I'm Your Man (35 page)

She also asked him his views on marriage and monogamy, given the imminent arrival of his second child with Suzanne. “I think marrying is for very, very high-minded people,” he said. “It is a discipline of extreme severity. To really turn your back on all the other possibilities and all the other experiences of love, of passion, of ecstasy, and to determine to find it within one embrace is a high and righteous notion. Marriage today is the monastery; the monastery today is freedom.” He told Marom that he had arrived “at a more realistic vision” of himself. There was no “high purpose” in his activities. “I'm just going,” he said, “so that I don't have to keep still.”

In September, barely a month after the release of his new album, Suzanne gave birth to Leonard's second child, a girl. Leonard named his daughter Lorca, for the Spanish poet.

N
ew Skin for the Old Ceremony
was the first of Leonard's five albums not to include the word “songs” in the title, nor to have a picture of him on the sleeve.
*
Instead there was a drawing of a winged, naked couple copulating above the clouds. It was a woodcut from
Rosarium philosophorum—
the sixteenth-century alchemical text that had so fascinated Carl Jung—depicting the
coniunctio spirituum,
the holy union of the male-female principle. But the union described in these songs seems decidedly unholy. Their lyrics are caustic, mordant and black—blackly humorous at times but no less dark and brutal for that. The love he sings about is as violent as the war about which he also sings. His woman is “
the whore and the beast of Babylon.
” Leonard, her poor beleaguered lover and servicer, is in various songs pierced, hung, lashed, captive and—with a knee in the balls and a fist in the face—sentenced to death.

He was not without self-pity, this “
grateful faithful woman's singing millionaire . . . Working for the Yankee dollar
.” His only power was in his contempt and in the brilliant cutting edge of his words. Even in his version of that most courtly of songs “Greensleeves,” when he sees his woman “
naked in the early dawn,
” he hopes she will be “
someone new
.” In “A Singer Must Die” he sings a scathing “
goodnight
” to his “
night after night, after night, after night, after night, after night.
” “Why Don't You Try” is more vitriolic still:

    
You know this life is filled with many sweet companions,

    
many satisfying one-night stands.

    
Do you want to be the ditch around a tower?

This barb is perfectly cruel in its encompassment of sex and captivity. Although his muse is not mentioned by name, never before had Leonard treated one quite so discourteously. The songs, aware of this, plead their case before courtrooms, his ancestors and his God.

What makes this album so different from its predecessors is that its dark poetry—every bit as dark as on
Songs of Love and Hate
—is often clad in sophisticated, unexpected musical arrangements, ranging from Afro-percussive to Brecht-Weill, to modern chamber music. Said Leonard, “It's good. I'm not ashamed of it and I'm ready to stand by it. Rather than think of it as a masterpiece, I prefer to look at it as a little gem.”
17
The critical response was also generally favorable. In the UK,
Melody Maker
found it “more spirited than the past four,”
18
while
NME
described it as “an agreeable blend of vintage Cohen and some new textures. Armageddon has been postponed if only temporarily.”
19
In the U.S.,
Rolling Stone
took the middle ground, saying it was “not one of his best” but that it had some songs “which will not easily be forgotten by his admirers.”
20

The two most enduring songs on
New Skin
were quite different from one another. “Chelsea Hotel #2” was one of the album's most straightforward, singer-songwriter productions. “Who by Fire” had been directly inspired by a Hebrew prayer sung on the Day of Atonement when the Book of Life was opened and the names read aloud of who will die and how. Leonard said he had first heard it in the synagogue when he was five years old, “standing beside my uncles in their black suits.”
21
His own liturgy ended with a question that his elders had never answered and whose answer Leonard still sought: what unseen force controls these things and who the hell is in charge?

New Skin for the Old Ceremony
had not been a great commercial success outside of Germany and the UK, where it was certified silver. In the U.S. and Canada it completely bypassed the charts. But there was an album, ergo there had to be a tour. In September 1974—the month of Lorca's birth, Adam's second birthday and their father's fortieth—Leonard embarked on his biggest tour to date. Two months of concerts had been booked in Europe, including a performance at a CBS Records conference in Eastbourne, England, followed by two weeks in New York and L.A. in November and December. The first two months of 1975 were also taken up with concerts, bringing him back and forth between Canada, the U.S. and the UK.

As Bob Johnston had done in the past, Leonard's new producer put together his touring band—a small group of the multi-instrumentalists and singers who had played on the album: John Miller, Jeff Layton, Emily Bindiger and Erin Dickins. Also like Johnston, Lissauer joined him on the road, playing keyboards. It was “very different to his last tour with the country boys,” says Lissauer. “We had a lot of artistic detail.” Leonard's new band was very young. “We were all kids. I was twenty-two and I had never played a concert before such a big audience, and I've never been on tour with a guy who's revered like he was. In Europe Leonard was bigger than Dylan—all the shows were sold out—and he had the most sincere, devoted, almost nuts following. Serious poetry lovers don't get violent but, boy, there was some suicide watches going on, on occasion. There were people who Leonard meant life or death to. I'd see girls in the front row”—women outnumbered men three to one in the audiences, by Lissauer's count—“openly weep for Leonard and they would send back letters and packages. And invitations. We would see people after the show—somebody intriguing or good-looking would get backstage—and they'd say things like, ‘I was suicidal and I put on one of your records and you saved me.' ”

The
Guardian
review of the Manchester show described Leonard as having “the inspired and fragile air of a consumptive. He cut a lonely and sensitive-looking figure centre-stage, wrapped around his guitar, plucking away with an ill mustered resolve at what passed for a melody line. Cohen generated an atmosphere of vulnerability and regret, an odd sensation in pop. None of his songs showed a sense of humor, none was bright and breezy. But the whole thing had a gloomy warmth.”
22

The tour, particularly when compared with the last two, unfolded largely without incident, apart from the bus breaking down on the way to the Edinburgh show (they divided into pairs and hitchhiked to the venue) and the showdown between Marty Machat and Herbert von Karajan in Berlin when the famed conductor, still rehearsing the Berlin Philharmonic, refused to let them in to do their sound check. “Marty's ego and von Karajan's ego—that was quite something,” Lissauer recalls. Among the more memorable performances was the Fête de l'Humanité in Paris. “Half a million people and all these little communist factions had come together for a festival, and they'd given us big limousines to take us there,” Lissauer says. “We dressed down for the occasion in fatigues and had them drop us off half a mile from the site, where we got into a bunch of beat-up little Renaults to drive up there, because we didn't want to be seen showing up [in the limos] because a lot of the people there were very fired up. There was a lot of very passionate political talk and fatigues and berets and Gauloises. Leonard hung out with them and fit right in.”

When the band arrived in New York for the November shows, Suzanne was there to meet Leonard. He took her along with him to his interview with Danny Fields.
*
He told Fields he had given up smoking, while elegantly eulogizing the beauty of the cigarette. He was no longer drinking either and tried to give Fields the bottle of vodka that had been given to him by Harry Smith. Fields asked him if his children were being raised as Jews. Leonard answered, “Unless I change my name, I will definitely raise them Jewish.” Meaning yes. The pleas in the song “Lover Lover Lover” to his father/Father to change his name were rhetorical. “I never liked the idea of people changing their names. It's nice to know where you come from.”
23

In an interview around the same time with Larry “Ratso” Sloman, for
Rolling Stone,
Leonard complained, “I think I'm getting old. My nails are crumbling under the assault of the guitar strings. My throat is going. How many years more do I have of this?” But, far from giving up, he said he wanted to keep going “forever.” Every man, he said, “should try to become an elder.”
24

In Los Angeles, a residency had been set up for Leonard at the Troubadour, the famous West Hollywood folk club where Tom Waits was discovered on an open mic night and where Joni Mitchell made her L.A. debut. “He did two shows a night, five nights, all sold out,” says Paul Body, the Troubadour doorman. “I was the ticket-taker, so I remember Phil Spector coming in on the Sunday with Lenny Bruce's daughter, Kitty. Dylan also showed up one night. There were quite a few different celebrities—and tons of beautiful women. The only guy I've seen who drew better-looking women than Leonard Cohen was probably Charles Bukowski. These women were all dressed up in seventies style and hanging on Leonard's every word, during the show and afterwards.” Leonard wore a gray suit—“He reminded me of the French actor Jean Gabin,” says Body—and the band were all dressed in black. “The manager of the Troubadour, Robert Marchese, told me, ‘You'd better check the bathroom for razor blades, because this stuff is real depressing.' ”

Between sets, journalist Harvey Kubernik asked Leonard about the new album. “For a while I didn't think there was going to be another album. I pretty much felt that I was washed up as a songwriter because it wasn't coming any more,” Leonard said. “Now I've entered into another phase, which is very new to me. That is, I began to collaborate with John on songs, which is something that I never expected, or intended, to do with anyone. It wasn't a matter of improvement, it was a matter of sharing the conception, with another man.” His previous album,
Live Songs,
he said, represented “a very confused and directionless time. The thing I liked about it is that it documents this phase very clearly. I'm very interested in documentation.”
25
Leonard was going to visit Dylan at his house in Malibu, he said, mentioning that Dylan had called him one of his favorite poets. Leonard also went to an Allen Ginsberg performance in Los Angeles and to dinner with Joni Mitchell. Kubernik, who accompanied Leonard, recalls a smiling Mitchell telling him off the cuff, “I'm only a groupie for Picasso and Leonard.”

Aside from the New York and L.A. concerts, Leonard's U.S. tour earned a lukewarm reception at best. In a couple of places, tickets barely sold. “He was almost unknown,” Lissauer says. “Leonard didn't really want to play the States, he didn't feel they understood him, and because they weren't putting out he wasn't putting out, so he had a nonaudience. This was distracting for me, as a record producer; I wanted to see him be big in the States. But on the Canadian tour he was mobbed, and some of those shows were really fabulous. We recorded a bunch of them.”

While on the road, Leonard was already planning a new studio album. This time he wanted a full collaboration with Lissauer. “Leonard really liked my melodies, so we decided to write together. It was going really well, we wrote some really strong songs and worked on them on the road”—“Came So Far for Beauty,” “Guerrero,” “I Guess It's Time,” “Beauty Salon” and “Traitor Song.” They also worked on new and different versions of “Diamonds in the Mine,” “Lover Lover Lover” and “There Is a War.” When the tour was over, the two of them went to New York and straight to work on the album Leonard called
Songs for Rebecca
.

Leonard once again moved into the Royalton Hotel. Lissauer would meet him there and Leonard would give him some lyrics, which they discussed, before Lissauer took them home and started coming up with melodies. “Then we would get together at my loft,” Lissauer remembers, “and work at the grand piano. Leonard didn't bring his guitar because my chord changes weren't, I think, the kind he naturally gravitated to. I mean, I was trying to write for him in a style that was comfortable—not just write a pop song and have him sing it—but I also lifted the melodies and structures a little out of his zone, which was mostly simple chords, no extended chords or inversions, that kind of thing. Also, he tended not to want to sing leaps, he liked to sing notes close together, almost speak-sing like a French
chanteur.
But I think he was tired of writing the same kinds of songs and wanted to break out of it, and he trusted me enough.” Lissauer made demos of the songs so that they could evaluate what they had. Leonard seemed happy with where it was going. Then he decided to leave for Greece.

On Hydra the songs were put to one side. Leonard went back to working on “My Life in Art.” “It was pretty bad ten years ago, before the world knew me, but now it's a lot worse,” he wrote; he was going to have to “overthrow [his] life with fresh love.”
26
There were a number of liaisons. He continued to live with Suzanne, but what he wrote about her was vituperative. Suzanne, by her own account, did not take this personally: “Living with a writer, you feel that it's all a white page, that it's all a rehearsal, that the author has the right to pause, erase, repeat, vary and repeat again. So I let him. Leonard found solace, purpose and comfort in the deconstruction and complaint of daily woes. I wanted to be a good audience and company, not just the reactive wife, although the last was inevitable at times of course.”