Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows

Digital Timeline

Introduction

Chapter 1:   Comparing Mythologies

Chapter 2:   Came So Far for Beauty

Chapter 3:   A Canadian in New York

Chapter 4:   From Music City to the Isle of Wight

Chapter 5:   Love and Hate, New for Old, and Unfinished Business

Chapter 6:   The Odd Couple

Chapter 7:   The New Black

Chapter 8:   Ten New Songs and One Old One

Chapter 9:   Leonard Cohen and the Adults

Chapter 10: How We Got His Songs

Envoi

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Contributors

Discography

Further Reading

Sources, Credits, and Acknowledgments

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It was a most peculiar voice I heard late one night in January 1968 on the underground FM radio station KPPC-FM (106.7) broadcasting from a church in Pasadena, California. My transistor radio in West Hollywood could pick up the faint signal, especially after the midnight hour. The DJ, probably B. Mitchell Reed or Charles Laquidara, back-announced Suzanne by Leonard Cohen from Canada, a poet who has just cut his debut for Columbia Records. And then he proceeded to recite the matrix number, as jazz DJs used to do, and spun the entire album. It was sort of scary, a dirge-like grumble sequenced between the blue-sky harmonies of Magical Mystery Tour and the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday.

The next day, in Mr. George Schoenman’s English class at Fairfax High School, Leonard made his presence felt again. Mr. Schoenman, who worshiped Ernest Hemingway, did not dislike rock ’n’ roll music like some of the other teachers on campus. His summer job was ushering baseball games at Dodger Stadium, where the Beatles performed their penultimate concert in 1966. Schoenman was assigned to protect the group in the dugout and aid in their great escape from frenzied fans, past center field into Elysian Park.

That semester we were assigned term papers on contemporary modern literature. Some of the hipper kids placed dibs on Bob Dylan; I countered with my way cooler discovery, the brooder from north of the border. And besides, half the kids in my class were named Cohen, a couple of ’em even claiming blood relation, which was a laugh because any Ashkenazi could claim kinship with the Cohen tribe. Schoenman applauded my adventurous choice and put Leonard’s name on the chalkboard next to mine.

After the school bell rang, I raced across Melrose Avenue to Aaron’s record shop and bought the album. My parents couldn’t complain – this was homework! I subsequently received a C on my paper with a notation to pay stricter attention to what was happening between the words – metaphor and allegory being difficult new terms to swallow. But I was hooked, a witting draftee into Field Commander Cohen’s company.

How could I have imagined that years later I would sit across from him at Canter’s Delicatessen, which I could see outside that classroom window; that over the course of my journalistic career I’d also interview him by phone and while sitting at his kitchen table; that I would talk to the players and engineer of that first album; or shake hands with the fabled Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who signed him to the label? Or that I would visit Cohen recording sessions and provide hand claps on a couple of tracks on his Death of a Ladies’ Man collaboration with Phil Spector at Gold Star recording studio in Hollywood?

Leonard encouraged me to stay in the music journalism and poetry game. One memorable night in the mid-seventies we went to see Allen Ginsberg read at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I stayed the course; in 2006 I wrote the liner notes to the first CD release of Ginsberg’s Kaddish album originally issued on the Atlantic label overseen by producer Jerry Wexler. The eighty-eight-year-old Wexler was rather amused when I called him in Florida to chat about this unearthed gem. "Hey kid, who’s the next alter kaker [Yiddish for a crotchety old person] you’re gonna talk to? Leonard Cohen? He’s working and doing quite well."

With Everybody Knows, I set out to explore Leonard’s oceanic body of work. But this book is not a monologue. It is socially constructed, meaning that it is a conversation among many of his professional and personal confederates – band members, producers, engineers, DJs, academics, filmmakers, authors, photographers, previous biographers, well-informed pundits and fan(atic)s – who have had decades to think about and reflect on the role Leonard has played in shaping their space. He is Whitmanesque in his reach, a welter of contradictions, simmering with multitudes.

My hope is to add some clarity and context to this most extravagantly lived, most solitary of public lives. Leonard is a man of simple gifts, an aspiring country-and-western singer turned clarion voice to multiple generations of disciples, who hang on his every utterance like he’s the oracle of Delphi.

This book is neither definitive nor encyclopedic; the subject’s quicksilver nature puts paid to that. If anything, the multi-voiced approach is the most reliable path to Leonard’s indeterminate location. He has transformed uncertainty into a personal mantra – part physics, part poetry, part promiscuous imbibing of life. It is enough for his friends and colleagues to say, I heard him, I worked with him, I felt I knew him … until I didn’t.

I also emphasize the importance of the West Coast in Leonard’s life and times. It continues to surprise many that such a well-traveled, Eurocentric figure has called Los Angeles home since the late seventies. Because he hails from Montreal and the literary center of America is still on the East Coast, Leonard is often associated with tweedy, Ivy League types. But, without grabbing a longboard, Leonard has shown himself to be a true California dreamer. He is, of course, a great many things other than that – the consummate hyphenate: poet, novelist, songwriter, singer, guitarist, traveler, Buddhist, Jew, thinker, healer …

I’ve tried to frame this panoramic life, aided by the terrific visuals which illustrate his inexhaustible trek into a ninth decade. I hope you find pleasure in the vivid recollections of those articulate witnesses who opened up to me, to both correct the record and, in the words of the teacher and spiritualist Ram Dass, honor the incarnation.

Leonard Cohen remains, at age eighty, a masterly recording and performing artist; in his sharp-suited elegance, a seductive fedora adorning his noble head, he has achieved an Elder Cool street cred to which I suspect he never paid the slightest attention. Leonard learned very early on that the music business was a racket rendered moot by committing to a work ethic and immersing himself in daily toil.

As a youth he was disciplined, invested in the pursuit of an ideal that he inherited from his learned grandfather. Later, he found that he could record the ideal and perform it on stage to an audience who would share his resolve. It is this very conversation, the struggle to share something so intimate with so many, which provides the spine of this story.

It is hard to explain, dissect, and tout the mysteries of charisma. But you sort of know it when you hear it, see it, or feel it.

This is not a history report on the life of Leonard Cohen. I tried that a long time ago and was told to stop talking and start listening. There’s a lot of listening in this book.

Harvey Kubernik, Los Angeles, California

1934

September 21:

Leonard Norman Cohen born, Royal Victoria Hospital, Westmount, Montreal

Lives with his mother and father, Masha and Nathan, and his elder sister, Esther (born January 14, 1930), at 599 Belmont Avenue, Westmount

1944

January 14:

Death of father, Nathan Cohen, aged fifty-two

1948

September:

Joins Westmount High School

1950

Has a short story, Kill or Be Killed, published in the school yearbook, Vox Ducum

Discovering The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca helps inspire him to start writing his own poetry

Buys a Spanish guitar and is taught how to play it by a Spanish flamenco player

Second marriage of mother – to Harry Ostrow

1951

June:

Graduates from Westmount High having become president of the Student Council and served on the publishing board of the school yearbook

September:

Enrolls at McGill University, Montreal, to study general arts, then maths, commerce, political science, and law

Wins the Bovey Shield for excellence in the university Debating Union and later becomes president of the society (in his fourth year)

1952

January:

Elected president of his fraternity house, Zeta Beta Tau

Summer:

Forms country and western group, the Buckskin Boys, with Terry Davis and Mike Doddman

1954

At McGill, meets and becomes friends with the Montreal Group of poets, including Louis Dudek, F. R. Scott, and, in particular, Irving Layton

March:

Has some of his poems published for the first time in a journal called CIV/n

1955

Wins first prize in McGill’s Chester Macnaghten Literary Competition

October:

Graduates with a BA from McGill

1956

May:

Publication of Let Us Compare Mythologies, his first collection of poems, which wins the McGill Literary Award

Fall:

Enrolls as a graduate student at Columbia University, New York

Experiences his first bout of serious depression

1957

Release of the spoken-word album Six Montreal Poets, on which he reads eight of his poems – his first appearance on record

While in New York, frequents clubs and cafés of Greenwich Village, attending performances by leading Beat writers

Also in New York, founds a short-lived literary magazine called The Phoenix

Falls for Georgianna (Anne) Sherman, and moves into her Manhattan apartment, but breaks off the relationship when marriage is mentioned

Breaks off his studies at Columbia and returns to Montreal, initially moving back into the family home

1957–1958

His first novel (working title A Ballet of Lepers) is rejected by publishers

Works at family firms W. R. Cuthbert, a brass foundry, and Freedman, a clothing company

1958

April 8:

Appears on stage at Dunn’s Birdland with jazz pianist Maury Kaye and his band, performing his poetry/lyrics in an improvisational style influenced by the Beats

Summer:

Works as a counselor at Pripstein’s Camp Mishmar, a children’s summer camp in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec

Great cities are invariably founded beside great rivers. Montreal, Quebec’s rich cosmopolitan center, draws its vitality from the mighty St. Lawrence, a fabled thoroughfare along which sailed the most intrepid early adventurers from Europe to explore the possibilities of the North American interior. By the first part of the twentieth century, Montreal teemed with a polyglot of British, French, Italian, and Eastern European cultures, all vying to harness and shape the burgeoning city they now called home.

Leonard Norman Cohen, born September 21, 1934, in Montreal’s Westmount district, a prosperous Jewish enclave, was nurtured in this lively climate of Old World (and Old Testament) influences, seasoned by the arrival of modernism’s clamorous achievements. Leonard’s family was a not uncommon mashup of intellectuals and industrialists. The family’s patriarch, Lazarus Cohen, Leonard’s great-grandfather, parlayed the scholarly training he had received in his homeland of Lithuania into a successful engineering enterprise in Canada, winning contracts from the government to dredge the St. Lawrence between Lake Ontario and Quebec. Lazarus’s younger brother, Hirsch, became the Chief Rabbi of Montreal. Leonard’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Solomon Klonitzki-Kline, was another rabbi and a renowned authority on the Talmud; he lived intermittently in the Cohen household. Leonard would spend countless hours imbibing philosophy and biblical insights from Rabbi Kline, a towering influence on the young and impressionable boy.

It was, however, the absence of Leonard’s father that played the largest role in shaping his childhood. Nathan Cohen, grandson of the imperious Lazarus, presided over his own family with a stern formalism and sense of social propriety that bordered on the Prussian. Resplendent in vested suits and spats even on vacations to Florida, Cohen père was the soul of discretion, a man whose temperament reflected a nagging melancholy brought about by a lifetime of poor health. His death in 1944 at age fifty-two cast a pall that would shadow all of Leonard’s subsequent endeavors; the poet laureate of pessimism was born here.

Being a dutiful Jewish son, Leonard strived to meet the demands of his mother, Masha, for academic and artistic excellence. He took piano lessons, played clarinet in the high school band, and became chairman of the drama club and a member of the student council, all of which enhanced both his CV and his mother’s sense of pride. There were also private pursuits; he began to express the bewildering thoughts of adolescence in journals and poetry. At the age of fourteen, he discovered the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who would become his most enduring literary influence. It was around this time that he started to play the ukulele and then the guitar. Leonard’s first guitar teacher was a Spanish flamenco player he encountered one day in a park near his home. After only three lessons, tragically the young man was to commit suicide.

Leonard also demonstrated an interest in somewhat darker pastimes, dabbling in hypnosis and magic. Perhaps he was drawn to the idea of exerting control over other people at a time in his life when he felt powerless; or maybe he saw a way of transcending his daily routine, a fraught state to be resisted with every fiber of his being. These teenaged proclivities shine a light on the conjuring he would later perform before witting audiences the world over.

Sylvie Simmons: Leonard Cohen is quite the magician. He was drawn to smoke and mirrors as a young boy and never completely let them go. As a child he’d been a keen amateur magician – no great surprise there; children are drawn to magic, and magic kits back then were a popular toy. But he took it further. By his early teens he had developed an interest in closely studying and/or taking lessons in whatever subject interested him – everything from poetry to fasting to playing a guitar. He acquired a book on hypnotism, set about learning it from chapter to chapter and, in a famous incident, having successfully hypnotized his dog, Tinkie, he tried his skills on the family maid. Once he had her in a trance, he instructed her to undress – an incident he fictionalizes in his first novel, The Favourite Game. What was fascinating to me, having found the actual book – 25 Lessons in Hypnotism – in his archives, were the subsequent chapters, teaching how to hypnotize a room full of people, how to modulate your voice and tone, let it become deeper and slower. That mesmerizing quality is an important part of Leonard Cohen’s music and his personality. (2014)

By the time Leonard was a senior at Westmount High School, the tug of a bohemian lifestyle, filled with artistic and amorous pursuits, chafed against his family’s bourgeois aspirations for him – college and then a position in the family business. He applied to and was accepted by McGill, the preeminent English-speaking university in Quebec, a long-distinguished training ground for Canadian elites in the fields of law, medicine, and commerce. Leonard shouldered the intellectual challenges of a general arts course with a certain amount of haughty disdain – paying off old debts to my family and society, he told Canada’s Saturday Night magazine years later.

Sandra Djwa: McGill was the major Canadian university next to UOT [University of Toronto] in international considerations for a great many years. McGill was very traditional, very English, very WASP-ish, and, of course, in the forties there was a Jewish quota. For a bright boy it was very important to get into McGill. By the time Leonard had got there it was the fifties. So things were loosening up. (2014)

If Leonard didn’t exactly rise to the top of the Dean’s List, he did manage to engage in enough off-campus activities to build a reputation as something of a provocateur. He was a leader in his fraternity, became a vibrant presence in the Debating Union (winning the prestigious annual Bovey Shield in his freshman year, as well as representing McGill in a host of national and international debating competitions), bantered with Hillel, the Jewish students’ society, where he teamed with his friend Robert Hershorn in some theatrical folderol, and formed the Buckskin Boys, an ad hoc country-and-western trio that fueled Leonard’s appetite for live performance while improving his modest guitar chops.

Leonard’s time at McGill was ostensibly a path to middle-class respectability. It was to his great good fortune, however, that his instincts to swim against the current were recognized by a formidable literary faculty that cultivated his raw, often impolitic talent. Hugh MacLennan’s course in creative writing introduced students to the loquacious surrealism of James Joyce, another profound influence on Leonard’s writing. The poet Louis Dudek guided Leonard’s first published work in CIV/n, an Ezra Pound–inspired literary journal. Leonard garnered a prize for his poem The Sparrow sponsored by the school’s newspaper, the McGill Daily. Energized by the attention, Leonard became a constant if contentious participant in the flourishing poetry scene in Montreal, which was displacing Toronto as Canada’s center of intellectual foment.

Above all others, however, it was Irving Layton who attracted Leonard’s most rapt admiration. Layton’s poetry crackled with a zealot’s fury; like a Hebraic John Brown, he brooked no compromise in his writings, mixing sex, politics, and iconoclasm into a pungent, intoxicating brew that proved irresistible to his young protégé. Layton was a shaman, a seer, and a showman, intoning his incantatory cadences before an audience eager to take the plunge into a metaphorical abyss with him. Leonard quickly positioned himself as Layton’s steadfast companion, traveling to conferences and readings with him, locked and loaded for action.

LC: In the early days I was trained as a poet by reading poets like Lorca and Brecht, and by the invigorating exchange between other writers in Montreal at the time. E. J. Pratt. A tremendous influence. Robinson Jeffers. His poetry has always been especially important to me.

You may be writing a song or a poem about something personal, but, more deeply, there’s sometimes another cry. Many men to be at home need certain channels to the past, just as they need certain indications of the future. And heritage or history are all techniques with which you can touch the past, and these are important because then and only then does a