RIP Leonard Cohen

[Bwian]

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice.

R. I. P. Leonard-a great Canadian talent.

I wanted to see him when he was last in the UK. I thought £75 plus fees was too much-what a fool.

If any of your musical heroes are playing near you, go and see them-they won't be around forever.

 

[Fungus]

RIP Leonard. My brother-in-law was the concert promoter who convinced him to tour again, and they became a good friends.

The concerts were wonderful, you could feel so much love in the room. Seeing him perform live gave so much more depth to the songs, and you could see how much he enjoyed singing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y

 

[Hotchilidog]

So glad I got to see him at the Brighton centre. It was a truly wonderful evening, never have three hours just flown by. Just listening to the last record now, it was clear he was a man at peace with his demise, very poignant indeed. He will be missed.

 

[catfish]

I was lucky enough to see the great man perform live 3 times over the years and they were all truly memorable occasions. His music will stay with me forever. RIP Leonard.

 

[Binney on acid]

I was at the first of the 2 Brighton Centre gigs. I was never a great fan, but the performance was sublime. In my top half dozen gigs over 47 years of regular concert attendance. I decided to give the 2nd gig a miss, because I knew he would never emulate the one that I'd attended. By all accounts it was equally as good. A remarkable talent. RIP.

 

[Insel affe]

The greatest ever songwriter. You can take your place alongside Hank Williams now in that tower of song, Leonard.

Correct.

I personally put Morrissey in the same Bracket along with Cash, all great in their own ways. I know Cohen was a big influence on Morrissey and you can hear it in his music.

 

[shingle]

Every time I hear the name Leonard Cohen, i think of Rik's quote from the Young Ones

He's gonna turn us into vampires, and we'll all be dead, and yet still alive... like Leonard Cohen!

 

[ManOfSussex]

OBITUARY
Leonard Cohen

‘Godfather of gloom’ whose songs and poetry inspired generations

For someone whose songs earned him a reputation as the most depressive, wrist-slitting troubadour of them all, Leonard Cohen had a highly developed and mischievous sense of humour. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist,” he noted. “I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain - and I feel soaked to the skin.”

The subject of his songs over a career that spanned half a century was the human condition, which inevitably led him into some dark places. He suffered bouts of depression in his own life and his mournful voice and the fatalism of his lyrics led his songs to be adopted by the lonely and lovelorn, the anguished and angst-ridden as a personal liturgy.

But there were also what Cohen called “the cracks where the light gets in”. Despite his image as a purveyor of gloom and doom, the inherent melancholia of his songs was nuanced not only by deep romanticism but by black humour and a razor-sharp wit.

A published poet and novelist who was in his thirties before he turned to music, Cohen was the most literate singer-songwriter of his age. With Bob Dylan he occupied the penthouse suite of what he called “the tower of song”. Together Cohen and Dylan not only transformed the disposable, sentimental metier of popular music into something more poetic and profound but, for better or worse, made the pop lyric perhaps the defining form of latter 20th century expression. In an era in which anyone who warbled about “the unicorns of my mind” was liable to he hailed as a poet, Cohen was the genuine article.

Many of his best known songs – Suzanne, So Long Marianne and The Sisters of Mercy – were romantically inspired by the women in his life. In Chelsea Hotel #2 , the theme of longing, love and loss turned to pure lust as he described a liaison with the singer Janis Joplin as she gave him “head in the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street”’.

The Story Of Isaac and The Butcher touched on religious themes and war and death loomed large, particularly after his experiences during the 1973 Arab-Israel war when he performed for Jewish troops.

Depression and suicide also informed several songs, including Seems So Long Ago, Nancy and Dress Rehearsal Rag. This tendency to lapse into morbidity led one critic to wail, “Where does he get the neck to stand before an audience and groan out those monstrous anthems of amorous self-commiseration?” Yet if his writing had a philosophical stock-in-trade, it was more stoical perseverance than the abandonment of hope.

Many of his compositions shared a search for self and meaning and were driven by a restless quest for personal freedom, nowhere more so than on Bird On A Wire, which opened with the lines “Like a bird on the wire/Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free”.

The song was covered by dozens of artists including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and Joe Cocker and was once memorably described as a bohemian version of My Way, sans the braggadocio.

Even at his darkest, the prospect of redemption and perhaps even a glimmer of salvation was evident. He described Hallelujah, perhaps his most famous composition, as an affirmation of his “faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion.”

The song took him years to write as he pared back 80 draft verses until each line rang true. It was characteristic of the meticulous way he worked to make every word count and led to an famous exchange with Bob Dylan, who expressed his admiration for the song: “He asked me how long it took to write, and I lied and said three or four years when actually it took five. Then we were talking about one of his songs, and he said it took him 15 minutes.”

Unfailingly courteous and possessed of an unfashionably old-world charm, Cohen’s intellectual coming of age predated the advent of rock’n’roll. His early cultural heroes were not Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry but the beat writer Jack Kerouac and the poet Lorca, after whom Cohen named his daughter.

Early in his life as a struggling poet he set out his plan for becoming famous in a letter to his publisher in which he described an ambition to appeal to an audience of “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography peepers, hair-handed monks and Papists, French-Canadian intellectuals, unpublished writers and curious musicians.”

His artistic leanings were liberal and bohemian, but he was never a hippy. Dressed in dark, tailored suits and smart fedoras, he had an elegance that was perhaps the legacy of his Jewish father, who owned a clothing store. Sylvie Simmons, his biographer, reckoned he looked “like a Rat Pack rabbi, God’s chosen mobster.”

He spoke in a deep and resonant voice that was full of a reassuring calm, and yet animated at the same time. If it was a great speaking voice, it was perhaps not a natural vehicle for a singer, although he developed his own idiosyncratic style to overcome its limitations: “I knew I was no great shakes as a singer but I always thought I could tell the truth about a song. I liked those singers who would just lay out their predicament and tell their story, and I thought I could be one of those guys.”

Handsome in a rugged and swarthy way, women found the combination of his physical attraction and the sensitivity of his poetic mind to be irresistible. In turn he described love as “the most challenging activity humans get into” and took up the challenge with prolific enthusiasm. “I don’t think anyone masters the heart. It continues to cook like a shish kebab, bubbling and sizzling in everyone’s breast,” he said.

Yet whether love ever bought him true happiness is debatable, and in his 2006 poem The Book of Longing he mocked his reputation as a ladies’ man as an ill-fitting joke that “caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.”

He never married but perhaps came closest to contentment with Marianne Ihlen, the inspiration behind several of his early songs and with whom he lived on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Their relationship lasted a decade through numerous infidelities. He also had a long relationship with the artist Suzanne Elrod, with whom he had two children. His son Adam Cohen is a singer-songwriter who produced his father’s 2016 album You Want It Darker. His daughter Lorca Cohen is a photographer, who gave birth to a surrogate daughter for the singer Rufus Wainwright and his gay partner.

There were also relationships with Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, the fashion photographer Dominique Issermann, the actress Rebecca De Mornay and the songwritwer Anjani Thomas. Mitchell, who once said the only men to whom she was a groupie were Picasso and Cohen, celebrated their year-long relationship in several songs, including A Case of You, in which her lover declares himself to be as “constant as a northern star”. He wasn’t, and yet she sang that he remains in her blood “like holy wine”.

Summing up his lifelong serial inconstancy, his biographer Sylvie Simmons wrote that Cohen’s “romantic relationships tended to get in the way of the isolation and space, the distance and longing, that his writing required.” The singer Jennifer Warnes, with whom he had a long platonic friendship and working relationship, suggested that “if he has one great love, it’s his love for God.”

Certainly he was as fixated on metaphysical matters as he was on carnal pleasures, and many of his best lyrics fused the erotic and the spiritual. In the 1990s his search for enlightenment resulted in him disappearing from public view for several years to live an ascetic life in a Zen Buddhist monastery, on the snow-capped Mount Baldy in California. Although he remained a practising Jew, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1996.

“It’s a way of life that is very simple, very rigorous, very military, that suits the unenlightened fascist in me,’” he told Nigel Williamson in an interview for the Sunday Times in which he described a spartan regime that involved rising at 3.30 am to meditate and pray.

He came down from the mountain in 1999 and returned to civilian life, only to find that while he was sequestered he had been robbed by his longtime manager Kelley Lynch and was practically broke. He issued legal proceedings against her for misappropriating millions from his retirement fund and swindling him out of his publishing rights. He was awarded nine million dollars by a Los Angeles court in 2006.

When Lynch was unable to pay, he undertook his first concert tour in 15 years to replenish his funds, presenting his greatest hits in a series of shows acclaimed for their warmth and intimacy, even though he was performing in huge and impersonal concert halls.

A golden period of late creativity followed. After releasing a parsimonious 11 studio albums in 45 years, he released three in four years between 2012 and 2016, including Old Ideas, which at the age of 76 became the highest charting album of his career. Even in the pop world, it seemed, the cult of youth cannot always beat the wisdom of experience.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934, into a prosperous and middle-class Jewish family. His father was already approaching 50 when his son was born, and died when Cohen was nine years old, leaving him with a small trust fund income.

His mother Masha was the daughter of a rabbi and brought him up steeped in Talmudic lore and the stories of the Old Testament. He later recalled a “Messianic” childhood in which he was told he was a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses.

In an era before rock’n’roll he was drawn to the folk and country music he heard on the radio. He learnt to play the guitar as a teenager and formed a group called the Buckskin Boys. Women also loomed large in his adolescent life. After reading a book about hypnosis, he tried out the technique and persuaded the family’s maid to disrobe. He was 13 at the time.

At the age of 15 he stumbled on a volume by the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in a second hand book shop in Montreal. Inspired by Lorca’s erotic themes, he decided to become a writer and adopted his lifelong credo that his creative muse was best served via the entanglement of heart and limbs.

At McGill University he chaired the debating society and won a prize for creative writing. His first book of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956. A second volume, The Spice-Box of Earth, was published five years later and put him on the literary map. By then wanderlust had set in and he travelled widely, spending time in Castro’s Cuba before buying a small house without electricity or running water on the Greek island of Hydra.

There he wrote a further books of verse and the novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, as well as conducting a decade-long romantic relationship with Marianne Ihlen.

His books were critically acclaimed and one enthusiastic reviewer gushingly likened Beautiful Losers to James Joyce. But good reviews don’t put food on even Greek tables and his books initially sold fewer than 3,000 copies. In need of cash, in 1966 he returned to north America, planning to try his luck as a singer and songwriter in Nashville.

“In retrospect, writing books seems the height of folly, but I liked the life,” he recalled. “It’s good to hit that desk every day. There’s a lot of order to it that is very different from the life of a rock’n’roller. I turned to professional singing as a remedy for an economic collapse.”

He never got as far as Nashville. After landing in New York, he was “ambushed” by the new music he heard all around him. “In Greece I’d been listening to Armed Forces Radio, which was mostly country music,” he said. “But then I heard Dylan and Baez and Judy Collins, and I thought something was opening up, so I borrowed some money and moved into the Chelsea Hotel.”

Collins became the first to record one of his songs and invited him to sing with her on stage. His first live performance caused him to flee with stage fright, but his shyness appealed to the audience who encouraged him back and set him on his new career as a troubadour. Already in his thirties, he was described by one critic as having “the stoop of an aged crop-picker and the face of a curious little boy”.

His singing, too, provoked mixed reactions but John Hammond, the legendary Columbia A&R man who had already signed Bob Dylan to the label, was not one to be put off by an unconventional voice. “He took me to lunch and then we went back to the Chelsea,” Cohen remembered. ‘‘I played a few songs and he gave me a contract.”

He spent two years living in the Chelsea Hotel, fell in with Andy Warhol’s set, became infatuated with the Velvet Underground’s German chanteuse Nico and released his debut album. Sales in America were initially modest but the record found a cult following in Europe and Britain, where he was dubbed “the bard of the bedsits”.

His early records sounded austere, centred around little more than his voice and a softly strummed guitar, although in later years he expanded his musical palette, adding a full band and chorus of backing singers.

Initially he appeared to be a literary aesthete, aloof from the hurly-burly of rock’n’roll, but by the mid 1970s his life was unravelling in a midlife crisis. ‘‘I got into drugs and drinking and women and travel and feeling that I was part of a motorcycle gang or something,” he admitted 20 years later.

His confusion led him to record with Phil Spector, whose production banished the simplicity of his earlier recordings in favour of melodramatic rock arrangements. One grotesque track, Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On, featured a drunken chorus of Cohen, Dylan and Allen Ginsberg repeating the title line over and over again.

Working with the volatile Spector was a fraught process. “I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out,” Cohen recalled. “For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. In the studio, you were slipping on bullets on the floor.”

At one point during the sessions, Spector locked Cohen out of the studio, put an armed guard on the door and would not let him listen to the mixes. When Cohen protested, Spector threatened him with a gun and a cross-bow.

The resulting album, 1977’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man, was a career nadir that horrified his fan base, and he swiftly returned to something closer to his old style. But when five years passed between the release of albums it appeared that his inspiration had dried up, a blockage that he later attributed to having become addicted to amphetamines.

His comeback album, 1984’s Various Positions, was a triumph and included Hallelujah, regarded by many as the finest composition in his entire oeuvre. It sparked a major revival both creatively and commercially as Cohen adopted the mode of a fashionable boulevardier.

With an increasingly sardonic humour he surveyed the wreckage of the modern world in songs such as First We Take Manhattan, Democracy and Everybody Knows and painted an apocalyptic picture of a world going to hell in a hand-cart. It was a vision that struck a hellish chord with the film director Oliver Stone who included three of Cohen’s songs from the period in his horrifyingly violent, dystopic movie Natural Born Killers. Shortly after the film’s release, Cohen retreated to his Zen Buddhist monastery.

When he returned to recording and live performance after a decade long break, he was treated more like a guru than a peddler of popular songs. Seated on a high stool, guitar in hand, or cupping the microphone (“as Hamlet held Yorick’s skull”, one critic suggested), his concerts became acts of communion, with rapt and reverential audiences treating his every utterance as if it were holy writ.

Age seemed to suit him, uniquely emphasising his sagacity while the advancing years simply made other fading rock stars appear irrelevant. Eschewing make-up, surgery and denial, he embraced getting old as “the only game in town”. That he was still writing compelling songs and releasing records into his eighties was “the ash” that showed his life was still “burning well”.

Despite continuing his recording career until the very end, Cohen stopped touring in 2013 and hinted at his preparedness for the end in the summer of 2016. After the death of Marianne Ihlen in August, a letter from Cohen was released in which he said goodbye to his muse and former lover.

“Our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,” the letter read. “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

Leonard Cohen, poet and songwriter, was born on September 21, 1934. He died on November 10, 2016, aged 82.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/leonard-cohen-9bvqv0s3g

 

[HantsSeagull]

bad day

 

[Wilko]

Embarrassed to say I only discovered his music in the last few years despite the fact I am approaching 40, really wish I had found him much earlier in life.

 

[dejavuatbtn]

Am grateful to have seen him at the Dome in the 70s. What a nice guy - reflecting on him writing songs in a room on the other side of the world and his delight with people over here knowing and enjoying them. Him and his music really are "one offs" - although I don't like the word, he had a "genre" pf his own. RIP great man.

 

[severnside gull]

At school a very wise teacher recognised my dislike of Shakespeare and pointed me towards Cohen's novels, Beautiful Losers and The Favourite Game. A prized gift when I was about 13 was a copy of his Collected Poems.
From the mid 60's I was addicted to his music although it wasn't until around 1969 or 1970 that I first saw him live at the Brighton Dome. Since then I've seen him perform many times, most recently last year. I always wished he'd written more prose. I firmly believe he is one of the great modern poets.
I mourn his loss but celebrate that he will live on in his words and his music.

 

[Questions]

I was introduced to him whilst very young through my older brother and he stayed with me for well over 40 years.
I could play Songs of Leonard Cohen every day of my life and never tire of it.
A sad day but thank you Leonard for every single bit of it all. No one else ever went inside and dug that deep.

 

[DavidinSouthampton]

If someone had never heard of him, just reading through the heartfelt and eloquent comments on here would convince you this was someone a bit special.

I was a student in the early/mid 1970s, so I am well aware of his music. reading through here has convinced me I should read some of his stuff (prose in particular) as well. Roll on Christmas.

 

[Paris]

Glanced at an ad for his new album a week or two ago and remember the title made me grin, as I have the mind of a five year old. Was clearly a very talented bloke.

 

[Greg Bobkin]

Probably the ONLY good thing about all these celebrity deaths is reading about the fascinating lives of the people who've passed. I was made aware of Cohen's music through my parents and probably didn't appreciate it at the time, but I knew that I liked it. To be honest, it was only really 'I'm Your Man, but the likes of First we take Manhattan, Everybody knows and the title track from the album, were enough to convince me that this guy had something unique. It's taken me a while to get around to reading the obituary, but it was well worth it, because it makes me realise what else he had achieved and what a great and talented man he was.

RIP.