I'm Your Man (56 page)

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
certainly helped pique and revive interest in Leonard. But another effect of the film was to prompt the question, why was everyone except Leonard singing his songs? A Canadian journalist asked Leonard directly if he ever intended to go back on the road. Leonard answered that it was “becoming more and more attractive to me as we drink,” but he failed to mention that he rarely drank much anymore. In
Book of Longing
he had captioned one of his drawings with the verse

    
the road

        
is too long

    
the sky

        
is too vast

    
the wandering

        
heart

    
is homeless

    
at last

But as the year drew to a close, Leonard showed no inclination to be anywhere other than home.

Twenty-three

The Future of Rock 'n' Roll

O
n the table were a slab of beef tongue and bottle of good cognac. Leonard knew what Roshi liked. He poured a large glass for Roshi and a small one for himself and they sat with their drinks in easy silence, Leonard and the old man who had named him Jikan but usually called him Kone (not quite “koan,” but close). In a few weeks' time Roshi would be one hundred years old, and yet here he still was, the constant in Leonard's life, the good friend, the wise father figure who disciplined and indulged him and never left, not even when Leonard had left him. Life, aside from “the pesky little problem of losing everything I had,”
1
was treating Leonard kindly in his old age. He had Roshi, he had Anjani and he had a grandson, Cassius Lyon Cohen—two good names, Leonard's boxing hero and his grandfather—Adam's son, born in February 2007.

Leonard wore his own seventy-two years lightly. Still, he had noticed some changes, like losing his capacity for alcohol for one, as well as his taste for tobacco. When he quit smoking, Leonard had promised himself he could start again when he reached seventy-five. He blamed his abstinence from cigarettes for the loss of the two lowest notes in his vocal range, even if in truth they had only ever been audible to certain mammals and devoted female fans. His voice now was deeper than it had ever been. It was like old leather, soft and worn, a little cracked in places but for the most part supple, and hung suspended somewhere between word and song. Since Leonard's return from the monastery, it seemed to have been leaning more toward the word. Of course there was always music in the word, but when it came down to actual melodies, Leonard seemed as content to leave them to others to write as he had been to let others sing his songs.

Another project was about to come to fruition, which featured his words set to music that Leonard neither wrote nor sang. Unlike
Blue Alert,
this was a stage production, with music by Philip Glass—among the most distinguished, influential and prolific composers in postmodern American music. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, between writing his avant-garde opera
Einstein on the Beach
and scoring the Martin Scorsese film
Kundun,
Glass had taken a poem of Leonard's from
The Spice-Box of Earth,
“There Are Some Men,” and turned it into an a capella hymn, which was performed as part of
Three Songs for Chorus a Cappella,
a work commissioned for the celebration of the 350th anniversary of Quebec. At that time, he and Leonard had never met. But having been introduced backstage at a concert somewhere along the way, they had talked about spending some time together and eventually, fifteen years later, they did, in L.A. They spent the day together, Glass recalls, “talking about music and poetry,” by the end of the day, they had agreed to work together on something, though neither knew what or when.

Glass had collaborated over the years on diverse projects with orchestras, rock musicians and filmmakers, but he particularly enjoyed working with poets. One of his favorite collaborators was Allen Ginsberg, with whom he worked for ten years, until Ginsberg's death in 1997. Not long after, Glass tried to get in touch with Leonard again, but he says, “I discovered he had gone into the monastery.” It would be several more years before Leonard e-mailed to say, “I'm out of the monastery, so we can go back to that project.” Glass, who “was missing having that in-depth relationship with a poet that was
alive,
” was delighted. “I kind of went from Allen Ginsberg to Leonard Cohen—a pretty good transition, don't you think?”

When Glass visited Leonard at his L.A. home, Leonard was still working on
Book of Longing.
He handed the composer a stack of loose pages, poems and illustrations, in no particular order. Sitting at the wooden table, Glass leafed through them, relishing the randomness. He started formulating categories into which he divided the contents: ballads, “the long poems I thought would be the pillars of the work”; rhymes and limericks, “the little ones”; dharma poems, “spiritual meditations”; love/erotic poems; and personal poems, about Leonard. He picked five or six from each category to write music for. Among them were some that Leonard had already recorded as songs. Tentatively, Glass asked Leonard if he would like to be involved in the music. “I was terrified that he might say yes, but he said, ‘You write the music.' ”

Glass composed a series of song cycles to be performed by four voices and a small ensemble made up of strings, oboe, horn, percussion and keyboards. To retain the sense of randomness he had felt and to give the theater audience a sense of “flipping through a book of poetry,” he included in each song cycle a poem from each of his five categories. He also wanted to hear how the poems sounded in their author's voice, so he asked Leonard if he would record himself reading a few. Leonard recorded the entire book and sent that. “When I heard the quality of this reading,” Glass says, “I thought I would put his voice into the piece itself. I said, ‘Though you may not be there to perform it, may I use your voice?' He said, ‘Yes.' ” Leonard also gave Glass use of his artwork as a backdrop. When the composition was finished—ninety minutes, twenty-two poems—he played it for Leonard, who sat and listened quietly. “He said almost nothing. There was one vocal part that he felt was a little bit high and I eventually brought it down an octave, but that was the only thing, and it did work better.”

The world premiere for
Book of Longing: A Song Cycle Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen
was set for June 1, 2007, in Toronto, coinciding with the opening there of
Leonard Cohen: Drawn to Words,
a traveling exhibition of Leonard's drawings and sketches. Glass flew to Canada to conduct the final rehearsals. To his surprise Leonard flew there too and spent a week working with him and the cast. As with
Blue Alert,
Leonard was not without opinions on how his words ought to be sung. Glass remembers, “He met the singers and said, ‘Well here I am, you can ask me anything you like.' They talked for hours. He had powerful insights into the approach to singing that worked with his words. He began talking about the ‘voice' that they should employ in singing the work—I don't mean the
kind
of voice, I mean the aesthetic. At one point he said, ‘You start by singing and make it simpler and simpler and simpler and where you reach the point where you're actually speaking, then you're finished.' He didn't actually literally mean they would be speaking, I believe he meant it would be
as if
you were speaking, that the affectations of singing were absent. And they followed that advice and they simplified their vocal style until it became almost like speech.” Leonard had said much the same thing to Anjani.

Leonard stayed and joined Glass in a public discussion of the work. When he was asked whether he considered what Glass had done to be classical or musical theater, Leonard's answer, “Glassical,” was wry but accurate. Although originally labeled minimalist for their haunting, repetitive rhythms and motifs, Glass's musical compositions were also earthy and erotic and drew on any number of different musical styles, all of them evident in this work. The
Toronto Star
's reviewer's description was “a confusing work of considerable importance.”
2

Following three successful nights in Toronto, the show left on a small tour, and in December 2007 the album
Book of Longing: A Song Cycle Based on the Poetry and Images of Leonard Cohen
was released, making it to No. 17 on the U.S. classical music charts. Over the next two years, the production would be staged in a number of U.S. and European cities and at a festival in New Zealand. In 2009 it returned to America for a five-night stand in Claremont, the university town at the bottom of Mount Baldy. The theater in which it was staged faced the mountain. A college building nearby hosted an exhibition of Leonard's art. Both events had been arranged by Robert Faggen, a writer and professor of literature at Claremont Graduate University who had a cabin on Mount Baldy, a short walk from the monastery. He and Leonard had become good friends since their first encounter in Wolfe's Market—the store at the bottom of Mount Baldy where Leonard would go to buy treats for Roshi. On the occasion of their meeting, Leonard was standing in the deli aisle, dressed in his monk's robes, meditating on the merits of buying some potato salad.

Faggen took Glass, who flew out for the Claremont shows, to the monastery to meet Roshi
.
Glass, like Leonard a Jew of Lithuanian-Russian descent, also shared his deep involvement with Buddhism; he had himself been on long retreats (where, in his case, he was given special dispensation to take his piano) and had been a contributing editor to the Buddhist magazine
Tricycle.
At Mount Baldy Zen Center, Glass sat for a
teisho
with Roshi. Although the old teacher declined to come down from the mountain to go to the concert, the audience included a number of monks.

There were now three productions featuring Leonard's work without Leonard making the rounds
: Book of Longing: A Song Cycle,
Came So Far for Beauty,
and
Leonard Cohen: Drawn to Words.
It was an invisible kind of visibility that suited Leonard just fine. “If you hang in there long enough, you begin to be surrounded by a certain gentleness and invisibility,” he once told an interviewer. “This invisibility is promising, because it will probably become deeper and deeper. And with invisibility—and I am not talking about the opposite of celebrity, I mean something like The Shadow, who can move from one room to another unobserved—comes a beautiful calm.”
3

With age had come a greater degree of serenity than Leonard had ever felt in his adult life. With age too had come homages and awards without end. He had to stop counting how many tribute albums there were—more than fifty by this point, from twenty different countries. A couple had caught his eye. One, because it was recorded by his first and most stalwart champion, was
Democracy: Judy Collins Sings Leonard Cohen
—from 2004, the year Leonard turned seventy—on which Collins had gathered all her interpretations of his songs under one roof. Another that had delighted Leonard was
Top Tunes Artist Vol. 19 TT–110,
an instrumental album of his songs (packaged with an album of Enya songs) made specifically for karaoke bars. “At last,” Leonard said, “somewhere to go in the evening,”
4
though in reality he was still happiest at home, “an old man in a suit . . . delicately talking about his work to somebody.”
5
Then Sony decided to reissue
Blue Alert.

On its original release the previous year, Anjani's album had reached No. 18 in the U.S. jazz charts but had had little impact anywhere else. For the new edition the record label added a DVD of videos and a documentary by Lian Lunson on the making of the album. The label also put together a short tour. In March 2007, shortly before Roshi's one hundredth birthday, Leonard flew with Anjani to Europe. The first three shows, in London, Oslo and Warsaw, were invitation-only events, media mostly, and Leonard Cohen fans who had won tickets through radio and website contests. Journalists who wanted to interview Leonard—and there were many—were told that they would have to talk to him and Anjani as a pair. As far as Leonard was concerned, the tour and the album were Anjani's, not his.

To a UK newspaper, Leonard described his work with Anjani as more than mere collaboration, “an expression of some kind of deep mutuality, some kind of marriage of purpose.”
6
Picking up on the “marriage” aspect, the host of a Norwegian television talk show asked Leonard to talk about their “love story.” Leonard's answer—that he “found it's best not to name a relationship”—demonstrated that he had lost none of his skills at deflection. However, Anjani did appear to be wearing an engagement ring. In an interview with the Buddhist magazine
Shambhala Sun
Leonard elaborated, “The woman is saying, ‘What is our relationship? Are we engaged?' . . . and my disposition is, ‘Do we really have to have this discussion, because it's not as good as our relationship?' But as you get older, you want to accommodate, and say, ‘Yeah, we're living together. This is for real. I'm not looking for anyone else. You're the woman in my life.' Whatever terms that takes: a ring, an arrangement, a commitment, or from one's behavior, by the way you act.”
7

During the
Blue Alert
tour Leonard had restricted his role to making the introduction, then taking a seat in the audience to watch the show. But one night, partway through a concert in a nightclub in London, Anjani invited Leonard to come up and sing with her, an invitation he accepted, shyly. His appearance was greeted by rapturous applause. When the tour arrived in the U.S., Leonard would show up on occasion and duet with Anjani on the song “Whither Thou Goest.” As word of this spread, the small venues where Anjani had been booked to play started to attract large crowds—people who were hoping to see Leonard. The question was, did Leonard want to see them?

Leonard had never much enjoyed touring, however good the concerts might have been. He toured simply because if you were in the music business that was what you did. You made an album and when it was done you went on the road to check in with your fan base and sell it. This ritual was of particular importance to an artist like Leonard, whose records were not all over the radio. It had been almost fifteen years since Leonard had last toured, with
The Future,
and it had been such a disagreeable experience that it was one factor in Leonard's decision to leave the music business and go live in the monastery. Since his return to the music business, none of his albums had sold a fraction as well as
The Future,
so there seemed even less point in going out on tour.