AsiaLIFE

As Leonard Cohen’s illustrious career heads towards its final encore, AsiaLIFE looks back at the career of one of the truly great musical performers. Words by Clive Graham-Ranger.

The cult of Cohen has been around for a long time, but with the western world once again suffering a crisis of confidence, who better than Lennie, the “godfather of gloom”, “poet laureate of pessimism” and “high priest of pathos” to doff his fedora and stage a comeback?

The reasons for Cohen’s comeback are well documented. Twenty-six years ago he turned Hallelujah, his 80-verse poem to a doomed relationship, into six stanzas. Regarded as a classic by many, it earned him millions of dollars in royalties after it was covered by a chart-load of singers, from wannabes such as Alexandra Burke to veterans like Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, Damien Rice, Bob Dylan, Jon Bon Jovi, KD Lang and John Cale.

It is a cruel irony, then, that his signature tune is a paean to a relationship with a woman who ultimately made off with most of his money, Kelley Lynch, his former manager of 17 years. A messy court case left Cohen virtually moneyless. He had to take out a mortgage on his house to pay legal costs and watched helplessly as his web of financial dealings unravelled before his eyes.

At an age when most people reach for a hookah pipe and slippers, he put together a gruelling, three-year world tour.

It was a masterstroke. Not only was he reaching out to his long-term fans of one generation but also giving their offspring an opportunity to discover what the fuss was all about. As a result, he has lit up the globe from Australasia to North America, Europe to his one Asian date at the Olympic Stadium in Phnom Penh on November 27. He has also enjoyed the kind of live album and back catalogue record sales only legends enjoy.

Legend? It’s hackneyed but true, because Leonard Norman Cohen’s musical and poetic roots run deep and span more than four decades.

Born into a Jewish family in the wealthy Montreal suburb of Westmount, his father died in 1943 when he was nine years old. In his teens he picked up a guitar and formed a group called the Buckskin Boys. He went on to McGill University and earned only average grades, but was good enough to win the McNaughton prize for creative writing by the time he graduated in 1955.

At birth, Cohen’s father set up a trust fund that, after university, allowed him to pursue his first love of writing. A year after graduating he published Let Us Compare Mythologies, a book of poetry, following it up five years later with The Spice Box of Earth. With the modest royalties from its sales and his father’s legacy he travelled the world, ultimately settling on the Greek island of Hydra in the Aegean.

His literary outpourings reached a high point with Beautiful Losers that earned favourable comparisons with James Joyce, the Irish bard, and his songwriting gave birth to Suzanne, which was a hit for Judy Collins. She also persuaded him to make his performance debut with her at the 1967 Newport folk festival alongside Janis Ian and Tom Paxton.

He was on a roll. His sell-out concerts in New York, poetry reading appearances on CBS television and Noel (son of Rex) Harrison’s cover version of Suzanne, which went into the Billboard charts, established him as a talent to be reckoned with. Something Columbia Records confirmed when it signed him and released The Songs of Leonard Cohen just before Christmas in 1967.

Never one to rush into the studios to create vinyl, his writing and singing careers ticked over until 1970 when he was on the same eclectic bill as Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and Emerson, Lake and Palmer at the post-Woodstock Isle of Wight festival. As a result his fan following grew. Better still Songs of Love and Hate, his next album, coupled with the earlier hit versions of Suzanne drew him into the movies when Robert Altman used his music in his 1971 western McCabe and Mrs Miller, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

Along with fame, mild introspection seemed to set in and instead of creating new material he plundered his back catalogue of live recordings to take stock of himself as a performer. Leonard Cohen: Live Songs was the result: a compendium of performances focused on highlights of his output from 1969. In a seemingly abrupt change in direction, he turned his back on the studios and took to the road in the US and Europe in 1971 and 1972 and even performed in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The release of New Skin for the Old Ceremony the next year, though, introduced fans to a different, fresh Cohen who was able to combine the brightness of pop with his customary bleak lyrics.

It also drew in an even wider audience, which persuaded Columbia to release a “best of” album featuring a dozen of his best-known songs from his previous four LPs. It was also during the mid-1970s that Cohen met and worked with Jennifer Warnes, which led to a series of key collaborations, stripped away some of his mystery and revealed his uncanny attractiveness to women, which chime with the romantic subjects of most of his songs.

In 1984, Various Positions was arguably his most accessible album, but it sank without trace and was followed by another four-year sabbatical from recording, which ended with I’m Your Man. In the interim, though, Warnes released Famous Blue Raincoat, which again broadened his appeal. The beginning of the 90s saw the release of I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, a CD of recordings of his songs by the likes of REM, the Pixies, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and John Cale.

In the midst of all of this he became a resident at the Mt Baldy Zen Center, a Buddhist retreat in California, becoming a monk during the late 1990s. When he re-emerged he collaborated with singer/songwriter/musician/producer Sharon Robinson to make Ten New Songs, which was released in 2001.

In 2004 he released Dear Heather, which is reckoned to be the most highly personal record ever, but it paled to insignificance alongside the embezzlement of his US$5m by a trusted employee. So it was back to what he knew best, entertaining his adoring public.

There can be few 76-year-olds with the energy never mind the resolve to take on such a marathon, but what is not in doubt is that he has offered music lovers the opportunity to see and hear a master at work and join him on his emotional rollercoaster ride.