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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Podcast Extra: Looking Back with Leonard Cohen
00:26:32
In Leonard Cohen’s last interview, he discusses his career, his spiritual influences, and what he is doing to prepare for death.
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- [00:00]
David Remnick
This is a special podcast episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
- [00:06]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
Like a bird on the wire Like a drunken in midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.
- [00:27]
David Remnick
At the end of the summer, I went to spend a couple of days with the great songwriter Leonard Cohen. I knew that Cohen was very, very sick, and he had made it clear he wasn't going to be with us for very much longer. He'd been avoiding interviews for the past four, five, six years, but once he agreed to talk to me, we talked for days. And I'm especially grateful that I had the chance to visit when I did, because this week we heard that Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82. Cohen once wrote a song called the Tower of Song, in which he compared himself really unfavorably to Hank Williams, but along with other great masters. Bob Dylan, certainly Joni Mitchell, Kanye west, everybody's got their own list. Leonard Cohen is way up there in the ranks of American song and songwriters. When I visited him in Los Angeles, he was suffering from cancer, although he was keeping that very private. He was in deep pain from compression fractures in his spine, and he had to sit in a big blue medical chair to ease that pain. He was very thin already, maybe 105, 110 pounds. But I've got to say that he was in a buoyant mood for a man who knew where life was taking him. He knew exactly where he was going and he was headed there in a hurry. And at the same time, he was incredibly gracious. The most gracious host this side of my mother.
- [01:45]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Would you like a few slices of cheese and olives?
- [01:47]
David Remnick
No, I'm good, thank you.
- [01:48]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
You're cool.
- [01:49]
David Remnick
Cohn had just finished up a new album and it's out now, called you'd Want It Darker. He had recorded almost all of it sitting in that medical chair right there in the living room. A really modest space with just a couple of guitars, some recording equipment, a keyboard. And even as our talk, like the album itself, never really strayed far from the end of things, he knew where he was headed. His sense of humor and his vicious self mockery was always present.
- [02:17]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Sorry, darling, could you bring my hearing aid? Yes, of course. I can't hear a fuck all.
- [02:25]
David Remnick
Cohen grew up in Montreal in a prominent Jewish family, a well to do established family. There his family ran a clothing concern. And it was almost as an homage to his family business that Cohen, even in the 60s, always wore beautiful well cut suits, including a tailored dark blue number that he had on when I saw him. When Leonard was nine years old, his father died. And that event became a kind of origin story for his career as a writer and as someone who believed in writing as an almost sacramental act.
- [02:58]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
My father's funeral was held in our house. We came down the stairs. The coffin was in the living room, and it was open. It was winter, you know. And I was thinking, like, must be hard to dig. I went to the plot. I saw my father buried. And then I came back to the house and I went to his closet and I found a bow tie. I cut one of the wings of the bow tie off, and I wrote something on it. I think it was some kind of farewell to my father. I don't remember what I wrote. And I buried it in the backyard. It was just some attraction to a ritual response to an impossible event. I'm leaving the table I'm out of the game I don't know the people in your picture frame if I ever loved you oh, no, no It's a crying shame if I ever loved you.
- [04:45]
David Remnick
You want it darker? The last album is saturated with thoughts of the end of death. But con subjects were always there from the first, the big things. Death, love, sex, God. And always undercut by that razor y wit. And as a young man, Cohn wanted to be a writer. Above all, a poet. And he was following less in the path of Hank Williams or Bob Dylan in those days than he was in the path of Allen Ginsberg or Frank o'. Hara.
- [05:13]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
His blood on my arm is warm as a bird his heart in my hand is heavy as lead his eyes.
- [05:23]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
Through my eyes shine brighter than love.
- [05:26]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Oh, send out the raven ahead of the dove.
- [05:31]
David Remnick
That's Cohen reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York 50 years ago. But around that time, it came clear that he'd never make a real living as a writer. And surrounded in New York by talents and early friends like Lou Reed and Judy Collins and Patti Smith, he wrote the songs for his first record, which came out in 1967.
- [05:53]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.
- [06:00]
David Remnick
Like the best poets, he was writing directly from his inner life and from the life all around him. If you grew up with him in Montreal, you also knew the places and the people in songs like Suzanne. And no one else seemed to have quite the same precision, the same irony.
- [06:15]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just first, when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer that you've always been her.
- [06:38]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Lover.
- [06:42]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
And you want to travel with her and you want to travel blind and you know that she will trust you for you've touched her her perfect body with your mind.
- [06:58]
David Remnick
What Leonard Cohen found really difficult was performance the stage. There was something about getting up on stage that he found almost false. He said that he felt like a chained parrot up there sometimes. And the stage fright could be paralyzing.
- [07:14]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I'm scared enough as it is up here, and I think something's wrong every time you begin to applaud.
- [07:21]
David Remnick
On one tour, he says he went through three bottles of wine a night before going on St. Chateau Latour. In fact, it went so well with the music, he said, still, the booze and the drugs didn't always really help with the anxiety.
- [07:36]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I hope you bear with me. These. These songs are kind of. They become meditations for me. And sometimes I just don't get high on it and I feel that I. I'm cheating you. So I'll try it again, okay? And if it doesn't work, I'll stop in the middle.
- [07:53]
David Remnick
In Israel in 1972, he left the stage when he felt like the show just wasn't going well. He went back to the dressing room and he dropped some acid. And then he heard the audience singing to him. It was really singing to him.
- [08:07]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
The audience had sensed that I was disappointed. I mean, how sweet. How sweet can an audience possibly be?
- [08:18]
David Remnick
It was singing back to you.
- [08:19]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
They started singing Avenu Sholom Aleichem, you know. And I'm hearing this in the dressing room. They're singing it to me, and they mean to be singing it to me. So I go out and I start singing Solang Narayana.
- [08:42]
David Remnick
That's one of his most famous songs about an ex girlfriend. Meanwhile, the acid starts to kick in. He's hallucinating.
- [08:55]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I see Marianne right in front of me.
- [08:59]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
I'd like to try.
- [09:01]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
And I start crying. I turn around and band is crying too.
- [09:14]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
Before I let you take me home Come on now. So long, Marianne. It's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.
- [09:41]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
And then it turned out into something quite comic. The entire audience turned into one Jew, which is enough for anyone. And this Jew was saying, what else can you show me, kid? I've seen a lot of things. And this don't move the dial. Entire skeptical side of our tradition manifested as an actual gigantic being judging me hardly begins to describe the operation. I mean, the sense of invalidation and Irrelevance that I felt was authentic because those feelings. And I don't. I'm not unique in this respect, but those feelings have always circulated around my psyche, you know, which is, where do you get to stand up and speak for what and who? And, you know, how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say to anybody? I think it really, really invited me to deepen my practice, like, dig in deeper, whatever it was, you know, like, take this thing a little bit more seriously, you know.
- [11:26]
David Remnick
Bob Dylan once told Cohen that his songs were like prayers. And in fact, many of Cohen's songs and poems lean heavily on Scripture, on the psalms in particular, as much as they do on the American songbook or on his heroes in country and folk music. Cohen was very reluctant, though, with me to analyze the religious aspect of his work or performance. He didn't like the suggestion that he might try to give his work a spiritual purpose or heft, even if plenty of his fans had seen him almost as a religious figure.
- [11:55]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Because I don't like to be identified with Jewish thought in my own mind, I know that I'm deeply conditioned by these. One of the great themes of Kabbalistic thought is the idea that the thrust of Jewish activity is the repair of God. God in creating, the world dispersed itself. The creation is a catastrophe. There are pieces of him or her or it that are everywhere in fact. And the specific task of the Jew is to repair the face of God. The prayers are to remind God that it was once a harmonious unity. The birds, they sang at the break of day Start again I heard them say don't dwell on what is passed away or what is yet to be yeah, the war, they will be fought again the holy dove, she will be cut again Bought and sold and bought again the dove is never free Ring the bell that still can ring Forgive your perfect offering There is a crack a crack in everything that's how the light gets in.
- [14:24]
David Remnick
Is, is your view of performance, especially in these last X years. It's been a religious dimension that's self conscious.
- [14:34]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
It's not self conscious, you know. I only know that if I write enough verses and keep discarding the slogans, even the hip ones, even the subtle ones, that something will emerge that represents. I've often said that the reason my writing is so slow is that I have to finish the verse before I discard it.
- [15:10]
David Remnick
But as I understand it, also for a lot of songs that have, say, three or four verses that are on the recording or published on the page, there are 60 or 70 or 80.
- [15:22]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Verses, some as many as that, but all with at least 10 or 20. Bring the bell that still can ring Forget your perfect alpha rain Like a.
- [15:48]
David Remnick
Lot of artists of his time, Cohen was a seeker. He dabbled in everything from Scientology to dancing with the Hare Krishnas. But he stuck with spiritual life in a way that few of his peers ever did. He was serious. It was never a hobby. In fact, he spent long stretches at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains outside of Los Angeles with a teacher named Joshua Sasaki Roshi, whose students lived in the most ascetic way possible. When I brought up Cohen's reputation as a ladies man, he laughed. And he talked instead about the thousands of nights and days he spent on a mountain just shoveling snow, cleaning cooking and meditating.
- [16:27]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I was deeply associated with Roshi for over 40 years. I don't really know too much about Buddhism or what formal Buddhist training is. I only know Roshi's system, which I understand is eccentric on its superficial level. It accomplishes what boot camp accomplishes, which is basically to get you to stop whining. It makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering.
- [17:14]
David Remnick
Some years ago, Cohen came back from the Zen monastery only to discover that his accounts had been absolutely wiped out by his manager. He sued, but there was no getting around it. The money was gone. And there he was, well into his 60s, with nothing for his kids or for his retirement. So Cohen had no choice. He had to go back to work. He published a book of new poems for the first time in 20 years. And he went out on a tour that lasted more or less for four years. And there was a different feel to Cohen's work on stage after this monastic period. He was funnier. He was more animated, more light hearted, and maybe for the first time, seemed really happy to be on stage.
- [17:57]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I was talking with some of the guys. Some of the guys in this band are kind of, you know, over the hill. And they were talking about the various stages that a man goes through in relation to his allure to the opposite sex. You start off irresistible and then you become resistible. Then you become transparent, not exactly invisible, but as if you're seen through old plastic. And then you actually do become invisible. And then, and this is the most amazing transformation, you become repulsive. But that's not. That's not the end of the story. After repulsive, you become cute. And that's where I am.
- [19:14]
David Remnick
I caught one of those concerts at Radio City Music hall, and I've got to say, it was one of the Best things I have ever seen in my entire life. Here was this guy dressed in a suit and a fedora. Over and over again, he'd sink to his knees almost in devotion to the audience and to the songs themselves. I'd always admired Cohn's songs, but I'd never been quite swept away. The studio recordings, especially, sometimes seemed a little, I don't know, rinky dink in their rendition. Too much synthesizer. Not quite worthy of the songs. But that tour was a triumph. Leonard Cohen had an astonishing band now, and his voice was as deep as the ocean.
- [19:55]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I'm just paying my rent every day in the tower of song I said to Hank William.
- [20:11]
David Remnick
When we finally met, Cohen was suffering from these terrible health problems. Cancer and excruciating back pain. And he was even allergic to most of the medicine that would alleviate the pain. All of those years spent meditating were coming in handy in an entirely new way.
- [20:29]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I've had to white knuckle this thing. Fortunately, I have some training in, you could call it mind control as a blessing. The mental activity is working just fine. I got most of my marbles, maybe more than I've had at other periods. In a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many less distractions than at other periods of my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity. The only thing that mitigates against full production is just the condition of my body because there are times I just have to lie down.
- [21:28]
David Remnick
Leonard, you have to say when you need a rest.
- [21:30]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
No, no, I'm fine. It's you guys. Would you like something to eat?
- [21:34]
David Remnick
He was incredibly solicitous. Instead of taking a break or asking us to come back another time, Leonard sent his assistant out to pick us all up some food at Fat Burger down the street.
- [21:45]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I think I got your.
- [21:46]
David Remnick
Did I get your onions or.
- [21:47]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
That's you. I think we all have onions.
- [21:51]
David Remnick
Cohen told me he was still hearing the voice of God, and it was at that moment that somebody started up a leaf blower or some damn thing next door. But Cohen was saying that God sounded different now. Not that awful, incessant voice of judgment that he heard when he was younger.
- [22:08]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
Sometimes it's just like, you're losing too much weight now, man. You're dying. But you don't have to cooperate so enthusiastically with the process. You know, like force yourself to have a sandwich or something. You know what I mean? You know, sometimes I hear it say, ignore me. Just get on with the things you have to do, you know, it's Very. It's very compassionate at this stage. You know, I mean, more than any time in my life. I don't have that voice that says, you're fucking up. That's a tremendous blessing. Tremendous blessing. You know, really, you know, ready to die. I hope it isn't uncomfortable. Spiritual things. Baruch Hashem. Spiritual things have fallen into place for which I am deeply grateful.
- [23:19]
David Remnick
To the very last. Leonard Cohen was working all the time, compulsively focusing on what he could get done at home. Writing, recording, collecting, finishing old poems. And to me it seemed like almost a model of how to live your last days, if you can.
- [23:37]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I like to tie up the strings. It's a cliche, but it's underestimated as a. As an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order is one of the most. If you can do it, one of the most comforting activities. And the benefits of it are incalculable. There's a great deal of new material that I haven't sorted out. 50 or 60 unpublished poems. There are songs halfway through that are not bad. Listen to the hummingbird Whose wings you cannot see Listen to the hummingbird don't listen to me Listen to the butterfly Whose days but number three Listen to the butterfly, don't listen to me Listen to the mind of God which doesn't need to be Listen to the mind of God don't listen to me so it's halfway. I don't think I'll be able to finish those songs. And maybe I'll get a second wind.
- [25:05]
Leonard Cohen (singing)
I don't know.
- [25:21]
Leonard Cohen (speaking)
I don't need a reason for what I became I've got these excuses they're tired and lame I don't need a pardon no, no, no, no, no there's no one left to blame I'm leaving the table I'm out of the game I'm leaving the table I'm out of the game.
- [26:13]
David Remnick
The great Leonard Cohen. I talked with him late this summer. Leonard Cohen died this past Tuesday. His latest album, and the last of his lifetime is Ioanna Darker. If you want to read the profile of Leonard Cohen that was published in the magazine, I'd be pretty pleased about that. You can find the piece@newyorkerradio.org.