I'm Your Man (40 page)

When he was on Hydra Leonard fell gratefully into his old rhythm of swimming, writing and socializing at the bar by the harbor. He heard from Anthony Kingsmill about a concerto that Terry Oldfield, one of the younger expat residents, was working on, and asked Oldfield if he could hear it. Having heard it, he offered to go to Athens with Oldfield and have it recorded. “A very generous guy,” says Oldfield. “I was somebody trying to make it with music and really trying hard at it, and I think he identified a bit with that. Maybe it took him back to his early days on the island when he was writing.” Leonard invited Oldfield to his house and showed him the room where he wrote. “It was in the basement, very dark, and looked like a kind of womb, and it had a little electronic keyboard he played around with, one of those battery-operated Casios. And this was the room where he wrote a lot of his best stuff. He said, ‘This room has been very kind to me.' ”

I
n early 1982 Leonard's friend Lewis Furey came to Hydra for a month with his wife, Carol Laure. With them was a friend of theirs, a French photographer named Dominique Issermann. Furey, who had made two records as a singer, was, like Leonard, “not that thrilled with the music industry and the idea of making records.” He says, “I was more interested in theatrical song, song cycles that told a story.” One reason for his visit was that he had the idea for a musical, a rock opera, and was hoping that Leonard would write the song lyrics.

At the time, Leonard was “working experimentally, for my own instruction, on the form of the Spenserian sonnet,” he said, “which is a very complex metrical and rhyme form—just to keep my chops up in meter and rhyme.” When Furey asked if he wanted to write lyrics for his rock opera, his answer was “Not particularly.” But Furey was persuasive, and when the conversation turned to their releasing it on video disc—a new format the size of a record album, one not destined to survive—Leonard was intrigued. “He gave me some very elementary plot outlines,” said Leonard, “and I wrote lyrics to them as an exercise.”
21

Over the next four weeks Leonard came up with “at least four or five complete lyrics,” Furey recalls, “very technical and all perfectly structured,” like sonnets. Furey began writing music to them. The project, which they titled
Night Magic,
was “very much a Faust story,” says Furey, “only the Mephistopheles character is three teenage angels who appear at the window, and the price you have to pay is suffering joy, redemption and decay.” Leonard and Furey worked on the musical on and off over the next year and a half—mostly in Paris, where Furey and his wife lived and where Suzanne was planning to move with Adam and Lorca. Dominique Issermann also lived in Paris. Leonard had begun an enduring relationship with the beautiful photographer on Hydra.

While Furey set about getting funding, Leonard started work on a short musical film for CBC television called
I Am a Hotel,
whose plot revolved around characters in an imaginary hotel. Leonard made an appearance in the film as a long-term resident of the hotel, smoking a cigarette and watching as the various characters' stories played out—with no dialogue—to five of his songs. These were “The Guests,” the song that had been the inspiration for the project; “Memories”; “The Gypsy's Wife”; “Chelsea Hotel #2”; and “Suzanne.” It was broadcast in 1983 and won an award at the Rose d'Or, the Montreux television festival. Leonard, meanwhile, was meeting with McClelland & Stewart about the new book he was writing, which he first titled
The Name,
then
The Shield,
and finally
Book of Mercy
.

Dennis Lee, whom McClelland had quite recently hired to head the poetry department, is a poet and essayist, author of a 1977 book called
Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology
—a joint study of Leonard's novel
Beautiful Losers
and Michael Ondaatje's
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.
Says Lee, “For ten or twelve months, Leonard and I lived in each other's back pockets and got to know each other very intensely within this one very narrow sphere of the new book he was working on.” Leonard described this new book as “a book of prayer . . . a sacred kind of conversation.” It was “a secret book for me,” he said, “meant for people like myself who could use it at a particular time.”
22
He wrote it, he said, because he found himself “unable to speak in any other way. I felt I had been gagged and silenced for a long, long time, a number of years. It was with the greatest difficulty that I could communicate with anybody, even for the simplest thing. And when I was able to speak it was in these terms, an address to the source of mercy.”
23

    
In utter defeat I came to you and you received me with a sweetness I had not dared to remember. Tonight I come to you again, soiled by strategies and trapped in the loneliness of my tiny domain. Establish your law in this walled place.

“6,” Book of Mercy

“The content, the prayerful quality of what he was doing had in some ways always been there,” says Lee, “but he really took off his gloves and went into it more directly and explicitly than he had before. I was very conscious that he was breaking new ground for himself.” Lee remembers that the first draft he saw of
Book of Mercy
“was much sketchier than what you read in the book now. A number of the very best pieces were written later in the process. I remember we were working away in Toronto and partway through he took off for a month or two to France—he told me that he was very much on his own when he wasn't with his kids—and he told me when he got back that, while he was there, he kept hearing my voice in his head saying what I'd said before he left: ‘I think there's still more.' There was no prima donna ‘I'm Leonard Cohen, you shouldn't be making any suggestions.' He was the most charming and thoroughbred human being, and really focused on trying to get the book right, despite the other stuff going on in his life. In the evenings there was nothing to do but hone in on the manuscript, probing for more material. He came back with some things that really knocked my socks off.”

On Leonard's last trip to Toronto before the book's publication, the main discussion between the two of them was the title. “One question Leonard had was: was there a danger of putting a title out that might sound pretentious or guilty of religiosity, that would invite suspicion from a reader even before reading it? But in the end, for Leonard it came down to a question of whether it should be called
The Book of Mercy
or just
Book of Mercy,
and we decided the ‘the' should be omitted so that it didn't sound like this was the
definitive
book of mercy, or a book in the Bible. It's a more modest title. Maybe he doesn't like to appear to be making a larger claim than he wants to.” (Perhaps for the same reasons, Leonard often dispensed with the definite article in titles of his albums and songs.) After their work was done on
Book of Mercy,
Leonard and Lee went to the set of
Fraggle Rock,
a children's television series made in Toronto by Jim Henson. Leonard wanted to meet the man who invented the Muppets. Says Lee, “He got a real kick out of watching him shoot the show.”

Book of Mercy,
Leonard's tenth book, was published in April 1984. Its front cover was illustrated with a symbol designed by Leonard that he called “the emblem of the Order of the Unified Heart.” It took the form of a hexagram, the Star of David, made up of two interlinked hearts, or as Leonard described it, “a version of the yin and yang, or any of those symbols that incorporate the polarities and try and reconcile the differences.” The book was dedicated to his “teacher.” What Leonard had learned from studying with Roshi had also brought him a deeper understanding of the Talmud, the Torah, the Kabbalah and the Jewish prayer book. He said he had reacquainted himself with his Jewish studies after having “wrecked [his] knees”
24
and finding himself unable to sit for long periods in
zazen—
seated meditation. “I had decided to do what I had never done which was to observe the [Jewish] calendar in a very diligent way, to lay
tefillin
every day and to study the Talmud.
Book of Mercy
came out of that investigation.”
25
Although there are Christian and Buddhist, as well as secular, references in the book, Leonard's aim in writing it was, he said, “to affirm the traditions I had inherited” and to “express my gratitude for having been exposed to that tradition.”
26

The book is made up of fifty short, numbered prose pieces, one for each year of Leonard's life. In them, he talks, pleads, confesses and prays—to himself, to his friend, to his teacher and to his woman, but mostly to his God—for deliverance and mercy. The pieces are written with the rhythm, tonality and implied music of psalms, and in “the charged speech that I heard in the synagogue, where everything was important.” Leonard said, “I always feel that the world was created through words, through speech in our tradition, and I've always seen the enormous light in charged speech, and that's what I've tried to get to.”
27
When one finds oneself “unable to function,” he said, the only option is “to address the absolute source of things. . . . The only thing you can do is prayer.”
28

The review in Canada's
Globe and Mail
described
Book of Mercy
as “an eloquent victory of the human spirit in combat with itself.” The Canadian Author's Association gave it the CAA Award for Poetry. Rabbi Mordecai Finley (whom Leonard would come to know later) remembers that one day, after synagogue, he said to Leonard, “So many of your poems have the feel of Jewish liturgy. Did you consciously write something liturgical?” Finley continues, “He said, ‘That's what I thought I was always writing, liturgy,' meaning, something out of the heart so that, in recitation, you're brought to a deeper place. His poetry had a liturgical feel, rhythmic; it almost bypasses the brain and enters straight into us. We have a liturgical tradition in Judaism where great Jewish poets wrote poetry and then they incorporated it into the prayer book—they didn't try to write prayers—and I think Leonard is actually the greatest liturgist alive today. I read his poems aloud at high holidays, from
Book of Mercy
. I think
Book of Mercy
should be in our prayer book.”

Seventeen

The Hallelujah of the Orgasm

P
salms were meant to be sung. As soon as Leonard was back in Los Angeles, he called Henry Lewy. The two went into the studio to make an album of Leonard reading
Book of Mercy,
accompanied by a string quartet. The record was not released. Instead Leonard flew back to New York and called John Lissauer, to make another album whose content was different from, but in its own way a mirror to,
Book of Mercy
.

Leonard said that during the writing of
Book of Mercy,
“the public almost evaporated”
1
; he had written these prayers for himself. He also said that he had no intention of becoming “known as a writer of prayers.”
2
Once the book was completed, the public had come sharply back into focus. One big reason for this was that Leonard was running out of money. If Leonard lived like a celebrity, if he'd had a yacht or a cocaine habit, it might be easier to understand. But though he did not spend much money on himself, he still had expenses: Suzanne, the children, Roshi's monastery and various friends whom he supported financially in one way or another. The majority of Leonard's income came from his songs, not his books, and five years had passed since his last album.

John Lissauer was “a little surprised” when he picked up the phone and Leonard was on the line, saying he was in New York and ready to record again—an understandable reaction given that Leonard had walked out on the last album and had gone on to rewrite or record the songs with two other producers. Upset as he had been, Lissauer—like Ron Cornelius, who had been uncredited for many years as the cowriter of “Chelsea Hotel #2”—blamed Marty Machat. “It was just one of those things, a lesson to watch out for managers, or for managers who were obsessed. Leonard knew that Marty was Marty, but Marty had taken such good care of him, so Leonard was in a little bit of Machat denial. He and I have joked about it since and he has admitted what Marty was really like, but at the time it was an unbroachable subject.” Lissauer did not mention the aborted
Songs for Rebecca.
“What was the point of making Leonard uncomfortable? It would have put the kibosh on this, and I was happy that he was calling.”

In his room at the Royalton, “Leonard had this shit-eating grin on his face—and Leonard, when he's grinning like a little boy, is something you never forget. He had this little crap Casio synthesizer which he'd bought on Forty-seventh and Broadway at one of those camera shops for tourists, where you push your finger down on a key and it'll play a dinky rhythm track. And then he sang me ‘Dance Me to the End of Love.' ” Leonard played Lissauer several songs in various stages of completion, and only one of them on guitar. On the others he was accompanied by the jaunty parping of the Casio. Lissauer came to the conclusion that Leonard had reached a point in his songwriting where he had “run out of ideas as a guitar player. There were certain things he could do with his guitar playing, but this dopey Casio did things that he couldn't on his guitar and made it possible for him to approach songwriting in a different way.” Writing songs was certainly proving torturously difficult for Leonard again. But this cheesy little two-octave keyboard that Leonard seemed so fond of gave him a whole new set of rhythms to work with, and he found he was able to come up with things he could never have created with six strings and what he called his “one chop.”

This time Marty Machat made no objection to Leonard's working with Lissauer. His only stipulation was that the budget be kept as low as possible. The impression Lissauer got from Machat was that Leonard had been spending “a ton of money unwisely and hadn't been touring.” Lissauer called Quad Recording and negotiated a good deal by block-booking four or five days of studio time. Quad was on Broadway and Forty-ninth, thirteen floors above the Metropole, an upscale strip club “where a guy would stand outside with fliers under a big rotating disco ball.” Lissauer put a small band together: his friend Sid McGinnis, who played guitar in the David Letterman show band; Richard Crooks, a drummer who had played with Dr. John; and Ron Getman and John Crowder, two Tulsans who would later front a successful country group, the Tractors. Lissauer himself played keyboards and Synclavier.

“Instead of basing it around Leonard and his guitar and overdubbing things, we went in and started doing tracks as a band and tried to make a little performance out of it,” says Lissauer, “which is something I don't think he'd done in quite a while. I brought in my Synclavier, a very early prototype, a phenomenally big thing, four rolling cases and computers and floppy discs, that cost around thirty-five thousand dollars. Leonard's Casio would have been ninety-nine dollars, if that much, but I couldn't get Leonard to drop his Casio.” It did not even have an audio output and needed to be miked. “I tried everything, we tried recording it with real drums, but he liked the sound of the Casio, and in a way it was very charming. So we added stuff to it so that it wasn't quite so embarrassing.”

Leonard had “always been interested in electronic machines and keyboards,” he said. “In fact, for my first record I interviewed one or two people who were doing experimental work in electronic instruments. I tried to get a sound, a drone, that would go behind ‘The Stranger Song'—I never managed to get the right kind I was looking for—but the technology had reached a sophistication by this time where I could use my little toys in the actual recording.”
3
The first song to feature Leonard playing his Casio was the new album's opening track, “Dance Me to the End of Love.” The seed of the song was something Leonard had read about an orchestra of inmates in a concentration camp, who were forced by the Nazis to play as their fellow prisoners were marched off to the gas chambers. As a testimonial to Leonard's way with words and a romantic melody, it would go on to become a popular song at weddings.
*

Leonard named his seventh studio album
Various Positions,
a title suggestive of a Cohen Kama Sutra. But his aim with the album was to explore “how things really operate, the mechanics of feeling, how the heart manifests itself, what love is. I think people recognize that the spirit is a component of love,” he said, “it's not all desire, there's something else. Love is there to help your loneliness, prayer is to end your sense of separation with the source of things.”
4
The songs take a variety of positions. Different characters in different songs offer different instructions: his dead mother sends him back into the world in “Night Comes On”; the commanding officer sends him back to the battleground in “The Captain.” Sometimes similar characters reappear in different songs in different contexts—“Heart with No Companion” has a mother with no son and a captain with no ship. “Hunter's Lullaby,” sung in the persona of a wronged woman, the deserted wife and mother of his children, has echoes of Leonard's commentaries in
Death of a Lady's Man.

The song “Hallelujah” contains a multiplicity of positions. It is a song about the reasons for songwriting (to attract women; to please God) and about the mechanics of songwriting (“
it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth . . .”
), about the power of the word and of the Word, about wanting sex, about having sex and about the war of the sexes. It is also a song about “total surrender [and] total affirmation.” As Leonard explained it, “This world is full of conflicts and . . . things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess. . . . Regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms . . . and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.' ”
5

“Hallelujah” took Leonard five years to write. When Larry “Ratso” Sloman interviewed him in 1984, Leonard showed him a pile of notebooks, “book after book filled with verses for the song he then called ‘The Other Hallelujah.' ” Leonard kept around eighty of them and discarded many more. Even after the final edit, Leonard kept two different endings for “Hallelujah.” One of them was downbeat:

    
It's not somebody who's seen the light

    
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah

The other had an almost “My Way” bravado:

    
Even though it all went wrong

    
I'll stand before the Lord of Song

    
With nothing on my tongue but

    
Hallelujah

Bob Dylan said he preferred the second version, which was the one Leonard finally used on the album, although he would return to the darker ending at various concerts. Leonard and Dylan had met up when they both found themselves in Paris and sat in a café, trading lyrics back and forth. Dylan showed Leonard his new song “I and I.” Leonard asked how long it took him to write, and Dylan said fifteen minutes. Leonard showed Dylan “Hallelujah.” Impressed, Dylan asked how long it took Leonard to write it. “A couple of years,” said Leonard, too embarrassed to give the true answer. Sloman, who was a friend and admirer of both Leonard and Dylan, says, “I always had this kind of debate in my own head over who's the better songwriter. Bob had those amazing feats of imagination that I don't think anybody could ever come close to, these lines coming out of nowhere—‘I wrote it in fifteen minutes in the back of a cab'—which would literally knock you over. But I think that as a formal, structural writer Leonard is the superior writer.”

“Hallelujah” was the one song Leonard had played to Lissauer in his hotel room on which he did not use the Casio. “He played me some verses on the guitar in his six-eighths style,” Lissauer remembers. “Kind of
chung-chiggie, chung, chung, chung-chung-chung chung,
you know, with chords that didn't really go anywhere. That song was one of the first things I started working with. I took it home and started to work on the chords to make it more gospel and give it a lift. We went in the studio right away, and I sat down at the grand piano and played and sang it for him in a big, grand, gospel way. Leonard said, ‘That's fabulous.' So that's the version we did. His original version was really quite different.”

Lissauer brought the band in. “I didn't want to make a power ballad out of it, so I told the drummer not to play with sticks but use brushes, nothing loud. I wanted it to be really exposed in the beginning, like the voice of God.” Then Lissauer added a choir. “Not a big gospel choir but regular people, people singing ‘hallelujah' like they would in church, people who weren't really singers, like the guys in the band, so that it had a feel of sincerity and it wasn't ‘We Are the World.' ” Among the women singers were Erin Dickins, Crissie Faith, Merle Miller and Lani Groves (one of Stevie Wonder's backing vocalists) and a jazz singer and keyboard player making her first appearance with Leonard, Anjani Thomas. Leonard's own voice echoed as if he were singing in a cathedral. “I remember being begged by Leonard for reverb,” says Leanne Ungar. “Leonard always liked reverb.” There is certainly plenty of it on
Various Positions,
on which Leonard's already deepened voice sounds cavernous. When they finished recording “Hallelujah,” Lissauer played it back, and everybody, he says, was stunned. “We were like, ‘Whoa, this is a standard. This is an important song.' ”

Dylan had told Leonard that he thought Leonard's songs were becoming “like prayers,” and none more so that the album's closing song, “If It Be Your Will.” It was, Leonard said, “an old prayer that it came to me to rewrite.”
6
The first draft was written in the Algonquin Hotel in New York in December 1980, shortly after Hanukkah was over and his children had gone back to their mother. It is a song about surrendering, resigning completely to the will of another, whether it be to “
speak no more and my voice be still
” or “
sing to you from this broken hill.
” It is a prayer for conciliation and unity, its last verse beseeching, “
draw us near / And bind us tight / All your children here.
” And, like
Book of Mercy,
it is a prayer for mercy:

    
Let your mercy spill

    
On all these burning hearts in hell

    
If it be your will

    
to make us well

It is an intensely moving song, intimate and fragile, and sung in a voice that had deepened with age. Lissauer noted that it had dropped four semitones since he and Leonard had last worked together. “It was a heavenly recording,” Lissauer says. “Jennifer Warnes came in and sang with him. Just one take.” Leonard was very pleased with it. Asked in an interview in 1994 which song he wished he had written, Leonard answered, “ ‘If It Be Your Will.' And I wrote it.”
7

The whole album, according to Lissauer, had been easy to record. “The boys in the band weren't drinking or getting high, nor was Leonard, and Leanne Ungar is very straight; I was probably doing some coke at the time at two in the morning because I was working so much and staying up longer than my body could do on its own, but it was very straight-ahead.” Yet it had taken a long time, “about seven months, because Leonard would keep leaving for a couple of months.” This time, unlike on
Songs for Rebecca,
Leonard would come back, and they would work on one or two more songs. One reason Leonard would leave was to write. “He was still shy a song or two for an album,” says Lissauer, “and he was working at that as we went along.”

Things might have been going well in the studio, but in his room at the Royalton Hotel, Leonard was tearing his hair out. “I found myself in my underwear, crawling along the carpet, unable to nail a verse, and knowing that I had a recording session and knowing that I could get by with what I had, but that I'm not going to be able to do it.”
8
Part of the problem was perfectionism; it was not that Leonard literally could not write but that what he wrote was not good enough. “I had to resurrect not just my career,” he said, “but myself and my confidence as a writer and singer.”
9
Among the songs attempted and abandoned for the album were “Nylon and Silk”—so called, says Lissauer, “because he was playing a nylon guitar and I was playing some silky synthesizer sounds. I don't think he ever had any lyrics to it”—and also “Anthem,” a very different early version of the song that would finally appear two albums later on
The Future
. Due to a technical problem, the intro to “Anthem” was accidentally erased by a technician. “I'd thought of a few different ways to fix it,” says Leanne Ungar, “but Leonard decided that meant the song was not ready to be recorded yet.”