From This Broken Hill...
On my rabbi, Leonard Cohen, and why I learned twenty of his songs
If it be your will that a voice be true
From this broken hill I will sing to you.
From this broken hill, all your praises they shall ring
If it be your will to let me sing.
In the midst of an emotional crisis in the ‘aughts, I awoke from a dream in which Leonard Cohen was my rabbi. I recall no images, but in that liminal space, just before my waking timeline clicked in, I realized: “Leonard Cohen is my rabbi.”
I am not Jewish, so some might say I cannot have a rabbi. Nevertheless, I do. (Re: my “devotional mode,” I prefer the term possibilian.)
The “Leonard Cohen Is My Rabbi” dream is not so unusual for me. Fatherless since age seven, I’ve compulsively sought male elders to help get me through life. Leonard is one of my better choices. I was a fan before the dream, but that event elevated him from admired artist to spiritual figure. Since his death in the annus horribilis that was 2016, I honor him even more. I’ve committed twenty of his songs to memory. Every year since 2018, on or around his September 21st birthday, I produce and perform in I’m Your Man: A Birthday Tribute to Leonard Cohen.
This year, for LC’s 90th, my six-piece band and I will be at The Cutting Room in NYC on Friday September 20th. Tickets HERE.
The following Friday, September 27th, we’ll be at Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. Tickets HERE.
Over the years, I’ve leaned into my Leonard Cohen disciple-ship. His songs (well, a lot of them) are my prayers. Affirmations. Codifications of gratitude, or, when I’m feeling Old Testament, articulations of vindictiveness.
I don’t love everything. Even Leonard agreed his canon is blighted by some awful songs. But that’s OK. Those failures were not mistakes, and they led to more greatness.
One of many lessons I learned from Leonard Cohen: failures are not always mistakes.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen initially captivated me when I was the bassist in garage rock titans The Fleshtones. I’d heard “Suzanne,” and a couple others from his 60s-70s period, but I was a rocker. His brand of sensitivity made me feel vulnerable, embarrassed. Rock and roll was effective armor for me. Leonard’s songs were mostly about being naked, physically and/or emotionally. The former interested me deeply, the latter, not so much. In part because, at age twenty-three, I did not yet possess the skill or courage to bring the latter to my work.
But I could rock your socks off.
In Spring of ‘88, The Fleshtones had just finished soundchecking at a roadhouse-type joint in New Jersey. Much was afoot in my fevered brain. I was considering leaving the band. I wanted to write songs, front my own group, captivate via solo acoustic. A different life tugged at me. The prospect of radical change evoked both anxiety and excitement, a combo most often manifested as mush-mouthed crankiness.
Leonard would give me clarity.
If you want a lover, I’ll do anything you want me to
If you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you.
If you want a partner, take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger, here I stand.
I’m your man.
Post-soundcheck, The Fleshtones dispersed. Lots of time-killing between soundchecks and gigs in those days. I wandered alone into a nearby cafe, resplendent in dyed black pompadour, skintight red twill jeans, Chelsea boots, and a biker jacket with Mardi Gras beads hanging from the epaulets. I ordered a double espresso. On the TV over the bar, the 1974 Leonard Cohen documentary Bird On A Wire played. Leonard was performing the title song. I’d heard the tune before, but on that waning afternoon, a door within creaked open, hinges perhaps lubed by that double espresso. A few lines, sung into the dense dark of a concert hall, and I was a goner, struck like Saul on the Road to Damascus.
Like a bird on a wire
Like a drunk in midnight choir
I have tried in my way
To be free.
I sat transfixed. The doc follows Leonard and his ragtag band on a chaotic 1972 European tour. Here was a kind of rock star I’d never seen, didn’t even know could exist. Erudite, funny, sporting turtleneck and cap, a rakish muso professor, unabashedly angry at the frequently shitty sound equipment, calming fierce crowds with song and speech, flirting with astonishingly beautiful women who devour him with their eyes, gazes under which he does not flinch. A quiet swagger. The Bard of Montreal speaks with effortless eloquence – of his songs, poetry, and his remarkable life, a life in which he seems both determined pilot and bemused passenger. He talks a lot, but he’s never boring.
Listening to L Cohen in Bird On A Wire, the nascent “word guy” within me rose to the fore, as if summoned. In those days, between loud, raucous gigs, I mostly expressed my deeper self in epic letters, scrawled in hotel rooms, Waffle Houses, et al. I would post the missives, don the rocker duds, and crawl back into the van to set fire to another far-flung stage.
Perhaps these two versions of myself could dance in the light simultaneously?
Leonard had just released I’m Your Man in late ‘87, and I’m guessing the 1988 broadcast of the doc was part of a promo blitz. Back in NYC after that New Jersey gig, I purchased the I’m Your Man LP at Sounds on St. Mark’s Place. The music rang quite different from the Bird On A Wire material, i.e. the folky stuff that had brought Leonard’s initial, cultish fame. I would learn some longtime fans were disappointed, but I loved that he’d significantly moved on from his 70s ways, both sonically and lyrically. I’m Your Man was the sound of risk-taking. In his early fifties, a little older than my dad would’ve been if he’d lived, Leonard exuded more magnetism than ever. Less was more. Loss was more.
The album, which Leonard mostly produced himself, surprised and delighted me: synth-heavy, occasionally Euro-disco. His baritone had dropped to the sub-basement, and slow-burned with a laid-back intensity. He’d forsaken his fingerpicked Spanish guitar for a drum machine and cold, precise keyboards. Within the digital crispness, which I usually didn’t care for, Leonard and Co. threaded stringed instruments like oud and violin. One holdover from his earlier recordings: lushly layered, angelic female voices in conversation with his burnished, back-from-the-desert voice.
It sounded like nothing else.
Mostly, the words, mixed high, penetrated me. All the aforementioned sonics comprised an effective trick to pull focus to the well-wrought syllables. The rhymes were often perfect, which is more work, as opposed to slanted.
Perfect: begin and Berlin; crossed and lost; voice and choice.
Slant: on and song; beyond and song; child and while.
Content-wise, the hewed-at, rhythmic couplets were more direct than impressionistic. Unlike much of his early material, on I’m Your Man and subsequent work, you know what he’s singing about. I like impressionistic, oblique lyrics fine, but as with the perfect rhymes, poetic directness is more challenging, riskier.
Crucially, I’m Your Man was sexy in a way that I’d not yet clocked at age twenty-three. The songs possessed sensual power and spiritual gravitas. And they were often funny. What’s not to like?
His voice is what folks say. Whatever. I love his strange, nasal, flat voice. I’ve never been a stickler for pitch if the song is a work of genius.
Folks would label Leonard “The Canadian Dylan.” I call Dylan “The American Leonard Cohen.”
On I’m Your Man, Leonard riffs on getting old(er), confronting loss, and thus appreciating deeper the glories, even the inevitable disappointments, of the flesh. The candor struck me as brave. I wanted that kind of courage in my life.
My friends are gone and my hair is gray
I ache in the places that I used to play
And I’m crazy for love, but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song.
I’m Your Man was the sound of an artist who’d been through some shit, some grown-ass man drama, yet he’d come out the other side with a kind of ritual scarring that made him seem tougher.
I was not unhappy in those days. Unsatisfied, yes; unhappy, no. I was robustly healthy, experiencing quite fully the sensual promise of one’s early twenties. Mine was not a misspent youth. Yet, I sensed darkness ahead. My innate vigilance, for good and for ill, wasn’t going anywhere. What could I latch onto that would be useful?
Here was Leonard Cohen, willfully walking in the shadows, yet still, it seemed to me, enjoying his life very much. In the work, he wielded the darkness. It did not consume him.
Leonard’s ever-expanding oeuvre offered me an emotional map, much more expansive than anything I’d previously looked to. It wasn’t rock and roll, but I liked it.
Come autumn of that year – 1988 – I would change my path for one that turned out to be ultimately more gratifying, but also harder. Challenges and failures aplenty. Indeed, I’d been prescient in that New Jersey cafe. I would need my Leonard Cohen in the time to come, and he would deliver. He was my man.
Against the odds of aging, commerce, and human frailty, Leonard got even better in the 90s and beyond. He overcame addictions to alcohol and nicotine, and spoke freely about his depression, anxiety, insomnia, meds, etc.
Onstage, I would hear him say: “I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I also turned to a rigorous and profound study of the religions and the philosophies. But cheerfulness kept breaking through.”
His song “Hallelujah,” became not just a standard, but also the subject of a book – Alan Light’s acclaimed The Holy or the Broken – and a beautiful documentary. No other song has a story like that.
As my life has played out, Leonard’s work has helped me with excruciating loss, feeling mean, being betrayed, betraying, making amends, and, if not making peace, recognizing the road to reconciliation. His ability to crystallize moments of beauty improved my ability to do the same. He made me less afraid of death, but more importantly, intermittently less afraid of getting older.
He was always the coolest guy in the room, age be damned.
Dance me to your beauty
With a burning violin
Dance me through the panic
‘Til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch
Be my homeward dove
And dance me to the end of love.
I witnessed Leonard Cohen perform three times. One of those shows – Madison Square Garden, October 24th, 2009 – is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. My wife took me as a gift. In the story of our union, the timing was good. Seventy-five-year-old Leonard and his band cast a spell, delivered us fully into that precious moment, away from the pain of the past and worries for the future.
The thoughts and feelings I experienced in that intimate arena…
Like the story of “Hallelujah,” the tale of Leonard’s Last Run, which had brought him to Madison Square Garden that autumn evening, is yet another remarkable, revelatory yarn.
In the early ‘aughts, Leonard had left “civilian life” to spend about five years at the Mt. Baldy, CA Zen Center. He became an ordained Buddhist monk, living in a spartan room, walking the walk in shaven head and robes, mediating for hours every day.
While he was there, Leonard’s former manager/lover, Kelly Lynch, stole his fortune – about 5 million dollars. He’d intended that money for his son, Adam, and daughter, Lorca. After the theft came to light in ‘04, Leonard suited up, put the band back together, and busted his broke ass on the road, bringing joy and transcendence to people like me. After recording acclaimed new albums, and touring the world from 2008 to 2010, then 2012 to 2013, senior citizen Leonard eventually made all that money back twice over.
(Leonard won a suit against Lynch, but only recovered a fraction of what she’d embezzled.)
As he’d done since his 1967 debut, through work, Leonard turned loss into triumph. I will never forget my rabbi skipping onstage in a suit and fedora to rapturous applause, hushing thousands with the power of song. For three hours, we swooned, hooted, laughed. We were free.
In the annus horribilis of 2016, three of my absolute favorite musicians died: David Bowie on January 10th, Prince on April 21st, and Leonard Cohen on November 7th, the day before Trump won the presidency.
Only Leonard Cohen’s death was not a surprise. He was eighty-two, and had been painfully dying from cancer for years. It was no secret. He’d written beautifully, heroically, about his impending demise on his last album You Want It Darker. Yet, although expected, my rabbi’s death was the only one over which I wept.
I wonder how he celebrated his last birthday – September 21st, 2016. I’m guessing surrounded by family of both blood and choice in his California home, breathing in sage, and, I hope, laughing. I’m sure he smoked. After decades as a nicotine addict, he’d quit, but upon his terminal diagnosis, he got back on the weed.
In my grieving of Leonard, I tried to do as he did, in my own way. I created opportunities to work. I surrounded myself with excellent musician friends: Elizabeth Clark, Nancy Howell, Rachel Loshak, Peter Dougan, Chuck Cornelis, Mark Lerner, Peter Newell. We crafted our own versions of L Cohen songs. Into his work I could pour my grief, but also my appreciation, my joy, and gratitude. The tunes are fathomless and, like all great art, they offer beautiful form to a wide range of unwieldy feelings.
The band and I worked very hard. People loved it, we loved it, the clubs loved it. So we remount it annually, and many folks come back. We do our best to help them transcend. When they do, we do.
We present I’m Your Man: A Leonard Cohen Birthday Tribute again on the 20th in NYC and the 27th in Woodstock. Do drop by.
When everything clicks, all of us – audience, band – are back in that place between dreamtime and the waking world, free of the past and future, where nothing is ever lost, and Leonard Cohen is our rabbi.
The autumn moved across your skin
I got something in my eye
A light that doesn't need to live
And doesn't need to die
A riddle in the book of love
Obscure and obsolete
‘Til witnessed here, in time and blood
A thousand kisses deep.
Wow. I was never a Leonard Cohen fan
until you opened him up for me.
Now his lyrics in his own voice give me chills.
Thank you Robert.
When Cohen received his Lifetime Achievement Juno, his speech was gorgeous, and he incorporated lyrics from Tower of Song. Worth a watch, if you haven't
https://youtu.be/QTZZzJCl0U8?feature=shared