A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen by Liel Leibovitz

Author:Liel Leibovitz [Leibovitz, Liel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“All Close Friends of the Artist, Please Leave”

* * *

A few weeks after returning to the United States—the European tour ended with the August 31 concert on the Isle of Wight—Cohen and the Army stepped into a Nashville studio to record Cohen’s third album. If Songs from a Room was slight and melancholy, Songs of Love and Hate was dark and austere. Most of its songs had been written while on tour, and they captured their author’s mood perfectly. Cohen’s old sensibility—the one that could tell an intimate story that transformed, when you thought about it, into (as a later song lyric so aptly put it) “a manual for living with defeat”—had largely disappeared. With the exception of “Famous Blue Raincoat,” which struck the familiar balance of the hopeful, the elegiac, the intimate, and the eternal, the rest of the tracks are expeditions down drill holes of despair. The opening track, “Avalanche,” begins with an ominous guitar, and then a violin, more ominous still, joins in. Next comes Cohen, his voice flat, low, and devoid of its usual warmth. If you were wondering what kind of an album this was going to be, the first few lines left no doubt: “I stepped into an avalanche / It covered up my soul.”

It’s a strange line. More than any other natural disaster, perhaps, an avalanche occurs rapidly and without warning, trapping everyone in its path, leaving little time or room for escape. But here was Cohen voluntarily walking into one—stepping, nonetheless, slowly and with deliberation—to the detriment of his spiritual well-being. Having lived for the first time the life of an entertainer, no longer privileged merely to release his albums and collect royalties in private, but obliged to meet his fans and their demands, Cohen contemplated the undertaking and found it a catastrophe. “When I am on a pedestal,” he reflected in the same song, “You did not raise me there. / Your laws do not compel me / To kneel grotesque and bare. / I myself am the pedestal / For this ugly hump at which you stare.” And if the trappings of renown were burdensome, they were also fleeting, like the old metaphysical Jewish joke about the food at a certain restaurant being not only bad but served in such small portions. By his third album and his fourth year as a singer, Cohen already felt, as he stated in the title of the album’s second song, like “last year’s man, / That’s a Jew’s harp on the table, that’s a crayon in his hand. / And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolled / Far past the stems of thumbtacks that still throw shadows on the wood / And the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend / And all the rain falls down amen / On the works of last year’s man.” The symbolism hardly masks the autobiographical elements: Like the rest of the album, the song is a stark portrait of best-laid plans gone horribly wrong.

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