Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

In this interview Cohen talks about this period of transition: "For a while I didn't think there was going to be another album. I pretty much felt that I was washed up as a songwriter because it wasn't coming anymore." Simmons adds a bit that I assume she got from Kubernik in her own interview of him, since it does not appear in the actual interview from 1975: "Now I've entered into another phase, which is very new to me. That is, I began to collaborate with John [Lissauer] on songs, which is something that I never expected, or intended, to do with anyone. It wasn't a matter of improvement, it was a matter of sharing the conception, with another man" (Simmons, 286). More from the 1975 text: "The previous album 'Live Songs' represented a very confused and directionless time. The thing I like about it is that it documents that phase very clearly. I'm very interested in documentation and often feel that I want to produce a whole body of work that will cover a wide range of topics and themes." About New Skin he later says, "I must say I'm pleased with the album. It's good. I'm not ashamed of it and I'm ready to stand by it. Rather than think of it as a masterpiece, I prefer to look at it as a little gem."

It's clear as David observes in his post, that Cohen felt a creative renewal, and the title of the new album reflects that. I really like David's phrase about what "skin" suggests: "a fresh, organic, and feeling surface." The album does explore new feelings and a new surface for them. It's also about touch, the interface between what is you and what is other, and "new skin in the game"--a sense of investment. The title also suggests the parable of the wine and the skins/bottles, which is found in the Gospels (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:21-22 and Luke 5:33-39). To paraphrase, no one puts new wine into old skins, or the old skins will burst. One puts new wine into new skins. For Cohen, it's old in new, or new participants in whatever old ceremony you wish to imagine at the heart of this new set of songs. The cover art suggests a ceremonialization of sexual congress, a very old ritual that calls down some very potent powers.

L.

 

I've always taken the album's title to be ironic. Once your skin is taken in the "old ceremony", there is no getting it back.

 

There's that, too, but the choice of "ceremony" over "game" gestures through and beyond the ironic reading. Very different if the title were "New Skin for the Old Game."

L.

 

Now I'm confused. I've never heard of circumcision being referred to as a game.

 

Now that's a new thought to me! I was thinking about the idea of losing your skin in the game (what you risk when, as we say, you've "got some skin in the game"). I wasn't thinking about circumcision, but of course, you're right that that's in there, too! Very old ceremony, of course.....

And it brings us to images of affiliation and genealogy and covenant, and to Abraham, of course, and Isaac--and that axe of burning gold....

L.

 

Cohen's comments about Live Songs are interesting, calling it a document of a confused and directionless time. The title New Skin For The Old Ceremony suggests many things, especially after one learns the background for the LP cover.

Mostly ripped from Wikipedia:



The original cover art for New Skin for the Old Ceremony was an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum. The two winged and crowned beings in sexual embrace caused his U.S. record label, Columbia Records, to print one early edition of the album minus the image, substituting a photo of Cohen.

The image originally came to public attention in C.G.Jung's essay, The Psychology of The Transference (2nd ed.1966) where it is held by Jung to depict the union of psychic opposites in the consciousness of the enlightened saint. The sexual embrace as a symbol for this condition of psychic unity is also found frequently in Tibetan thangkas (sacred paintings). This is one of Jung's later writings, in which readers will find the practical applications to familiar psychological situations. It is an account of Jung's handling of the transference between psychologist and patient in the light of his conception of the archetypes - based on the symbolic illustrations in a 16th-century alchemical text.

 

The censorious 2nd U.S. issue cover (front):



and back:



L.

 

The more creatively censorious UK cover (note the strategic extra wing):



L.

 

There has been some interesting discussion already of the title New Skin for the Old Ceremony. My perspective on it dovetails with your comments about "Chelsea Hotel #2," although I don't share your opinion of it. I've always taken the line about "giving me head on the unmade bed" -- which may or may not be clumsy, and certainly is vulgar in context, although I think Cohen has always been prone to vulgarity of one kind or another -- to be an instance of the album's overall rather dogmatic strategy of plainspokenness and candor. I think of "Take This Longing" and its line about how Cohen loves to see you naked, "especially from the back": there used to be a website (maybe it's still up), the major Leonard Cohen website of the early 2000s, which had art that Cohen had contributed. There were two kinds of art: self-portraits, and sketches of girls' butts with pretentious titles (called things like "Transcendence" and "The Ascension" and what have you). In light of the (let's face it) ludicrous opacity of songs like "Avalanche" and "Love Calls You By Your Name," these lines come as a shock that I, at least, consider welcome. The structure of the stanzas of that song ("Chelsea") is also quite poetically interesting: they are common meter ballad stanzas, but they solve the formal "problem" of the blank (i.e. unrhymed) A/C line endings in the traditional form by means of those leonine rhymes ("well"/"hotel", "head"/"bed"). There is a lot of craft here, in spite of the vulgarity, and it's tempting to read the surface vulgarity as an aspect of the speaker's persona, concealing a wounded heartbeat. In any event, I find the melody bewitching and the last truncated verse deeply haunting.

Oh yes, that title. If we take "the Old Ceremony" to represent Cohen's former, equally fleshly and vulgar, preoccupations on the Songs Of/From trilogy, then we can certainly see Cohen putting a new "skin" on it here -- and we can also readily work out how he arrived at both vehicles of his mixed metaphor.

A final observation about the music of the album: to me, New Skin for the Old Ceremony is THE pivotal Leonard Cohen album -- though note that I didn't say "best" or "definitive." It represents Cohen reconceiving of himself, casting off his former role as a poet who put out music (somebody else noted the utilitarian titles of the first three albums, and Louis has been doing great work pointing out that the majority of the material on those albums consists of settings of previously published print poems). Now, he's a pop musician, crafting tunes with catchy choruses, funky bass, and horn solos. Like it or not, that's what he's been and done ever since. I happen to like it, even if Cohen did sacrifice some of what made him such a singular musical figure in the first place in the process. Still, I can't get enough of clever pop like "Why Don't You Try," "There Is a War," and "Is This What You Wanted?"

 

This seems the right moment to post this amazing collaboration from, I believe, 1989:



Anybody who grew up, as I did, with a Hebrew-English machzor (high holiday prayer book) will understand Cohen's impulse to parody the Netaneh Tokef, the most fatalistic piece of Jewish liturgy.

 

Musical footnote about Live Songs: OK, so we all know that one of the backup singers, "Jennifer Warren", is Jennifer Warnes of Famous Blue Raincoat fame. But who's Donna Washburn? I just noticed (after owning the album for 8 years) her name on the cover. For those of you who don't know, she was once a member of Dillard & Clark -- with Gene Clark, formerly of the Byrds.

 

I agree with both of these larger observations about the album. I think that this directness and the fact that the songs fall into recognizable pop genres are the two things that make the album so much more hospitable than the earlier 4. The genre play is inviting in the sense that on a musical level they signal immediately to us how we might engage the songs. The album is gregarious, open, and full of sonic pleasures. There's a lot more to do here than just (just?) attend to complex and dense poetic images and feelings of deep isolation as the melodies wander through their uncertain harmonic structures. You can dance, for example. Parts of it are also very funny. It's not sweetness and light, of course, but it is companionable, even when it's combative and aggressive (as it often is) and bitter. The subject matters are also more outward, more public, engaging politics and the artist's relationship to it more directly than the politically tinged songs on Songs From A Room. In the love songs, the address to a specific, present beloved is more direct. The love songs on the earlier albums lacked this sort of directness, even when they were being more or less direct--and then usually to say I'm sorry, justify an abandonment, or to plead for sex or complain, and then mostly in a set of complicated images. Here the lovers seem to be having an actual quarrel, the singer admits he's tried to leave, but he's still there, he pleads very directly with and confesses his unfaithfulness to another, he tries to sweet/bitter talk yet another into her own infidelity, and gives us a drunken late night choir complaint to yet another who left him as he pisses himself all over a nice old Elizabethan ballad. He's working more than one side of the street, here--intersection, really--and he's having a pretty interesting time of it. I find it all endlessly interesting, and, of course, some of the songs ("Chelsea Hotel #2," "Who By Fire," "Lover Lover Lover") are absolutely arresting.

More on those and others soon.

L.

 

I think that's a cogent observation regarding the transition this album represents. New Skin For The Old Ceremony finally sees Leonard Cohen embracing the role of singer-songwriter. There was always an uneasy tension lurking under the surface in the first three albums that Cohen was possibly toying with music, and that he still considered himself a poet and novelist first.

Beginning with this album, instead of bending the music to the will of his words, his verses start bending toward the sway of his music. I don't believe Leonard could have created a song like There Is A War before this album. John Lissauer ended up touring with Leonard Cohen's band from 1974 to 1976. I don't think it is coincidence that Leonard Cohen's music was far more expansive after he recorded with John Lissauer as producer. John Lissauer would also go on to produce Various Positions for Cohen.

I think the change in approach made his music more accessible, leaving behind the early Folk trappings for good. Though if I am being honest, I wish he would have gone back to that sound for a later album or two. Some of the labored intensity in his earlier albums' writing is evident, as proven by the elaborate treatises already seen in this thread.

 

As much as I love those early records, I'm not sorry myself that that period ended. The new grasp of songwriting craft he got from his collaboration with Lissauer would lead eventually to his greatest work. And I think it's important and telling that Cohen himself referred to his work with Lissauer as a collaboration. It's clear from the extensive accounts that Lissauer himself gave to both Reynolds and Simmons that Cohen wrote the basic songs, words and at least the basic original scaffolding of the music, but over the course of the months it apparently took to create this album he was introduced to a new way of doing things--a way that I think dovetailed with what he was groping toward without knowing how to make it happen when he hired the members of Kaleidoscope to alter the feel of Simon's original productions on the first album. (I think, by the way, that Simmons gives a false impression that the recording didn't take long--this is one thing that I think Reynolds got right, mostly by just quoting from Lissauer at length--I followed Simmons in my earlier post, but I think that was mistaken).

In any case, as he took Cohen's songs and let his musical imagination run with what they implied to him, Lissauer at just 22 years was able to bring to bear the technical skill and collaborative empathy necessary to help Cohen (almost twice his age at 40--with 20 years as a publishing and touring writer and 7 as a recording artist and touring performer under his belt) realize a musical vision he could only up to that point grope at in the dark, so to speak. Lissauer took the longing from his tongue and realized it for and with him. Lissauer's extensive remarks about their work on the album in Reynolds book are well worth reading (maybe the one thing in the book I'd say that about).

It's not that I think Simon or Johnston were bad producers or did less powerful work with Cohen, I just think that the former--a man with a clear production vision--was dealing with someone who could only bring so much to the table (a set of striking songs in an idiosyncratic style, along with an equally idiosyncratic performance style) and he tried--with some lovely successes (and a few wrong steps that got partially corrected almost by accident)--to make what sounded like a record to him. The latter was a man who's approach was the opposite, just let the artist and a set of sympathetic supporting musicians work their way toward something, and make sure that the tapes are rolling when they et there. It's remarkable that they did get somewhere very powerful on that 3rd record (with a few equally strong moments on the second) and on many of the 1972 tour performances, too. That's a testament to Cohen's sheer creative will--and the fact that he had something to say that was going to get said in one way or another. But by then he hit a dead end. Enter Lissauer who pointed the way forward to the rest of the career.

I hope someday we'll hear the unfinished Songs For Rebecca material. It's a shame that it never got finished, although I think I understand why it didn't and why Cohen made the next record with Phil Spector. I also hope we get to hear some of the live music from the '74 and '75 tours--a good number of those shows got recorded professionally (and you can hear a combination of audience and some radio broadcasts on boots that circulate). But there will be time to discuss all this when the relevant music rolls around. Right now, I'm off to bed.....

L.

 

Strangely, it's Cohen's next attempt to embrace an up-to-date production style (for the first time since his first album) on Various Positions that displays his musical roots in commercial folk music most clearly among his post-70s work. "Coming Back to You," "Night Comes On," "If It Be Your Will," and "The Captain" all bear the marks of it, often with Cohen's own (cliched by this point) 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 guitar picking.

I'm very curious to hear what Louis considers Cohen's greatest work (apparently we haven't covered it yet); to my ears New Skin rounds out his classic period, leading into an uncertain but rewarding "period of transition" (as Van Morrison put it) that itself ends with Various Positions, ushering in a confident but to me, less rewarding period starting with I'm Your Man and ending with 10 New Songs.

 

I think the masterpiece is Ten New Songs, but it will be easier to explain why I think that when we get to it. But I will say that my sense of that work's greatness does depend in part on my sense of how it fits into the work as a whole. I think Cohen is right about what he's up to when he says in that Melody Maker interview that he was (and still is) trying to produce a "whole body of work," and that he's interested in "documentation." It's all of a piece in a sense, and keeps rolling back over a set of themes, pushing deeper in particular directions as the persona who communicates them ages. He's keeping some kind of record.

L.

 

Speaking about that picking pattern, there's a very funny and touching moment captured by Tony Palmer from the 1972 tour in which Cohen starts playing one of his characteristic picking patterns on some minor chord, and the audience starts cheering. But Cohen just stops and says, and I paraphrase: "wait a minute...you couldn't possibly know what song that is. That's how I start all my songs...." There's lots of laughter, and then someone says something very complimentary, and Cohen instantly regrets what he suddenly sees as ingratitude on his part, and he apologizes. It's a lovely mix of self-deprecating humor and then a gracious, empathetic step outside himself.

L.

 

I don't remember on which song but John Prine, another of my favorite songwriters, made a similarly self-deprecating comment about his own "limited" guitar playing on his excellent 1988 live album. To paraphrase, he begins picking then comments about having learned three chords and deciding that's about as far as he got.

@RayS, who started the excellent John Prine album thread which gave me the idea for this one, may remember which song and/or what Prine actually said.

 

I've been too busy and distracted to get all my comments on particular songs together for posting--I hope to get that together over the weekend. In the meantime, however, since some questions have been raised concerning "Chelsea Hotel #2," I thought I'd post the following recording and transcription.

As some of you know, the "#2" on the New Skin version is there because there was an earlier version of the song, which was performed during the 1972 tour, but never recorded for release in a studio. That first version has some virtues, but it lacks the formal clarity and focus of the album version. Comparing the two helps with seeing just what makes the album version such a superb song. I agree, by the way, that the explicitness of the 3rd line of the first verse is uncomfortable (I've been performing the song on and off in public for years, and I always have to carefully suss the audience--any kids? any older people who look like the might be offended?--before I sing the original version of that line--sometimes I sing, "Lying with you on the unmade bed"), but I think it's a deliberate, calculated, and effective gesture, both to create that directness we've already talked about and to violate and call in question certain taboos against explicit sexual language, or at least to "call them out," evoke them, and the energies that surround them. Say what else you will about it, the gesture works in that sense. It puts us right where the song wants us.

I also think Cohen decided at a certain point--and maybe he really later regretted it, maybe not really--to violate another rule and "kiss and tell," by naming Joplin as the brave, sweet talker of the song. I don't know what went on in his mind, of course, but I can imagine how hard it must have been for him to resist--for better or worse--the energy and power he knew would accrue to the song if people knew who he was singing to/remembering well. And I think he knew full well the ethical question this would raise, and also couldn't resist the power they, too, would lend the song. All of that is, in an important sense, part of what the song is about.

And I agree with Maggie about how haunting the final, truncated verse is. A brilliant stroke. There's more to say about both the music and the lyric of the final version, but here's the early one for your consideration.

The lyric is transcribed from the performance in Tel Aviv on April 19th, 1972, which you can hear here:



A shorter version with slightly different lyrics was performed the following night in Jerusalem and can be seen in Tony Palmer’s documentary of the 1972 tour, Bird on a Wire. Cohen reports in several interviews and stage comments that Ron Cornelius, the guitarist in his studio and touring bands at the time, helped him with the chord progression on this version of the song (presumably, this refers to the chorus, because the compositional credit does not appear on the later version of the song released on New Skin...).

“Chelsea Hotel [#1]”

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet,
Giving me head on the unmade bed,
While the limousines wait in the street.

Those were the reasons, and that was New York.
I was running for the money and the flesh. (I’ll say it again)
I was running for the money and the flesh.
That was called love for the workers in song,
And it still is for those of us left.

Ah, but you got away, didn't you babe?
You just threw it all to the ground.
You got away, they can’t pay you now
For making your sweet little sound, can they?
Making your sweet little sound, on the jukebox
Making your sweet little sound, on the radio
Making your sweet little sound

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
In the winter of ’67.
My friends of that year, they were all getting’ queer [“were tryin’ to go queer” 4/20]
And me, I was just getting even.

Those were the reasons and that was New York.
I was running for the money and the flesh.
That was called love for the workers in song,
And it still is for those of us left.

Ah but you got away, didn't you baby?
You just turn your back on the pain.
You got away on your deepest dream,
Racing the midnight train, baby
Racing the midnight train, all naked
Racing the midnight, feet on the gravel
Racing the midnight train, yes you caught it baby
Racing the midnight train, on your way to me, now
Racing the midnight train, we can’t follow you
Racing the midnight train

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel.
Then I went down to Tennessee.
Sat by the stream, listenin’ to nothing else,
But holdin’ my honorable dream.

Willie York from the Big East Fork,
he came there to talk with me,
And we fed the peafowl the bread for their pride,
The stream there, it’s still running inside.

Ah, but you got away, didn't you baby?
You just threw it all to the ground.
You got away, they can’t pay you now
For making your sweet little sound, I’m so tired
Making your sweet little sound, I’m thinking of you babe
Making your sweet little sound, did it happen baby?
Making your sweet little sound, were you standing here…
Making your sweet little sound, just like I am?
...tired singing
…all that clapping
…people listenin’….etc.
[improvised phrases and variations in response to the refrain….]
Making your sweet little sound, baby
Making your sweet little sound, on the jukebox
Making your sweet little sound….
I guess I got nothing more to say to you baby,
I mean, so long, gotta leave you now….
Little sound.

It's quite different in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that, formally, it works by expansion and repetition, without the formal concision of the final version and it's striking dead-fall of an ending.

Comments?

L.

 

Great, informative post, as always.

Listening to this song for years in my self-imposed Cohen cave, I never had a clue that it was about Janis Joplin. That revelation both detracted from, and added to, the song for me. The line "We are ugly, but we have the music" is certainly given greater poignancy, given the little I know about Janis's discomfort with her appearance. Of course in other ways it does limit the possibilities that the song can hold.

I agree that the re-write really tightened and focused the song. The song provides some vulgarity (I think my very first exposure to Leonard may have been "Don't Go Home With Your Hard On", so I can't say that I was shocked), some self-deprecating humor, and just an amazing kiss off in the last verse. "I can't keep track of each fallen robin." Wow. It suggests a bit of protesting too much, perhaps?

 

Yes. That last verse is a worth a "wow" indeed. It can, as you say, suggest he protests too much, and it also has a numb coolness to it, or numb distractedness, and there's an unnerving sense of dismissal, a special pleading for weakness or lack of moral investment ("not my job") in the way the line "I can't keep track of each fallen robin" suggests Hamlet's (Hamlet again!) "there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow," which echoes, of course, Jesus' remark at Matthew 10:29: "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father" (KJV). He's no God, this guy, don't expect that of him, he says. Am I my lover's keeper?

And yet--and yet--there's the song with all it's deeply tender and aggrieved interest. He may not think of her that often, but when he does he doesn't let a feather fall to ground. He does keep her. And the fellow-feeling of the second verse is very deep, despite the sting the "handsome man" remark still plainly has. She was brave and free, or she could talk the talk. Not she's legend indeed, and he's written himself into the legend along with her and this tender, messy episode.

And there's also the outlet song of death that the refrain constitutes, the yearning for, the envy of suicide as an escape from it all, all that "jiving around," the smugness of the figures of beauty, the ******** of politics as a veneer over plain old raw desires, the inadequate consolations of art.

And again, yet again, love calls. There's all that art, and all it carries, lets us think and feel, all that it holds up to our attention. Disconsolate, desolate, but far from un-consoling. Not an ounce of jive in it at all, not really.

L.

 

Chelsea Hotel #2 has become a trendy cover of choice in modern music circles. I'd say it's probably the third or fourth most popular song from Cohen's entire catalog that gets covered by modern musicians. There is actually some internal dispute about Chelsea Hotel's credits between Ron Cornelius and Leonard Cohen. I wasn't going to bring it up but the guitarist's name was mentioned by Louis.

Ron gave us this response regarding his role in writing this song:
"He claims that I helped him with a chord change in writing an earlier version of this song. The truth is that I co-wrote the song with him on an airplane (8hrs) from New York to Shannon, Ireland. The reason it has a No.2 behind it is that he tried to cheat me out of my share by recopyrighting it that way (he changed nothing) - it was just "Chelsea Hotel." Anyone can check out the writer credits by contacting BMI to get the truthful writer credits. I ran his band for a long time (worldwide), played on his records, and have nothing but honest input to look back on - Leonard can't say that!!!"

Since we are nearing that time of year, here is a very rare performance of Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes singing Silent Night from a Brighton concert in December of 1979. No video is known to exist, though its audio recording has survived through the years.

 

I certainly agree. The tension between the cold kiss off in the last verse, and the tenderness of the middle of the song, is what gives this song its special power for me. Perhaps it is just realism - I really enjoyed our time but you were one of many so I'm not going to dwell on your death very long. I don't see an envy of suicide as much as an envy for her ability to not have placed emotional requirements on him (avoiding both "I need you" and "I don't need you", while other women require that "jive").

 

Interesting. The music certainly contributes a great deal to this song - couldn't get it out of my head all night, which isn't something I can't say about a great many Cohen songs.

 

I suppose that's right. She got away from life, and also, in life, away from bonds of that sort.

Free, in her way.

L.