I'm Your Man (43 page)

I'm Your Man
was lauded by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. John Rockwell in the
New York Times
called it “a masterpiece”; Mark Cooper wrote in UK rock magazine
Q
that it was Leonard's best album since the midseventies. Leonard had perfected “the art of being Leonard Cohen . . . the usual gorgeous melodies and an ageing poet taking himself very seriously, until he twinkles.”
5
“All the major critics of the era reviewed it,” says Weisz, “and the reviews were extraordinary.” Those who seemed to think that Leonard had gone away hailed it as a comeback.

On February 7 Leonard left for Europe on a promotional tour to do interviews. There was great anticipation for the concert tour, which was due to begin in April. Leonard went back to Los Angeles to prepare for it, but there was a serious problem. His manager was dying. Marty Machat was gravely ill with lung cancer, and although it was clear to almost everyone else that his condition was terminal, Machat was convinced he was going to pull through. In early March, with only weeks to go before the tour began, Leonard was getting anxious. A large sum of money had been paid into Machat & Machat's attorney account as a tour advance, and Leonard needed access to it. He called Marty. Avril, Marty's lover, picked up the phone.

Says Steven Machat, “Dad was very quiet, very shy, Leonard was very quiet, very dark, and in the middle of their relationship was Avril.” Machat dismisses his father's romantic partner as “a woman who Dad gave money to, to do Leonard's PR” and someone whom he “kept around because he thought Leonard Cohen wanted her around.” Steven Machat did not like Leonard either. “I never liked him from the moment go; he never looks you in the eyes, ever. He plays victim.” But Marty Machat, he says, loved Leonard and would have done more for him than for anyone. Since this presumably included his son, it might not have helped relations between Steven and Leonard. “My dad would get on the phone with Leonard. My dad didn't give a fuck about anyone, he wanted the money, but Leonard he would sit there with, he'd listen to Leonard. If Leonard got sick, my dad would be upset—‘Oh, Leonard's got a cold.' It was interesting. When Leonard went to Israel making believe he was going to fight in the war, all of a sudden my dad rediscovered that he was of Jewish blood.”

Steven knew that his father did not have long to live. In his mind he saw vultures circling and among them he included Leonard. But Leonard, on the eve of a major tour for what was potentially the most commercial album of his career, was doing his best to take care of business. Steven Machat says that Leonard turned to him for help and that, for his father's sake, he agreed. Perhaps he did, although the evidence seems to indicate that Leonard turned to lawyers for advice and to women for help. With Marty's blessing, Avril went with Leonard to the bank to withdraw the money he needed. Kelley Lynch, Marty's secretary and assistant, stepped up and offered to take care of administrative matters for the tour. When Marty Machat died on March 19, 1988, aged sixty-seven, Lynch took various files on Leonard from the offices of Machat & Machat that the lawyers said could be taken legally, including documents relating to the publishing company that Marty Machat had set up for Leonard. Lynch took the files to L.A., where she set up shop and began making herself as indispensable to Leonard as Marty had once been. At one point Leonard and Kelley became lovers. Eventually she became his manager.

Meanwhile, Roscoe Beck had been putting together Leonard's touring band. Leonard had asked him to come along as his musical director, but Beck was scheduled to produce albums by Eric Johnson and Ute Lemper. So Leonard went on the road with a band made up of Steve Meador and John Bilezikjian, both of whom had played on Leonard's 1979–80 tour; Steve Zirkel (bass); Bob Metzger (guitar and pedal steel); Bob Furgo; Tom McMorran (both keyboards); and two new backing singers, Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla.

They were quite a pair—Julie a striking, statuesque blonde who, for half of the eighties, had sung with her then husband Chris D. in an edgy L.A. punk-roots band called the Divine Horsemen, and Perla a petite, sparkling brunette of South American ancestry, with her own band and a background in jazz and rock. Both were stylish and mischievous, and accomplished singers who had sung together in the past. Christensen was the first of the two to be hired. Beck had known her from Austin, where she sang jazz and occasionally played gigs with Passenger. Christensen can remember seeing Passenger when they returned from Leonard's 1979–80 tour and noticing how “they all came back changed; everyone had some kind of aura around them of having become citizens of the world.” So there was no hesitation when Beck invited her to audition for Leonard's 1988 tour. Henry Lewy, overseeing the rehearsals with Beck, was impressed with not just her singing but her knowledge of Leonard's songs; she had sung them at the piano with her mother since she was a young girl. “I didn't have to audition for Leonard,” says Christensen, “but he wanted to meet me, because being on the road is like this marriage that's going on.” Over lunch, Leonard told her, “This is going to be a very difficult tour; we'll be playing four or five nights a week in different cities.” Christensen laughed and told him, “ ‘Leonard, I had just got done doing CBGB's and the Mab and these places where I had to pee by the side of the road and change in awful restrooms.' I was like, ‘Come on, let's roll up our sleeves and go.' ” Leonard was charmed.

When Beck called Perla to audition, having not grown up playing Leonard Cohen songs, she went straight to the record store and bought as many cassettes of his as she could find. This being America, there were not many. But Roscoe told her not to prepare anything, “because,” she says, “99 percent of this was Leonard's feelings about me as a person. Which made me nervous. I remember walking in, dressed in white from head to toe, and Leonard was there completely in black. We just looked at each other and laughed and that was it.” Again, Leonard was charmed. “But the true magic happened when Julie and I started singing. We read each other's minds musically; we'd never say which part we'd take, our voices were constantly mixing. Together we were a real force as a backup singing pair, and it showed onstage.” The day they left for Europe, Perla's mother and father came to the airport to see her off. “It was my first time out of the country. My dad was really an old-fashioned kind of guy, very ill, but an elegant man, who dressed in a suit—he was like Leonard in that way—and it was a big deal to him that I was leaving for Europe. He asked Leonard to take care of me and they shook hands and Leonard promised him he would.”

The tour—fifty-nine concerts in three months—began on April 5, 1988, in Germany. “There was a good feeling among all the people on that tour,” Julie says. “Leonard just had this way of being really like the camp counselor. We would do this thing on that tour where, if we were jet-lagged and wide-awake in the middle of the night, we would hang a hanger on the door to indicate that we were awake and it was okay to come in, and there were several times when I would go to Leonard's room and just have snacks and chat.” Perla remembers Leonard seeming “very happy, and very playful. A lot of people don't know that side of him, but Leonard was one of the funniest people I've ever met, so hilarious at times you just want to crack up.” When she and Julie came up with a spontaneous vaudeville routine onstage, Leonard happily played along with them. During the Spanish leg of the tour, Leonard had Perla translate for the audience what he said between songs, which, depending on his mood and his red wine intake, could be long, complex and mortifying—and terrifying for a woman who had been raised speaking English. “Every night we were on the edge of our seats to see where he was going to go,” Perla says. “It was so much fun, and as risky as live theater sometimes.”

In Europe, Leonard was often mobbed by fans. “Women would follow us around,” Julie says, “and men for that matter, and go, ‘Where is Leonard staying?' ” In Sweden they had to fight their way through a crowd of teenage girls to get on the ferry to Denmark. Perla says, “If Leonard was in the street or in a café people would come up to him; there was no privacy whatsoever. But he was very happy. We'd take long walks through the streets together and he was in his element, I think, delighted with his success.” In the UK, the BBC made a documentary about him,
Songs from the Life of Leonard Cohen,
and Buckingham Palace sent him an invitation to appear at the Prince's Trust concert, alongside Eric Clapton, Elton John, Dire Straits, the Bee Gees and Peter Gabriel. Julie remembers, “Peter Gabriel came up to Leonard with a couple of albums for Leonard to sign. He was like a little disciple: ‘Can you sign this one? And this one's for my son.' ” Prince Charles, whose charity the concert benefited, was also a Leonard Cohen fan. “The orchestration is fantastic and the words, the lyrics and everything,” the prince said in a British television interview. “He's a remarkable man and he has this incredibly laid-back, gravelly voice.”
6
In Iceland, Leonard was received by the president of the country.

On the eve of Independence Day they flew back to the U.S. By now Leonard had become used to the difference between the European and American tour experience. But the Carnegie Hall concert on July 6 could not have gone much better. The show was sold out and the media had come in droves. “I remember thinking that if they dropped a bomb on the place, American rock music criticism would be over,” says Sharon Weisz, “because of the number of journalists who had requested tickets to this show.” The
New York Post
reviewer Ira Mayer wrote, “If ever there is an award for emotional laureate of the pop world, Leonard Cohen will be the uncontested winner. He gave vent—magnificently—to all the doubts, fears, longings, memories and regrets that comprise love in the twentieth century.”

Following two West Coast shows, in Berkeley and L.A., there was a three-month break before the North American tour resumed in October. At Halloween, in Texas, they performed in a TV studio for
Austin City Limits,
a popular long-running concert program that airs on PBS. On November 16 the tour ended, as it had begun, in New York, where the
New York Times
named
I'm Your Man
its album of the year. Leonard stayed on in New York. Adam and Lorca were living there now and Hanukkah was just a couple of weeks away. Leonard rented a room in a hotel in one of Manhattan's less fashionable neighborhoods and began preparing for the holiday.

T
he eighties had not been easy on many of the recording artists who had come up in the sixties. They tended to flounder in a decade when style took the place of substance, yuppies replaced hippies, shiny CDs made vinyl LPs obsolete and the drugs of choice were designed to boost egos, not to expand consciousness. Although Leonard had had a tough time of it during the first half of the eighties, by the end of the decade he had adapted far more successfully than most of his near-contemporaries. He had the style, the beats, the synthesizers and the videos—two excellent videos made by Dominique Issermann, to whom
I'm Your Man
had been dedicated. (Written around a picture of a man and woman ballroom dancing were the words “All these songs are for you, D.I.”)

I'm Your Man
had outsold all of his earlier albums. “In terms of my so-called career,” Leonard said, “it certainly was a rebirth. But it was hard to consider it a rebirth on a personal level. It was made under the usual dismal and morbid conditions.”
7
Suzanne was suing him over money, and his romantic relationship with Dominique was unraveling. This was a dance whose complicated steps Leonard knew well: the intimacy and the distance, the separations and reconciliations, running on the spot and, when the music stopped, good-bye. Romance would often be replaced by an enduring friendship; Leonard appears to have remained good friends with many of his former lovers, remarkably few of whom seem to bear him any ill will. But the more immediate result of the end of a long love affair would be a rush of freedom, which gave way to depression, from which Leonard might emerge with a poem or a song.

Leonard has claimed in several interviews—and confirmed it in the closing verse of “Chelsea Hotel #2”—that he is not a sentimental or a nostalgic man, that he does not look back. Religion would validate this as a healthy position: when Lot's wife looked back at Sodom she was turned into a pillar of salt. As a writer, although he tended to look inside himself or at his immediate environs, Leonard also looked back at lovers from whom he had parted. In
The Favorite Game,
Leonard's fictional alter ego writes to the girl he loved in fond anticipation of their separation: “Dearest Shell, if you let me I'd always keep you 400 miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. . . . I'm afraid to live any place but in expectation.” As a writer Leonard seemed to thrive on this paradox of distance and intimacy. As a man, it was more complicated. Often it seemed to make him wretched, and, as a wretch, he turned to God. But as Roshi told him, “You can't live in God's world. There are no restaurants or toilets.”
8

Back in L.A., with little to keep Leonard occupied, his depression reappeared. It came “in cycles,” he said
9
—sometimes even when things were going well, which would make him feel ashamed. “One might think that success helps you fix up your personal problems,” he said, “but it doesn't work that way.”
10
When things were not going well, though, depression could send him into a serious tailspin.

“I never knew where it was coming from and I tried everything to shake it, but nothing worked.”

What did you try?