Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
But the opening paragraph made me bristle slightly: "He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960..."
I'm assuming that's Canadian dollars. So he was living abroad doing what he loved, and presumably not breaking much of a sweat.
No less than ten years later, in the same country, my parents were struggling to bring up two children on my father's wage which was half that amount - and for a 40-hour week of very dangerous, manual work.
Now obviously people aspire to successful, creative careers, and most people don't begrudge them that, especially if they bring a great deal of joy to others. But I notice there is a phenomenon quite common in journalism, esp. regarding artistic figures, a great many of whom were actually born into relatively privileged circumstances, and a number of whom, especially during the sixties, wanted to display their bohemian credentials by living in somewhat spartan conditions. Strangely, however, they can always afford an air fare (decades before budgets airlines), and often inherit a house here or there, and always able to afford recreational drugs.
The image of the impoverished poet has long had journalistic appeal, but it is often a lie. They were actually in a very privileged position compared to 99% of people.
And in those days, Burberry was actually an upper-class brand without the downmarket associations it has these days.
In the liner notes to 1975's The Best of Leonard Cohen, which includes the song, he mentions that the famous blue raincoat to which he refers actually belonged to him, and not someone else:
I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in New York City sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.
Are you talking about your 1970 father's wage being $1500 per year, or per month, or per pay period?
The bristling at the journalist is fine (after all, $3000/year in 1960 is approximately equivalent to $24,000/year in today's dollars, with which a single man could live quite well in Greece). But let's make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
Canadian minimum wage in 1970 was 1.75/hr, which comes out to well over $3000/year assuming 40/hr weeks. So I'm guessing you're talking per month or other pay period.
He was certainly paid way below the average wage at the time, and as the decade progressed he moved on to better paid work. There was no minimum wage in the UK until 1999, so unscrupulous employers would pay what they could get away with. I think it was something of a low point, and unsurprisingly, the 1970s is remembered as a decade of workers' strikes as they demanded better pay. People often moan about it, but I think it improved our circumstances at the time.
In any case, I sympathize with your complaints about the coverage, since $3000 CAD wasn't a bad deal at all for a single person in 1960, particularly for doing what he loved. Certainly not "scraping by" or having to make sacrifices like your father would have been doing in 1970, with a family to feed. Glad he secured better paying work.
I didn't realize UK only got minimum wage in 1999, wow. It's surprising to me that the US had minimum wage for decades when the UK did not.
Check out Irving Layton as well (another Canadian poet/professor). Really good stuff, and clearly influenced Leonard Cohen's writing.
Seriously, he's an excellent songwriter, but much of his music is ruined by the choices made in terms of 80s synth stuff and disappointing backing vocals. 'Birds on a Wire' is a great album, because it doesn't have any of that nonsense in it. Some of his other albums are really good too, but I'd say half of his discography is disappointing, despite having excellent songwriting.
At the risk of -20 downvotes, I was going to say the same thing.
The synths I can handle.
But the backing vocals ... my god man ... I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's beyond kitsch.
You gotta take it as a 'package'.
I find that people who are more lyrical tend to like him. Musical people less so.
Often the chords make no sense, they go back and forth, there's no progression - but then you realize they are following the cadence of his prose, and then it kind of makes sense.
He's almost like a beat poet - where there's some 'muzak' in the background.
If anyone reading this can sing, start drinking whiskey and smoking cigars. You'll die early, but before you do, perfect your Cohen voice and fix this.
edit: The other artists in the line-up were top-notch. My favorite part of the non-Cohen sung songs was the Webb Sisters with "Coming Back to You": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzX0Nk3sCJE
> Cohen smiled. “Then Dylan says to me, ‘As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.’ Meaning, as I understood it at the time—and I was not ready to dispute it—that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”
Pretty fitting after today's Nobel prize award. Cohen is definitely up there with the greatest songwriters and poets of this generation.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/appl...
Did they know in advance that he would win the Nobel Prize?
(But perhaps they were tipped off that it would be a singer-songwriter, and they made the wrong guess.)
I'd say Cohen is entirely Canadian. He has this very self-deprecating humor that you don't really get from Americans.
Leonard's first album had amazing production by american producer John Simon (who also worked with The Band, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin), probably the best in Cohen's entire career, so he chose well deciding to work out of Columbia's studio in NYC...
Not sure what else you can call someone from USA, so I guess it makes a bit of sense.
I would not be surprised that one of the lesser reasons Dylan was awarded this year was to open the door to others including Cohen in future years.
Not to mention that Dylan's awarding might have the more subtle effect of encouraging contemporary musicians, if they are not already doing so, to commit to more enduring songwriting than otherwise just making a weekly Top 40.
Dylan is also mentioned in that episode, since they had some kind of mutual admiration. Apparently Dylan and Cohen meetup at some point and Dylan asked Leonard how long it took him to write Hallelujah and he lied saying "2 years". Then Cohen asked Dylan how long it took him write "I and I" and Dylan said: "oh, like 15 minutes".
If you are interested in exploring more, I annotated a bunch of fun facts from that episode https://www.listeningcrowd.com/podcasts/1-revisionist-histor...
>Over the decades, Dylan and Cohen saw each other from time to time. In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a café they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in “Hallelujah.” Even before three hundred other performers made “Hallelujah” famous with their cover versions, long before the song was included on the soundtrack for “Shrek” and as a staple on “American Idol,” Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write.
> “Two years,” Cohen lied.
> Actually, “Hallelujah” had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor.
> Cohen told Dylan, “I really like ‘I and I,’ ” a song that appeared on Dylan’s album “Infidels.” “How long did it take you to write that?”
> “About fifteen minutes,” Dylan said.
> When I asked Cohen about that exchange, he said, “That’s just the way the cards are dealt.” As for Dylan’s comment that Cohen’s songs at the time were “like prayers,” Cohen seemed dismissive of any attempt to plumb the mysteries of creation.
I was gratified that I got a guffaw, and we ended the phone call.
Think it's because of the album
So maybe he's next.