cohen has said, “I ripped open the envelope and handed out small portions to each band member.” A quick shave, a cigarette, and then out to the stage to receive a tumultuous welcome. The LSD took effect as he started to play and he saw the crowd unite into the grand image of “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel’s dream in the Old Testament. This image, “the Ancient of Days” who had witnessed all history, asked him, “
Is this All, this performing on the stage?” Deliver or go home was the admonition. At that moment, Cohen had been singing “So Long, Marianne” intensely and a vision of Marianne appeared to him. He began to cry and, to hide his tears, turned to the band—only to discover that they, too, were in tears.