LJ's idol
Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 12:32 pm
LEONARD Cohen turns 80 this week. He published his first poem in 1956, his first (failed) novel in 1963, his first record in 1967. It follows that his fan base must consist largely of ageing baby boomers who (like me) never quite mastered the devious art of ripping music off the internet.
Maybe that’s why Sony Music has summoned scores of earnest hacks from around the world to London for an audience with him. As far as I can tell, the idea is to attract the attention of the few remaining technophobes still willing to pay for music.
By 2013, CD sales had fallen to around 15% of their 1999 level, and the trend was still relentlessly downwards. Digital download sales have come nowhere close to closing the gap. That’s presumably why U2 opted to give their latest album away for nothing, as a publicity stunt to mark the launch of the iPhone 6. Apple apparently paid a fortune for the privilege, but still, the moral of the story was dismaying: even U2 can’t sell millions of albums anymore.
Why then is Sony spending a fortune on the launch of Popular Problems , Leonard Cohen’s latest? In the boom years, the music industry was famous for this sort of extravagance but in the present climate it seems almost insane to spend money on such an epic scale.
Perhaps such generosity was sparked by Cohen’s rarity value in a musical landscape in which hardsell is the content of stardom. Miley Cyrus is cute but utterly vacuous, Beyoncé is a one-woman corporation, and U2 are an ambush marketing firm. But Leonard Cohen remains a phenomenon unlike any other.
Maybe Sony is gambling on art, and on our better nature. Maybe the suits believe, against all odds, that the songs of this wizened Buddhist sage are so beautiful and sacred that nobody will steal them for fear of karmic damnation.
Did that make you cringe? I understand entirely. There was a time when I too found Cohen a bit twee. Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river… God.
I can almost smell the incense, hear the tinkling hippie finger cymbals and see Shapiro Jr casting his eyes heavenward as he mimics Cohen in candlelight at a Woodmead School folk-music evening circa 1972. For those who liked their drugs and music hard, the Canadian bard was a crushing bore, totally eclipsed by caustic Dylan and the apocalyptic debaucheries of the Rolling Stones.
But something changed in the 1980s. Maybe it was me, but I prefer to think Cohen is a man who only came into his own after nearly 60 years of trial and error.
I base this almost entirely on First We Take Manhattan, the song that opened his stunning 1988 album, I’m Your Man. Some said it was a return to form, but that couldn’t be, because Cohen had never sounded like this before: I don’t like your fashion business, mister/ I don’t like the drugs that keep you thin, all set to a throbbing disco beat with pullulating synthesisers and sexy girl backup singers. It was hip. It was dark and sinister. I was smitten.
And then came The Future, title track of an album that came out in 1992. Cohen had often struck a mystic Jewish pose, full of wails and lamentation, but The Future was something else entirely: a song about the end of the world that actually lived up to its subject.
Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St Paul/I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.
Looking back, it seems odd that a song so dark should have been written at such a sunny moment in human history, but that’s what prophets are for, I suppose: they sense what is coming. And what Cohen saw coming was war, calamity, beheadings and the loss of almost everything, including love and life itself.
But he did not foresee the loss of all his money. After The Future, Cohen retreated to a Buddhist monastery atop California’s Mount Baldy, leaving his worldly affairs in the hands of his former lover and manager, Kelley Lynch. She manoeuvred his fortune ($13-million) into a dodgy tax shelter and proceeded to loot it. By the time he woke up, all but $150 000 had vanished and Cohen had to start over again at the age of 70.
We must therefore be thankful to Ms Lynch, who inadvertently triggered one of the great cultural events of our era — a “perpetual world tour” that began in 2004 and continued for years thereafter. At almost every stop, the Leonard Cohen roadshow reduced audiences to a state of religious veneration. His band was on it, his backup singers were angels and they played for hour after hour in a spirit of generosity and selflessness rivalled only by Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead.
Standing alongside and just behind Cohen in these shows was Sharon Robinson, a statuesque African-American who started as one of Cohen’s backup singers but grew up to be his songwriting partner and producer of Ten New Songs (2001), an album of almost indescribable beauty and perfection.
When I was 54, I contracted chickenpox, a childhood disease that sometimes kills older people. I came close one night, but when dawn came I was still there — exhausted, staring out of my window at Table Mountain while the music of the spheres played in my head. It sounded magical. It sounded holy. It sounded like Sharon Robinson and Leonard Cohen.
So yes, I became a convert. That’s why I was so touched by Old Ideas (2012), a collection of sad songs by a 78-year-old man coming to terms with his imminent mortality.
Show me the place, help me roll away the stone/show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone/show me the place, where the Word became a man/show me the place where the suffering began.
Those are words of farewell, and yet not really, because Cohen didn’t die. He just teamed up with former Madonna producer Patrick Leonard and made Popular Problems, the record whose release Sony chose to mark by flying journalists from 25 countries to London. On arrival, we congregated in a pub just off Grosvenor Square, quaffing craft ales and pondering the Leonard Cohen mystique.
One should strive to rise above such things but, as I near 60, I find myself marvelling at the manner in which the octogenarian Cohen still makes women weak at the knees and wondering how I might achieve a similar outcome.
Some fellow hacks had been entertaining similar thoughts and were quite keen to share their analyses. Stay thin, they said. Always wear a good suit and tie, with a hat to disguise any sign of baldness. Cultivate an air of world-weariness and give the impression that you are kept alive only by yearning for spiritual communion with the exquisite object of your desire. And then write a love song for her.
And that, of course, is the difficult part. I have spent hundreds of hours studying Cohen, trying to understand how he achieves his poetic effects. Look at these lines, for instance: Suddenly the night has grown colder/ The god of love preparing to depart/ Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder/ They slip between the sentries of the heart. Every time I read this verse, I get the dismaying sense that tears are about to well in my eyes and destroy my reputation as a cynic.
I cannot begin to say why. All that is clear is that Cohen’s approach to verse is essentially Victorian. Every line rhymes. Every sentence obeys the laws of scansion, meaning that the tempo is steady as a drumbeat. Beyond that, it is a mystery — to me, at any rate. Perhaps Cohen will shed light when our séance commences.
At 6pm, we troop across Grosvenor Square and into the residence of Gordon Campbell, the Canadian high commissioner. High ceilings, Regency furniture, waiters with trays of canapés and Canadian méthode champenoise — a totally novel idea for me. (Canadian champagne? When last I visited, they drank only beer.)
But anyway. The room grew stuffy. Anticipation mounted, then Cohen appeared, acknowledging the applause with little Buddhist bows and silent murmurings of Namaste, or so I imagined.
Cohen is an elfin creature with close-cropped grey hair and a voice whose depth and strength is at curious odds with his tiny frame. The sound engineer pressed a button, and Popular Problems began to play. Cohen graciously excused himself during the listening session, thereby leaving us free to grimace or sneer if necessary (as he quipped). When the music was done, he came back into the room and answered a few questions.
He began by introducing the producer, Pat Leonard, a baby-faced chap with long grey-streaked hair, and saying a few words about the simple tunes they’d crafted as a vehicle for Cohen’s poetics.
Some come from the genre of gospel, others from the blues, and Did I Ever Love You is country-western. Oddly, Cohen seemed to lay no premium on musical originality. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “You take the forms that are available and try to work with them.” (Recording devices were forbidden and a promised transcript failed to materialise, so some of this is paraphrased.)
In the next breath, he answered the question raised a few paragraphs back — how does he achieve the hypnotic spell cast when the words and music are welded together? “I have no idea,” he said. “Nor does Pat. It’s a mysterious process.”
But enjoyable, apparently. “We’re already half-way through the next album,” Cohen said. “This one is Popular Problems. The next will be Unpopular Solutions.”
This sounds political, but with Cohen, you can never quite tell. Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that the new record is imbued with “a mood of despair” but declined to elaborate on real-life events that might have engendered such a feeling. I was a bit disappointed, because there is at least one song on Popular Problems that reeks of social commentary. It’s called Nevermind:
The war was lost, the treaty signed / I was not caught, I crossed the line / I had to leave my life behind / I dug some graves you’ll never find / The story’s told with facts and lies / I had a name but never mind.
Between every verse we hear a woman wailing in Arabic, like a snake-charmer at play in some ancient souk.
Clearly, Cohen is saying something about the Middle East and about Islam, although what exactly is anyone’s guess. “I have spent my life,” said Cohen, “trying to define a political position that no one can decipher.”
A deft evasion, I thought, but it didn’t entirely satisfy those bent on finding hidden messages in Cohen’s music. One dredged up a line from the last album and challenged Cohen to define what he meant by “a manual for living with defeat”.
“We are all living with defeat,” said Cohen. “We are all living with dark forces that modify our lives. It is important to remember that everyone suffers and that everyone is engaged in a similar struggle for meaning. It’s important to see that yours is the same as everyone else’s, otherwise we remain trapped in a savage battle. Otherwise, there is no solution.”
With that, the MC declared the proceedings closed and I headed off into the warm September night, beset by the sense that I’d witnessed the end of something. Thirty years ago, record-industry junkets like the one I’d been on were common.
Now they are almost extinct. On Grosvenor Square on Tuesday night, all the talk was of last week’s U2/Apple deal, cursed or hailed as the new template; in future, we will get the music that corporate sponsors think we should have, and their choice is predictable: young, bland, goodlooking and danceable.
I doubt there will be room for an artist as deep and complicated as this. Worse yet, the man himself might not be here either. And that’s as sad as a Leonard Cohen song
Maybe that’s why Sony Music has summoned scores of earnest hacks from around the world to London for an audience with him. As far as I can tell, the idea is to attract the attention of the few remaining technophobes still willing to pay for music.
By 2013, CD sales had fallen to around 15% of their 1999 level, and the trend was still relentlessly downwards. Digital download sales have come nowhere close to closing the gap. That’s presumably why U2 opted to give their latest album away for nothing, as a publicity stunt to mark the launch of the iPhone 6. Apple apparently paid a fortune for the privilege, but still, the moral of the story was dismaying: even U2 can’t sell millions of albums anymore.
Why then is Sony spending a fortune on the launch of Popular Problems , Leonard Cohen’s latest? In the boom years, the music industry was famous for this sort of extravagance but in the present climate it seems almost insane to spend money on such an epic scale.
Perhaps such generosity was sparked by Cohen’s rarity value in a musical landscape in which hardsell is the content of stardom. Miley Cyrus is cute but utterly vacuous, Beyoncé is a one-woman corporation, and U2 are an ambush marketing firm. But Leonard Cohen remains a phenomenon unlike any other.
Maybe Sony is gambling on art, and on our better nature. Maybe the suits believe, against all odds, that the songs of this wizened Buddhist sage are so beautiful and sacred that nobody will steal them for fear of karmic damnation.
Did that make you cringe? I understand entirely. There was a time when I too found Cohen a bit twee. Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river… God.
I can almost smell the incense, hear the tinkling hippie finger cymbals and see Shapiro Jr casting his eyes heavenward as he mimics Cohen in candlelight at a Woodmead School folk-music evening circa 1972. For those who liked their drugs and music hard, the Canadian bard was a crushing bore, totally eclipsed by caustic Dylan and the apocalyptic debaucheries of the Rolling Stones.
But something changed in the 1980s. Maybe it was me, but I prefer to think Cohen is a man who only came into his own after nearly 60 years of trial and error.
I base this almost entirely on First We Take Manhattan, the song that opened his stunning 1988 album, I’m Your Man. Some said it was a return to form, but that couldn’t be, because Cohen had never sounded like this before: I don’t like your fashion business, mister/ I don’t like the drugs that keep you thin, all set to a throbbing disco beat with pullulating synthesisers and sexy girl backup singers. It was hip. It was dark and sinister. I was smitten.
And then came The Future, title track of an album that came out in 1992. Cohen had often struck a mystic Jewish pose, full of wails and lamentation, but The Future was something else entirely: a song about the end of the world that actually lived up to its subject.
Give me back the Berlin Wall/Give me Stalin and St Paul/I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.
Looking back, it seems odd that a song so dark should have been written at such a sunny moment in human history, but that’s what prophets are for, I suppose: they sense what is coming. And what Cohen saw coming was war, calamity, beheadings and the loss of almost everything, including love and life itself.
But he did not foresee the loss of all his money. After The Future, Cohen retreated to a Buddhist monastery atop California’s Mount Baldy, leaving his worldly affairs in the hands of his former lover and manager, Kelley Lynch. She manoeuvred his fortune ($13-million) into a dodgy tax shelter and proceeded to loot it. By the time he woke up, all but $150 000 had vanished and Cohen had to start over again at the age of 70.
We must therefore be thankful to Ms Lynch, who inadvertently triggered one of the great cultural events of our era — a “perpetual world tour” that began in 2004 and continued for years thereafter. At almost every stop, the Leonard Cohen roadshow reduced audiences to a state of religious veneration. His band was on it, his backup singers were angels and they played for hour after hour in a spirit of generosity and selflessness rivalled only by Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead.
Standing alongside and just behind Cohen in these shows was Sharon Robinson, a statuesque African-American who started as one of Cohen’s backup singers but grew up to be his songwriting partner and producer of Ten New Songs (2001), an album of almost indescribable beauty and perfection.
When I was 54, I contracted chickenpox, a childhood disease that sometimes kills older people. I came close one night, but when dawn came I was still there — exhausted, staring out of my window at Table Mountain while the music of the spheres played in my head. It sounded magical. It sounded holy. It sounded like Sharon Robinson and Leonard Cohen.
So yes, I became a convert. That’s why I was so touched by Old Ideas (2012), a collection of sad songs by a 78-year-old man coming to terms with his imminent mortality.
Show me the place, help me roll away the stone/show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone/show me the place, where the Word became a man/show me the place where the suffering began.
Those are words of farewell, and yet not really, because Cohen didn’t die. He just teamed up with former Madonna producer Patrick Leonard and made Popular Problems, the record whose release Sony chose to mark by flying journalists from 25 countries to London. On arrival, we congregated in a pub just off Grosvenor Square, quaffing craft ales and pondering the Leonard Cohen mystique.
One should strive to rise above such things but, as I near 60, I find myself marvelling at the manner in which the octogenarian Cohen still makes women weak at the knees and wondering how I might achieve a similar outcome.
Some fellow hacks had been entertaining similar thoughts and were quite keen to share their analyses. Stay thin, they said. Always wear a good suit and tie, with a hat to disguise any sign of baldness. Cultivate an air of world-weariness and give the impression that you are kept alive only by yearning for spiritual communion with the exquisite object of your desire. And then write a love song for her.
And that, of course, is the difficult part. I have spent hundreds of hours studying Cohen, trying to understand how he achieves his poetic effects. Look at these lines, for instance: Suddenly the night has grown colder/ The god of love preparing to depart/ Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder/ They slip between the sentries of the heart. Every time I read this verse, I get the dismaying sense that tears are about to well in my eyes and destroy my reputation as a cynic.
I cannot begin to say why. All that is clear is that Cohen’s approach to verse is essentially Victorian. Every line rhymes. Every sentence obeys the laws of scansion, meaning that the tempo is steady as a drumbeat. Beyond that, it is a mystery — to me, at any rate. Perhaps Cohen will shed light when our séance commences.
At 6pm, we troop across Grosvenor Square and into the residence of Gordon Campbell, the Canadian high commissioner. High ceilings, Regency furniture, waiters with trays of canapés and Canadian méthode champenoise — a totally novel idea for me. (Canadian champagne? When last I visited, they drank only beer.)
But anyway. The room grew stuffy. Anticipation mounted, then Cohen appeared, acknowledging the applause with little Buddhist bows and silent murmurings of Namaste, or so I imagined.
Cohen is an elfin creature with close-cropped grey hair and a voice whose depth and strength is at curious odds with his tiny frame. The sound engineer pressed a button, and Popular Problems began to play. Cohen graciously excused himself during the listening session, thereby leaving us free to grimace or sneer if necessary (as he quipped). When the music was done, he came back into the room and answered a few questions.
He began by introducing the producer, Pat Leonard, a baby-faced chap with long grey-streaked hair, and saying a few words about the simple tunes they’d crafted as a vehicle for Cohen’s poetics.
Some come from the genre of gospel, others from the blues, and Did I Ever Love You is country-western. Oddly, Cohen seemed to lay no premium on musical originality. “We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “You take the forms that are available and try to work with them.” (Recording devices were forbidden and a promised transcript failed to materialise, so some of this is paraphrased.)
In the next breath, he answered the question raised a few paragraphs back — how does he achieve the hypnotic spell cast when the words and music are welded together? “I have no idea,” he said. “Nor does Pat. It’s a mysterious process.”
But enjoyable, apparently. “We’re already half-way through the next album,” Cohen said. “This one is Popular Problems. The next will be Unpopular Solutions.”
This sounds political, but with Cohen, you can never quite tell. Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that the new record is imbued with “a mood of despair” but declined to elaborate on real-life events that might have engendered such a feeling. I was a bit disappointed, because there is at least one song on Popular Problems that reeks of social commentary. It’s called Nevermind:
The war was lost, the treaty signed / I was not caught, I crossed the line / I had to leave my life behind / I dug some graves you’ll never find / The story’s told with facts and lies / I had a name but never mind.
Between every verse we hear a woman wailing in Arabic, like a snake-charmer at play in some ancient souk.
Clearly, Cohen is saying something about the Middle East and about Islam, although what exactly is anyone’s guess. “I have spent my life,” said Cohen, “trying to define a political position that no one can decipher.”
A deft evasion, I thought, but it didn’t entirely satisfy those bent on finding hidden messages in Cohen’s music. One dredged up a line from the last album and challenged Cohen to define what he meant by “a manual for living with defeat”.
“We are all living with defeat,” said Cohen. “We are all living with dark forces that modify our lives. It is important to remember that everyone suffers and that everyone is engaged in a similar struggle for meaning. It’s important to see that yours is the same as everyone else’s, otherwise we remain trapped in a savage battle. Otherwise, there is no solution.”
With that, the MC declared the proceedings closed and I headed off into the warm September night, beset by the sense that I’d witnessed the end of something. Thirty years ago, record-industry junkets like the one I’d been on were common.
Now they are almost extinct. On Grosvenor Square on Tuesday night, all the talk was of last week’s U2/Apple deal, cursed or hailed as the new template; in future, we will get the music that corporate sponsors think we should have, and their choice is predictable: young, bland, goodlooking and danceable.
I doubt there will be room for an artist as deep and complicated as this. Worse yet, the man himself might not be here either. And that’s as sad as a Leonard Cohen song