Bradley Morgan (3:22)

You say in your book that everything reached Israel late, And here the 60s lasted until 1973. Can you share with us what that means?

Matty Friedman (3:31)

So communication, of course, was much slower in the early 1970s than it is today. And songs that were popular in, in the States would arrive in Israel months months later. And cultural trends that were already far advanced in, in North America would arrive here maybe, you know, a year or by 1973, the 60s are over in the US and there's an argument about when exactly the 60s end. Some would place it at that famous Rolling stones show in 1969, and there are other dates given for it. But in any case, by 1973, the 60s are over in America and things are already in a different place musically, culturally. Summer of Love was a long time ago by 1973, but in Israel, the 60s were still going on. It was still a time of kind of communal sentiment and naivete. There was kind of an optimism in the air that was similar to the optimism of the 60s. It wasn't exactly the same as the 60s in the United States, but it was a similar vibe. And in some ways, in a kind of cosmic way, the 60s really come crashing to an end on the day that the Yom Kippur War started, which was October 6, 1973.

Bradley Morgan (4:45)

You profile several Israeli citizens and soldiers in your book before introducing Cohen. Who were they and how did they fit into the story you wanted to tell?

Matty Friedman (4:53)

So when I started out with this idea, the idea was to write about this concert tour and about Leonard Cohen. And Leonard Cohen is, of course, a legendary figure from the 60s, and he has this kind of storied career that continues until he's about 80 and he's one of the. Really, one of the great voices of the last half of the 20th century, a great poet and a great. A great singer and kind of a true original who came out of the 60s and had this remarkably durable musical career. And I thought the book would be about him and about his tour. And very early on, I realized that that would not be enough, that what made the tour so incredible was the fact that it was happening in a war and that the audience for these concerts wasn't a regular concert audience. Right. It wasn't people who were paying for tickets in a stadium or in an auditorium. These were soldiers who were facing death. And Cohen, as I write in the book, Cohen played for them, knowing that this might be one of the last things they ever heard. And that made the concerts very charged and very powerful, very raw and very memorable. People who saw Cohen in Sinai never forgot it. And I realized that the book would have to be about the soldiers as much as it was about Cohen, because without the soldiers, you don't get the power of the concerts, which are. The power of the concerts, which is as much a function of the audience as of the performer. So if you read the book, you'll see that it's. And you've read it, of course, Bradley. But if the listener reads the book, they'll see that the book is kind of maybe evenly balanced between Cohen and his journey through Sinai and the soldiers who see him. And there are stories in the book about individuals who encountered this performer who kind of landed from the moon at the darkest and most terrifying moment of their lives, of the lives of the soldiers. And you meet some young women who were in charge of a radar station at the southern tip of Sinai and got hit by missiles on the first day of the war, and then saw Cohen play not long afterward. And there's a couple, a bride and a groom, who are supposed to get married. And the wedding is disrupted by the war, and. And the bride sets out to find. To find her husband. And Cohen pops up in that story, too. There's a group of. Of commandos, kind of a pickup team of reservists who. Kind of an ad hoc commando unit that takes part in some of the worst fighting around the Suez Canal. And they cross the Suez Canal into Egyptian territory. And on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, in the middle of nowhere, at the height of the fighting one night, Leonard Cohen shows up in their encampment. And there's a young military doctor who encounters Cohen in kind of an army operating theater in the desert. And these are kind of very potent memories for the people who saw Cohen. So the book ends up being as much about them as it's about him.

Bradley Morgan (7:41)

How did you come across them?

Matty Friedman (7:43)

One of the great things about Israel is that it's really small. So as a, as a journalist, it makes it pretty easy to find people. It's a small and kind of tightly webbed country. There are about 9 million people in Israel. So it's a country about the size of New York City and people tend to know each other. So I would find, I mean, it took years to find the soldiers in the book, but I would find one soldier and call them up and I would say, hey, I heard you saw Leonard Cohen in the Yom Kippur War. And they would say, no, I didn't, but you want to call my friend Moshe, and then here's his number. And I would call Moshe and then Moshe would pass me on to, you know, three other people. And eventually I'd find people who, who saw Cohen. Someone sent me a photograph, a black and white photograph that was taken on board a Navy landing craft in the Gulf of Suez with Leonard Cohen. And I had tracked down the person who'd taken the photograph. I tracked down the person in the photograph. And that's the way it, that's the way it worked. But I was really using the kind of the Israeli network of these men and women who were now in their 70s, who'd had this experience and who were quite helpful in passing me on from person to person and giving me cell phone numbers and emails. And ultimately I had kind of a variety of stories that illustrate kind of a broad variety of military experiences in the Yom Kippur War. So you'll meet people who were in the Navy, you meet people who are flying fighter jets, you'll meet infantrymen, you'll meet women again who are kind of Air Force personnel at a radar stations. You get a broad cross section of the army of these young Israelis doing their mandatory service. We have a draft. So these are not particularly milit military people. These are just kids doing their mandatory service after high school and are having this absolutely horrific experience in a war that is really a catastrophe for Israel in many ways. And in the middle of the catastrophe, this Canadian poet shows up and sings them, you know, bird on the Wire. And the, the hallucinatory nature of that experience, just the sheer strangeness of the experience really stuck with them. And it, it's a major theme of, of the book, just how, how weird it all was.

Bradley Morgan (9:44)

Yeah. And those stories make the book so incredibly rich. And I'm glad you had the opportunity to do that.

Matty Friedman (9:51)

That's what I was hoping that. I think it would have. It would have been a pretty bare book if it had just been about Colin. And it's really. It's a book about music, and it's a book about this great performer who really is, I think, one of the great musical figures of, you know, of this. Of the last half of the 20th century. But it's a book about war, and it's a book about young people who are kind of thrown into a very scary and kind of crazy situation. And the book. It's a short book, but I think it ends up being about a few different things. And that happens because the story allows us both to talk about this visitor, this foreign performer, and his music and his own very interesting journey. But it also allows us to talk about the people who were standing in the desert, hearing him play. And that meeting of art and war, I think, is a very potent one. And I think it's a very potent one, not just in this story, but in any case, where we have an artist dropped into a war zone or an artist kind of trying to grapple with the realities of war, we might think of Picasso painting that famous painting, Guernica, or other artists. And I find the electricity of that meeting between war and art very interesting and worth exploring.

Bradley Morgan (11:00)

And there's also a lot of richness with just the cultural identity as well. For example, you talk about three moments of observance and prayer that you link to Cohen in the beginning of the book. What are these three moments?

Matty Friedman (11:13)

So I guess the most important thing to know about the Yom Kippur war is that it breaks out on Yom Kippur, which for Jews is a really solemn day. It's a fast day. The name literally means the day of atonement. And it's a day where you're supposed to think about what you've done in the past year and look ahead to the coming year and kind of set your affairs in order with God as the new year begins. And. And the war breaks out on that day. And in fact, it breaks out not long after people across Israel were saying this one specific prayer, which in Hebrew is called unatane tokef, which is prayer that says, God is sitting on his throne. He's about to judge all of us. And we're about to, you know, he's about to decide in the coming year who will live and who will die. It's a pretty wild Prayer. The text of the prayer is pretty crazy and very graphic, and it goes on to list the many ways you can die. It's a prayer written in medieval times, obviously, in a time of great violence being experienced by the Jews of Europe. And, you know, it says he's going to decide who will live and who will die, who by water and who by fire, who by the sword, who by wild beasts, who by strangulation, who by earthquake. And it goes on like that. There's more. And not long after that prayer, which is kind of the height of the Yom Kippur service, not long after that prayer is recited in synagogues across Israel. At about midday on October 6, 1973, a war breaks out, and Israeli men are called up to their units and are sent off, and many of them die in the ways that are described in the prayer. And that's a really potent part of the Yom Kippur war to this day. The war which is perhaps the most traumatic moment in the country's history. After its independence in 1948, the war is commemorated on Yom Kippur and around Yom. Yom Kippur. For Israelis, the war and the. The holy day are wrapped up with each other and can't really be separated. So that prayer is one moment that is evoked in this story in part because Cohen ends up writing a very famous riff on that prayer. So Cohen has a song called who by Fire? Which is. Which is him riffing on that famous part of the Yom Kippur liturgy. And his version isn't exactly like the, you know, the medieval version, but it's corresponds with it and it maybe laughs at it a bit. And it's a very powerful version of the. Of the song. And it's written immediately after the war. It's clearly part of the way Cohen was processing this experience. It's very jarring and, I think, upsetting experience that he had in the Yom Kippur war. So that's one of the moments. Another moment is the reading of the book of Jonah, which is read once a year on Yom Kippur. And the Book of Jonah. People know, of course, the story of Jonah and the fish. In the actual book, it's not a whale, and kind of in the Western consciousness, it's been remembered as a whale, but in the book, it's just a big fish. And the way that Jonah, he's. He's a prophet. God is speaking to him. He wants to give him a mission, to go warn the sinful residents of the City of Nineveh, to repent from their evil ways and return to God. And Jonah doesn't want to do it. He's the only prophet in the Bible who tries to get out of doing what God wants him to do. And instead of doing, you know, going to Ninve to warn the people there, he basically hightails it. He tries to get the hell out of Dodge, and he goes down to Jaffa, according to the book, and he gets on a ship and he kind of flees to the Mediterranean, and he tries to get away from God. And the whole book, which is very short, is about how you cannot escape God. God tracks him down. He knows that he's on the boat. A storm comes up. Jonah's thrown overboard. He's swallowed by a fish. He's, you know, then kind of vomited out of the belly of the fish and ends up back on land and realizes that there's really no way to get to escape your fate. And that's one of the messages of Yom Kippur, which is that ultimately you will not be able to escape your fate. You can distract yourself with, you know, the usual pleasures that human beings pursue, and you can, you know, look at your iPhone or, you know, pursue, you know, different distractions like, you know, sex or food or. Or whatever. But ultimately, you're going to have to face the fact that you're immortal. And Yom Kippur kind of simulates that end, right? You're not allowed to eat. Sexual relations are forbidden on Yom Kippur. You're not allowed to turn on your phone. You're not allowed to use electricity at all. So the day is very much trying to force you to think like Jonah at the end of the Book of Jonah, which is just look at fate, realize you're not going to escape, and act accordingly. And that's a very powerful message. And it's reflected in Cohen's life in an interesting way, because Cohen also grows up, and he grows up in a synagogue in Montreal. He comes from a pretty traditional family. His grandfather's a rabbi, and he spends much of his life trying to escape. So he escapes this community in Montreal, and he ends up in Greenwich Village, and then he goes to London, and then he ends up on this Greek island called Hydra. And he. He kind of runs very far from this life that was intended for him when he was a kid growing up in Montreal. And ultimately he. He too, comes face to face with the knowledge that you cannot escape. And he writes absolutely stunning poetry and music on that theme. So that's another of the moments from the Yom Kippur liturgy that kind of come up in my brain when I think about the story of Kohen and Sinai. And the third and final moment is the blessing of the priests. There's a moment in the Yom Kippur service and a few other times during the year that the congregation and the synagogue is blessed by people who are called priests. Now, priests in Judaism have nothing to do with priests in Catholicism or in other religions. Judaism does not require an intermediary between you and God. So there's no necessity to have a priest present in order to pray. But there are certain Jewish families have preserved the tradition that they are descended from the priests in the Jerusalem Temple, which was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. And we know who these families are because they fathers have passed that status on down to their sons. And. And the word for priest in Hebrew is Cohen. And Leonard Cohen was a Cohen. He was a priest and he came from one of those families and one of their jobs, the main job of the priest in modern Judaism, because we don't have a temple anymore, so there's no need to sacrifice goats or cows or anything. The main job of the priest is to get up in front of the congregation and recite the priestly blessing, which is this really short 15 word Hebrew blessing that calls down div protection on the congregation. And that moment too is echoed in the war in a very interesting way. Cohen is grappling with his own Judaism, with his own Jewish identity, and with the knowledge that not only is he a Jew who is maybe not conforming to the expected behavior, he's not an observant Jew, and I think he feels the tension there. But he's also aware of the fact that he's a Cohen, he's a priest, he has a job in the community. In the job is to call down divine protection and bless the congregation and that he has this power with his words to protect people. And it's really interesting to think about why Leonard Cohen became a poet. Like, why he thought words had power. Well, if you grow up as a kid being told that you have the power to say a blessing that will protect the congregation, then you will believe that words have power. And I think there's definitely a line between the fact that he grows up, you know, in this family of priests and the fact that he becomes a poet. There's definitely a connection there. And he tries in the war tour to do a version of what he was supposed to do as a priest. He tries to Call down divine protection. He doesn't do it in the traditional way. He does it with a song called Lover, Lover, Lover. But that's also part of the story. So that was a long answer to a short question. But those are the three moments in the Yom Kippur liturgy that kind of reoccur in an interesting way in this story about 1973.

Bradley Morgan (19:23)

It was an absolutely great response and I thank you for sharing that. Because what makes this story so interesting is not only how little known it is, because even the most die hard Leonard Cohen fans aren't that familiar with it, but it's having the context of that cultural and social background that really provides a great framework for understanding this visit. So I appreciate you sharing that. We touch upon a lot of things about Cohen. So let's go and move to that because, you know, people want to know about Cohen. So around the time the war starts, he's living on the island of Hydra in Greece. And you quote him as saying a large part of his life was escaping what was happening in Cohen's life at that time.

Matty Friedman (20:02)

Cohen's living on Hijra, which is this beautiful island. And he found the island in the early 60s. There was a bohemian scene there. And he describes arriving on this island and just seeing the sunshine and just this kind of beautiful place that's full of light and air. And I mean, you're in Chicago. I grew up in Toronto. You know what a long, gray northern winter is like then. Cohen's from Montreal and you know, you just grow up with, you know, eight months of the year being gray and cold. And he found this place and he fell in love with it. And by the time the war came around in 1973, I think he felt trapped. And he. That's how he describes it. He's living with a woman named Suzanne, who is not the Suzanne from Cohen's famous song Suzanne, that was a different Suzanne. But he's living with a woman named Suzanne and they have a child, Cohen's first child, Adam, who's a year old at the time of the war. Cohen is 39. So it's kind of a prime age for a male crisis. And he's deeply depressed and he feels trapped and he's incredibly unhappy. And we know this because of this manuscript that he wrote. At the time. Cohen almost never spoke about the war, which made it bit tricky to do the research. And my breakthrough came when I found this manuscript that he'd written immediately after coming home from the war. It's 45 typed pages, very Weird, very raw kind of train of thought, often very obscene and very, very angry. And it's a manuscript that he obviously sticks in a box, and it's never published, and I was lucky enough to find it. And that manuscript really makes his state of mind clear. And his state of mind was really, really dark. And I think he feels an urgent need to escape his own life. And the war provides a way out. So, you know, one part of why he went to Israel for the Yom Kippur war is this draw to Israel. He feels deeply connected to the Jewish people and he understands that this is a crisis and he needs to be there. But. But a part of it is that he needs to escape. He needs to get out. And he. He sees our crisis in Israel as a way out of his own personal crisis, which I think might have been a more urgent crisis for. So when he hears that the war is broken out on the radio, he walks down the stairs from this little white kind of fisherman's cottage where he was living on Hijra, and he says goodbye to Suzanne and to their son and gets on a ferry to Athens and then gets on a flight to Israel. And that's how he ends up in Israel in October 1973, with the country in a state of existential dread.

Bradley Morgan (22:37)

So he went to Israel because he had a connection with the people there, but prior to that, he had a bit of a struggle with his faith. At prior to that, can you discuss some of the issues that he had with his Jewish faith?

Matty Friedman (22:51)

So Cohen grows up in the synagogue which is called Shar Hasamayim, which literally means the gate of heaven. And it's a really important synagogue in Montreal to this day. And he grows up immersed in the Jewish tradition. As I mentioned, his grandfather, his mother's father, was a very learned man, a rabbi. And he. Cohen grows up, up knowing the Bible and knowing the liturgy, and it's a big part of his life. And of course, it's obvious in his poetry if you know any Leonard Cohen music, you know, you know, from King David in, in the song Hallelujah to, to his song if it be your will, which is a very biblical prayer. It's. It's all over the place in Cohen. You can't really understand his music without understanding that he's immersed in. In the Jewish tradition and in other religious traditions as well. I mean, he had a very strong affinity for. For Catholicism and, and present Buddhism. So that's all. That's all going on. But when he, when he's a young man, He. He leaves the community and he gives a pretty amazing speech as he leaves the community. Kind of like leaves and slams the door. And he gives the speech which. Which you can actually hear on YouTube where he. It's 1964, and he's invited to address the Jewish community in Montreal. And he basically, you know, in beautiful language and kind of classic Leonard Cohen language, he rips into them and says, you know, we are supposed to be communicating with God. We're supposed to be open to receiving divine transmissions. We've forgotten all of that. And all we care about is ourselves and status and, you know, we're supposed to be vertical, but we're all horizontalists. And, yeah, it's a great. It's a great way of kind of summing up a pretty typical human problem, which he says we're all just kind of horizontal and we're knocking on our own doors. He says, and we're surprised that no one's answering. And, you know, he talks about how empty the ritual is and. And he says we just need to shut all this down until someone has a vision, until someone speaks to God. And he's just tired of the empty ritual and he leaves. And, you know, he ends up in all kinds of different places in the 60s and, you know, drugs and Greek islands and women and. But he never. He never quite leaves. He never quite leaves. I don't think he really wanted to completely leave. He never changes his name, right? He's got this really obviously Jewish name, Leonard Cohen, which he never changes, unlike someone like Bob Dylan, whose name, of course, is Robert Zimmerman. But. But Robert Zimmerman wants to be someone else. He's not going to be famous as Robert Zimmerman. So he invents a new identity for himself, which is Bob Dylan. This kind of all American folk singer. Leonard Cohen doesn't do that. Leonard Cohen never claims to be anything but a Jew from Montreal. And it's one of the reasons that I love Leonard Cohen, just because of that stubborn and kind of inconvenient clinging to his own religious identity. So he never leaves Judaism. And even in the years that he spends later on living in a Buddhist monastery, practicing Buddhism as a. He's very explicit that that does not replace Judaism, that Buddhism is more of a science for him than a religion. And that he says, yeah, I have a perfectly good religion and it's Judaism. So he struggles with religious observance. He's certainly not keeping, you know, 100% of the religious commandments, to put it lightly. But he's. He's deeply connected and he Never exits the tradition. And ultimately, at the end of his life, he dies in. In 2016, and he releases this incredible album not long before he dies. And the album includes a song which is, in many ways, his farewell song, whether he intended it to be or not. And it's called you'd Want It Darker. And that song includes another male voice singing in Hebrew, which is really rare for Cohen. And that voice belongs to the cantor at Sharashamayim at his childhood synagogue. So it's a return to the place where he grew up. And not long after that song came out, Cohen died and was buried in the cemetery of the synagogue in Montreal, and he's buried next to his parents. So Cohen never leaves. He goes far away, like Jonah, like the prophet Jonah. But ultimately, he. He realizes that you can't. You can't really leave. And he has this line from you Want It Darker, where he's talking to God, and he says, you know, if you're the dealer, I'm out of the game. You know, it all comes back around. It all comes back around. Exactly. And that's really the Cohen story.

Bradley Morgan (27:11)

You conducted a lot of research for this book. We talked about the typed manuscript that you found. But you also discussed that there were no army records of Cohen's visit, and he didn't keep a detailed journal, let alone really speak about this. What was your research process like when piecing together the timeline of the tour?

Matty Friedman (27:29)

So it started with me finding the Israelis, because very early on, I realized that Cohen had barely spoken about this. And I knew that I'd have to resolve this somehow because I needed, you know, some kind of indication of what Cohen thought about it all. But I had almost nothing. The scrap from an interview that he gave to a British music magazine called Zigzag after he came back. And here there were, you know, here and there, there were these little scraps of information, but. But he almost never spoke about it publicly, which in itself was interesting, because it was clearly a very significant experience for him. And the more I learned about how deep he'd gone into the war and how significant it had been for him and for the people who saw him, he was really at the front. Like, he was not playing at rear bases. He was on the front lines, and he was in danger. It just seemed stranger and stranger that he never mentioned it. And I began to piece together what had happened by finding soldiers who'd seen him. As you mentioned, there's no schedule of concerts. Like, I went to the Israeli army archive to see if there had Been some kind of list of concerts, you know, who was in charge of Leonard Cohen when he Was here in 1973? The answer is that no one was in charge. It was completely chaotic. No one was keeping records. The con. The country really thought it was about to lose the war. So people were not preoccupied with, you know, keeping track of Canadian poets at the front. They were preoccupied with other more pressing matters. And no one was known as keeping records. So beside a few kind of beautiful photographs that I found in the archives, there was nothing. And officially, the tour never, never happened. So I managed to piece together some of it just by finding soldiers. And then I had this breakthrough, which I really owe to a librarian at the McMaster University Library in Hamilton, Ontario, named Chris Long. I had a tip from another writer that there was a manuscript in the McMaster Library, and a crisis dove into the archive and came up with this incredible Cohen manuscript that was exactly what I was looking for, which was this. It's not a journal and it's not a diary, which is frustrating for me as a journalist. Like, I want Leonard Cohen to give me a day by day, you know, play by play of what happened in the war. That's not the kind of guy Cohen was. He was a poet. He wasn't a lowly journalist like me. Like, he was, you know, he wouldn't stoop to actually describing events a lot, although the manuscript ends up being very, very close to events. And you can. We can cross check a lot of what he wrote, and it's a very immediate and quite accurate account of what had happened, but it's coded in this very literary language and it's often kind of hard to understand. But the manuscript was the breakthrough because the manuscript allows us to understand Cohen's state of mind, which was, again, dark and unhappy at that time. It kind of gives us the texture of his visit and allows us to really tell the story from his.

Bradley Morgan (30:09)

It.

Matty Friedman (30:09)

From his perspective and through his own eyes. And the manuscript was so interesting that at a few points in the book, I just let Cohen tell the story. I felt like I would be sinning against Leonard Cohen if I paraphrased pages and pages of Cohen. We have original Cohen material that has never been published, and we can hear Leonard Cohen telling us the story in his own voice. So at a few points in the book, I just let him talk. And you get that kind of Leonard Cohen cadence on this very unique language and you get his take on the whole thing, which is. Is fascinating and weird and sometimes quite upsetting and, and. And Uncomfortable because he's in a dark place in his own life. He's at that time, I think, you know, there's, he's, he's kind of a narcissist and he treats women in a way that's, you know, by our, by our standards of today, completely unacceptable. And what, what saves him is that he's aware of who he is. He has no illusion, illusions about who he is. He's not caught up, caught up pr. He's. No one is harsher about Leonard Cohen than Leonard Cohen in that manuscript. And that of course is one thing that redeems him. And we also know that ultimately Cohen is going to find his way to a kind of grace at the end of his life. And we're going to have this performer that we all remember from the last incarnation of Leonard Cohen where he's this elegant gentleman who seems reconciled to the world and grateful for the love of his fans and you know, this kind of 75 year old guy in a fedora standing on the stage of a stadium, you know, facing 50,000 people and just smiling, smiling. And that's the cone we remember. So we forgive him the sins of his younger self.

Bradley Morgan (31:52)

So Cohen feels motivated to go. He goes to Tel Aviv, where he had been before a year prior, and that didn't go well. So this time around he's hanging around some cafes until he gets invited by some musicians to go to the front lines. Could you describe what those first performances were like and how the soldiers responded?

Matty Friedman (32:09)

Cohen seems to have gone to Israel without intending to play for soldiers, which is one of the surprises of, of my research. I assume that that's why he went, but it's pretty clear that he had no idea what he was going to do. He just needed to go, he needed to be there and he needed to get out of his own life. And he went to Israel without a plan. And he told people that he wanted to volunteer on a kibbutz, maybe pick grapefruit, you know, help out while the men had been called up for the war. And he just bums around the country for a few days and meets some interesting people. And we have these great descriptions of it in, in his manuscript. And then he's in a cafe in Tel Israel's a really small place at that time. It's barely 3 million people and there's really a very small bohemian scene that revolves around these two cafes in Tel Aviv. And he's at one of them and he's recognized by a few Israeli musicians who happen to be in the Cafe. And these were some of the most famous musicians in Israel, but Cohen had no idea who they were. And they're sitting at a table and one of them recognizes Leonard Cohen, and he's a big deal in Israel. He's an international star. And he performed in Israel, as you mentioned, the previous year, and people knew who he was. And it was. It didn't make any sense that he was in Israel in the middle of the Yom Kippur War. So one of the singers doesn't believe that it's Leonard Cohen. And the other singer says, no, it is Leonard Cohen. I'm going to prove it to you. And he walks over to his table and says, are you Leonard Cohen? And when Leonard Cohen confirms that he is in fact Leonard Cohen, they convince him to come with them to play for troops. There's a tradition in Israel that if you're a musician, when war breaks out, you go to the front. It's kind of like penance for not fighting in the war. You take your guitar and you go and you try and raise morale at the front. And going to the front for Israelis does not involve flying halfway around the world, which it does for Americans. You drive to the front, it takes an hour or two. The country is tiny and the fighting is really close to the major cities. So they just basically piled everyone into a Ford Falcon, which belonged to one of the singers, O Cleve, who was at the height of his fame at that time. They find Cohen a guitar. Cohen had come without a guitar, which is, I think, indicative of the fact that he didn't intend to perform. And by the way, that same year, he'd already announced that he was retiring from music. So he announced that his music career was over. And I don't think he came as a rock star. I don't think he thought that's who he was anymore. So they find him a guitar and they set off to play for soldiers. And the first stop is this air force base, which is not far from Tel Aviv. It's called Khatsor. And the air force at that time, which is pretty close to the beginning of the war, is getting decimated. It's the worst week in the history of the Israeli Air Force. And the Air Force had a lot of bravado. And the Six Day War had been won by the Air Force basically in a matter of hours. And the Yom Kippur War was very different. The Arab armies had been supplied with these new Russian missiles called SAMs, and the Israeli planes were getting shot out of the sky at A rate that was shocking. It was so shocking that it was being hidden from the public. So these air force bases were dark places. People were traumatized, people were afraid. And Cohen shows up at Hazor and he plays a show with this improvised band of Israeli musicians. And the show is so successful that not all the soldiers can get in to see him. So he's playing for pilots, for air crew, and they pack the theater at the base and there's just too many people, they can't all fit in. So the commanders of the base ask him to play again and they do two shows at Khatsorin in the middle, in the intermission between the two shows, he writes one of his most durable songs, which is Love Her Lover, Love her, which is actually written at this airbase. From the air base, they get on a transport aircraft and fly down to the front in the Sinai Desert. Desert. And then we have a period of time we can't. It's hard to nail down exactly how long because it's hard to find dates. But we have Cohen traveling around the front basically, you know, in a jeep, stopping wherever they found soldiers. He. The descriptions are quite amazing. I mean, this is not like a Bob Hope type tour. It's completely disorganized and they're just driving along on desert road. They see, see, you know, some artillery pieces parked in the sand. They stopped the jeep, they asked the soldiers do they want to hear some music? And if the soldiers were into it and not all the soldiers were, they would, the musicians would get out of the jeep and they'd build a stage out of ammunition crates and stand on the crates and they didn't have an amp a lot of the time. And if it was night, they'd use the jeep headlights as spotlights and they would play, you know, Suzanne, they'd play Bird on the Wire, Sisters of Mercy. I mean, they'd play the, this Cohen music, this really foreign sounding Cohen music to these Israeli soldiers engaged in the Middle Eastern war. So the descriptions of the concerts are quite, quite incredible and made a huge impression on the soldiers who encountered this international star in the middle of a war in the middle of the desert. And it's really an incredible musical moment because it's really, it's art shorn of all the, you know, like no one was selling tickets and no one was selling records and everyone was completely sober. Right? No one's stoned, no one's drunk. It's not a dorm room, it's. It's not even entertainment, really. Something very deep is Happening. It's a matter of life and death. And when you hear the, the descriptions of the concerts, you get the impression that there have never really been concerts. Those ones in October 1973.

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Bradley Morgan (37:54)

So you were saying earlier that when an Israeli musician is asked to go to the front lines, they go. And some of the musicians that you profile include artists such as Brothers and Sisters, Maddy Caspie and Chocolate Mint Gum. What kind of songs were they performing as compared to Leonard Cohen?

Matty Friedman (38:13)

One of the interesting things about this story was diving into the world of Israeli pop music at that time because Cohen happens to be here at a moment of great cultural change in Israel. The Yom Kippur War really changes, it changes Israeli politics, it changes Israeli society, it shatters Israelis faith in their leaders and it really changes music because the music of Israel up to that point had really been kind of on message Zionist ideological music. And the tone was really set by the government. And a lot of the most popular songs were performed by soldiers. The military had these kind of entertainment troops kind of bands that would go around singing songs, these very like upbeat accordion heavy songs and performing skits. And that was very much the culture of the country until 1973. And then things get dark and Israelis start using the communal we a lot less after the Yom Kippur war. So it's not really that kibbutz country anymore. And the singers aren't talking about we, they're talking about I. It becomes about the individual and kind of people looking into their souls and, and Leonard Cohen's at the moment that it changes. So the music that other musicians were playing at the front was very different than Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen really sounded. I mean he was singing in English of course, which was a big difference. But he was also playing a completely different kind of music than was popular in Israel at that time. But interestingly, the music that Israelis come to love after 1973 sounds a lot like Leonard Cohen. So there's really a rise of Cohen esque artists. People like, like Shalom Chanokh or Mayor ARIEL these singer songwriters, these kind of maybe brooding, very literate, very deep singer songwriters who are not really interested in the communal we and not really interested in raising anyone's morale. They're not kind of a part of the national effort in any conscious way. They're talking about, but, you know, the individual human and the struggles of the individual human in the world about love, about disappointment, things that would be familiar to people like Leonard Cohen. So that's one thing that makes this story so interesting, which is that it's not just that Leonard Cohen shows up and then leads, and things go on. In Israel, the fall of 1973 is a moment of huge cultural change, and it's reflected in music. And Cohen is there in a very interesting way at precisely that moment.

Bradley Morgan (40:39)

There are so many ways that this book is so rich. And one of those ways is that you often share personal anecdotes in the book about serving in Israeli infantry. And one of those anecdotes is about seeing a pop group performing a song in faux military uniforms and holding plastic guns. And you write about feeling resentment about being there, but later feeling empathy for the singer. And I'm wondering, since there's a shared nationality between the. The performers and the soldiers, do you think the performers feel a sense of obligation to convey patriotism, even enforced, you know, an obligation that would be different than what a Canadian folk singer known for songs about relationships would feel?

Matty Friedman (41:16)

There's definitely a sense of commitment among Israeli artists, and it's true to this day, although to a lesser extent, I think, than in the 1960s or 70s, when the country was a more ideological place. But at a moment of crisis, Israelis feel committed to each other. I mean, it's a really small country, and because we have a draft, the soldiers in the. In the army are not removed from society in the way that they are in the United States or in Canada, where it's a volunteer military. And you often meet Americans who've never met a serving member of the military. It's almost a separate class in the society. But because we have a compulsory draft here, the soldiers are your brother and your neighbor and your nephew and your cousin. And when they're in crisis, you want to go help. And if what you have is a guitar and a few popular songs, I mean, that is what you're gonna do.

Bradley Morgan (42:02)

So.

Matty Friedman (42:02)

So it's still. It's still true, I think, that. That artists feel that. That commitment. The incident that you mentioned, which I mentioned in the book, is really one that's stayed with me. It was Just a weird little episode. And we'd been serving in South Lebanon in this very strange guerrilla war. I mean, I don't even want to call it a war. It's not a war compared to the Yom Kippur War, but it's a kind of. It's a war like Iraq or Afghanistan kind of a strange entanglement. And it was enough of a war for me as a Canadian teenager who kind of blundered into it in the 90s. And it was scary at times. And we came back from this operational service inside Lebanon, and we had this week of RNR and the army for very obscure reasons. Like many things that happened in the army, they brought us this singer, this pop singer who had a hit at that time, which was. It was like this. This hit. It was like a pop hit full of, like, double entendres. And the song's lyric was, unload your weapon, my soldier. Unload your weapon in my body. I'm not making it up. That's a direct translation of the song. So she performed it, and she was like this kind of Britney Spears type character, and she had these two male dancers who had, like, faux military uniforms on and little plastic guns, and she was doing her thing on this little stage, and they were dancing, and. But we were real soldiers, and we just come down from something real. And I remember just standing, staring at them, thinking, like, what the hell is this shit? Like, who thought this was a good idea? And just, like, feeling disdain for her and for these dancers and for our commanders who thought for some reason that this was something that we wanted to see. As an older person and as someone who's dealt with the story of Leonard Kahn, I feel a lot of sympathy for her because she was asked to do this or she volunteered to do this, and it wasn't her fault. And when I tried to imagine how Cohen felt on stage or, you know, standing on some ammunition crates in Sinai, facing these men and in some cases, women who were facing death and who were, you know, demonstrating credible heroism and had just seen terrible things. You know, there must have been a real feeling of inadequacy there and a real question in his mind about what he was doing there and what he could possibly have to offer to. To these people. And. And I kind of feel for him in that situation. And that made me reconsider my previously very critical attitude toward that PO Pop singer who. Who had to do her routine for a bunch of dirty and tired infantry soldiers in the 90s. And that's why I thought that episode would be worth, you know, a short paragraph in this book about Leonard Cohen.

Bradley Morgan (44:35)

Well, it's just an interesting story because you tie it into this idea about you. You reference a study about soldiers, American soldiers in Vietnam, and what they were listening to and the music they were not. They were listening to was music with themes similar to Lara Cohen's and not. Not Credence Clearwater or Jimi Hendrix or any other soundtrack of the 60s that you hear in media today. So I thought that was just fascinating in its own right.

Matty Friedman (45:03)

So that study about the music of GIs in Vietnam, I saw it discussed in a really interesting book called We Gotta get out of this Place, the soundtrack of the Vietnam War, which is by Craig Hansen Werner and Doug Bradley. It came out in 2015. And they talk about, about the kind of the misconception of what soldiers in Vietnam were listening to as interpreted by war movies made about Vietnam. So if you see the war movies and you think they were listening to this heavily political music, this kind of anti war music, when in fact what they really like to hear was leaving on a jet plane or kind of really, kind of almost cheesy music about love and longing. And that's what they were actually listening to in the war. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, when I was in the military, we certainly didn't want to hear any heavy music music with like really deep political messages. We just wanted to escape reality for a few minutes with some, you know, it's some sentimental pop music that, you know, would be probably not taken seriously by. By serious critics of music. So I think that's true. That's true here too. There was something very resonant obviously about what Cohen was playing for, for the soldiers. And I guess, and we have to mention that he didn't speak modern Hebrew. He knew kind of synagogue Hebrew, but he didn't know modern Hebrew. And many of the soldiers presumably did not know English and couldn't understand the lyrics of his songs. But there was something about his performance and just something about who he was and his stage presence, which was very unique and very empathetic. There was some real connection that was formed in those concerts and it might have been deeper than the lyrics, maybe even deeper than the songs themselves.

Bradley Morgan (46:38)

Let's talk about one of those songs that created that connection. We had mentioned a couple times earlier, one of his most well known known songs, Lover Lover Lover, from the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony. That song originated from the performances on the. On the desert front lines, but it included an extra Verse that was never later on the final version. And it kind of upset some of the soldiers. Can you talk about the song's origins and that verse?

Matty Friedman (47:02)

So Cohen shows up at this Air Force base that we mentioned before at Ator. And in between two concerts, he writes a new song. And it's the song Lover, Lover, Lover. And that's a song that. It's not as famous as Hallelujah, of course, but it was a song that he played throughout his life, until the very end of his life. And it's really kind of a beloved Cohen song and was written on. On this base. And it includes lyrics that are very hard to understand unless we understand that he's writing it, you know, for an audience of Israeli Air Force personnel who are, you know, facing, you know, imminent death or captivity. And there's a line in that song that says, may the spirit of this song may it up pure and free. May it be a shield for you, a shield against the enemy. So he's kind of offering them this song as a kind of amulet or something that might protect them as they head out in their. In their aircraft to risk everything in this. In this war. But the most interesting thing about. About the song, which I was very surprised to discover, is that it has a verse that disappeared along the way. And a soldier who heard Cohen play it in Sinai. I remembered hearing this verse, and he said, I'll never forget it. Cohen sang this verse and he called us his brothers. He called the Israeli soldiers his brothers, and that meant a lot to them. Israel felt very isolated, and these guys had been kind of thrown into this kind of wild set of circumstances on the far side of the Suez Canal in the war. And they meet Leonard Cohen, and he called them his brothers, and it really stuck with him. But there's no verse in Lover, Lover, Lover, in which he calls the Israeli soldiers his brother, others. So I initially assumed that the soldier was mistaken, as many people are in their memories of wars or in their memories of absolutely anything. And I just kind of chalked it up to misremembered events. And then I was lucky enough to get access to Cohen's notebooks, which are kept by his family trust by the Cohen estate in Los Angeles. And after many efforts, because of the kind of the generosity of Robert Corey, who is Cohen's last manager and who runs the estate, I was given access to the notebook that Cohen kept at the time of the war, which include scraps of songs and impressions and people's phone numbers and names. And going through these notebooks, I Found the first draft of Lover, Lover, Lover, which was pretty exciting in itself. And I found the missing verse. And the missing verse goes like this. I went down to the desert to help my brothers fight. I knew that they weren't wrong. I knew that they weren't right. But bones must stand up straight and walk and blood must move around and men go making ugly lines across the holy ground. It's a pretty good verse. But in the version of the song that is released on an album a few months after the war, that verse is gone. And in fact, if you look at the. The draft of that verse, you'll see that he's scratched out the words my brothers. So he has this very deep kind of tribal identification with the Israelis as he arrives and takes part in the war. And then as the war progresses, as he steps back and he realizes, I think, that he's a universal poet. He can't be perceived as being on one side of a war. He's got to be bigger than the Israeli side of the Yom Kippur War. He's got to be bigger than the Yom Kippur war. So in the draft, he scratches out the words my brothers. So that whole line to help my brothers fight is gone. And instead it reads, I went down to the desert to watch the children fight. So he's removing himself from the circumstances. He's not. Not. He's no longer helping his brothers fight. He's watching the children fight. And even that seems to have been too much for him. And he ultimately erases the whole. The whole verse, which doesn't appear in the song. And in 1976, you can find this on YouTube, he's presenting the song to an audience in France, and he acknowledges that he wrote the song in the Yom Kippur War, but claims that he wrote it for the Egyptians and for the Israelis in that order. So he's remembered, I think, that his job is to address the universal soul and that maybe he got caught up too much in his own tribal affiliations and his own Jewish identity. And you can really see him struggling with it during the war. Who am I? What is my place here? What is my connection to these people? And the song Lover, Lover, Lover is a great illustration of that.

Bradley Morgan (51:16)

Well, it's interesting because he was motivated to go there, and he calls them brothers and then changes the children, which I would want to understand what his thought process. Process was to go from brothers to children, because I would think that there's probably some negative connotation there as well.

Matty Friedman (51:34)

It seems A bit condescending. I mean, it certainly feels like from being in the thick of it with his equals, he is now kind of a parent watching children playing in the sandbox. And maybe that's why he erased the whole verse. I mean, maybe just felt that he kind of tried to amend his position in the event and maybe decided that that wasn't honest either and that the whole thing was better erased. So it might have been an act of honesty on Cohen's part to erase the verse and just kind of avoid the problem altogether.

Bradley Morgan (52:07)

Well, it never quite leaves him because you write about 43 years later, after the war, he comes back to Israel to perform, and he refers to Israel as his myth home. And from reading this book and hearing your other interviews, this was a very big concert. It was a big deal. And Cohen is quoted as saying it was like being in love with someone you don't really know. Can you share with the concept of what the myth home is and what.

Matty Friedman (52:31)

It meant for Cohen? When Cohen comes to Israel in 73, he says at one point in this manuscript, I'm going to my myth home. And that's a very complicated idea. And it's. It's hard to unpack it. And it's also hard to read Cohen's mind. I would love to ask him what exactly he meant by it. But certainly for many Jewish people, Israel is a kind of mythical home. It's the homeland of the Jewish people. It's where the nation is formed. It's where the Bible takes place, at least most of it. And. And at the same time, it's a foreign country where, you know, if you're a Jewish person living in America, you've never lived in Israel, and it's quite possible you've never even visited it. And yet you have this idea that you're connected to it in some way. And that makes coming here quite complicated because. Because it's. It's a foreign country and it's a country in the Middle east, and it's very. It's very kind of strange for. For visitors. And, and Cohen experiences all of that. So he has the idea that this is not a normal country. He's not just going just, you know, he's not going to Poland or Serbia or France or Canada. He's going to a place that exists in the realm of myth. And, and that makes visiting complicated because, of course, Israel doesn't really exist in the realm of myth. It's a real country on planet. On planet, Planet Earth. And you see Cohen grappling with that he kind of comes in, I think, maybe feeling very idealistic. And that's reflected in that expression of, you know, brotherly love for the Israelis that you have in that verse of lover, lover, lover. And as time goes on, he's. He's increasingly shaken by the war. And there's a moment that we, we have in the manuscript where you can really see things change for him, where he describes being at an air force base, an Egyptian base that's been captured by the Israelis. And a helicopter lands and there are wounded soldiers on this helicopter that are being evacuated. These are soldiers who are really, really kind of banged up really bad, and some of them are dying. And he writes in the manuscript, this is unbearable. These are Jewish soldiers who are wounded and dying. And he's clearly very upset by it. And someone comes up to him and says, leonard, don't worry, these are Egyptian soldiers. And he's relieved for a moment and then he catches himself and he says in his manuscript, I hate this relief. This is blood on your hands. The idea that it's okay that these are Egyptians and not Israelis is, you know, it's in contrast to everything Leonard Cohen holds dear. You know, the idea that some people are, you know, more worthy of your compassion than others. And I think it's at that moment that he begins to step back, that he understands that he's kind of in a problematic position as a poet and he. He begins kind of cooling on the whole thing. And I think that's one reason that he doesn't talk about this a lot after he leaves.

Bradley Morgan (55:17)

Cohen, after the war, experienced several career defining moments and achievements and becomes the man who we know him as today. The smiling old man in the fedora, as you say. How did that experience performing on the front lines shape his artist industry?

Matty Friedman (55:32)

It definitely gets him back on the horse. In 1973, I mean, he'd announced that he was retiring and he seemed despondent about his. His work. He kind of lost faith in his art. And immediately after the war, he puts out a phenomenal album called New Skin for the Old Ceremony, which has Lover, Lover, Lover on it. And it has. If it, it has. Here, I'm just going back, right? It has Lover, Lover, Lover on it, and it has who by Fire on it, and it has Chelsea Hotel on it. So clearly something happened in Sinai that restored his faith in his, in his art. And he went in looking for inspiration and hoping that somehow he'd be able to sing again. And it happened. It happened in a very surprising way. He can sing again after the war. And it's quite possible that these concepts, concerts which are a matter of life and death and which involve no commercial gain for anyone, it's possible that those concerts were kind of a restorative experience for him. That's what seems to have happened. So that's important because if con had flared out in 1973 at age 39, that would not have been surprising. Most rock stars don't make it to 39, let alone past 39. But we would not have most of the great Cohen songs that we know. We wouldn't have Hallelujah and we wouldn't have Daniel Dance Me to the End of Love and wouldn't have it be your Will. And we wouldn't have Anthem and, you know, long list of incredible Cohen songs that really change popular music. So that's one way that the war affects him. It, it resurfaces in his work throughout the years. Of course, there's who by Fire, but there's also mention of it in, in a song that he writes in the 80s, a kind of oblique reference to the war. And ultimately he comes back to Israel in 2009 during this incredible Resurrection tour where he goes back on the road as an old man. And the war is present in that concert, even though it's not mentioned. But when I heard that Cohen was coming in 2009, I was here and I just couldn't understand why Israelis were so excited. I didn't realize that Cohen was this venerated character in Israel. I'm from Canada, so of course he's a venerated character in Canada. But I didn't realize that Israelis felt the same kind of relationship with him. And yet people went nuts. The phone lines crashed when the tickets went on sale. And the, they, they got 50,000 people out in Tel Aviv to see Cohen in the country. That's pretty small. And I think had there been more tickets available, they would have sold more tickets. And a big part of what was going on was that memory that in 1973, at one of the darkest moments in this country's history, Cohen came and, you know, no one made him come. Most artists didn't come and, and he did. And Israelis remembered it. And a lot of the characters in this book, the soldiers who'd seen Cohen as 18 year old, 19 year old, a military personnel, were at that concert in 2009. Now they were grandparents, now they themselves were in their 60s and 70s. And it was a reconnection. It was kind of this incredible reconnection with, with an artist who everyone remembered from that dark moment in 1973.

Bradley Morgan (58:37)

That's so great. And I bet that concert was absolutely wonderful.

Matty Friedman (58:42)

I think Cohen thought so too. It was almost a religious moment, a according to the people who were there. And it ends with Cohen reciting the priestly blessing that we were discussing earlier in this really incredible, incredible moment, which he didn't do it at any of the other concerts. It's almost midnight and he's done this three hour show. He was in his mid-70s and he was just giving everything that he had. And at the very end of the show, he shocks everyone by moving to Hebrew and reciting this blessing that he'd been taught as a child in the synagogue in Montreal, the priestly blessing. And you can find that on YouTube too. And you can hear 50,000 people in the stadium shouting Amen. They SHOUT AMEN IN Hebrew when Cohen finishes the blessing. So it was more than an ordinary concert.

Bradley Morgan (59:34)

Mati, this has been a really great and insightful conversation and I really appreciate you joining me today, today.

Matty Friedman (59:41)

Bradley, thanks so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.

Bradley Morgan (59:44)

And I just want to say I absolutely just love this book. And to write about a missing piece of a legendary icon's history and to do so with such personal, cultural and social elements intertwined I think is a really difficult thing. And you, you put out an amazing book and it's just so admirable. And I believe that you deserve every distinction you get for it.

Matty Friedman (60:08)

Thank you so much. That's so kind of it. It's lovely to get that kind of feedback. Yeah, I mean, it's really great to hear it. I'm really, really glad and thanks for bringing the book to your, to your audience and hope more people read it. And I had fun writing it, so I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Bradley Morgan (60:28)

My name is Bradley Morgan and you've been listening to new books and music with my guest today, Maddie Fried Friedman. His book is who by Fire? Leonard Cohen and the Sinai and is published by Spiegel and Grau.