Leonard Cohen, the high priest of singer-songwriters, keeps the faith Three years after the release of his last album, "I'm Your Man," Leonard Cohen is working hard on his yet-untitled new record, due out later this year. One song by the 56-year-old Canadian Jew who now half-facetiously calls himself "just another L.A. songwriter," is called "Democracy is Coming," a paean to America as "the cradle of the best and of the worst." Pruning the song to an appropriate length was an ordeal, says Cohen, in an interview.
Among the casualties was a verse that referred to the anti-Semitism unleashed by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe: "It ain't coming to us, European style, Concentration camp behind the smile. It ain't coming from the East With its temporary feast as Count Dracula comes strolling down the aisle… Also cut were these lines on recent manifestations of Afro-American Jew-hatred: First we killed the Lord and then we stole the blues Who are these gutter people always in the news? But who really gets to laugh behind the black man's back when he makes his little crack about the Jews?*
Had these stanzas been written by anyone else, it might have been assumed they were dropped because of commercial considerations. But Cohen has never pandered to the marketplace. In fact, his modus operandi has been to drop from sight so completely between records that many give him up for dead. After 10 albums, Cohen's off-and-on career haunts the American pop music scene like a gloomy, unsmiling Cheshire cat.
Yet "I'm Your Man" was his most commercially successful album ever, selling 1.2 million copies. One of its tracks, "Everybody Knows," even became a modest hit after being used as an anthem on the soundtrack of last year's teen-cult film "Pump Up the Volume." The album made Cohen a hot commodity among intellectually precocious adolescents while surprising their parents, who still fondly recall his raspy folk laments during the 60s, when he was seen by many as an upmarket Bob Dylan.
"It's only very recently I've used the word career," says Cohen, in the Los Angeles duplex where he now lives. "Somehow you are forced to accept the fact that you've had a career, one that has to be cared for and maintained and organized and manipulated. I thought of myself as specifically not having a career, as having some kind of destiny. My job was to unfold."
Cohen began to "unfold" while growing up as the son of a well-to-do Montreal clothier in the city's upper-class Westmount section. In 1956, while still studying at Montreal's McGill University, he published his first collection of poetry, "Let Us Compare Mythologies." This was followed by a second anthology, "The Spice Box of the Earth" (1962), the autobiographical novel "The Favorite Game" (1963) and another prize-winning poetry collection the next year, "Flowers for Hitler."
Established in Canada as one of the leading poets of his generation, Cohen then confounded his literary mentors by moving into popular music. Though lacking "the gift of a golden voice," as he proclaimed wryly in "I'm Your Man" one critic described his voice as one that "fades like the white dot that lingers in the center of an old TV screen once the power has been switched off" Cohen was always musically inclined. In his teen years he played guitar at a socialist Jewish summer camp in the mountains north of Montreal, singing Spanish Civil War and Jewish folk songs.
Cohen began haunting the peripheries of the New York folk scene during the early 60s, in appearances that combined singing and poetry reading. After folk star Judy Collins made hits of a number of his songs, including "Suzanne," "Bird on A Wire" and "Sisters of Mercy," Cohen cut his first album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen" (1968). His gift for poetic lyrics and complex narrative tunes was further demonstrated on such albums as "Songs From A Room" (1969) and "Songs of Love and Hate" (1971).
Like his mentor, Canadian-Jewish poet Irving Layton, Cohen has been a staunch and outspoken supporter of Israel. He first went to "hang out" there in 1960; he later returned during the Yom Kippur War to perform for troops in Sinai, and recalls singing inside a bunker under fire. His most recent visit was as part of a concert tour in 1979.
"As a Jew," says Cohen, "I am very vigilant, and have a sense of solidarity with Israel that it has to be protected but also a sense that legitimate criticism should be encouraged. I also think there is a Jewish role in the Diaspora, a noble and interesting role, maybe more so than in Israel. That's a very unfashionable idea, but one I've had all my life. Otherwise I would have gone to Israel."
"But then," he adds, with barely a wink, "I am a member of the priestly caste. These secular concerns come and go. My role in these matters is eternal. If I go there, it will be to dress in white clothes and enter the Holy of Holies." *(Lyrics copyright Stranger Music Inc). Hadashot