I'm Your Man (27 page)

So, fellow-feeling had something to do with it; in a 1969 interview he said, “I always loved the people the world used to call mad. I used to hang out and talk to those old men, or with the junkies. I was only 13 or 14, I never understood why I was down there except that I felt at home with those people.” There was also something of “there but for fortune,” given his own history and that of his mother. On a practical level, it was also a good place “to tighten the band up,” says Donovan, “and blow their minds.” Leonard did it at his own expense and without fanfare. Although there were two big Johnny Cash prison albums, there was no Leonard Cohen
At Henderson Hospital
. But a tape of the concert exists, and it's good. Milne, who was also an amateur sound recordist, captured it on his four-track stereo Stella reel-to-reel.

The concert started around seven
P.M
. in the high-ceilinged tower attic. There was a small stage, so crammed with the band and their regular concert equipment that Leonard had to play at floor level. He stood beneath one of the tall, narrow windows that gave the room the feel of a chapel. Around fifty residents made their way into one of a half dozen rows of folding chairs while the band did a quick sound check—“Arms of Regina,” an unreleased song, sounding here like a midtempo country ballad with heart-tugging harmonies. To the audience Leonard said, “There was a fellow I spoke to last night, a doctor. I told him I was coming out here. He said, ‘They are a tough bunch of young nuts.' ” While playing the opening bars of “Bird on the Wire,” Leonard stopped. “I feel like talking. Someone warned me downstairs that all you do here is talk. That's psychotic, it's contagious.” Apparently so. Leonard spoke a lot during the eighty-minute concert, in between the eleven songs and one poem, and often more freely than at regular shows. He talked of how his affair with Marianne slowly faded and died and told the stories behind some of his songs: “You Know Who I Am” had “something to do with some three hundred acid trips I took” and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” “was written coming off amphetamine.” “Tonight Will Be Fine” was played like a country hoedown, upbeat and raucous, and with extra verses. There were signs of “Tennesseefication” too in “Suzanne,” where the lonely wooden tower became “lonesome.” Here and there Leonard tried out different lyrics; in “Bird on the Wire,” “
I have saved all my ribbons for thee
” was changed to the quite different “
I have broken all my sorrows on thee.
” There was no recognition or response from the audience when he added, “It was written in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, a place where you never leave the elevator alone,” but “Chelsea Hotel #2” and the Janis stories were still some years off.

There appeared to be quite a few Leonard Cohen fans in the audience. One called out a request for “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “a song,” he said, “that I didn't know anybody knew about, that we have only sung in concerts. It's a song that I wrote in New York when I was living on the east side of the East Side, and it's about sharing women, sharing men, and the idea of that if you hold on to somebody . . .” Leonard let the conclusion drift away. During the songs, the audience was silent, entranced. When the band stopped, the applause was loud and rapturous. “I really wanted to say that this is the audience that we've been looking for,” said Leonard, who sounded moved and happy. “I've never felt so good playing before people.” People who were mentally damaged seemed to make Leonard and his songs feel at home. They performed other mental hospital concerts later that year, “and those shows were one of the best things about the whole tour, every one of them,” said Donovan, “just the way the audience locked in on what Leonard was doing and how he just interacted with them.”

In early November 1970 they would play at the Napa State mental hospital, a colossal nineteenth-century Gothic pile set on 190 acres in California wine country. The band had a temporary new backing singer in California, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
*
A few days earlier, on Halloween, Phillips had married the actor Dennis Hopper. Leonard, whom Hopper considered a friend, was at the ceremony. “So we dragged Hopper up to the hospital too,” says Bill Donovan. “On the way he took some acid.” It started to kick in just as the limo pulled into the grounds. As they started unloading, they could see the staff bringing the audience into the building in which they were to perform. Many of the patients were in wheelchairs; others lurched slowly on foot. The hospital housed many severely damaged and highly medicated patients; it also had a separate wing for the criminally insane. “When Hopper saw this,” Donovan says, “he freaked out, like it was
The Night of the Living Dead
or something. Hopper ran back into the limo and locked the door and wouldn't come out.” Leonard, performing for the patients, sang and played and talked a little, then jumped down among them with his guitar, “and anyone who could move followed him around the room and back and forward and over the stage.”

In Montreal, when the band performed at a hospital there, a young woman patient told Leonard she was not crazy, and that her father had put her there because she had taken drugs. She begged him to help her get out. There was something in her story that brought to mind Nancy, the judge's daughter about whom Leonard wrote “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” They formulated an escape plan. It did not succeed—fortunately, it seems, since they discovered that she did have a serious mental illness. “There are things that happened that would take your breath away,” says Ron Cornelius. “At one show eight or nine people in wheelchairs all decided that at six o'clock exactly they would all shit their pants. They were marched out with their dirty gowns and they were all crying, because the music was doing something for them that they had never had. One kid stood up with a triangle missing from his skull—you could see the brain beating—and he started screaming at Leonard in the middle of a song, to where we actually ground to a halt. The kid said, ‘Okay, okay, big-time poet, big-time artist, you come in here, you've got the band with you, you've got the pretty girls with you, you're singing all these pretty words and everything, well what I want to know, buddy, is what do you think about me?' And Leonard just left the stage and before you knew it he had the guy in his arms, hugging him.”

O
n their way to the Isle of Wight, Leonard studied the music magazine that Johnston handed him. It was opened to a full-page ad for his album, which pictured Leonard, dressed in a black polo-neck sweater, gazing off to the left, as if trying to ignore what his record company had written at the back of his head. It said, “Do you ever get the feeling that you want to disengage yourself from life? To withdraw into some kind of solitary contemplation just to think about everything for a while? Everything. You. Her. It. Them. Well that's how a poet feels, because he's no different from everyone else. What makes a poet different is that he takes time to put it all down on paper. Beautifully. And what makes Leonard Cohen a very different poet is that he turns his poetry into songs. He did it for
Songs of Leonard Cohen
. Then came
Songs from a Room,
the second Leonard Cohen album for the growing number of people who have identified with him. And what he feels. But don't have that rare poetic vision. There could be millions of Leonard Cohens in the world. You may even,” it ended, “be him yourself.” If Mort had only mass-produced those Leonard masks, they could have made a fortune. A slow, stoned smile grew across Leonard's face, for which much of the credit went to his drug of choice on this part of the tour. The Army had taken to calling him Captain Mandrax.

The Isle of Wight, a four-mile ferry ride from England's south coast, is a placid little island, encircled by yachts and popular with retired naval officers and genteel holidaymakers. For five days in the summer of 1970, it was invaded by hundreds of thousands—six times the island's population—of young music lovers, hippies and militants. From the hill above the festival site in the west, on Afton Down, you could see dust rising from corrugated fences that had been trampled and the smoke rising from trucks and concession stands set on fire. Nicknamed Devastation Hill—for obvious reasons to anyone who was there—it had been taken over by ticketless squatters, some of whom were responsible for the disturbance. Off in the distance, crammed in front of the stage, were thousands of exhausted festivalgoers, who had spent days watching a bill that rivaled Woodstock. The artists who played that year included the Who, the Doors, Miles Davis, Donovan and Ten Years After. Leonard had the slot before last on the fifth and final day, after Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez and before Richie Havens.

Tension had been rising at the festival for days. The promoters had expected a hundred and fifty thousand people but half a million more turned up, many with no intention of paying. Even after the promoters were forced to declare it a free festival, ill will remained. During a set by Kris Kristofferson, bottles were thrown and he was booed offstage. “They were booing everybody,” says Kristofferson. “Except Leonard Cohen.” As the day progressed, things only got worse. Baez offered to go on before Hendrix to try to calm things down; she said, “I knew that my music was a little more difficult to burn fires to.”
12
During Hendrix's set, someone in the crowd threw a flare that set fire to the top of the stage. Flames shot up while Hendrix played on. Leonard and Johnston stood nearby and watched.

“Leonard wasn't worried,” says Johnston. “Hendrix didn't care and neither did we. Leonard was always completely oblivious to anything like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they didn't have a piano or an organ—I don't know, someone had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage—so I couldn't play with him. Leonard said, ‘I'll be in the trailer taking a nap; come and get me when you've found a piano and an organ.' ” He took some Mandrax. It was around two in the morning when they woke Leonard and brought him onstage, in his safari suit, his chin stubbled, hair long, eyes very stoned. As the Army took their places, he stood staring out into the pitch-black night.

Jeff Dexter, a well-known British DJ of that period who was onstage playing records between sets, made the introduction. He saw immediately that Leonard and the band “were totally Mandraxed; they were in such a state I could have fucked them all and they wouldn't have known it.” He was worried for their safety. So was Murray Lerner, the American documentary filmmaker who was shooting the festival. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a disaster,' and that what happened to Kristofferson would happen to him,” says Lerner. “But he looked so calm.” Johnston says, “He was calm, because of the Mandrax. That's what saved that show and saved the festival. It was the middle of the night, all those people had been sitting out there in the rain, after they'd set fire to Hendrix's stage, and nobody had slept for days”—all the ingredients for turning nasty. “But then Leonard, with the Mandrax in him, started out singing, very slowly—so slowly it took him ten minutes to sing it—‘
Like . . . a . . . bird.
' And everybody in that audience was exactly with him. It was the most amazing thing I've ever heard.” Charlie Daniels says, “If Leonard was in a zone with Mandrax, it certainly didn't cause any bad musical decisions. Crowds can be kind of funny and it was getting late and he just seemed to feel the mood. He just kind of laid it down, eased it down.”

Before he sang, Leonard talked to the hundreds of thousands of people he could not see as if they were sitting together in a small, dark room. He told them—slowly, calmly—a story that sounded like a parable, worked like hypnotism, and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn't much like circuses, but he enjoyed it when a man stood up and asked everyone to light a match so they could locate each other. “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” said Cohen, “so I can see where you all are?” There were few at the beginning, but as the show went on he could see flames flickering through the misty rain.

“He mesmerized them,” says Lerner. “And I got mesmerized also.” For the lovers in the audience, Leonard sang “Suzanne,” saying, “Maybe this is good music to make love to,” and for the fighters he sang “The Partisan,” dedicating it to “Joan Baez and the work she is doing.” Says Johnston, “It was magical. From the first moment to the last. I've never seen anything like it. He was just remarkable.” Thirty-nine years later the spellbinding performance was released, along with Lerner's footage, on the CD/DVD
Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
.

A
month after the festival, Leonard, Johnston and the Army were back in Nashville's Columbia Studio A, recording Leonard's third album,
Songs of Love and Hate
. Work began on September 22, 1970, four days after Jimi Hendrix died at the age of twenty-seven in London, and continued daily until the twenty-sixth, eight days before Janis Joplin died at the same age in a Los Angeles hotel. The break from recording was to play a handful of U.S. and Canadian shows in November and December. The first was an anti–Vietnam War concert at a university in Madison, Wisconsin; a homemade bomb had gone off there that summer and Leonard was offered protection by the White Panthers, which he declined. He began the show with a song he had learned at Socialist summer camp, “Solidarity,” and dedicated “Joan of Arc,” a song written to Nico, to the memory of another muse, Janis.

When they reached Montreal on December 10 for the last show of 1970, the city was under martial law following the kidnappings of a journalist and the British trade commissioner in Leonard's old neighborhood, Westmount. Canada's prime minister Pierre Trudeau—Leonard's old friend from Le Bistro, he of the famous beige raincoat to Leonard's famous blue one—was on CBC television, angrily telling the reporter, “There's a lot of bleeding hearts around who don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed.” Meet the new decade, same as the old decade. In their little house in the immigrant quarter, Leonard and Suzanne watched the snow steadily fall and settle on the street, silently, whitewashing everything.