17 November 2016
Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen, poet, song writer, singer: 1934 – 2016
by J.R.Thomas
Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.
An extraordinarily pointed juxtaposition of events in the USA on Thursday last. President-elect Donald Trump and family rolled up to the White House to meet the soon-to-depart President Obama. And in a modest house in Los Angeles Leonard Cohen died, quietly, with his family by his side. Trump is 70; Cohen was 82, not quite the same generation, but near enough. Both men defied categorisation, and refused to categorise themselves, refusing to hitch themselves to the conventional, to movements or groups or campaigns, but called for change, in very different ways. Those are the similarities; that indeed is probably all they have in common. It is certainly hard to imagine Trump lying back on a bean bag listening to Cohen’s gravelly mantras, harder still to imagine Cohen checking into a Trump International Hotel and Golf Resort.
My father says I’m chosen; my mother says I’m not
To some of us Leonard has been around for ever, like Queen Elizabeth II, but with gravelly voice and guitar; his sometimes caressing, sometimes angry, words accompanying us through all the troubles and joys of our lives. Yet for a music icon he emerged late. He was the son of a prosperous Jewish family in the textile trade in Montreal, his father a highly regarded rabbi who died when Cohen was nine. His mother was from a senior rabbinical family also – allegedly descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses – and she gave Cohen an abiding interest in and loyalty to his Jewish heritage. Early in life he developed two abiding passions; a wide ranging search for signs of God and faith; and also for the pleasures, both cerebral and carnal, of the company of women. But his greatest ambition, from his mid teens, was to be a poet. His family finances were able to support him in that ambition, so at the age of 22 he published his first book of poems. It was critically acclaimed but sold thinly; his second volume four years later was more acclaimed but had even thinner sales. Like many creative souls with a little money he began to travel, visiting post revolution Cuba where he warmed to revolutionary concepts but not to their practical results, moving on and ultimately settling on the Greek island of Hydra.
Anything that moves is white
A gull, a wave, a sail,
And moves too purely to be aped
Smash the pain
Hydra was the creative making of Cohen; he lived simply, imbibed various stimulants to deepen his consciousness, wrote both poetry and a novel, considered the nature of communion with an obscure and eccentric God, and met Marianne, his greatest muse. But poverty became a prison rather than a liberation, and in 1966 he returned to North America, to the Chelsea Hotel in New York, and began song writing. Soon he was invited to perform his work and that, in one of those fairytale progressions, brought him a recording contract.
He could not sing, by his own admittance, but that deep voice, which can truly be described as mesmeric, with a rhythmic rendition of his incredibly carefully crafted words, was the perfect medium for his exploration of the human condition, of themes of break-up and pain and betrayal and unhappiness. To a new generation of young socially liberated hippies (and, much more so, aspirant hippies) finding unhappiness among the drugs and free loving, Cohen was the spirit they craved.
I caught the darkness
It was drinking from your cup
I said is this contagious
You said: Just drink it up
Success came rapidly and overwhelmingly to Cohen. Like all the best fairytales the happy ending turned out to be merely the unhappy beginning. Marianne, feeling herself abandoned on Hydra and apparently misunderstanding his song “So Long, Marianne” returned to her native Norway. Two children were born of a relationship with Suzanne Elrod, but Cohen, in that traditional 1960’s way for musical genii, increasingly engaged in total excess of drugs and alcohol and women. In 1977 he released an album produced by Phil Spector, two years and much anger and violence in the making. It so horrified his fan base that it awoke Cohen to how far behind he had left his questing thoughtful roots. It took him a long time to get back to the place he wanted to be, but in 1984 he released what has become his signature piece “Hallelujah” on a new and highly acclaimed album.
My friends are gone and my hair is grey,
I ache in the places I used to play
Those lost years brought Cohen a new perspective on the world around him; a more forceful campaigning against the bad things that were going on in the world (with an admission that whilst he knew what was wrong out there, he was much less sure that there were any solutions) and a sardonic and increasingly visible sense of humour. Having re-engaged with the world and made his peace with his fans, Cohen vanished into the unlikely surroundings of Mount Baldy monastery in northern California. Mount Baldy was, and is, a Zen Buddhist monastery and although Cohen remained a practising and devout Jew, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1996. The life at first suited him and enabled him to concentrate on the spiritual exploration which met one half of his fascinations. But the other half would not let him be. As he said, “I realised that I was walking round with a hard-on, and the other monks were walking round listening to Leonard Cohen on their Walkmans”.
In 1999 he came down from the mountain to resume a quiet life in Los Angeles, only to find that he was as poverty stricken as any monk. His retirement funds and some of his song copyrights had been misappropriated by his business manager. Cohen had no choice but to go back to work, to get back on the road.
I’m wanted at the traffic jam
They’re saving me a seat
I’m what I am, and what I am
Is back on Boogie Street
He began a series of tours, initially in the USA but widening it to a world tour – encircling the globe several times, with his band of distinguished musicologists, his co-songwriter and backing singers Sharon Robinson, and the Webb Sisters, who he memorably introduced at a UK concert at the O2 centre at Blackwall “as travelling here tonight, all the way from Kent, England, the incomparable Webb Sisters”. Cohen discovered a real love of touring, skipping on to the stage, engaging with great humour and magnificent courtesy with his audiences, many, but by no means all, of his own generation. Much of what will surely be regarded as his finest material was written in the last sixteen years of his life, brooding on failing bodies, on the still agonising pain of loving, on injustice and war and hypocrisy, bringing new treatments and depth to his great classics such as “Alexandra Leaving”, “Anthem” and “If It Be Your Will”. He might have been in his late 70’s but his energy was extraordinary and his voice so deep, gravel turned to granite, that it continued to hold his audiences as if possessed, injecting his faith and insights into their lives.
Cohen lived modestly all his life, latterly sharing a small house in LA with his daughter and grandchildren, maintaining a retreat in Montreal, the city where he was born and where he spent the first part of his life. He continued to write fervently, only four weeks ago releasing his latest album, “You Want It Darker”; still searching for religious truth and despairing of finding it, and exploring love, though with finality: “I don’t need a lover/ The wretched beast is tame/ I don’t need a lover/ So blow out the flame”.
Leonard Cohen, poet, song writer, singer: 1934 – 2016
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
That’s how the light gets in.
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