I'm Your Man (41 page)

When Leonard and Lissauer heard the final mixes of the album, they were both excited. Leonard was happy with the modern sound, the subtle arrangements and the smooth, high-tech production. “There were some exquisite moments on it,” says Lissauer, “ ‘Hallelujah,' ‘If It Be Your Will.' I was like, ‘This is special. This is
it.
This will be the record that's going to do it for Leonard in the States.' ” Leonard and Marty Machat took the tape to Columbia and played it to Walter Yetnikoff, the head of the music division. He did not like it. Leonard remembers, “Walter Yetnikoff said, ‘Leonard, we know you're great, we just don't know if you're any good.' ” They neglected to inform him that they had decided against releasing his new album in the U.S.

How did you learn that
Various Positions
would not get an American release?

“I happened to pick up a catalog of their recent releases and I just looked through it to see a picture of my record in the pamphlet. I couldn't locate it, so I thought there must be a typographical error. They didn't have to tell me why. From their point of view, the market was so limited that it didn't justify the distribution machinery that would have to go into operation.”

Had you resigned yourself by that time to not having an audience in the U.S.?

“I thought they were making a mistake. I thought that there
was
an audience in the United States and Canada. What I didn't understand at that time—because I thought that if they had bothered to promote it, the work would have sold more widely—but what I understand now, very thoroughly, is that the dollar they spend on promoting me can much more profitably be spent on promoting another singer, so I completely understand their strategy and I have no quarrel with it. I don't think I suffered any sense of remorse or bitterness. Most of the energy was devoted to trying to find some little label that would put it out.”

“When Leonard told me he'd had that meeting with Yetnikoff and he wouldn't release the album,” says Ratso Sloman, “I was so infuriated that I literally started hounding Yetnikoff. I would go to all these Columbia events, like Dylan's, and go up to him and say, ‘The nerve of you not releasing Leonard's album, shame on you.' ” He wrote in a 1985 article for
Heavy Metal
magazine that Columbia had sent “Leonard's new kid straight to the showers. Aborted in the USA, as ‘the Boss' would say. But, as Dylan told me a few months ago in the studio as he was finishing up his newest Columbia LP, ‘Somebody'll put out Leonard's record here. They have to.' ” As for John Lissauer, he was devastated, he says, “because I knew how good the whole album was. So I said, ‘Okay, I've had it with the music industry, they're a bunch of idiots,' and I quit.” He says he was never paid for producing the album.

In retrospect
Various Positions
can be viewed as a stepping-stone between the timelessness and guitar-ballad style of Leonard's earlier albums and the slick electronics and almost anthemic sound of those that followed. The minor-key melody of “Dance Me to the End of Love” has a familiar Old European romance and gravity but also the modernity and jarring novelty of the tinny Casio. Where once there might have been dark, Old Testament lyrics, sung by Leonard alone, there are the transcendent prayer “If It Be Your Will,” sung serenely with Jennifer Warnes, and the hymn “Hallelujah,” sung with a choir of voices and a synthesizer.

The album was released worldwide, excluding America, in January 1985. Unusually, it was largely ignored by the UK music press.
NME
noted the “sad gaiety” that hung over much of it, “the maidenly correctness” of Jennifer Warnes's harmonies and the album's overall resemblance to “a French movie soundtrack, or even Scott Walker in his Brel period. . . . If the title proposes another thesis of sexual sneering, the songs are complex but peaceful reports from a wearied heart.”
10
Sounds
magazine reviewed its first and only single, “Dance Me to the End of Love,” describing its chorus as “inspiration copulating with commerciality” and predicting a hit.
11
It flopped. The album did not fare much better. In the UK it made it to No. 52, one of Leonard's lowest chart positions. With the exception of Norway and Sweden, Leonard's first album in five years did remarkably little across Europe, although it did make the lower half of the Top 100 in Canada.

The
Various Positions
tour began on January 31, 1985, in Germany—a lengthy tour with seventy-seven concerts. Leonard, who had turned fifty a few months earlier, had no desire to go back on the road but dutifully dusted down his suit. John Lissauer could not go with him as his new wife was expecting their first child, but he put a band together for him: John Crowder, Ron Getman and Richard Crooks, who had played on the album, and Mitch Watkins, a veteran of Leonard's 1979–80 tours. All it lacked was a keyboard player and backing singers. “I thought of Anjani,” says Lissauer, “killing two birds with one stone.”

Anjani Thomas, then in her early twenties, was a singer and piano player who had played in a jazz trio in her native Hawaii. She had recently moved to New York, and Lissauer was one of the first people in the music business she met. He had hired her to sing a background vocal on “Hallelujah” after the main recording was finished, and two months later invited her to audition for Leonard's tour. “So I went to John's loft on Thirteenth Street,” Anjani remembers. “I got there first, then Leonard arrived. I remember John opening the door and I looked down—I was very shy then; I'd just moved to the big city from a little island in Hawaii, and I really knew nothing about Leonard or his work and stature. I saw his black shoes first. As my eyes traveled up I saw the black pants and the black belt and the black shirt and the black jacket, the black bolo tie, and I thought, ‘Wow.' Where I come from the men wear aloha shirts and shorts. I'd never seen anyone so present in black like that before. He was very nice, shook my hand, and I played him a song and he said, ‘Well great, now I know you can sing and play. You've got the job.' ”

The European leg of the tour included, for the first time, Poland—the People's Republic of Poland was not well-known for welcoming Western pop musicians. The four dates had been a last-minute addition resulting from the efforts of an independent promoter who was a Leonard Cohen fan. Leonard's name was known in Poland largely through Maciej Zembaty, a comedian, writer and popular radio personality who had been translating and singing Leonard's songs—more than sixty of them—since the early seventies, and who had been imprisoned in 1981 for organizing a festival of songs banned by the regime. Zembaty's Polish version of Leonard's adaptation of “The Partisan” had become an unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement. The concerts were instant sellouts (the first show was delayed by two hours while police at the front door confiscated thousands of forged tickets) and the fans so spirited that Anjani was given her own bodyguard, a man previously assigned to protect the pope.

Leonard, with his Lithuanian ancestry, appeared touched by his visit to Poland. He talked onstage about the “thousands of synagogues and Jewish communities which were wiped out in a few months” during the war. But when word reached him that Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, had requested that Leonard appear onstage with him, he declined, perhaps out of concern for the promoter who had fought hard to get him there, or likely his usual disinclination to take political sides. During that Warsaw concert Leonard also said, “I don't know which side everybody's on anymore, and I don't really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we're on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. It doesn't mean that I don't wish you courage in your struggle. There are on both sides of this struggle men of goodwill. That is important to remember—some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety. In solemn testimony of that unbroken faith which binds a generation one to another, I sing this song.” It was “If It Be Your Will.”

Anjani was the sole woman on the tour (there was no second female vocalist; John Crowder, Ron Getman and Mitch Watkins also sang harmonies) and also the youngest member of the band. Neither of these things was a new experience for her, but a tour of this size was. “A couple of times on that tour I'd run into Leonard at the hotel sauna, and we spoke about spiritual matters, and that was a bit of a relief, you know, connecting with a kindred soul on the path.” Anjani had started meditating when she was sixteen years old, after a couple of her friends died from drug overdoses. “I knew that if I stayed in music and kept on doing drugs that that could very well be a possibility for me. I had to go in another direction completely, so I went off on a spiritual trek. I was young enough to believe that if you put in the time, you'll become enlightened. It didn't happen, but it certainly made my life miserable on the way. I also saw that Leonard was having a tough go of it on a certain level—because everyone on that spiritual journey is having a tough go of it, for the most part.”

Before leaving for the tour, Leonard had told Ratso Sloman, “Look, nobody enters a Zen meditation hall to affirm his health. You enter because you have a doubt and because you want to study how the mind arises, so they make you sit still for seven days, and finally you get so bored and fatigued with your mind that you might be lucky enough to let it drop for a second. As soon as that mind is at rest, the Mysteries manifest as reality. It ain't no mystery.” Leonard also told Sloman that this was the first time in his life that he'd had to work, to support his kids, but that it was the thought of his kids that kept him going. “Other than that,” Leonard said, “it's bleak, it's bleak.”

When the European tour ended on March 24, they flew back to the U.S. to play a handful of East Coast concerts. At the Boston show, at a safe distance from Poland, Leonard dedicated “The Partisan” to the Solidarity movement. Crossing the border to Canada for a whirlwind tour, Leonard learned while he was there that
Night Magic,
his musical film collaboration with Lewis Furey, had won a Genie Award for Best Original Song, “Angel Eyes.”
*
The tour continued in Australia, then returned to America, the West Coast this time, for shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then it was back to Europe again for fifteen more shows, plus one in Jerusalem.

It was the midsummer of 1985 when Leonard was finally home in L.A. In his still-barely-furnished half of the duplex, he unpacked his case, opened a bottle of wine and heated up a TV dinner.

V
arious Positions
was finally released in America in January 1986, on the tiny Passport label. It did not trouble the U.S. charts. But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and particularly so in the miraculous story of “Hallelujah.” John Lissauer had told the record label that he thought it should be a single; “I thought it the best single I'd ever made for a serious artist. But they said, ‘What
is
this? We don't even know what it is.' ‘Well, it's kind of an anthemic thing,' I said.” They told him, “It will never get off the ground.” Some twenty-five years after its first appearance on
Various Positions,
“Hallelujah” would become, as
Maclean's
magazine described it, “the closest thing pop music has to a sacred text.”

In recent years a number of essays and lengthy articles, as well as an hour-long BBC documentary, have appeared across the world on the subject of this one Leonard Cohen song. At the time of the writing of this book, “Hallelujah” has been covered by a remarkable assortment of artists, more than three hundred of them. Some interpretations favored one ending of the song over another. John Cale went so far as to ask Leonard for all the verses he had written so that he could compile his own version; Leonard offered him fifteen. “Subsequent covers tinkered here and there with the words to the point where the song became protean, a set of possibilities rather than a fixed text,” wrote Bryan Appleyard in the
Sunday Times
. “But only two possibilities predominated: either this was a wistful, ultimately feelgood song or it was an icy, bitter commentary on the futility of human relations.”
12
He forgot to mention a third category, “the hallelujah of the orgasm,” as Jeff Buckley described it onstage, although arguably this might fit into the first possibility. But Appleyard was right; “Hallelujah” would become a kind of all-purpose, ecumenical/secular hymn for the new millennium. As k. d. lang remarked, “It just has so much fodder, so much density, it can be deep, simple, mean a lot of things to different people, there's so much in it.”
13
Also, as with many of Leonard's songs, the melody's spaciousness was generous to people who chose to cover it.

Among them were Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson, Bono, Hawaiian ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro and San Franciscan a capella group Conspiracy of Beards. Rufus Wainwright sang it on the soundtrack album to the animated film
Shrek
.
*
Justin Timberlake and Matt Morris from
The Mickey Mouse Club
sang it in the
Hope for Haiti
telethon. Jeff Buckley's transcendent version, recorded on his 1994 album
Grace,
was used on the soundtracks of numerous American television series, including
ER, Scrubs, The OC, The West Wing
and
Ugly Betty
. “Hallelujah” was sung in the finale of
American Idol,
where the judge Simon Cowell declared it (specifically the Buckley rendition; fans of the song take distinct sides) one of his favorite songs of all time. In similar fashion, it made the finale—it's a song made for finales—of the UK TV talent show
The X Factor,
where the big, gospel version by the young winner Alexandra Burke became the fastest-selling Internet download in European history.