I am listening to an 80-year-old groan.
And it is sublime.
The 80-year-old in question is Leonard Cohen and the record is his forthcoming live album Can't Forget: A Souvenir of the Grand Tour (Sony Legacy), which will be released May 12. The bluesy "Never Gave Nobody Trouble," one of a pair of original songs Cohen has never before released, is floating around on the Internet.
Cohen has been remarkably prolific these past few months. Can't Forget will be the third album he has released since September (preceded by Live in Dublin and Popular Problems) and his fifth live set in the past six years. It's distinguished from the other live albums in that it includes songs Cohen performed infrequently over the years, as well as covers of Georges Dor's Quebecois love song "La Manic" and George Jones' "Choices."
I'm starting to like Cohen's live albums more than his studio work. I wasn't wowed by Popular Problems (Columbia), the studio release that kicked off this run; the songs didn't seem up to his usual standard. Old Ideas (Columbia, 2012) was just all right, and Dear Heather (Columbia, 2004) suffered from the sort of overproduction to which Cohen albums have always been susceptible.
There's always been a bit of tension between Cohen's serious intent (one gets the feeling that he became a folksinger because it was more lucrative than "just" being a writer) and the necessity of entertaining an audience. No one has ever known quite what to do with his dry and at times tuneless voice.
On his debut album, producer John Simon added strings and horns over the artist's objection. The whole thing reached a nadir with Phil Spector's work on 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man (Columbia), which augmented Cohen's butter knife flat voice with bells, whistles and probably backwardly masked squirrel chatter.
Cohen has always been a problematic studio artist, with his own sense of timing and key. He rarely makes great recordings. There's always something about the production (which often features Euro-clubby atmospherics and angelic backup choirs) of his studio work that feels forced and/or remedial. Sometimes the songs compensate, but not always.
We understand why Cohen continues to record and tour; his output is at least partially attributable to pecuniary anxieties that forced his remarkable comeback story. His return to the stage in 2008 after a 15-year hiatus from touring was made necessary because his manager of 16 years misappropriated almost all of the $5 million Cohen had in his retirement accounts. Though he eventually won a civil judgment against her and she was sentenced to 18 months in jail on criminal charges, she was in no position to pay him back.
"This has propelled us into incessant work," Cohen told the Canadian magazine Macleans at the time.
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And the work has been steady -- a progression of studio albums, a long and winding succession of tours documented by live sets (2009's Live in London and Live at the Isle of Wight, 2010's Songs From the Road, 2014's Live in Dublin). With another artist in another position, we might consider the ratio of live albums to studio suspect, but here we have utter transparency.
Cohen is working because he needs to and the best (for most artists, only) way to make decent money is by touring. Besides, Cohen's new material generally isn't up to the standards he set in the '60s and '70s. Popular Problems is listenable, but a couple of the songs -- "Almost Like the Blues" and "Did I Ever Love You" -- come across as facile exercises. And while the latter is sabotaged by an unfortunate arrangement, "Almost Like the Blues" -- the lyrics of which were published as a poem in The New Yorker in September -- verges on trite, with weak verses like:
I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot
My father said I'm chosen
My mother said I'm not
That sounds like faux Cohen to me, the sort of vaguely evocative noodling Bernie Taupin used to write for Elton John to sing, which means it's fine as long as it's only serving as a kind of faux koan, a delivery system for the emotive flow of a particularly strong singer's voice. Van Morrison could get away with a lyric like that because between the yarrgh and the Dublin rhotacism we probably couldn't make out exactly what he was going on about anyway. But, as befits his literary roots, Cohen is a precision writer who generally respects the connotative shadows of language. (For instance, when he drops the Scientology jargon "Did you ever go clear?" into "Famous Blue Raincoat," we can receive it as either sincere or mocking and as indicative of a specific history between the singer and the subject. A lesser writer would evoke nostalgia through more generic, less loaded means.)
Cohen's writing is of paramount importance because he's not Elton John or Van Morrison or even Jackson Browne as a singer. His tunes, while serviceable, rarely stray more than three or four notes afield. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; the simpler ones, such as "Hallelujah," which wittily describes its own chord structure in the lyric: "goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, and the major lift," tend to be the most enduring.)
Yet his voice has somehow gotten better with age. While it has lost a certain viscosity, Cohen has managed to fetch up from the depths of his lower register a surprisingly satisfying bluesman's growl. He's not quite Howlin' Wolf, but it's an appropriate noise coming from this dapper old gentleman.
But the writing isn't everything.
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Given how often Cohen's songs have been covered, it seems ironic that one of the highlights of his recent work is his swaying, melancholic version of the mamba "Save the Last Dance for Me" from Live in Dublin. Cohen's down-sliding baritone flattens out the Drifters' vocal harmonics but manages to return a fitting air of wry resignation of the song. According to legend, the lyrics of the original were written by wheelchair-bound Doc Pomus on the back of an old wedding invitation. Pomus was reminded of his own wedding, when he watched his new bride whirl around the floor with his brother Raoul.
The cover is intelligent for a couple of reasons; it serves as sort of a benediction for a life spent onstage, but apart from the dance floor (where real life presumably occurs). Plus it's exactly the sort of straightforward pop we don't associate with Cohen, although if you stop and listen to the lyrics it becomes apparent that it's about more than trusting one's girl with one's friends. (See Pete Townshend's covert rewrite "The Kids Are Alright.")
If you want to restrict the conversation to things like vocal range and note-finding accuracy, well, Cohen technically isn't a good singer. But that's less than half of it; pop singers succeed when they connect with audiences by any means necessary. Cohen, like Bob Dylan and Levon Helm, is a great vocal actor. His phrasing can be brilliant. (Hear how he playfully injects some woozy menace into the crucial final verse of "Save the Last Dance": He will ASK -- ifyoucamealonecanhetakeyouhome/You MUST telllll him NO.) More than this, it's a song from Cohen's era. He would have been 26 when the Drifters' version was released, maybe even a little too old for it to figure as part of his essential internal catalog. Cohen, we can't forget, is not of the baby boom. He was born in 1934 and may have received the Beatles as hopelessly jejune. With his stoic dignity and narrow range, he seems an unlikely figure to be carrying on.
While the songs might not be as keen and haunting as they were in his relative youth, Cohen displays a canny showman's charm in live shows. It's odd to think that such an intimate writer could come across so well in the 25,000-seat arenas that Cohen commands in Europe (he's less popular in the United States), but the truth is Cohen is one of those performers who is best experienced live -- or at least while fronting live musicians. He's as much entertainer as writer -- he has always known how to connect with an audience -- and he has acquired a sly courtliness that fits him as well as the jazz man he affects on stage. With his fedora shading a hawkish visage, he flirts with the audience and moves in a gingerly yet lithe old coot way that belies the obsidian coolness of most of his material.
Most rock 'n' roll fans have never had the problems with growing older that their idols have. They have no occasion to contemplate the irony of their position; they are too busy listening to the rumble and crash to consider that they are consuming a product designed to entertain an essentially juvenile audience. They don't stop to wonder why they haven't outgrown the music of their youth. They are under no obligation to think about their preferences.
Most rock stars don't have to worry about aging gracefully; most are gone before we know it. The young Elvis Presley anticipated the rock 'n' roll apotheosis; he dyed his hair black because he believed that movie stars with black hair enjoyed longer careers. If you go to Graceland and take the tour, you can see him on videotape, poignantly promising to hold on to his big house "for as long as I can." Early on, Buddy Holly described the perfect rock 'n' roll career arc -- a few hit singles and a plane crash.
"It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace," Cohen sang in 1974's "A Singer Must Die." He was never burdened with hit singles.
They took all his money away so that he had to work. But Cohen's not dead yet. Hallelujah.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 04/05/2015