A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen Read online

  A Broken Hallelujah

  * * *

  Rock and Roll, Redemption,

  and the Life of

  Leonard Cohen

  LIEL LEIBOVITZ

  To Lisa and Lily,

  whose love is the engine of my survival

  * * *

  Contents

  * * *

  PREFACE

  PRELUDE

  ONE / “Looking for the Note”

  TWO / The Soul of Canada

  THREE / The Prophet in the Library

  FOUR / Notes from a Greek Isle

  FIVE / “One Big Diary, Set to Guitar Music”

  SIX / Waiting for the Sun

  SEVEN / “All Close Friends of the Artist, Please Leave”

  EIGHT / “There Is a War”

  NINE / “A Secret Chord”

  EPILOGUE / “A Manual for Living with Defeat”

  PERMISSIONS

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ALSO BY LIEL LEIBOVITZ

  A Broken Hallelujah

  * * *

  Preface

  * * *

  This is not a biography of Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen himself already delivered the best possible account of his life, in a letter to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, written when he was twenty-nine. Here it is, in its entirety: “I was born in Montreal, September 21, 1934. My passport number is 5-017560. My eyes are hazel.”1 He was writing to enter his most recent collection of poems, Flowers for Hitler, in a contest for young writers. He might have been better served had he mentioned his previous two books of poetry, both well received, or his modest fame, or earlier prizes he had won. He didn’t. The thing being judged was his work, and whatever morsel of his personal life he felt comfortable enough sharing with strangers would find its way, after a process of mild sublimation, into a book. Or an album: Years later, as a celebrated musician, he remained reluctant to divulge too much. In interviews he’d reply that the only answers that mattered were there in his songs.

  To look for clues elsewhere, in lists of accomplishments or in the particulars of love affairs or in the knots of familial entanglements, is to assume that an artist’s work is just a stage on which some larger drama is being performed. It is to believe that there’s a Rosebud, some critical moment that explains everything and that enough digging can reveal. And it is not a very gratifying approach, particularly when the subject at hand is a singer and a poet whose words, like the chants of Gregorian monks, seem designed to attract the attention of some higher power. What more might we learn about “So Long, Marianne,” for example, by knowing that the woman who inspired the song met Leonard Cohen in the agora of the Greek island of Hydra, or that she was walking with her blond husband and blond baby and looked, to a lonely Cohen, like the holy ghost of a beautiful, tanned trinity?2 The song leaves us with difficult ideas, like what it means to be almost young or what happens when the angels forget to pray for us. The story, on the other hand, is just gossamer—airy gossip that fades away with time.

  Once people knew I was writing a book about him, I heard a lot of stories about Leonard Cohen. I spoke to some of his friends and fellow musicians, scoured his letters and notebooks, and read my way through five decades of press interviews. None of these helped explain his strange career. Cohen, as the journalist Bruce Headlam noted, belongs to an exclusive club of entertainers—Ray Charles may be the only other member—who don’t really fit into any one particular era, always at odds with the times: “He was too young to be a Beat, too old to be a folkie, and he announced he wanted to change the face of Canadian literature before there really was one. He lived in Tennessee near Nashville in the early 1970s, before the country-music revival, and in the 1980s, when everybody went super-chroma, he stayed black and white. By the early 1990s, when everyone else was depressed, Cohen—the Dr. Kevorkian of pop music—began to have fun, cutting music videos, graciously accepting awards … and appearing at Hollywood functions with his girl friend, actress Rebecca De Mornay.”3 His twelfth studio album, Old Ideas, released in 2012 when he was seventy-seven years old, was his first to make it into the Billboard top ten chart; the rest had barely registered. Adored in Europe, he was such an anomaly to U.S. audiences that in 1984, Walter Yetnikoff, the monarch of Columbia Records, summoned Cohen to a meeting, looked at the middle-aged singer’s dark double-breasted suit, and said, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.” It was Yetnikoff’s way of telling Cohen that the label had decided not to distribute his latest album, Various Positions, in the United States. It wasn’t, Yetnikoff said, contemporary enough.4 The culture eventually caught up with Cohen: The album’s centerpiece, an anthem about love and redemption dense with biblical imagery, became one of the most frequently covered songs of the last three decades. In 2008, for example, no fewer than three versions of “Hallelujah” scaled Britain’s Top 50 chart,5 and the song graced the sound tracks of blockbuster movies, from Shrek to The Watchmen.

  Little about Cohen’s life illuminates these wild oscillations. His story fits snugly into what can be called rock and roll’s ur-biography: He lost a parent at an early age (like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young), found comfort in poetry (like Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith), left his native country and settled somewhere exotic for a spell (Morrison again, Keith Richards), did mounds of drugs (pretty much everyone), wrestled with depression (David Bowie, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson), and lived long enough to see himself becoming an icon to younger musicians (the few, the fortunate). But most of Leonard Cohen’s peers are either four decades dead or ambling onto stages in never-ending nostalgia concert tours, and he’s becoming better somehow, or at least more culturally salient and more commercially popular. We smile when Mick Jagger takes the stage and attempts all the old Stones classics, because we understand that there’s something amusing about a man his age trying to recapture the same libidinal thrusts that made him so sexy and cool nearly half a century ago. But when Leonard Cohen, a decade Jagger’s senior, walks up to the microphone, nobody laughs. You feel the same hum at a Cohen concert that you do in a church or a synagogue, a feeling that emanates from the realization that the words and the tunes you’re about to hear represent the best efforts we humans can make to capture the mysteries that surround us, and that by listening and closing your eyes and singing along, you, too, can somehow transcend. We have better poets than Leonard Cohen, and more skilled novelists. Songwriters blessed with greater talent wrote songs and gained fame and withered away. But Leonard Cohen lingers and thrives because he is not really any of these things, at least not essentially. He’s something more intricate, the sort of man whose pores absorb the particles of beauty and grief and truth that float weightlessly all around us yet so few of us note. He is attuned to the divine, whatever the divine might be, not with the thinker’s complications or the zealot’s obstructions, but with the unburdened heart of a believer—it’s not for nothing that he referred to himself in song as “the little Jew who wrote the Bible.” Millennia ago, as we began asking ourselves the same fundamental questions we still ponder, we called men like him prophets, meaning not that they could foresee the future but that they could better understand the present by seeing one more layer of meaning to life. The title still applies.

  So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently? These are the questions at the heart of this book. They’re not easy ones to answer: Some themes, like theology or rock and roll or orgasms, often wilt
when captured between the covers of a book, and Leonard Cohen’s body of work is obsessed with all three in more or less equal measure. To study them without robbing them of their vitality, we need to observe them in their natural environment. Sometimes they are best understood when considered through a particular story from Cohen’s life; at others they require more remote meditations. They cut across the fields of Jewish eschatology and Zen Buddhism, Canadian poetry and American rock and roll, lust and lucre. They’re not always accessible to reason. But they’ve given us our man, and with him the license to reconsider the sort of sentiments—grace, redemption—that, until late in our adolescence as a species, took up most of our time and that now, when we’re all mature, sound too wild to be relevant and too dangerous to roam outside some intellectual discipline’s cage. And the only appropriate thing for us to say in return is Hallelujah.

  Prelude

  * * *

  The rusty green jeep could barely make it up the hill, so Mick Farren climbed out, put his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes from the glare of the late August sun, and surveyed the island.1 He’d never been to the Isle of Wight before, and little about it interested him now. Had he turned around and looked to the north, he would have seen a sliver of the island’s spectacular shoreline, which, with its salt-stricken limestone cliffs, looked like the footprint of some enormous animal long extinct. But Farren was looking south, staring downhill at two snaking lines of corrugated metal fencing in a large patch of grass patrolled by men in navy blue uniforms and German shepherds in tight leather collars. Farren shook his head. The whole scene, he told his driver, reminded him of East Germany or, worse, of Dachau. He pointed at the large stage erected at the heart of the encampment, a rickety-looking thing with the words “music festival” painted on a scaffold in bright, cheerful colors. The festival, he said to no one in particular, had to be freed.

  A few days later, Farren received a phone call from the festival’s producer, Rikki Farr.2 Their similar-sounding names weren’t the only points of resemblance between the two men: They were both in their twenties, both the sons of working-class English families, born shortly after the Second World War and set loose in their adolescence by the thrills and tumults of the 1960s. But whereas Rikki had long, straight blond hair and took an interest in managing musical acts that sang softly about love and peace, Mick wore his curly black hair like a mushroom cloud and fronted a band called the Deviants whose biggest hit was “Let’s Loot the Supermarket.” When they first met, sometime around 1966 or 1967, Farr and Farren could still talk genially about politics and music and the many people they knew in common in London’s underground cultural scene. By 1970, however, Mick had formed a militia of pranksters he called the White Panthers, and had gained notoriety for such brazen acts as taking over a segment of David Frost’s television show and shouting anarchist slogans. Farr had heard that Farren and his White Panthers were planning to show up at the Isle of Wight and pull off all sorts of riots. The last thing he needed to contend with just a day before the festival was scheduled to begin were troublemakers like Mick Farren.

  The producer, Farren later recalled, said something about peace and love and good vibes. Farren had little patience for such slogans, and accused Farr of having no other motive but money. Defending himself, Farr replied that given the festival’s stellar lineup—he had booked the Doors, Hendrix, the Who, Joni Mitchell, and virtually every other major musical act of the time—there was little else he could do but charge for admission. The artists had to be paid, he calmly explained, as did the carpenters who built the stage, the electricians and the roadies and everyone else needed to put together a five-day-long festival. Farren mumbled something about music wanting to be free, but Farr could take it no longer. He hung up.

  As the first swarms of concertgoers stepped off the ferry on Wednesday, August 26, 1970, there was little to suggest that Farren’s threats might come to fruition. The youth who’d arrived looked like decent kids. They had long hair and big smiles, and many of them lived off unemployment payments doled out by the British government. They bought their tickets for three pounds sterling and rushed into the festival’s fenced-in area to catch a good spot on the grass in front of the stage. They swayed dreamily to the progressive rock band Judas Jump, and cheered warmly for the California folksinger Kathy Smith and her two-hour-long set of mellow tunes. A clean-shaven Kris Kristofferson was there, too, but the sound system stuttered, and his set was soon inaudible. The crowd was kind, protesting mildly, clapping when appropriate. Rikki Farr apologized profusely, promising Kristofferson he could play a second set in a day or two. Despite all the technical glitches, Farr was certain that the event he’d worked for more than a year to make real was going to be epic. It would be, he told his friends at the tent he set up as the production’s makeshift office, England’s Woodstock.

  On Thursday morning, with seventy thousand ticketholders already in attendance, Farr pranced onto the stage to introduce Supertramp, an unknown band a few weeks away from releasing its first album. “I can see we’re going to have one hell of a great festival!” he said. “You got your rocks off, right? You know, I think I’m going to come down there and join you, because that’s obviously the place to be at the moment.”

  But Farr spent most of his time in the production tent backstage, where cash was quickly piling up. He needn’t have been much of an experienced promoter to realize, a day after its inauguration, that the Isle of Wight festival was slated to be massively profitable: The main attractions were still a day or two away from taking the stage, and if the current attendance rate was any indication, it stood to draw upward of two hundred thousand people. With the sort of satisfied smile reserved only for particularly auspicious problems, Farr asked a young assistant to get on the phone and inquire about procuring more portable toilets: The festival’s rows of wooden commodes, he said, might not be enough.

  Such problems, however, lay in the future. For the time being the patch of grass known as East Afton Farm looked as orderly and well maintained as a camping ground, with tents strewn at reasonable intervals from one another and communal bonfires bringing together strangers for shared impromptu meals. If Woodstock was strong American coffee, quipped one festivalgoer, then Wight was weak English tea, comforting but not particularly arousing. Two more days of mild music proved his point. Most of the artists taking the stage—Chicago, Procol Harum, and Rikki Farr’s brother, Gary, an R & B crooner with sandy hair and a sweet voice—seemed like throwbacks to the mid-1960s, to the era before Dylan went electric and the Hells Angels went to Altamont and the promises of change curdled into violence or, worse, despair. Listening to the melodies floating through the farm, struggling sometimes to overcome the din of the waves crashing on the cliffs, one could think that whatever demons were clawing at America’s social and political fabrics, they had not yet crossed the Atlantic.

  And then came the weekend.

  At first, sometime late Friday morning, someone tapped Rikki Farr on the shoulder and asked him who were all those people hanging out on the hill just above East Afton Farm. Probably nobodies, Farr said, probably just a bunch of kids who couldn’t afford the ticket or were too stingy to pay. By the late afternoon, however, the crowd of stragglers grew thicker. Each arriving ferry seemed to unload more and more people headed not to the fenced-in festival site but up to the hill. By the time the sun had set and the Voices of East Harlem children’s choir took the stage, the ticketholders inside the encampment were in the minority.

  It didn’t take much guessing to figure out who was behind the sudden influx of freeloaders. Furious, Farr grabbed the phone and again called Mick Farren. When he heard the anarchist’s sleepy voice on the other end, Farr lost his temper. As Farren later recalled the conversation, the producer threatened to kill him. Their talk went nowhere.3 Farr slammed the phone against his makeshift desk and ran outside to observe the situation.

  What he saw was jarring. No longer content with merely watching the concert from
their elevated vantage point, the mob on the hill tumbled toward the festival site, rolling against the metal fences and confronting the guards and their dogs. Mostly newcomers to keeping the peace, the guards wanted no trouble, nor did they know what to do if the hill people decided to attack. For every step the free-music crowd took forward, the guards took two back. Even if they had stood their ground, there still would have been little they could have done to keep the mob at bay—with the fence snaking on for nearly half a mile, all anyone needed to do to get in was stroll along the perimeter, find an unguarded spot, shake the thin leaves of metal until they bent, and crawl underneath. One by one, muddied men and women were spotted inside the festival’s grounds, their hair just a little bit longer and their nudity just a little bit more pronounced. They were Mick Farren’s minions, and Farr was determined to stop them.

  From random conversations with a handful of the infiltrators, Rikki Farr learned that Farren had spread the word throughout London that the festival on Wight was being run by a cabal of greedy bastards, and that the thing to do was show up and demand that it be made free. A music journalist as well as an activist and a musician, Farren had written a series of articles in the underground press in the days leading up to the festival, urging his readers to take the first ferry out to the island. He had been there himself, he wrote, and had found just the spot from which to watch the concerts without pay; after “Desolation Row,” Dylan’s famous hymn of chaos and disillusion, he called it Desolation Hill.

  The son of Tommy Farr, one of England’s most renowned prizefighters, Rikki Farr grew up knowing all about tactics. Farren, it wasn’t too difficult to realize, could only succeed if he managed to convince the masses that Farr and the festival’s other organizers were money-hungry creeps bent on exploiting artists and audiences alike. The thing to do, Farr told his colleagues back in the production tent, was to show Farren’s minions that the people who put the festival together were just a couple of like-minded cool cats: The thing to do was win them over.