Jeff Burger - Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

L eonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, has had a strange and eventful life. Now, for the first time, he tells his story in his own words, via more than fifty interviews conducted worldwide between 1966 and 2012.

In Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohenwhich includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photosthe artist talks about Bird on the Wire, Hallelujah, Famous Blue Raincoat, and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, and his long battle with depression. He also comments on his classic poetry and novels, the financial crisis that nearly wiped out his savings, and his remarkable late-career resurgence.

Here youll find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, along with conversations that have not previously been printed in English. Some have been broadcast but never published. And some of the material has not been available until now in any format, including the many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology.

O THER B OOKS IN THE M USICIANS IN T HEIR O WN W ORDS S ERIES

Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews

Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix

Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews and Encounters

Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis

Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters

Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

Copyright 2014 by Jeff Burger

Foreword copyright 2014 by Suzanne Vega

All rights reserved

First edition

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61374-758-2

A list of credits and copyright notices for the individual pieces in this collection can be found on

Interior and cover design: Jon Hahn

Cover photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Leonard, 1934

Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen : interviews and encounters / edited by Jeff Burger. First edition.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-758-2 (cloth)

1. Cohen, Leonard, 1934Interviews. 2. SingersCanadaInterviews. 3. ComposersCanadaInterviews. 4. Poets, Canadian20th centuryInterviews. I. Burger, Jeff, editor. II. Title.

ML410.C734A5 2014

782.42164092dc23

[B]

2013034568

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

For Madeleine

Index

Ive had the chance to talk to Leonard Cohen on a few occasions, some private and some public.

You should know, and youll see in this book, that he tends to speak in complete sentences, with careful and appropriate vocabulary. Mr. Cohen is a bit formal, in fact.

This is true even after a bottle or two of wine. We did an interview together once. A room was reserved somewhere on the record company lot, where we sat for more than an hour and bantered. He asked me questions about an album of mine that was just being released. The result was funny, dense; he was being provocative and asking (fair) questions about my personal life, and the world of the songs, that I wasnt inclined to answer. Especially since we were being recorded for radio.

After the interview was over and we went out to dinner, though, I decided I would probably reveal what he wanted to know. But to my surprise, I found that although he continued to be flirtatious, he no longer pushed to know, and I didnt pull. So all was left unrevealed. Although he had been candid during the interview, it was still definitely a kind of performance as he was more polite, congenial, and friendly in private.

But still somewhat formal.

I asked him once about his preference for wearing suits. My father was a tailor, he said. I am not trying to be Paul Bunyan.

One Saturday I ran into him at a hotel in Los Angeles. He invited me to breakfast by the pool at ten the next morning. I showed up on time. I wondered whether he would wear one of his well-known suits. He showed up wearing jeans, a T-shirt, cowboy boots, possibly a fedora, and a tailored jacket.

Would you like to hear a song Im working on?

Of course! I said.

Without looking at any papers, he then proceeded to recite for the next eight minutes a perfectly metered, perfectly rhymed song. (Unfortunately, I cant remember which one.) I sat, mesmerized.

Then, as I watched, first one girl in a bikini came out behind him and then another. They arranged themselves around the pool for a day of sunning.

By the end of the song, there were probably nine girls in bikinis around the pool.

Youll never guess what happened! I said to him, and joyfully described the scene right beyond his back.

Without turning around to see, he just shrugged and smiled.

It works every time, he said.

When I was a teenager, I was the only one of my friends who listened to him, which I did fervently, every day after school. I felt that he was my friend, and this feeling was not changed by meeting him. I loved his darkness and complexity, his fearlessness of song choices. It has been strange to witness his rise in the world. Now I must share him with thousands of people at Radio City and Madison Square Garden.

And with you! Enjoy this book and the eloquence of the man.

S UZANNE V EGA
New York City, 2013

How many of the 701 people inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by 2013 hit their peaks in their mid- and late seventies? Maybe just one: Leonard Cohen, who, at age seventy-three, began his first tour in fifteen years in 2008, the same year he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Since then, he has performed all over the world to some of his largest audiences ever; released three popular DVDs, Live in London, Songs from the Road, and Live at the Isle of Wight 1970; and issued the most successful album of his nearly half-century recording career, the emotive Old Ideas. That 2012 recordingonly his twelfth studio collectionclimbed higher on the charts than any of its predecessors, reaching number one in nearly a dozen countries and the two or three position in others, including the United States.

Besides peaking late, Cohen started late, at least as a recording artist. Born in Montreal on September 21, 1934, he didnt release his first album until he was thirty-three. We wont dwell in these pages on what he did before that age, as his early years are well covered in several biographies, most notably Sylvie Simmonss Im Your Man. Suffice it to say that his youth provided strong hints of the direction his life would take. He was a poetry fan by high school and showed particular interest in the work of Federico Garca Lorca. He also learned guitar and formed a country-folk group, the Buckskin Boys. Then, in the early 1950s, while an undergraduate at McGill University, he published his first poems and won a literary competition.

After graduating from McGill, Cohen flirted with the idea of becoming an attorney (can you imagine?) and attended one term at the universitys law school. Then he spent a year at Columbia University in New York. But he became increasingly focused on fiction and poetry. He published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956. The following year, he returned from New York to Montreal and began taking odd jobs so he could concentrate on his writing. Four years later, in 1961, he published a second book of poetry,