Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Last week Leonard Cohen performed two concerts in Istanbul, the first time that he has played there. Earlier in the summer Loreena McKennitt also played Istanbul, one more great Canadian performer (with, of course, Hugh Marsh in her ensemble), so we have been well represented musically there this year – just need Neil and Joni, I guess, to complete that picture. You can read some interesting accounts of Leonard’s performances in the reviews and reactions listed by Dr. Guy in his blog here. They seem to have been good concerts, much appreciated by the Istanbul audiences, one of which included my good friend Ann and her daughter Çağla, who went for the best seats. There’s a nice view of “Hallelujah” here -- I hope that Ann and Çağla saw and heard as well as that.

I was quite familiar with Leonard’s work back in the 60’s, initially from the poems his teacher/mentor Irving Layton selected for the 1962 anthology of Canadian love poetry, Love Where the Nights are Long (still worth the price of admission!). I had my own copy of The Spice-Box of Earth, the one that had a cutout window in the paper cover showing Leonard’s picture inside, as did Lorraine when we first got together a few years later. Leonard’s poems were important to all of us young lovers and romantics as we tried to figure out who and how we were. Read “The Cuckold’s Song” to see why. Or this:

Song

I almost went to bed
without remembering
the four white violets
I put in the button-hole
of your green sweater

and how I kissed you then
and you kissed me
shy as though I’d
never been your lover

We all read Beautiful Losers and talked endlessly about Catherine and that great mantra “God is alive; magic is afoot”. Leonard was present in our lives, even though, as Warren T pointed out, he didn’t have the rhythmic or verbal complexity of Bob (he meant Mr. D but it could also have been our other hero Creeley); Warren was right, of course, but for us Leonard was still cool.

When we heard in 1967 that Leonard was coming to UBC to do a reading, we were all going. When we got into the lecture theatre, we waited. Leonard was not sitting down front to be introduced like at most readings – he wasn’t in the hall at all. We waited. When he came out from the wings, he was carrying a guitar -- no book, no sheaves of paper – just a guitar, and that small smile you will recognize if you ever saw him perform. He began with “Suzanne” and he owned us.

Later in the old caff we sat around tables while he told us that it was his birthday, his 33rd, and that he was happy to be in Vancouver, and he reminded us of the fact that Jesus was crucified in his 33rd year. He pointed out that such a thing was not part of his own plan, though he certainly toys with such ideas in “Dress Rehearsal Rag”, which we all knew from the copy of Judy Collins’ “In my Life” I was given for my birthday that year. The next year up in Sechelt Jon F. played and sang Cohen songs beatifically at our campfires on the beach at Sergeant’s Bay, etching songs like “Sisters of Mercy” and “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” into my consciousness forever.

I have followed Leonard’s work over the years but haven’t been to a concert since that first one back at UBC. I’m glad he is doing them and glad that Ann and Çağla got to go to one last week. After all he is still, at close to 75, very cool and always worth a listen.