I'm Your Man (21 page)

The other nine songs Leonard recorded—almost enough for a whole other album—were “The Jewels in Your Shoulder,” “Just Two People” (a.k.a. “Anyone Can See”), “In the Middle of the Night,” “The Sun Is My Son,” “Beach of Idios,” “Nobody Calls You But Me,” “Love Is the Item,” “Nancy, Where Have You Been Sleeping” and “Splinters.” As of this writing, all of these songs appear to be unreleased. Leonard played “Jewels in Your Shoulder” at his performance in April 1967 at the university in Buffalo, New York, and somewhere in circulation there's a very rare acetate of early demos that includes “Love Is the Item.” The rest remain on the shelf.

When Leonard had finished recording his vocals and guitar, John Simon took over. He came up with string arrangements and added backing vocals, the principal backing singer—uncredited on the album—being Nancy Priddy, Simon's then girlfriend. Simon also overdubbed other instruments onto Leonard's track. “What I welcomed, to satisfy my own creative impulse, was Leonard's allowing me some room with his arrangements,” says Simon. “To this day, I'm real happy with the arrangements I did using women's voices instead of instruments.” However, when Leonard heard what his producer had done, he was not happy. If he had indeed thought that Hammond's production was too raw, Simon's was not raw enough.

What exactly didn't you like about it?

“John Simon wrote some delightful arrangements like the one to ‘Sisters of Mercy,' still based around my guitar playing. I wanted women's voices and he came up with some nice choirs of women. We did have a falling out over ‘Suzanne'—he wanted a heavy piano syncopated, and maybe drums. That was my first requirement, that I didn't want drums on any of my songs, so that was a bone of contention. Also he was ready to substitute this heavy chordal structure under the song to give it forward movement and I didn't like that, I wanted it to be based on just my picking, and he felt it lacked bottom. And then where we had another falling out was ‘So Long, Marianne,' in which there were certain tricky conventions of the time where a song would sometimes just stop and start again later, and I thought that interrupted the song. But I do think he's a really fine producer and he did bring the project to completion. As my friend Leon Wieseltier said, ‘It has the delicious quality of doneness.' ”

Particularly delicious by that stage, I would imagine.

“Well, when John Hammond got sick it kind of threw me for a loop and I felt that I'd lost contact with the songs. I actually went to a hypnotist in New York—I wanted her to return me to the original impulse of the songs. It was a desperate measure but I thought I'd give it a shot. And it didn't work, I couldn't go under. [Laughs] The whole episode had a comic quality that I could not escape.”

The disagreements continued until Simon finally threw up his hands. “He said, ‘You mix it. I'm going on vacation,' ” said Leonard, “and I did.”
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Leonard worked with the studio engineer, Warren Vincent. When Vincent asked Leonard what the trouble was, he answered that he disliked the arrangements: the orchestration on “Suzanne” was too big, and “Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye” sounded too soft. “I'm not that kind of guy,” Leonard told him. “I don't believe that tenderness has to be weakness.” Vincent said, “We'll see what we can do.” “Well, if we can't,” said Leonard, “I'll commit suicide.”
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It happened that Nico was performing in New York that week at Steve Paul's the Scene, a cellar nightclub that was part cave and part labyrinth and was popular with both the rock crowd and high society. The series of shows was to promote Nico's solo debut
Chelsea Girl,
an album that included songs by Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan but ultimately nothing by Leonard. The house band at the Scene was a young West Coast psychedelic folk rock group called the Kaleidoscope; David Lindley, Chris Darrow, Solomon Feldthouse and Chester Crill were musical virtuosos who played a variety of stringed instruments of various ethnicities. It was their first East Coast tour and they were supposed to have been playing a series of shows at the Café Au Go Go, but, after the first night, the owner told them not to come back, that no one liked long-haired California hippies in New York. Steve Paul took pity on them and offered them a three-week residency at his club.

“The Scene,” says Chris Darrow, “was the heavy club in town at that time, and everybody who was anybody showed up the first night we played: Andy Warhol and all his people, Frank Zappa with the Mothers of Invention, the Cyrkle; Tiny Tim was the emcee. That was the night we met Leonard Cohen. He came up to me after our first set. In that light he looked like the palest human being I had ever met. He was wearing a black leather jacket and he was carrying a black briefcase—I remember this so particularly because he was out of place in terms of what a musician in 1967 looked like. My dad was a college professor and Leonard looked like a college professor—a real academic vibe. He appeared very confident, like he belonged there. He just walked right up to me and said, ‘I'm doing an album for Columbia Records and I think you guys are really great. Would you be interested in playing on my album?' ”

After the last set of the night, they met in the Greek hamburger joint above the club. Conversation turned to Greece and how much Leonard liked living there. As Chester Crill recalled, one thing Leonard said he liked about Greece was that he could get Ritalin there—a stimulant widely used for both narcolepsy and hyperactivity—without a prescription. Crill told Leonard that he had stopped taking acid since some of the manufacturers starting cutting it with Ritalin. “Leonard said, ‘Oh, I really loved that.' He said it was very good for focus.”

The following afternoon Leonard, carrying a briefcase and a guitar, met with the band at the Albert Hotel, where they shared a room. Sitting on a bed, the only place not taken up with one or another of their instruments, Leonard sang them his songs. “I didn't really know what to make of them,” says Crill. “It sounded like it was probably an attempt at folk music, but kind of in the pop genre, but then the songs were a little unusual for pop, not your typical A-B, A-B.” David Lindley says, “I liked them. I thought it was kind of an unusual approach, but in those days people did a lot of things that were unusual—every kind of approach. A lot of the words to the songs were great, and he had a real understated way of delivering them. And he really seemed to like us, so it was good.” They agreed to come to the studio and play on his album. “I thought, ‘Nothing's going to come of this,' ” says Crill, “ ‘but we're starving to death and we'll get enough money to eat and do our gigs in Boston then go home.' It really saved our asses.”

The Kaleidoscope showed up at Studio E laden with stringed instruments, including harp guitar, bass, violin, mandolin and some of Feldtman's Middle Eastern assortment. Crill and Darrow found themselves sharing the elevator with Arthur Godfrey. “I remember listening to his radio show on the cab ride back with the guys and he was saying, ‘I had to share the elevator with a bunch of those filthy hippies,' ” recalls Crill. In the candlelit studio, Leonard was deep in discussion with the man behind the control desk, who was saying, “ ‘We've spent all the money, it's already the most expensive album we've ever been associated with,' blah, blah, blah. Then they would play a track for us and the producer would come on the talk-back and say, ‘We only have one track open so we can't put two instruments in here,' and a ten-minute argument would begin. Leonard, poor guy, would be, ‘We don't want the glockenspiel'—because on every one of these tracks it sounded like there was two orchestras and a carousel. It was like a fruitcake, it was so full of stuff. Making the room for us to play on anything took more time than actually having us play, because of the old technology. And to go from a guy who was sitting in your room, just playing a guitar and singing a song in a nice quiet voice, to the Entrance of the Gladiators—Jesus! His songs weren't the kind that needed all that orchestration and women's voices to get them across. It sounded like Tiny Tim's first album. I felt really sorry for the guy.”

In the studio, Leonard sang the songs as he had originally played them, before the overdubs. “He went through a lot of songs,” says Chris Darrow, “basically trying to figure out if anybody had any ideas. I remember him playing the guitar and having a hard time myself trying to figure out what the groove was, because he had this sort of amorphous guitar style that was very circular. I think one of the problems that he was having was that he wanted something very specific and he understood what it was that he wanted, but I think he was having a hard time at that time either getting producers or other musicians to understand. I never remember him being disparaging about anybody else or anything, but it being his first record and him not being really known as a musician I think there were things he was having a hard time communicating.”

There was no rehearsal. The band improvised, and Leonard told them when he liked something and if he wanted them to add another instrument. The latter would prompt a voice from the control room, over the talk-back, telling Leonard that he could only have one. When Leonard protested, Crill recalls, “he was told, ‘We can't change it; we're locked into this.' It was horrible for him. It wasn't for us, because every minute we were getting more money for getting out of New York.”

The Kaleidoscope did three Leonard Cohen sessions in all, two long and one short, playing on “So Long, Marianne,” “Teachers,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song.” They were not in the album credits, but neither were any of the other musicians; as Lindley points out, at that time “it was like dancing bears or performing seals”; you just did the job and moved on. John Simon too had moved on; he was now producing the band Blood, Sweat and Tears and, he said, pretty sure that he was not in the studio when Leonard and the Kaleidoscope played. Simon felt that he had done all he could for Leonard, and if Leonard wanted to change what he'd done, yes, he was disappointed—“But,” he said, “it was
his
album. Plus he was older than I, so I was conditioned to back off graciously.”

Talking to Simon more than forty years later, he still rhapsodizes about the album. “ ‘Suzanne': fucking gorgeous, I love this track; the strings and the girls together with the rich vocal and guitar make a lush blanket of sound. ‘Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye' is another of my favorites—this and ‘Suzanne' both have a guitar line in thirds with the vocal. I like the girls' parts a lot—they're mine—and I love the instrument that sounds like a Brazilian
berimbau
or a low-pitched Jew's harp, which must be the Kaleidoscope. The mandolin on ‘Sisters of Mercy' is probably the Kaleidoscope—talk about elaborate. ‘So Long, Marianne': I heard somewhere that Leonard specified there be no drums on his album; well, there are drums on this. Incidentally, stereo was so new and strange to me—or to whomever mixed this; who knows at this point?—that I placed the bass and drums fully to one side of the stereo, a no-no. ‘The Stranger Song' made me think about his lyrics. Although Bob Dylan paved the way for the lyricists who followed him, in that he got an audience to accept lyrics that were more thoughtful, less banal than the average pop lyric, Leonard's seem to show more finesse. His scansion is stricter, his rhymes truer, as a rule. Whereas Dylan's language had a connection to ‘the people,' in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, blues and folk, Leonard's lyrics reveal a more educated, exposed, literate poet. But Leonard was not just a poet who strummed a little. What a marvel the speed of his finger-picking pattern is. I like the humor in the lyrics of ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,' they have an undercurrent of ardent young lust, but they're so funny at the same time. As for the questionable taste of the ending with the recorder, the whistle and Leonard screeching way up high, what can I say? We were young.”

Said Leonard, “I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet, and I think it goes for a young singer, too, or a beginning singer: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.' It's only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that conspires to silence everyone.”
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S
ongs of Leonard Cohen
was shipped on December 26, 1967, in the winter of the Summer of Love.
*
Leonard was thirty-three years old—by sixties standards antediluvian. He made no attempt to disguise his age in the photograph on the album's front sleeve, a head-shot, taken in a New York subway station photo booth. Sepia-toned and with a funereal black border, it showed a solemn man in a dark jacket and white shirt, unmistakably a grown-up; it might well have been the photo of a dead Spanish poet. Viewed alongside the head-shot on the back of
Let Us Compare Mythologies,
in which Leonard looked more buttoned-up, less defiant, it appeared that Leonard's bottomless eyes had seen too much in the eleven years between his first book and first LP. The back cover was taken up with a colorful drawing of a woman in flames—a Mexican saint picture Leonard found at the store where he bought his candles and spells. It was quite unlike any other album sleeve of its time.

Then, Leonard's album was like nothing of its time—or of any time, really. Its songs sounded both fresh and ancient, sung with the authority of a man used to being listened to, which he was. Their images and themes—war and betrayal, longing and despair, sexual and spiritual yearning, familiar to readers of his poetry—were in keeping with the rock music zeitgeist, but the words in which they were expressed were dense, serious and enigmatic. There is a hypnotic quality to the album—the cumulative effect of the pace and inflection, the circular guitar, Leonard's unhurried, authoritative voice—through which the songs are absorbed and trusted as much as understood.