Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Leonard Cohen -Dance me to the end of love

•Bob Dylan was a great admirer of Cohen's and the two once ran into each other in a Paris cafe and traded lyrics. Dylan showed Cohen a new song, "I and I," and told Cohen he'd written it in 15 minutes. Cohen showed Dylan "Hallelujah," and when Dylan asked how long it took, Cohen said "two years," cutting the actual number in half.


•Jimi Hendrix played "Suzanne" in a club and later hit on Joni Mitchell when she was walking with Cohen. "He didn't distort his guitar," Cohen told Simmons about Hendrix's version of his signature song. "It was just a lovely thing."

•Mitchell and Cohen had a short, intense romance that began with Mitchell asking for a list of books (he suggested Lorca, Camus and the I Ching) and included references to Cohen in several Mitchell songs, including "A Case of You," "Chelsea Morning" and "That Song About the Midway." Cohen compared his time with Mitchell to "living with Beethoven" and said he didn't like it "because who would? She's prodigiously gifted. Great painter too."

•Most of Cohen's lovers speak fondly of him while noting his chronic inability to commit. Marianne Ihlen and Suzanne Elrod, immortalized in his songs, are affectionate in their memories. Mitchell said years later that she was only a groupie for two people, Picasso and Cohen.

•Rebecca DeMornay got a marriage proposal in "Waiting for the Miracle" ("Ah, baby, let's get married, we've been alone too long") and a production credit on "Anthem," one of Cohen's greatest songs, partly for telling him to stop working on it, it was finished. They never got married.

•When DeMornay was working on "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" in the Puget Sound area, Cohen accompanied her and wrote songs in her trailer while she was on the set. "Tacoma Trailer," an instrumental, is about that time.

•Throughout his life, whenever he's asked what attracted him to poetry, Cohen always says it was to meet women. It worked. When he played the Troubador in the 1970s, the doorman, Paul Body, said "The only guy I've ever seen who drew better-looking women than Leonard Cohen was probably Charles Bukowski. These women were all dressed up in Seventies style and hanging on Leonard's every word, during the show and afterwards."

•Unlike Bob Dylan or Joe Strummer, to name two, Cohen never invented a cool new name and a colorful past. He's an upper-class Jewish kid from Montreal who was devoted to his mother and didn't forget where he came from.

•Over the years Cohen, again unlike Dylan, has offered intrepretations of his songs. Of the beautiful line from "Anthem," "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in," he had this to say:

•"The light is the capacity to reconcile your experience, your sorrow, with every day that dawns. It is that understanding, which is beyond significance or meaning, that allows you to live a life and embrace the disasters and sorrows and joys that are our common lot. But it's only with the recognition that there is a crack in everything. I think all other visions are doomed to irretrievable gloom."

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