Leonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, has had a stranger-than-fiction, roller-coaster ride of a life. Now, for the first time, he tells his story in his own words, via more than 50 interviews conducted worldwide between 1966 and 2012. In Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen—which includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photos—the artist talks about "Bird on the Wire," "Hallelujah," and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, his long battle with depression, and much more. You'll find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but also conversations that have not previously been printed in English. Some of the material here has not been available until now in any format, including the many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology.
Leonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, has had a stranger-than-fiction, roller-coaster ride of a life. Now, for the first time, he tells his story in his own words, via more than 50 interviews conducted worldwide between 1966 and 2012. In Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen—which includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photos—the artist talks about "Bird on the Wire," "Hallelujah," and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, his long battle with depression, and much more. You'll find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but also conversations that have not previously been printed in English. Some of the material here has not been available until now in any format, including the many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology.
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Overview
Leonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, has had a stranger-than-fiction, roller-coaster ride of a life. Now, for the first time, he tells his story in his own words, via more than 50 interviews conducted worldwide between 1966 and 2012. In Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen—which includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photos—the artist talks about "Bird on the Wire," "Hallelujah," and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, his long battle with depression, and much more. You'll find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but also conversations that have not previously been printed in English. Some of the material here has not been available until now in any format, including the many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613747612 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Series: | Musicians in Their Own Words , #5 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 624 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen
Interviews and Encounters
By Jeff Burger
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2014 Jeff BurgerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-761-2
CHAPTER 1
TV INTERVIEW
ADRIENNE CLARKSON | May 23, 1966, Take 30, CBC (Canada)
Though Leonard Cohen gave a few brief interviews in the early sixties (several of which are quoted in this book's preface), he spent most of the period living in semi-seclusion on the Greek island of Hydra. He was nearly as reclusive in the late sixties and early seventies, when he granted only the occasional interview.
One such interview was with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Adrienne Clarkson, who decades later would describe herself as a Leonard Cohen groupie who has been to dozens of his concerts all over the world. Clarkson talked with Cohen shortly after the publication of his second novel, Beautiful Losers. At the time, Cohen's debut album release was still a year and a half away, but the thirty-one-year-old artist was already receiving lots of attention for his novels and poetry, particularly in his native Canada. As the introduction to Clarkson's interview makes clear, however, that attention wasn't exactly all favorable. — Ed.
Adrienne Clarkson: Listen to what some of the critics said about his latest book.
Announcer: [reads from reviews.] "This is, among other things, the most revolting book ever written in Canada." [Robert Fulford, Toronto Daily Star.] "I have just read Leonard Cohen's new novel, Beautiful Losers, and have had to wash my mind." [Gladys Taylor, Toronto Telegram.] "Verbal masturbation." [The Globe and Mail.] "We've had overdrill and overkill and now we have oversex." [The Globe and Mail.] "At its best Losers is a sluggish stream of concupiscence exposition of ... nausea." [Time.]
[Cohen reads a poem.]
AC: How does it affect you when you read a poem that you've forgotten? Is it like reading a poem by someone else?
Leonard Cohen: Well, this time I was just faking it because for the purposes of continuity I had to read this poem but I hadn't read it for some time, and I left out a verse and I'd forgotten the meaning of the whole poem.
AC: Does it in any way disturb you? Isn't every poem a part of you as a poet?
LC: It doesn't disturb me 'cause I don't think anything was at stake. But I think that the message comes through with the body, with the eyes, and the voice. You could really be reading the instructions from a shoe-polish can.
AC: What's the point of writing poetry if you could just as well read instructions on how to polish your shoes?
LC: It depends. If you want people to have shiny shoes, you want to write those kinds of very good instructions. And if you want to polish other parts of yourself, you do it with poetry.
AC: How can you relate the creating of a work of art with an act of polishing shoes?
LC: It depends on where you're looking. It depends exactly where you've got your binoculars trained. If you stand far enough away, it's probably the same thing. You know the story of that juggler who performed his acrobatics and plate balancing in front of a statue of the virgin? Well, I think it really comes down to that. You really do what sings.
AC: Is that the key to your diversity?
LC: I'm all in one place.
AC: You may seem so to yourself. But you must admit that for other people looking at you, the poet, the novelist, the man who lives in a white house on the [Greek] island of Hydra, scion of a Jewish family from Montreal, pop singer, and writer of pop songs ... all these things may add up to Leonard Cohen but they do look rather complex at first.
LC: Well, I think the borders have faded between a lot of endeavors and people are no longer capable of those kinds of poses, like the poet on the mountain with the cape or the singer catering to the masses. All those kinds of expression are completely meaningless. It's just a matter of what your hand falls on and if you can make what your hand falls on sing then you can just do it. If someone offered me a building to design now, I'd take it up. If someone offered me a small country to govern, I'd take it. Anything going I'd like to try.
AC: Would you feel bad that maybe the building you designed would fall down or the country that you were trying to govern would turn into chaos?
LC: I don't think the building would fall down and I have perhaps an arrogant dream that the country would [endure] ... I knew a fellow [Michael X. — Ed.] who was trying to take over a country. He's a friend of mine in England. He's the head of a large Negro movement there and he will probably take over a country soon. I asked him what the purpose of his government will be and he said, "It will be to protect the people from government because they're fine as they are. Just let 'em alone and my government will just keep everything away."
Things are really a lot more substantial than we think. And I think that my building would probably last. It would either last or fall down depending on the needs of the people inside it. Some people may want a building to collapse over them at a specific time. A friend of mine designed a mural for a coffee shop in Montreal with a special glue on it. This glue dried every winter and the mural fell to pieces and he would have to be engaged to repair the mural. He said, "Cars are designed with built-in obsolescence — why not murals?"
AC: What about poetry?
LC: I think that history and time pretty much build obsolescence into poetry unless it's really the great stuff and you never know whether you're hitting that.
AC: Don't you ever?
LC: Sometimes you know about it. But I'm not interested in posterity, which somebody said is a kind of paltry form of eternity. I'd like to see headlines ... instead of the Spencer case [An apparent reference to Vancouver mail clerk George Victor Spencer, who was caught collecting information for the Soviet Union. — Ed.], something like "[Canadian painter Harold] Town Finishes Painting Today." I'd like the stuff I do to have that kind of horizontal immediacy rather than something that is going to be around for a long time. I'm not interested in an insurance plan for my work.
AC: What about the kind of diversity that you want to do? Do you want to write musical comedies like Town wants to do?
LC: Oh, yes, sure. I'd like to write a musical comedy.
AC: What would it be about?
LC: I'd really have to fall on an idea. But I'd like to do that. Maybe Town would sing the lead.
AC: Does he sing?
LC: All the time. He's a very good singer.
AC: Do you mean with notes and everything?
LC: He's not tied down to anything.
AC: Does that help — to sing?
LC: I think it helps everything.
AC: Does that mean you have to opt out of society? It's a terrible phrase but it's the only way I know how to put it to you.
LC: Well, it's a good trick if you can manage it, but I don't know anybody who's managed to do that. Everybody's on the crust of this star. I don't know anybody who's opting out, except a couple of astronauts and they always come back. And they bring their own smoked-meat sandwiches with them. Nobody really wants to leave.
AC: When you go off to your house in Hydra, do you want to leave? Do you leave things behind?
LC: Well, I have no plans to go back there. I've been in Greece off and on for six years now. I've just been discovering Toronto for the past couple of days. It's really nice.
AC: Is it exciting?
LC: I think it's a happy revolution.
AC: A revolution?
LC: Well, that's how we describe all phenomena today. But there's a quiet one in Quebec and I think there's a happy one here. I was walking on Yorkville Street and it was jammed with beautiful, beautiful people last night. I thought maybe it could spread to the [other] streets and maybe even ... where's the money district? Bay Street?
AC: King and Bay.
LC: King and Bay. I thought maybe they could take that over soon, too.
AC: Do people need the kind of happiness that you can sing about?
LC: I don't establish any of those criteria for happiness. I just like to sing. I don't have a program to establish with my singing. I just like to get up and sing my piece and sit down, listen to other people.
AC: Do you actually not make value judgments about what you like to do better or less? Right now you're writing songs. You're not writing poetry, you're not writing a novel, so you're liking [songs] better.
LC: I've got a new book of poems ready to go out ... but I don't want to be glutting the market with my work so I'm holding that back a while. No, everything keeps on going or it stops. You know when you're happy. There's been so much talk about the mechanics of happiness — psychiatry and pills and positive thinking and ideology — but I really think that the mechanism is there. All you have to do is get quiet for a moment or two and you know where you are.
AC: And so this knowing where you are ... you don't need the help of anything like drugs or liquor?
LC: It's not a matter of the help. You can cooperate with the vision that alcohol gives you. You can cooperate with the vision that LSD gives you. All those things are just made out of plants and they're there for us and I think we ought to use them. But also there's another kind of high to get from refusing to use them. There are all kinds of possibilities. Asceticism is a nice high, too. Voluptuousness is a high. Alcohol is a high. [Harold] Town gets beautiful under alcohol. I just get kind of stupid and generally throw up. But some people get beautiful with alcohol.
AC: Do you see things in terms of highs and lows or is this just an appeal to sensation?
LC: It's not just a matter of sensation. What I mean by high is not a manic phase of swinging, knocking down buildings, and laughing hysterically. I mean that you're situated somehow. There's a nice balance. You're in the center of your own orbit or as Dylan said, you fade into your own parade.
AC: In one of your poems ["Why I Happen to Be Free," in Flowers for Hitler], you say, "Now more than ever I want enemies." This is in your poem about how people conspire to make you free. Do you feel this way about the criticisms of your book?
LC: Oh yes. I'd feel pretty lousy if I were praised by a lot of the people that have come down pretty heavy on me. I think, first of all, in a way there's a war on.
AC: What kind of war?
LC: Well, it's an old, old war and I think that I'd join the other side if I tried to describe it too articulately, but I think you know what I mean — that there's a war on, and if I have to choose sides, which I don't generally like to do, I'd just as well be defined as I have been by the establishment press.
AC: Thank you, Leonard Cohen.
CHAPTER 2AFTER THE WIPEOUT, A RENEWAL
SANDRA DJWA | February 3, 1967, the Ubyssey] (Vancouver, Canada)
By the time Sandra Djwa interviewed the then thirty-two-year-old Cohen, he was on the verge of receiving serious acclaim for his music. The release of his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen remained more than ten months away, but Judy Collins's recordings of his "Dress Rehearsal Rag" and "Suzanne" appeared shortly before this conversation. (Both were on her November 1966 sixth album, In My Life, which spent thirty-four weeks on the US pop charts.)
The interview, which Djwa conducted while earning her PhD at the University of British Columbia, ran on page eight of the school's student newspaper and was not touted on the front page. When I emailed current editor Jonny Wakefield to ask about including the piece here, he replied, "Wow, we had an interview with Leonard Cohen?"
Djwa remembers the conversation well, however. "I had written an essay called 'Leonard Cohen: Black Romantic,'" she told me, "and had sent it to the journal Canadian Literature. In it, I had argued that Cohen was a 'black' romantic, and writing the essay had given me some sense of the questions to ask in the interview." Djwa added that during her conversation with the singer, "I sensed that he was a little spaced out but he was very helpful and spoke of his sense of 'wipe-out' while in Greece."
The interview was not Djwa's last encounter with Cohen. "He phoned me in the mideighties from California, regarding his friendship with Canadian poet, lawyer, and political activist F. R. Scott, whose biography, The Politics of Imagination, I was then writing," Djwa recalled. "He said he had attended law school at McGill for a time because it had been a good place for Scott, who was then McGill's dean of law. Scott gave Cohen permission to stay for a time at his summer cabin at North Hatley [a village in Quebec, Canada — Ed.], where he wrote much of [his first novel] The Favorite Game. Cohen was doubtful about leaving the family clothing business to become a writer, but he recalled that Scott 'gave me the courage to fail.'" — Ed.
Sandra Djwa: At one point, when reading Spice-Box, seeing all the poems that you simply call "song" and later, when you started singing on the TV show Sunday, I thought of you in connection with that Yiddish word "ngin." I think it means "singer of the people."
Leonard Cohen: Ngin, yes. That's close to the tradition. We have all somehow lost our minds in the last ten or fifteen years. Whatever we have been told about anything, although we remember it, and sometimes operate in those patterns, we have no deep abiding faith in anything we have been told, even in the hippest things, the newest things. Everybody has a sense that they are in their own capsule and the one that I have always been in, for want of a better word, is that of cantor — a priest of a catacomb religion that is underground, just beginning, and I am one of the many singers, one of the many, many priests, not by any means a high priest, but one of the creators of the liturgy that will create the church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen by Jeff Burger. Copyright © 2014 Jeff Burger. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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