Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

That's after "Grandpa Was a Carpenter". Prine often jokes about his limited use of chords. Also reminiscent of Neil Young's comment that opens "Year of the Horse" - "They all sound the same!"

 

On the Ron Cornelius/"Chelsea Hotel" issue, there's an interesting thread from over at the LeonardCohenFiles site forum:

http://leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4849&sid=08242febbe19526b65d89e916ec7348a

And here are some key posts (much of the thread is taken up with people trying to defend Cohen or Cornelius, and it get's very tiresome fast, but these are the key bits that record actual communication with the principles):

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by Kjelling on Fri Dec 02, 2005 4:18 am
Tom makes some good points regarding "Came So Far for Beauty" being a Songs for Rebecca outtake. Thank you for that chain of thought! This also goes to indicate that the "demos" were of quite good quality. (However, I don't see any reason to think that Lissauer just "claimed" to have co-written it when everybody – the LP, BMI, ASCAP and Copyright Office – splits credit between him and LC.)

Now, for the matter at hand. I emailed Ron Cornelius and asked him if he had any input on the so-called #2 version of "Chelsea Hotel", which we all know and love. Here is his full reply, quoted with permission:

There is no #1 and #2 of the Chelsea Hotel – they're both exactly the same. Leonard and his manager of the time (Marty Machette) merely added a number two to the song in order to re-copyright it under another number – therefore screwing me completely out. When that happened, I hired Harold Ornstein (a New York music attorney) and went after them. I had to hire a 'Musicologist' to get involved. The outcome was that the 'Musicologist' (who was ready to testify in court if it came to that) said that "Whoever Wrote #1 – Wrote #2, they're exactly the same". At that point, with them knowing I would beat them in court, they offered me $8,500.00 to walk away from the whole thing. I was almost destitute at that time – I took the money and walked. They had convinced me that, due to the porno lyric in the song, it would never be released anyway – and you know damn well that they knew it was going on the next album. I did a very stupid thing, but was down at the time – and I'm certainly not the only writer that something like this has happened to. Anyway, I still receive my 50% from all worldwide 'Performance' on the song, as BMI doesn't allow such tactics to injure writers. Now, to make the record straight – Leonard wrote the lyrics – but what he had going musically was dumb. My entire input was melodic and, of course, the musical changes that are what the song is.

Leonard goes on record saying that "Ron helped me with a chord change on an earlier version" – when, the truth is, there was and is no earlier version – and I musically manicured what he had going – with a lot more than one of the chords in the song being mine. When it was finished, Leonard told everyone in our outfit – "ya know, that's the first song I've co-written – and I'm glad it was with Ron" – that's a direct quote from Leonard – then later, the dollar signs got in his eyes and he lost sight of honesty, and for that matter, friendship. Anyway, if you've read the latest write-ups on him – he's been cheated out of a lot of money by someone he thought was his friend – "It's Just A Taste Of His Own Medicine".

Cornelius is right that the 1972 "Chelsea Hotel" starts out exactly the same and has an identical melody. The fact that Leonard later cut some verses and rewrote some other words doesn't constitute writing a new song. It seems adding that crucial #2 was a clever move.

Kjelling
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by jarkko on Fri Dec 02, 2005 8:10 am
From Leonard:

Ron did help me with the music. It wasn't all "dumb"; the tune was there, the movement from major to minor was already established, but he did help. I didn't know about the legal stuff. I'm sorry to hear about it, and I deeply apologize. I wish he had gotten in touch with me personally. I hope he will now. Leonard

Addendum on March 19, 2006: (also posted on the 10th page in this thread!!!

Leonard writes:

Ron Cornelius and I had dinner the other night. Twenty years since we saw each other last. Our old friendship was still there. His memory is better than mine. From now on, let it be knownwe wrote Chelsea Hotel together.

Last edited by jarkko on Sun Mar 19, 2006 5:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.


jarkko
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Useful context, I think. And FWIW, Simmons mentions a conversation reported to her by with Billy Donovan, the tour manager on the 1972 tour, that corroborated Cornelius' assertion about Cohen's saying at the time that the song was his first collaboration (Simmons, 274-5).

L.

 

I'll add that I think it's safe to say that the musical structure of the 1972 tour version of the song is the product of a genuine collaboration, and therefore so is the musical structure of the parts that version shares with the album version of the song (the structure, in other words, of the verse and chorus--without the extended call and response taglines of the earlier version).

The redactions of that version, which led to the crystalline final album song are down to Cohen--and probably some input from Lissauer, who had a lot to do with the final shaping of the songs on the album, for which he rightly got producer's, but not composer's, credit and payment. Of course, the fate of the Songs for Rebecca project songs, some of which show up on later albums in altered form, is more complicated. But we'll get to that later.

L.

 

Just for the record, both of the central paragraphs from Kjelling's December 2, 2005 post should be in red and italics--that's all Cornelius:

There is no #1 and #2 of the Chelsea Hotel – they're both exactly the same. Leonard and his manager of the time (Marty Machette) merely added a number two to the song in order to re-copyright it under another number – therefore screwing me completely out. When that happened, I hired Harold Ornstein (a New York music attorney) and went after them. I had to hire a 'Musicologist' to get involved. The outcome was that the 'Musicologist' (who was ready to testify in court if it came to that) said that "Whoever Wrote #1 – Wrote #2, they're exactly the same". At that point, with them knowing I would beat them in court, they offered me $8,500.00 to walk away from the whole thing. I was almost destitute at that time – I took the money and walked. They had convinced me that, due to the porno lyric in the song, it would never be released anyway – and you know damn well that they knew it was going on the next album. I did a very stupid thing, but was down at the time – and I'm certainly not the only writer that something like this has happened to. Anyway, I still receive my 50% from all worldwide 'Performance' on the song, as BMI doesn't allow such tactics to injure writers. Now, to make the record straight – Leonard wrote the lyrics – but what he had going musically was dumb. My entire input was melodic and, of course, the musical changes that are what the song is.

Leonard goes on record saying that "Ron helped me with a chord change on an earlier version" – when, the truth is, there was and is no earlier version – and I musically manicured what he had going – with a lot more than one of the chords in the song being mine. When it was finished, Leonard told everyone in our outfit – "ya know, that's the first song I've co-written – and I'm glad it was with Ron" – that's a direct quote from Leonard – then later, the dollar signs got in his eyes and he lost sight of honesty, and for that matter, friendship. Anyway, if you've read the latest write-ups on him – he's been cheated out of a lot of money by someone he thought was his friend – "It's Just A Taste Of His Own Medicine".

The bit about Cohen "going on record" the chord changes is a reference to what Cohen says in the liner notes to Best of Leonard Cohen:

 

I was disappointed the reissue series ended with Songs of Love and Hate. It would have been interesting to see what they would have dug up from the vaults for New Skin For The Old Ceremony.

The original plan was to reissue the first nine albums in batches of three, but I guess sales got in the way.

 

Me too. I was looking forward to some of the inter-album stuff emerging on the Death of a Ladies' Man reissue.

I understand those hardcover books were expensive to manufacture, which was a factor in the project being cancelled. Plus, when they were first released, every CD came with a (let's face it, useless) "So Long, Marianne" / "Bird on the Wire" 7". I ended up with three of those 7"s, though I only have two of them now since one was damaged in a move.

 

I agree that it's a shame they gave up on the original reissue campaign. It was overtaken/compensated for by the release of the "Complete" box, but the bonus tracks didn't make the transition. Hopefully there will be some sort of rarities set and maybe some more archival live sets in the not too distant future.

L.

 

Can I just say, listening to this performance, that while it's no match in terms of craft and formal discipline compared to the studio "#2" version, it's incredibly moving. I'm sitting here in tears. (The "sweet little sound" chorus adds a sentimental element that isn't present in the finished version, but it's also cathartic in the way that Cohen's live exorcisms uniquely are.) Hearing a song again, for the first time. But what's he getting at with "tryin' to go queer"?

That said, I find the authorship controversy intriguing. I don't agree with Ron Cornelius that the songs are identical, though almost all of the melodic content in #2 is present in #1.

 

I don't mean to make you cry more, but here's the performance from the Jersualem concert that Palmer caught on both audio and video:



I didn't post it earlier because it's not complete (cutting off before the Tennessee verse), but it's an even more moving performance than the longer Tel Aviv version--or maybe it's just that you can see how locked into each other Cohen and the singers get--and look at the way Warnes leans into Washburn's shoulder and how she looks at Cohen so intently and expressively. The singers become the sweet little song, conjuring it back from the long gone train ride (they even evoke the train whistle off in the distance). And you're right that the chorus tag lines add a sweet, cathartic sentiment that the later version lacks--or replaces with something starker and less nostalgic or sentimental. This version is really made for the broad expressiveness possible in a concert, and these performances really get it.

I think the "tryin' to go queer" bit might be a glance at the Warhol's Factory milieu that Cohen was orbiting around in '67. But that's just a guess.

L.

 

Cornelius does overstate the "identity" of the two songs, but I suppose he probably meant more or less what you say--that there's nothing in the basic musical structure of #2 that's not in #1. But the things that are in #1 that are not in #2 do make them significantly different songs, when you take in their overall impact and feel. And it's more than just the expressive manner of the earlier performance, it's a matter of structure, too, the way those tag lines open each verse and chorus to a feeling of reiterative longing. Not way to make the later version express that, the form is too curtailed and tight and that's part of what give it its own particular feel and meanings.

More broadly emotional readings of the album version are possible, however. I'm not fond of a lot of covers of this song (although I enjoy performing it, I wouldn't make claims for my own take on it), but this one is really, really good, I think (the interview bit just before is of interest, too):



L.

 

Leonard in those days gave the most intense, emotional concert performances. From all the audio and video I've seen, it was physically draining for both Leonard and the audience. Not to dismiss his more recent live concerts, he's become more of a showman in older age.

 

New Skin for the Old Ceremony seems not to have generated much discussion, and I think I know why. When I first heard the album in 2004, I remember being surprised that it was more or less of a piece in terms of instrumentation, etc., with the earlier albums -- I had been led to believe, mistakenly, that everything post-Love & Hate was in a totally different style. All anybody ever talked about, online and in person, was the early records and the 80s ones. I bought New Skin and Death of a Ladies' Man together in a package deal, and it was clear that these were the 'missing links' in his discography: 'missing' because they were practically unknown to the public -- at a time when every Canadian undergraduate or baby boomer with intellectual pretensions could be trusted to own either Songs from a Room or I'm Your Man or both. So I'm not surprised this isn't the album that's spurring new folks to contribute to the thread.

A handful of songs from New Skin are familiar enough to Cohen fans, but it's no coincidence that they are the ones that happen to have been included on the 1975 Best Of.

As an aside, I figure the thread's going to stay pretty quiet until we get past Recent Songs -- even I don't have that one, though I expect I'll pick it up in the new year -- and turn to the much more familiar Various Positions.

 

I actually have a couple of posts worth of things to say about the album, but end of term circumstances at work and the recent death of a member of my band have kept me from finding time to hack it all together into something like coherent form. It's just been too busy and too sad. But I do expect to post some of this stuff some time this week.

L.

 

So sorry to hear that, Louis. My condolences.

 

Thanks. He was only 30 and had been playing accordion with me for 4 years. Just graduated from law school. Very sudden and very sad. A real loss to several different communities around here, not to mention his family.

He tried in his way to be free.

L.

 

Wow, sorry to hear that. My condolences.

 

My condolences. If there were only as many words to allay sadness as there are words to express it.

Rough as it is to be busy in such times, hopefully it provides a measure of conscious centering that leaves room for the subconscious to do its work.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying I look forward to your rumbling thoughts when they're ready to cohere.

 

Taking a breather from specific albums, here are selections from an article ("listicle" if you like portwebmanteaus) published shortly after the album Dear Heather; I've stuck with what seems least trivial and bolded what strikes me as most intriguing and ripe for discussion:

• The heart," he says, "goes on cooking, sizzling like shish kebab." He likes the image so much, he used it to interviewers in 1977, 1988, 1997 and 2001.
• Cohen's maternal grandfather, a rabbi, wrote a 700-page thesaurus of Talmudic interpretations.
• His father, who was in the garment trade, died when he was nine.
• He liked the Greek island of Hydra so much that he bought a house there in 1960 for $1,500. It had no electricity or running water. He could live there for $1,000 a year, so he would go back to Canada, earn the money with his writing and head back to Hydra "to write and swim and sail".
• Singing ["Suzanne"] in concert decades later, he sometimes found the emotions hard to unearth. "I was never so good that I could make a song sound real or authentic without it being that, and if it isn't, people know. I find that quite a lot of red wine will do it."
  
• He is a lifelong manic depressive. Asked about drugs, he has said: "The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical - I've tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked."
  
• Some time in the early 70s, his songs were dismissed as "music to slit your wrists to". The phrase stuck. "I get put into the computer tagged with melancholy and despair," Cohen said. "And every time a journalist taps in my name, that description comes up on the screen." [Personal aside: As a student in England in 1994, a friend of mine dismissed Cohen with those same exact words. Oddly, this friend -- like me an avid student of poetry -- was such a fan of William S. Burroughs (a writer who could induce me to slit my own wrists) that his most treasured possession was a signed Christmas card he'd received from Mr. Burroughs that was covered with thumbnail sketches of cats.]
  
• His hero is Federico García Lorca. Cohen named his daughter after him: "She's a lovely creature, and very inventive. She really deserves the name." He translated a poem of Lorca's into the song Take This Waltz, which took him 150 hours.
• On Anthem (1992), he wrote: "There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Later he said: "That's the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs."
• Cohen has been with Columbia for 37 years, but relations are ambivalent. Accepting an award in 1988, he thanked Columbia and said: "I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work." [This reminds me of Johnny Cash's famous Billboard ad repurposing an old photo of him flipping off a camera that was later used as a "thank you" to country radio for supporting his Grammy Award Winning album.]
  
• Asking him where the songs come from is fruitless. "If I knew, I'd go there more often."
  
• [Well known trivia but:] His album Death of a Ladies' Man was produced by Phil Spector, the reclusive genius of girl-group pop. "I was flipped out at the time," Cohen said later, "and he certainly was flipped out. For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns - the music was a subsidiary enterprise ... At a certain point Phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, 'Leonard, I love you.' I said, 'I hope you do, Phil.'"
• Cohen has described the album they made together as "grotesque".
  
• In 1988, Cohen told Musician magazine: "As you get older, you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality."
  
• In 1992 he released a song called Democracy, which was unlike anything else in his oeuvre or the pop canon - a satirical march, highly politicised although not party-political. It was later used by Ralph Nader in his presidential campaign, and sung by Don Henley at the MTV Ball during Bill Clinton's inauguration ("slaughtered," according to Leon Wieseltier). The song came out after the LA riots of April 1992, but was recorded before them. "Some people have suggested that it's prophetic. It's hard to wear that mantle. But when you're writing, your antennae go up, and you're sensitive to nuances in the air."
• Cohen is always rewriting. In 1988 he was full of enthusiasm for a song he was writing called My Secret Life, but it took him another 13 years to get it right. "I can't discard a verse until I've written it as carefully as the one I would keep." [I can't wait to discuss this song.]
• In 1994, Cohen said: "If you're going to think of yourself in this game, or in this tradition, and you start getting a swelled head about it, then you've really got to think about who you're talking about. You're not just talking about Randy Newman, who's fine, or Bob Dylan, who's sublime, you're talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you're talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don't think it's particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet. I really do feel the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write. But I don't fool myself, I know the game I'm in. When I wrote about Hank Williams 'A hundred floors above me in the tower of song', it's not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin' Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. I've taken a certain territory, and I've tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I'm too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is."

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/sep/17/2

 

I've always found There Is A War one of Cohen's most sarcastic songs. I've always liked it musically, the stanzas hang together far better with the little flourishes placed between them. I've seen the song used in a couple of films, mostly as a theme on the battles in a relationship between men and women.

There Is A War
There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn't.

Why don't you come on back to the war, that's right, get in it,
why don't you come on back to the war, it's just beginning.

Well I live here with a woman and a child,
the situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says "I guess you call this love";
I call it service.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous.

You cannot stand what I've become,
you much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be embarrassed,
why don't you come on back to the war, you can still get married.

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
a war between the black and white,
a war between the odd and the even.

Why don't you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get even,
why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?

A 1993 rendition of There Is A War, preceded by Leonard joking around a bit in the introduction.

 

Leonard gives a brief interview in 1979 on the background behind Who By Fire. The audio quality isn't that great, I believe it's from French television.

 

I think everyone reading this thread will be very interested in this speech he gave in 2011 at the Prince of Asturias Awards. He fondly recalls an experience learning guitar from a Spanish man.

 

Thanks to everyone for the condolences both on and off thread. It’s been a difficult couple of weeks, and I’m sorry to have dumped all that on the list, but I suppose if you can’t bring those sorts of things up on a thread about Leonard Cohen, where else can you bring them up?

In any case, I’ve had a little time today to sort through some of my thoughts about New Skin for the Old Ceremony, so here goes.


There is definitely a war:

Before I say some things about particular songs, I wanted to bring up something I noticed about the running order of the album. I have no idea if the following is the result of some very conscious intention on Cohen’s part (or Lissauer’s)—I wouldn’t make that claim—and it’s more noticeable when you look at the CD, rather than at the old LP, but it seems to me that the order of the songs has a kind of thematic symmetry to it.

Here’s the original LP order again:

Original LP Side A:

Is This What You Wanted
Chelsea Hotel #2
Lover Lover Lover
Field Commander Cohen
Why Don't You Try

Original LP Side B:

There Is a War
A Singer Must Die
I Tried to Leave You
Who by Fire
Take This Longing
Leaving Green Sleeves

The center of the running order is the first track of the second side. The sequence looks like this, if you look at it as a single, running list:

Is This What You Wanted
Chelsea Hotel #2
Lover Lover Lover
Field Commander Cohen
Why Don't You Try
There Is a War
A Singer Must Die
I Tried to Leave You
Who by Fire
Take This Longing
Leaving Green Sleeves

That’s interesting to me because it suggests that the other tunes are arrayed symmetrically on either side of that central track, and if you look at them that way, the first and last make an interesting pair, as do the 2nd and the 10th, the 3rd and the 9th:

“Is This What You Wanted” / “Leaving Green Sleeves”
“Chelsea Hotel #2” / “Take This Longing”
“Lover Lover Lover” / Who by Fire”

Then there’s a slight rearrangement, with the 4th pairing with the 7th and the 5th pairing with the 8th:

“Field Commander Cohen” / “A Singer Must Die”
“Why Don't You Try I” / “Tried to Leave You”

So there’s a way in which “There Is a War” stands unpaired at the center (or at the brink of side two), but in it's isolation it describes in a way more general than the other songs the universe that all the other songs address, inhabit, represent—a universe that is constituted by one long, unresolvable lover’s quarrel, a place of division, conflict, war, tension. The key line of the song is the one that says that there is even a war between those who say there is a war and those who say there isn’t. Denial of this basic reality will not let you off the hook; you’re always on one side or another. There is a war, don’t try and escape from it, like a lover shying away from a proposal, or the like the suicidal depressives of the last album withdrawing into their own null-zone of isolation. Come back to it, engage. And as the remarks Cohen makes about the song in the video that PhantomStranger posted make clear, the song is also a move in a war between Cohen’s sensibility and the “flabby” one he heard people prate on about all around him in those days (this aspect of the song connects it, in particular, to the devastating lines in “Chelsea Hotel #2” that expose the venality behind the idealizing and, at best, deluded platitudes common among folk and pop musicians in the late ‘60s: “those were the reasons and that was NY,/ We were running for the money and the flesh./ And that was called ‘love for the workers in song,'/ It probably is for those of them left”).

Now, as I said, I wouldn’t claim that this symmetry is a secret decoding of Cohen’s intentions, but the fact that the parallels can be drawn (with or without the symmetry) suggests the thematic coherence of the album, obscured to some extent by the musical variety we’ve already discussed. It also suggests the care with which Cohen collected a set of songs designed to give us glimpses of more than one side or aspect of the various matters and conflicts that its songs address. Each pairing, if you hold them up to the light, lets you refract the light of a set of ideas differently as you tilt it one way or the other.


“Is This What You Wanted” and “Leaving Green Sleeves:”

The first and last songs on the album have a couple of things in common. Both are complaints over a beloved’s decision to leave or to redefine a relationship in terms the singer can’t stand (different kinds of leaving). Both are also unnerving examples of a risky, but I think successful, experiment in seeing what happens if Cohen’s voice were not only close-mic’d, but also fully exposed without reverb, pushed very forward in the mix, performed with a deliberately expressionistic awkwardness or lack of control, and pushed to the edge of screaming. This is something Cohen and Johnston did with “Diamonds in the Mine” on SOLAH, but it’s more extreme here. All three songs are designed to be at odds with their generic cues. “Diamonds in the Mine” is a nihilistic folk anthem (folk anthems are supposed to be idealistic and afford us an opportunity to feel at one with like-minded advocates of this or that cause we proudly and indignantly espouse--"Diamonds" tears that expectation apart with bitter irony). Is This What You Wanted" and "Leaving Greensleeves" both introduce themselves as one kind of love song, only to quickly reveal themselves as another kind entirely. But the exposure is more extreme on the new songs, both because of their placement on the record—one invites us in and the other spits us out—and because they expose the voice in the intimate isolation of the lover’s complaint. Usually the things the lover complains about are things we want to hear. We want to share the indignation, commiserate. Her the thing she says are not things we really want to hear or look too closely at, yet there they are and so are we. There are background vocals, but they haunt and punctuate the choruses of the songs, rather than modeling an ironic folk-style sing-along like they do in “Diamonds.” There’s indeed something disorienting about the way they come in and then drop out of the chorus on “Is this What You Wanted,” adding to the disorientation created by the rhythmic dislocations of the drum part and the wobbly, woozy timing of Cohen’s vocal. Note the way they quiet themselves when they echo, “haunted.” On “Leaving Greensleeves” they are like the ghost of the old song that Cohen’s new lyrics hollow out and banish along with all of its sentimental and anachronistic connotations.

In their dour ways, these two songs are also absurdly, darkly funny. Cohen has a lot of dirty, transgressive and hyperbolic fun with the dichotomies he creates to spit out to his uncooperative beloved all the things the relationship had come to mean to him—or how these things now feel in the wake of whatever it is she did or said to vacate their now haunted house of any comfortable meanings, a house in which she seems now to be proposing they continue to live—or maybe just she will be living there now. The images are so strange and funny and compelling, and by turns attractive, repellant, hostile, and tender, that it’s hard not to feel jostled around even before the bumpy, boisterous choruses, and the lazy, jazzy horn charts create a feeling of swagger turned to more of a stagger, having discovered it had one too many bourbons.

And of course they are all examples of, as we say, “way too much information!” It’s interesting that the first two verses are versions of the singer reflecting back to his beloved images that flatter her as his own expense, like descriptions of a set of masochistic role-playing sex games. In the third, he turns that around, flaunting his isolation against her gregariousness (maybe her promiscuity) and then taunting her with an account of how he won her against her initial resistance: “You said you’d never love me./ I undid your gown” (a strong and uneasy slant rhyme with “alone”).

It’s also interesting that in concert on the ’74 and ’75 tours he sometimes introduced the song with variations on remarks like this one from a November ’74 show in NYC:

“This is a song which represents a dialogue between you and your ideal lover. The ideal lover is not present for this particular dialogue, if indeed your ideal lover exists at all.” (quoted from the Diamonds in the Lines site).

Yes. A dialogue of one against an absent other.

“Leaving Greensleeves” is another take, indeed a piss-take, as the English say, on the lover’s complaint. Here it’s an example, and ill-advised one if you were going to actually say anything like this in actual life—of how to complain about inaccessible ideals (or ideals that taunt you with their inaccessibly, leave you haunted by what you almost had, or seemed to have), and about how messy things get when you try and live out actual relationships as though they could contain or realize your absurd dreams of amity and passion—not to mention somehow allow you the freedom that they actually, of course, militate against, ask you to renounce.

The original song is a fairly sad and complaining one, too, the singer alternating between dyspeptic disappointment that he gave his lady this or that gift, and yet she still did not love him back, and proclamations of absurd faithfulness in the face of her rejection. In its original 16th Century context, that would have been resolvable in the context of a certain platonic ideal about the nature and true purposes of desire (its energies were to be disciplined by the lady’s denial and focused in a quest aimed at transcending the good of mere physical beauty and attaining to the highest ideals of virtue and truth, ultimately a communion with the divine). In Cohen’s version, the added verses (he only sings one that appears in the versions of the original that I know of, and maybe a second one that’s modified), it’s all about getting to lay between those “matchless thighs” and the aftermath of being left either because the woman actually left, as lovers always do, parting in the morning (the classic subject of another kind of love song, the aubade), or because in the light of day she just turned out to not be what he thought she was in the tumescent furor of the night before, when I suppose he thought she was Jesus Christ, Marlon Brando, and the father of modern medicine:

I sang my songs, I told my lies
To lie between your matchless thighs
And ain't it fine, ain't it wild
To finally end our exercise

Then I saw you naked in the early dawn
Oh, I hoped you would be someone new
I reached for you but you were gone
So lady I'm going too

And so the dirty little boy gets drunk and bellows out his nasty little song, and leaves, only as free as a drunk in a midnight choir (more like a midnight aria).

Lissauer told Reynolds and Simmons that Cohen, usually (along with everyone else) very sober and straight in the studio for these sessions, was actually 5 or 6 sheets to the wind after a long night of drinking a Korean liqueur called ng ka pe, something Roshi had introduced him to, when he tracked the vocal for this cut.

Is this what you wanted? Well, yes. I just didn’t know it until I heard it…..

More on what the other pairings suggest to me soon.

L.

 

Even his speeches are poetry.

 

I think you might be on to something, though I've never seen the matter discussed before. At first blush, the symmetry looks somewhat valid. I don't know if Cohen arranged the track order or not, though it's my impression he had control over these things from the very beginning of his career.

Here is Rolling Stone's review for New Skin:

Paul Nelson | February 26, 1975
"Myself," claims Leonard Cohen, "I long for love and light/But must it come so cruel and oh so bright?" In Cohen's monochromatic, endgame world, where Scott Fitzgerald's famous "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning ..." could pass for one of the rules of the game, the answer is almost always yes, the truth almost always yes, the truth almost always cruel and bright. And, not willing to leave it at that, the singer rarely forgets Scott's terrifying last phrases "... day after day."

Cohen's fifth album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, is not one of his best, but there are songs on it which will not easily be forgotten by his admirers. In "Chelsea Hotel #2," a remembrance of a departed lover, the artist reaffirms his kinship "for the ones like us who are obsessed by the figures of beauty." But this obsession — starring, as it does, the singer's usual archetypal lonesome heroes and heroines who can never quite connect, whose lives are filled with betrayal, inertia, jealousy — is, for Cohen's detractors, not beautiful at all: the death and despair, the narrow vision, the limited voice, the dark romanticism. Like Graham Greene and Ingmar Bergman, Cohen is concerned with the inevitability of tragedy. He is awesomely open to mythic heroism, to the mystique of love, but in the end he believes, as did Ernest Hemingway, that there are no happy endings between men and women, that the only glory is in the attempt. "Their vows are difficult/They're for each other," says the artist in "Why Don't You Try." The listener may be advised to do the same.

Leonard Cohen is a writer who has touched a great many people in a way that few others have: "Suzanne," "Sisters of Mercy," "The Stranger Song," "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye," "The Partisan," "Story of Isaac," "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy," "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Joan of Arc" are a few of the great ones. Some of the songs are deeply pessimistic — one would not be as haunted by the figures in Bob Dylan's, Randy Newman's, Jackson Browne's mirror — but many are not, and in the rooms of today, Cohen's predicaments seem both real and reasonable, albeit frightening. All victories, all relationships, may be transitory, but there are many beginnings and many endings to almost everything of importance in a life, and Cohen's art is more cognizant of this than most.

A solitary survivor caught by the spell of love and death, Cohen shoots for the moon in his best songs. Indeed, his chief strengths would seem to be an insistence upon the deep exploration of his themes ("Like any dealer, he was waiting for the card that is so high and wild he'll never have to deal another"), an optimism that keeps breaking in (as in the vulnerable admission, "Yes, many loved before us/I know we are not new") and the power of his lyrics.

The current album is unfortunately marred by John Lissauer's coproduction (with the singer) and generally insensitive, melodramatic, obtrusive arrangements. Lissauer's sense of the ironic (banjos, tubas, congas, mocking brass) is as false as Cohen's is true: In trying for irony, he never gets beyond a kind of cuteness that is merely sarcastic, not sardonic, or just plain at odds with the song ("Why Don't You Try," "I Tried to Leave You," the final few seconds of "Who by Fire"). His regrettable tendency to overproduce does some damage but he does well enough with about half of the material. There are some good songs here ("Chelsea Hotel #2," "There Is a War," especially "A Singer Must Die") and two masterpieces: "Who by Fire," a chilling litany of suicides and death made more terrifying by its simplicity and the excellent counterpart of the benign female voices in the background and "Take This Longing" ("Oh, take this longing from my tongue/All the useless things my hands have done"), a love song in which the singer once again throws himself on the mercy of a woman.

There comes a time in all of our lives when we realize we cannot be to others all that they and we expect us to be, and that moment is often tragic if there is love involved. For me, the art of Leonard Cohen is about that moment, repeated into infinity. When I saw him recently at the Bottom Line in New York City, I was more convinced than ever of his greatness. His solitude, which he seems to carry with him everywhere, even onstage, was in a way far more moving than the audience's enthusiastic acceptance of his work. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has written: "Alas, unless a man can manage to eclipse the world, he's left to twirl a gap-toothed dial in some phone booth, as one might spin a Ouija board, until a phantom answers, echoing the last wails of a buzzer in the night." Leonard Cohen may be that phantom.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/new-skin-for-the-old-ceremony-19750226#ixzz3LeC9oElo

 

Another review from the 1970s, this time from a British Columbia newspaper. It's funny how the writer assumes the subject of Chelsea Hotel #2 is Nico, when we now know it was Janis Joplin. I also find it amusing Mr. Binns finds Greensleeves the most "effective" song on New Skin For the Old Ceremony. I've always had a soft spot for it and Cohen's ragged delivery at the end, but I think that's a stretch of some magnitude.

Poet of loneliness spawns losers' treat

By RON BINNS

"We're the sadists who like to sit alone," Cohen once wrote in a poem, and his music seems entirely aimed at solitary listeners, "my own shattered people."
On this, his fifth LP, Cohen is once again hoarse and miserable. But the style has changed considerably after his last disappointing Live Songs album.

Two of the finest tracks on the album are in his old style of slow finely-imaged melancholia: Chelsea Hotel #2 is addressed to an unnamed famous lady (the singer Nico, judging by gossip in old Rolling Stone magazines) who escaped Cohen and the New York in-scene. (And number two presumably because Valentina of the poem Valentina Gave Me Four Months in his latest collection The Energy of Slaves was number one.)

Take This Longing, equally slow and haunting, is a radical re-writing of an old Cohen song, Bells, previously only recorded by Buffy St. Marie on her album She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina. Bells sounded as if it was addressed to the same woman who appears in Chelsea Hotel #2, both set in New York and containing drug references (calling to mind the double-entendre of the "cold lonesome heroine" Cohen years for in Joan of Arc on his third album).

But whereas Bells goes "Your body like a searchlight in the prison of my needle" the new version continues "Your body like a searchlight, my poverty revealed." The melody has also been completely re-written, but either way it's a powerfully-moving song.

In dramatic contrast are two unusually fast numbers: Lover Lover Lover, a beautifully effective wail of longing where the connecting stanzas hardly seem to matter and all the impact comes from the ritual chorus "Yes 'n lover lover lover lover lover lover lover come back to me." There Is A War is a marginally less effective fast song which brings into the open Cohen's curiously courtly view of human relationships as a kind of ritual war or ceremony conceived in military terms (not insignificantly Cohen's backing group is called The Army). Field Commander Cohen returns us to this view of life as an emotional war, with Cohen on the side of the losers and victims, — a salvation army in fact.

Cohen's writings and his songs exist in a continuum with the romantic myth he has so successfully fabricated around his life. Is This What You Wanted? is unusual in that it connects with the less well-known, darker, ironic side of Cohen which is manifested in Beautiful Losers. This novel inverts and parodies the romance elements of his previous book The Favourite Game, and likewise this song establishes an ironic polarity to his usual lyrics of pain and nostalgia.

If the lyrical style edges off into a darker, lonelier view of the human condition than even his classic downer album Songs From a Room achieved, so equally the arrangement of the music has changed, with the intrusion of a banjo in Why Don't You Try, and a lush incongrous orchestral backing on A Singer Must Die. Most effective of all, perhaps, is the honky-tonk piano in I Tried to Leave You, which evokes the impression of one of those Bogart movies where the love drama is played out in a restaurant while the pianist tinkles in the background.

Perhaps the most surprising, and certainly the most effective song on the album, is Cohen's version of Greensleeves. Cohen has always worked within the central folk ballad tradition which deals in songs of love and nostalgia (Teachers on his first album was a complete steal from Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci), and on the penultimate song Who By This Fire, the not unexpected references to pain, suicide and barbituates are juxtaposed with a reference to "the merry merry month of May." Leaving Greensleeves echoes the cries of rage which close the songs One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong and Diamonds In The Mine from previous Cohen albums, and the crashing crescendo of harpsichord, orchestra and Cohen's screaming makes it an explosive climax to a classic album.