Clouds in My Coffee #9: Rebirth of a Ladies' Man

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

It's how the light gets in

-- Anthem, Leonard Cohen

While generally these Clouds posts focus on my idiosyncratic brushes with celebrity, in this case the brush is extremely minor -- telling of it is just a pretext, really, to sing praise to one of our age's ageless wonders who's recently come back into the limelight.

Even as a young man, Leonard Cohen was old.  Listen to his voice on the very first album, which opens with the instantly unforgettable strains of Suzanne, and you hear a world-weariness, the eternal sigh of elder sages, that would seem unbecoming in a young singer-songwriter poet were it not for the level of insight evidenced in his lyrics. 

It's not just the deep bass register he adopted as time went by, but the entirety of the man's persona: the sober, rabbinical pose at the altar of keyboard or guitar, the spare and simple folk-timeless chord patterns with his hoarse, incantatory phrasing cushioned by the sweet young voices of female background singers.  You felt, listening to Cohen even in his early middle age, that you were hearing the testimony of a man who had been to the mountain and back, an aged soul whose eyes were focused on the higher, deeper truths that transcended the more superficial ditherings of whatever was preoccupying contemporary pop culture.

Now 71 years old, Cohen has indeed been up the mountain and down again, having retreated to Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles for 5 years of seclusion and been ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk.  Now he's back among us with a low-key but pervasive flurry of publicity surrounding the release of his latest poetry collection, The Book of Longing, a CD he's produced for (and co-written with) his recent partner Anjani (Blue Alert), and a documentary on the current State of Cohen, containing live performances and interviews with luminary fans like Bono and Nick Cave, called I'm Your Man.

The film is in L.A. as part of the L.A. Film Festival (next Saturday night the 24th) and looks to be entertaining and illuminating; the Anjani CD I cannot, in good faith, recommend (to add to Cohen's couplet: Love may be blind, but desire is not / as a singer-composer, she's more warm than hot).  The Book of Longing, at any rate, is a treasure trove for Cohenists and newcomers alike.

To properly appreciate it, let's pause to acknowledge the Cohen canon.  Besides Suzanne, Bird on a Wire alone would assure him a seat in the Songwriting Hall of Fame (he was recently inducted into the Canadian Music [and Songwriters] Hall of Fame and it's about time, thanks).  But his two late period albums I'm Your Man and The Future are, track by track, full of more indelible songwriting masterpieces (the prescient First We Take Manhattan, classicTower of Song, mordant Closing Time, Democracy etc.) than many of his contemporaries have penned in a career.

Then there's the poetry.  While Longing doesn't pack the major wallop of Stranger Music (selected poems and songs from 1956-1993), it's full of great lines, and with its doodles and drawings by the poet, gives one a sense of being privy to his private notebooks (a recent interview with Cohen discussing the genesis of the book can be heard here).  This "odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer" as Cohen terms it, has many images that strike one right between the eyes with the force of a Zen master's stick.

It's also a good handbook of Cohen's familiar themes.  Central to his work has always been a visceral melding of the sacred and profane.  There's a poignant, painful honesty to his eternal pursuit of beauty, and his unapologetic surrender to the power of the feminine and its ability to undo or enlighten men (sometimes simultaneously).  Often in Longing, it's difficult to tell whether the "you" addressed in a given verse is deity or lover.  To Cohen, G-d is woman, and Woman is G-d (and who are we to argue?).   

Longing is a book to savor, to read and dip into at leisure.  But that doesn't mean you should wait for the paperback.  There's a subtext to its release that caused me to purchase the hardcover immediately upon its release: Leonard is broke, or to put it more properly, he's been robbed.  You may have followed this in the press, but the drift is, the songwriter was bilked out of millions due him by his former manager, Kelley Lynch.  A true femme fatale, even though Cohen successfully sued Lynch (for $9 mil), she has ignored the suit.  Death of a Ladies' Man (title of his ill-fated collaboration with Phil Spector), indeed.

So I bought the book to put some change in the man's pocket.  Hopefully many will do the same; it would be nice if some of his more truly well-to-do fans would offer some support -- no less a personage than Prince Charles has declared himself a Cohen-lover (the gag here being that, according to friends of that royal life-of-the-party wild man, of course Leonard Cohen music is his idea of a good time).

And while we're at it, how about new editions of the fiction?  While The Favorite Game is largely ignored, it's good to hear, at this late date, that Cohen's early novel Beautiful Losers is getting its due (recently canonized by the Canadian literati as one of the past century's best reads).  This book was a real influence on me as an adolescent;  I was properly awed by its weird, surreal eroticism and to this day can vividly remember the unique set-piece wherein a benignly monstrous vibrator has its way with the lover-protagonists, and then makes an exit worthy of a creature from some '50s sci-fi horror pic:

The Danish Vibrator slipped off her face, uncovering a bruised soft smile.  "Stay," she whispered.  It climbed onto the window sill, purring deeply, revved up to a sharp moan, and launched itself through the glass, which broke and fell over its exit like a fancy stage curtain...  When it reached the ground it crossed the parking lot and soon achieved the beach...  How soft the night seemed, like the last verse of a lullaby...  We watched the descent of the apparatus into the huge rolling sea, which closed over its luminous cups like the end of a civilization.

You can perhaps imagine the effect of such literature on the fertile imagination of a 16 year-old who had yet to see a vibrator, let alone been ravaged by one.

Years later I was introduced to Mr. Cohen briefly backstage on the night I attended one of his by now-legendary I'm Your Man tour concerts (one of the best live shows I've ever seen); nothing memorable to note there, just a polite head nod -- otherwise I stood around eavesdropping as he talked to my more famous companions (see Periphery Man photo captioned: Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Unidentified Man, etc.).  Then there's my more recent encounter, underwhelming in its story values, but gratifying in its karma.

[Another installment in the ongoing true life adventures of Periphery Man, who has had myriad peculiar encounters with celebrities, while not being a celebrity himself.]

A few years ago, I went for lunch at the French cafe below Venice Boulevard on Abbot Kinney with friend Peter, and shortly after we got settled into our table, I noticed an elderly man come in, accompanied by a very attractive younger Asian woman.  As they sat down at a table across the little patio, I gave the man a curious glance, because there was something very familiar about his face.

A bit further into our lunch, I put it together: the older man with the haunting, luminous eyes, the younger beauty so attentive to him.  "I think that may be Leonard Cohen," I told my friend.  I chanced another look at their table.

And here's the odd thing: when I did so, the man was already looking at me.  There was an air of expectancy in his gaze, as if he'd known before I did that there was reason for me to look, as if, in fact, he had recognized me.  He returned my feigned casual glance with a gaze of open curiosity.

My second look had confirmed, at any rate, my suspicion that there was indeed an icon of my generation having tea in the French cafe.  But the weirdness persisted; a few times during the course of our meal, I had the distinct feeling of being watched, and when I snuck another look Cohen-ward, once again I found his waiting eyes anticipating mine.

It could have been any number of things, but thinking about it now, Cohen's behavior strikes me as extremely Zen.  If idolized, idolize the idolator.  He was in a sense acting as a psychic mirror --  either that, or mistaking me for the guy who did his dry cleaning.  There's also the possibility that he unabashedly enjoyed being recognized, and/or was having the kind of day where his ego welcomed the attention... which come to think of it, is antithetical to being a Zen monk.  There you go -- his familiar dichotomy theme: the struggle between the spiritual and the material!

By the time Cohen and his companion were paying their check, I couldn't contain myself.  "I'm sorry if this embarrasses you," I told Peter, "but I've got to talk to the guy."  There was something I felt compelled to impart to Mr. Cohen, coincidentally having listened to I'm Your Man in the course of a writing session only a few nights previous, and so when he and the young woman came down our aisle, I stood up and briefly blocked his exit.  Again, he seemed to anticipate and expect this, as if it were an inevitable ritual.

"Excuse me, but are you by any chance Leonard Cohen?" I asked.

He smiled.  "Yes, I am," he admitted, looking very happy about it.

In the better, fictionalized version of this story he would have then said, And are you by any chance Billy Mernit? and things would have taken a very Twilight Zone turn from there.  But what happened in reality was far less spectacular.

I introduced myself and shook his hand.  "I was listening to your Tower of Song the other night," I said, "and it occurred to me that I first read Beautiful Losers as a teenager.  I'm a writer, and I just want you to know that you've been in my life, giving me great pleasure and inspiration for quite a long span of time, so thank you for that."

"You're very kind," he said, and we nodded at each other, I stepped aside, and he and the Asian woman (who seemed relieved that I'd been wielding neither an autograph hound's pen or a .45 magnum) went on their way.  But I don't think I was wrong in feeling that Leonard Cohen had been genuinely pleased to be given my little tribute, and I guess this is the point of my anecdote.

Too often the greats don't get their props until they pass away.  There are but a handful of songwriter-artists who have continued to produce a sustained body of meaningful work over a damned impressive number of years -- Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Tom Waits come to mind.  Let us celebrate them now, I say, while they're still among us.

For it's one thing to make a big splash and then fall by the wayside while times and taste shift, and another thing entirely to transcend the vagaries of fashion and be, in a very real sense, eternally young, eternally old... ever alive to what's eternal.  It's a formidable challenge, one addressed in these lines from The Book of Longing's poem, The Faith:

The sea so deep and blind

The sun, the wild regret

The club, the wheel, the mind

O love, aren't you tired yet?

Comments

[Jennica]

What a nice time to read this post... the universe is clearly all aligned. A good friend had a baby boy Friday night. His name is Cohen.

[MaryAn]

Dear Lady, Queen of Solitude
I thank you with my heart
For keeping me so close to thee
While so many, oh so many stood apart

[Babs]

Mernit - What an amazing encounter with him. Beautiful. And I'll buy the book in hardcover. Great post.

[mernitman]

Jennica, how neat is that!

MaryAn, your song lyric acumen is getting downright spooky.

Thank you, Babs. Do you own "The Future" CD? That's the must-have.

[MaryAn]

Only when I take pain meds.

[binnie]

I loved this post. And I wasn't going to respond but Billy made me. I was a Leonard Cohen fan from the time I was twelve; I had an older, hipper sister who brought home all his records and books and I fell in love with the man and the music, learned all his guitar chords and all his songs, which served me well when I ended up, at age 18, in a show called "Sisters of Mercy", based on Leonard's music, first at the Shaw Festival in Canada then off-Broadway in New York. The following year I got a call to sing background vocals on his album, "New Songs For The Old Ceremony" (and one of the songs, "Who By Fire?" is a duet with the man - one of my top ten studio experiences), then toured with him in Europe and North America. To this day I remember every minute of that tour, it was the best gig I ever had, and there is something very interesting about Leonard that not too many people know, or would expect. He's hilarious! One of the funniest people I've ever met. He did everything possible to crack up the band at any given opportunity. He stood on his head to get motorists' attention when our tour bus broke down in Europe. He read comic books aloud to us (and in that deeply serious voice, we were dying from laughing so hard), and would raid the hotel kitchen at night and cook for us. He bought me an extremely silly cuckoo clock in Switzerland. When we played The Troubadour in LA, someone outside the club kept yelling up to his dressing room window, "Leonard, I need to talk to you about death!". Leonard calmly went to the window and said, "Friend, can this wait until after my gig? Death is so final."
Thanks for this gorgeous post, Billy.

[binnie]

OOPS! That's "New Skin For The Old Ceremony"... not "Songs"...

[chesher cat]

Growing up in Canada, I heard Leonard Cohen all the time...thanks to the Canadian content laws.

When I was fourteen, I met this really cute guy from Florida who had a summer job working the midway at the Stampede. One afternoon we sat on the banks of the Bow river and I sang "Suzanne" to him. My middle name is Suzanne. I always thought the song was about me.

[Anna]

Nice post. My only knowledge of Mr Cohen is my mum's admiration of him. As a hil-arious teenager I always teased her that the guy was so depressing sounding that his concerts must spark spontaneous wrist-slittings. I probably only ever heard 1 song to set me in this opinion of him, so maybe i should give the guy another chance huh?

[markensparklefarkle]

bill you are on a tear! or is it a longing tear drop... and you have shaken even more Canadians out of the trees. I have to find a picture I have of Leonard C and Kelly the embezzler...sp? New Skin for an Old Ceremony really represents the beginning of Chapter 2.as the Future is the peak of Chapter 3. can I touch you binnie... another Angelino, the extraordinary Leanne Unger... produced and mixed most of the modern records...
great leonard music, that some don't know about because of pathetic distribution...

Recent Songs (contains Gypsy Wife, The Smokey Life and the Ballad of the Absent Mare)

Leonard Cohen Live (same era)
funky color xeroxy cover

Various Positions which has Dance Me to the End of Love and the song that everyone must do a cover of... to be taken seriously as an artiste, "Hallelujah".

Billy, I only disagree with the Leonard was always old notion. I understand... but before he was old.. he had the perpetual adolescent wonderment and mischief that has carried him to the land of zen and therefor maybe the weariness is a mask. Part of a never ending seduction.

[mernitman]

Binnie, thank you for the reminiscences -- priceless stuff.

Chesher: And it IS about you, it is!

Well Anna, you're not alone in thinking of Leonard as a downer --one parent I know used to use "Suzanne" in repeat mode to put his daughter to sleep -- but if you check out the songs on "I'm Your Man" or "The Future" you can find the more Up side of Leonard.

Marken: I hear that. (Leanne is an old friend -- and largely responsible for those cited CDs sounding as good as they do...)

[mernitman]

Graham, thanks for the cool site -- there are all KINDS of goodies on there!

[markensparklefarkle]

check out todays streaming from KCRW, "Bookworm",
silverblat's show or is its silverbladder... because he thinks his piss is precious.... anyway it was the LEONARD for a solid hour.. illuminating as always....

hey I dont know if cross blogification is permitted, but regarding Chesher's remarks that growing up in Canada she heard Leonard because of the Canadian Content Rules... Chesher, you may have been joking, but if not.. let me suggest... that in the long nights of the frosty north, we heard;

the quess who,
ann murray,
bachman turner overdrive,
and lighthouse (chest fever)

due to the remarkable content regulations, (for you yankees, just imagine a cultural dietary regulatory system imposed by the state):

but you heard: Leonard Cohen because he lived abroad, gained notoriety outside of Canada and therefor in our great Canadian fashion for acknowledging the obvious.... we embraced him and played his music.

[Bill]

I've been listening to and reading Leonard Cohen for years. Thanks to him, I read Lorca's poetry (Take This Waltz is Cohen's take on a Lorca poem). As others have said, living in Canada I've been perhaps more exposed to him than if I lived elsewhere.

He and the poet Irving Layton were great friends and I recall seeing an interview with the two of them - they were like two kids together.

Binnie mentioned it, but I'd also say one aspect of him I love is his humour. And it is so dry! He delivers lines with the straightest face ever. He received an award one year in Canada for vocals (Vocalist of the Year or something like that) and receiving the award he said somthing to the effect, "I'm grateful to be from a country where someone like myself can receive an award for singing."

(He, of course, was much funnier - and very dry.)

Anyway ... I've always loved his work, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is his facility with language.

[mernitman]

Bill: Yes, he's pretty amazing in just simple conversation -- the most eloquent sentences... I'm going to look into Mr. layton.

[Bill]

btw ... Book of Longing is dedicated to Irving Layton. I can't say I'm as familiar with him as I would like to be, but I do know he was a huge influence on Layton - both as a friend and, I believe, a kind of mentor.

[Bill]

Sorry ... typo. I meant, a "huge influence on Cohen."