Leonard
Cohen
Spin
magazine August 1985
article
by Scott Cohen
ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ
The Portable
Leonard
Cohen
article
by Scott Cohen
After he wrote
“Beautiful Losers”, his best-selling novel (1966), Leonard Cohen.
took his Olivetti to Greece, where he had bought a house for $1,500. Beautiful Losers got great reviews but
only sold 3,000 copies in hard cover—not enough to live on in Canada. He could
live in Greece for less than $1,000 a month. About five years later, his novel
sold millions of copies in paperback.
While
writing Beautiful Losers, Leonard
Cohen listened to a lot of country music and Ray Charles on the radio. On his
way to Nashville to become a country singer, he stopped in New York to check
the scene. Danny Fields introduced him to Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful
young heiress and Andy Warhol superstar who later killed herself.
Danny Fields
took him to the Dom,
the hottest disco in the world, where Lou Reed walked up to Leonard with a copy of
“Flowers For Hitler” [:Leonard
Cohen’s third collection of poetry (1964)] and asked him to sign it.
Another night, Leonard and Lou Reed were in the back room of Max's Kansas City,
and some guy was provoking Leonard. Lou Reed said to Leonard, “Man, you don’t
have to take that kind of shit. You wrote Beautiful
Losers.”
Leonard Cohen
got his start when an influential person in the record industry who knew him as
a Canadian poet took him to New York, where he met various people in the
business who said, “Stand up, kid. Aren’t you a little too old for this?”
Leonard was about 33; he couldn't pay his grocery bills, couldn’t pay his rent,
and had a woman and child to support.
Finally, he
was introduced to Judy Collins, who then was a star in the circles he respected, A
few months later he wrote “Suzanne,”
called Judy
Collins, and sang it to her over the phone. Judy Collins recorded it, which
gave Leonard a certain validity, and then it was arranged for him to meet John
Hammond of Columbia Records, who signed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,
and Bruce Springsteen, among others. John Hammond [:record
producer] went to Leonard’s room at the Chelsea Hotel, where
Edie Sedgwick, Tennessee Williams, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Sam Shepard, and
everybody weird and arty stayed in the 1960s. Hammond asked, “What songs do you
have?” Leonard picked up his guitar and sang them; one song, two songs, five
songs, twelve songs, fifteen songs. Hammond immediately signed him.
Leonard
Cohen went to Hollywood in 1967 to score a film. It was the first time anyone
had paid his way across the continent and put him up in a hotel. They even put
his name on the matchboxes. Then they showed him the film, but he couldn't
relate to it.
Leonard
Cohen's songs starred, along with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty, in Robert
Altman’s McCabe
and Mrs. Miller (1971 anti-western film, Starring Warren Beatty and
Julie Christie): a beautiful but depressing movie.
“Songs From a Room” [Leonard
Cohen’s second album (1969)] and “Songs of Love
And Hate” [Leonard Cohen’ s third album (1971)]
were typed in Tennessee, where Leonard Cohen lived on 1,500 acres he rented for
$75 from Boudeleaux Bryant, who wrote “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” and
“Bye-Bye, Love.”
Leonard
hated “Death of a Ladies’ Man” [:Leonard
Cohen’s fifth studio album (1977)]. He wrote it in Los Angeles
in 1976. Leonard says Phil Spector, who produced it, confiscated the tapes
under armed guard and mixed them in secret. Cohen didn’t like the mix, because
a lot of the vocals were either first takes or guide vocals for the band.
Cohen's options were to either hire his own army and fight it out with Spector
outside Gold Star Records on Santa Monica Boulevard, or let it go.
The
Olivetti did not go with him to New Mexico a few summers ago when he checked
into a Zen monastery. There was no time for serious typing. He had met an
80-year-old Zen master in L.A. at a friend's wedding. One of the marriage vows
was not to become intoxicated. Then they broke out the sake, and the bride and
groom had to drink seven glasses in a row.
A few months
later, Leonard Cohen got into trouble—“the trouble,” he says, “that we all
embrace, but can't name.” Leonard went to the Zen master’s retreat in New
Mexico and stayed the better part of a month. “It was too rigorous for me. The
master was Japanese and the abbot was German, and I'd find myself walking
around in the snow at night wearing sandals as part of the walking meditation,
and thought this was the revenge of the Second World War. They got all these
idealistic American kids and were torturing them.”
Leonard went
over the wall, but a couple of things lingered with him, and he went back.
“It's a deep sense of doubt that drives you into the meditation hall, and often
it’s a self you discover and can’t stand, which is why you drop it.”
The Olivetti
not go with him to New York this last time around, when he went to see Walter
Yetnikoff, president of Columbia Records. Columbia distributes Leonard Cohen's
albums in Europe and Canada, where he is famous. All his records go gold—though
it might take four or five years. Europeans, like country fans, stick with
their heroes. Every year there’s a Leonard Cohen Festival in Krakow, Poland,
where all they play is Leonard Cohen.
After reviewing
Leonard's dark, double-breasted suit, Walter Yetnikoff said, “Leonard, we know
you're great, but we don’t know if you are any good,” and turned down Various Positions, Cohen's new album,
because it wasn’t contemporary.
[ Various
Positions: Leonard Cohen’s seventh tudio album,
released in December 1974 (also February 1975) – songs: “Dance
me to the End of Love” – “Halleluja”
Leonard
Cohen’s new songs sound older than his old songs. Why, Leonard, do you sing the
same old song? “I don't think anybody changes. Of course, there are elaborations
and changes in technology, but I think any artist—writer, singer, painter—has
only one or two paintings that he does over and over.”
Leonard Cohen
is part of a tradition involving, as he puts it, certain men who, with a sense
of shame or a sense of triumph or just the honor of survival, have spoken about
their condition, sometimes in a modest way, sometimes in an ironic way,
sometimes in a shameless way, according to their natures. ... Leonard Cohen feels closé to those
men. He is those men. He is the same man who stood up and made those prophetic,
ridiculous, ironic declarations about feelings concerning women; mostly
concerning women, because that’s what Leonard Cohen is here for.
Curiously,
Leonard, 50, is acknowledged as an influence or mentor to such unlikely
contemporary bands as Scraping Foetus Off
the Wheel, Nick Cave, The The, Joy Division, Sisters of
Mercy, the Flying Lizzards, and Ruin. They give him their records and he
listens: “When I first heard Nick Cave’s
version of ‘Avalanche,’ I thought his instincts were impeccable for taking that
song and tearing it apart. On this new album by Ruin, they sing the first verse of the Master song more or less as I
sing it, but then they bring this world to it of every sound you ever heard and
murder it, but as it should be murdered. It's a clean killing. Jim Foetus I think feels some kind of
kindred spirit with me. It's writing from the deepest place he can locate. One
song he wrote is “My Gums Bleed For You.”
Leonard
considers himself a minor writer, one whose promise is small but who explores
it very, very thoroughly. “You know whether you're a high jumper or not. I know
that in a sense I’m a long-distance runner. I'm not going to win any sprints.
I’m not going to win any high jumps or anything spectacular. I may hang in
there if my health remains good, and I will explore this, tiny vision.”
Counting all
his songs, poems, novels, and other works, Cohen has typed more than a million
words on his Olivetti. The Olivetti people should send him a gold typewriter,
and he should donate his Olivetti to the Leonard Cohen Museum in Poland, now
that he's getting an Apple computer.
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Leonard Cohen
Spin magazine August 1985
article by Scott Cohen
ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ ]
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