Leonard Cohen for all seasons

I came from Office early yesterday, feeling a bit giddy and my insides were churning. The boss tells me to go home, get well and come tomorrow since we have several meetings lined up.As I lay down in bed to rest, I watch “Leonard Cohen: I’m your Man” coming on Star Movies. It transports me to another world.
There was a time when our choice of music was linked to how good it sounds performing live. Whether there are brilliant guitar pieces or has that druggy somnolent quality to it. I discovered Leonard Cohen rather late in life. After I left music or rather transcended it. I moved beyond just the sound and on to the poetry and the soul behind the music. I rediscovered Bob Dylan all over again. I also started thinking that Dylan may not be the iconic figure he was in the recesses of my consciousness.
I bought a cassette of “Various Positions” by Leonard Cohen from Pai & Co in M G Road Ernakulam in the late eighties. In those days, my first task on receiving my salary is to blow away a substantial portion of it on books and music. I would identify what I would buy if I got rich or got my next pay. I was a dreamer with a boring bank job during the day. In the evenings I would return to my cubby hole in the lodge in Jew street in Ernakulam and read and listen to music late into the night.
I kept listening to Cohen’s deep golden voice singing about love, death, sex, power politics and religion.
“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," He sang “Dance me to the end of world”. Somehow it touched a deep chord somewhere……here is a guy who could say what every lost soul wanted to say.
His music belonged to the age of moral liberation. He wasn’t prolific at churning out albums. He grew up in Montreal, went to New York to pursue a career in music and songwriting. Those were heady days of flower children, peaceniks, Newport Folk festival, hippies, marijuana and free love. He looked Jewish with a long hook nose in the cover photograph. Those were days before Google and I had no means of learning more about this poet-musician. But his music grew on me slowly and slowly and became a part of myself. Chelsea Hotel, one of his famous songs have these lines….
“ Giving me head in an unmade bed….
You told me again you preferred handsome men….
But for me you made an exception …..
We may be ugly but we have the music..
Sounded like an unkempt musician getting lucky in an “unmade bed” with a beautiful woman who has a marked preference for handsome guys. Years later I heard Cohen admitting on TV that it was about Janis Joplin, the firefly of the music world who burned bright too short and died early. He also felt it was very ungallant of him to admit it was Janis Joplin because his mother would mind the corny lyrics about a known person although Joplin wouldn’t have minded herself if she were alive. The sexual liberation rather opaque in another beautiful song called “ Seems so Long ago”


“ It seems so long ago, none of us were very strong;
Nancy wore green stockings and she slept with everyone.
She never said she'd wait for us although she was alone,
I think she fell in love for us in nineteen sixty one……
And now you look around you,
see her everywhere,
many use her body,
many comb her hair.
In the hollow of the night when you are cold and numb
you hear her talking freely then,
she's happy that you've come,
Cohen drones on in my iPod as I walk and in my Office PC as I work. There is that sad quality about his songs. Of love cruelly spurned, of heartbreaks, of the power of violence, of God, spirits and religion…... Sometimes I admit his poetry makes little sense unless you know what he exactly he had in mind. His poetry isn’t just the arrangement of words. Cohen conveys strong themes and emotions through his lyrics. Even he admits he can’t hold a tune properly and is rather humble about his musical talents- just as some would suspect of Dylan but Dylan would never admit. But as he belts out his next number in his deep voice, I am transported into another world. Into my past and into all the beautiful moments that contain in it. Of silly heartbreaks and the anxious moments. Cohen is incredibly romantic in a very very sad way. I tell my son to listen to Cohen too see the other side of music. Sample the revolutionary here in “Everybody Knows”
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes …….
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Isn’t that a rather stunning indictment of just how things are and how everybody knows but don’t talk about?
Even in my generation few people seem to know him. Slotted as a niche singer, he has a loyal following. His background as a poet and novelist gives his songs that edge over others. Probing deep into the dark corners of human existence and putting them to music. One of his later songs is “Gypsy’s wife”

And where, where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight
I've heard all the wild reports, they can't be right
But whose head is this she's dancing with on the threshing floor
whose darkness deepens in her arms a little more
And where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?
Where, where is my Gypsy wife tonight?
Ah the silver knives are flashing in the tired old cafe
A ghost climbs on the table in a bridal negligee
She says, "My body is the light, my body is the way"
I raise my arm against it all and I catch the bride's bouquet…..

I can pick a Leonard Cohen song to suit every mood; every moment in life…He lived a full life. He had dalliances with many women, some famous, some not so. He wrote great poetry and produced soul stirring music. He spent five years as a Zen Monk in Mount Baldy. A few years were spent in a Greek Island. He still lives. But somehow the recent albums lack the poetic turn of lyrics. Great music nevertheless…..