Harvey Kubernik - Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows

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I t was a most peculiar voice I heard late one night in January 1968 on the underground FM radio station KPPC-FM (106.7) broadcasting from a church in Pasadena, California. My transistor radio in West Hollywood could pick up the faint signal, especially after the midnight hour. The DJ, probably B. Mitchell Reed or Charles Laquidara, back-announced Suzanne by Leonard Cohen from Canada, a poet who has just cut his debut for Columbia Records. And then he proceeded to recite the matrix number, as jazz DJs used to do, and spun the entire album. It was sort of scary, a dirge-like grumble sequenced between the blue-sky harmonies of Magical Mystery Tour and the Byrds Younger Than Yesterday.

The next day, in Mr. George Schoenmans English class at Fairfax High School, Leonard made his presence felt again. Mr. Schoenman, who worshiped Ernest Hemingway, did not dislike rock n roll music like some of the other teachers on campus. His summer job was ushering baseball games at Dodger Stadium, where the Beatles performed their penultimate concert in 1966. Schoenman was assigned to protect the group in the dugout and aid in their great escape from frenzied fans, past center field into Elysian Park.

That semester we were assigned term papers on contemporary modern literature. Some of the hipper kids placed dibs on Bob Dylan; I countered with my way cooler discovery, the brooder from north of the border. And besides, half the kids in my class were named Cohen, a couple of em even claiming blood relation, which was a laugh because any Ashkenazi could claim kinship with the Cohen tribe. Schoenman applauded my adventurous choice and put Leonards name on the chalkboard next to mine.

After the school bell rang, I raced across Melrose Avenue to Aarons record shop and bought the album. My parents couldnt complain this was homework! I subsequently received a C on my paper with a notation to pay stricter attention to what was happening between the words metaphor and allegory being difficult new terms to swallow. But I was hooked, a witting draftee into Field Commander Cohens company.

How could I have imagined that years later I would sit across from him at Canters Delicatessen, which I could see outside that classroom window; that over the course of my journalistic career Id also interview him by phone and while sitting at his kitchen table; that I would talk to the players and engineer of that first album; or shake hands with the fabled Columbia Records executive John Hammond, who signed him to the label? Or that I would visit Cohen recording sessions and provide hand claps on a couple of tracks on his Death of a Ladies Man collaboration with Phil Spector at Gold Star recording studio in Hollywood?

L eonard encouraged me to stay in the music journalism and poetry game. One memorable night in the mid-seventies we went to see Allen Ginsberg read at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. I stayed the course; in 2006 I wrote the liner notes to the first CD release of Ginsbergs Kaddish album originally issued on the Atlantic label overseen by producer Jerry Wexler. The eighty-eight-year-old Wexler was rather amused when I called him in Florida to chat about this unearthed gem. Hey kid, whos the next alter kaker [Yiddish for a crotchety old person] youre gonna talk to? Leonard Cohen? Hes working and doing quite well.

With Everybody Knows, I set out to explore Leonards oceanic body of work. But this book is not a monologue. It is socially constructed, meaning that it is a conversation among many of his professional and personal confederates band members, producers, engineers, DJs, academics, filmmakers, authors, photographers, previous biographers, well-informed pundits and fan(atic)s who have had decades to think about and reflect on the role Leonard has played in shaping their space. He is Whitmanesque in his reach, a welter of contradictions, simmering with multitudes.

My hope is to add some clarity and context to this most extravagantly lived, most solitary of public lives. Leonard is a man of simple gifts, an aspiring country-and-western singer turned clarion voice to multiple generations of disciples, who hang on his every utterance like hes the oracle of Delphi.

This book is neither definitive nor encyclopedic; the subjects quicksilver nature puts paid to that. If anything, the multi-voiced approach is the most reliable path to Leonards indeterminate location. He has transformed uncertainty into a personal mantra part physics, part poetry, part promiscuous imbibing of life. It is enough for his friends and colleagues to say, I heard him, I worked with him, I felt I knew him until I didnt.

I also emphasize the importance of the West Coast in Leonards life and times. It continues to surprise many that such a well-traveled, Eurocentric figure has called Los Angeles home since the late seventies. Because he hails from Montreal and the literary center of America is still on the East Coast, Leonard is often associated with tweedy, Ivy League types. But, without grabbing a longboard, Leonard has shown himself to be a true California dreamer. He is, of course, a great many things other than that the consummate hyphenate: poet, novelist, songwriter, singer, guitarist, traveler, Buddhist, Jew, thinker, healer

Ive tried to frame this panoramic life, aided by the terrific visuals which illustrate his inexhaustible trek into a ninth decade. I hope you find pleasure in the vivid recollections of those articulate witnesses who opened up to me, to both correct the record and, in the words of the teacher and spiritualist Ram Dass, honor the incarnation.

Leonard Cohen remains, at age eighty, a masterly recording and performing artist; in his sharp-suited elegance, a seductive fedora adorning his noble head, he has achieved an Elder Cool street cred to which I suspect he never paid the slightest attention. Leonard learned very early on that the music business was a racket rendered moot by committing to a work ethic and immersing himself in daily toil.

As a youth he was disciplined, invested in the pursuit of an ideal that he inherited from his learned grandfather. Later, he found that he could record the ideal and perform it on stage to an audience who would share his resolve. It is this very conversation, the struggle to share something so intimate with so many, which provides the spine of this story.

It is hard to explain, dissect, and tout the mysteries of charisma. But you sort of know it when you hear it, see it, or feel it.

This is not a history report on the life of Leonard Cohen. I tried that a long time ago and was told to stop talking and start listening. Theres