As I am writing this, I have just learned that Leon Russell has died.
And so the obituaries pile up, for I was sitting down to write about Leonard Cohen, who died last week at 82, a few years older than Russell, who deserves his own tribute, from someone better prepared than me to write it.
(I would like to get off the death beat as soon as possible, for though it seems that 2016 has been an extraordinarily tough year on culture heroes, I think it is only going to get worse. All of us are older now than we have ever been, and our march cannot be paused. We might marvel how mean old Chuck Berry made it to 90, how it is that Keef still walks among us, but one day those mysteries too will be cleared up. When Bill Murray goes, the universe will fold in upon itself.)
That people die is not news that should surprise anyone. We know this is the way of things, but we don't really know what that means; whether there exists in the pit of a man something indestructible and eternal. All we know for certain is death is never the end, people persist so long as their legacies impinge on the ongoing world. We live in an age of miracles, when with a few keystrokes I can bring Cohen's or Russell's voice up on the meager speakers of this laptop. We hear the ghosts singing all the time.
This should cause us more consternation, for it cannot be natural. Our technologies grant us the grace to hear Hank Williams and Robert Johnson, to transport us across decades. There is no one left alive who ever heard the voice of Abraham Lincoln. These days most of us are routinely archived, our voices and images preserved casually, in social media repositories, in dead files retarding our computer's speed.
Everyone's immortal now; few of us are saints.
For several years, for reasons that were never quite clear to me, a person who hated Leonard Cohen sent me emails on a nearly daily basis. Or rather she attached my address to a long chain of others and fired off long and incomprehensible diatribes against the singer. She claimed to be a person who'd had a business association with Cohen that had turned personal and eventually dissolved into acrimonious legal wrangling. If you are familiar with Cohen's history, you can guess who she is (or who she was pretending to be). But I have no opinion or much interest in the fiduciary entanglements of artists and frauds, and I was nothing but relieved when the messages quit arriving.
I don't know whether this woman's grievance was legitimate. I don't know what it possibly could have had to do with me other than to remind me that we rarely know much about the private lives of public people and even when we think we do there is always some conflicting testimony. We can be moved by the art of murderers if the art is strong enough. And the fine-hearted are often bland and dull. Morality has nothing to do with the spark and powder of creation; the devil has his talents to divide.
And it is stupid for me to say I loved Leonard Cohen. I never met the man except in the most fundamental and important way. I heard his voice, that ridiculous flat-wound baritone throbbing in the night. I heard his songs. They seemed wrought from rough adult experience even when I was too young to know of rough adult experience. And unlike a lot of art I cherished when I was young, I never wore them out. I never came to believe I could spot his tricks, or even to believe that there was trickery involved. I gave him the sort of trust I've given only a few other artists: Even his limitations inspired me.
Cohen was never a comfortable rock star. He came to it late, only after he'd established himself as a literary figure, which meant after he'd established himself as a struggling artist. I don't doubt that his picking up a guitar was a business decision, that he looked around and saw what feral kids could do with three sloppy chords and a rhyming dictionary and thought he could peel off some of that.
It wasn't long before he was standing up in front of maybe 600,000 at the notoriously troubled 1970 Isle of Wight Festival--an unruly, nasty crowd that had run Kris Kristofferson off and literally set the stage afire at the end of what turned out to be Jimi Hendrix's final performance in the U.K., an action that ruined the instrument Cohen's piano player was supposed to play. So Cohen's performance--filmed by Murray Lerner for his documentary Message to Love--was delayed until they could find another piano.
It's after 4 a.m. when Cohen strolls out, the crowd a heaving, roiling ocean of ill-tempered humanity just beyond the stage. He cradles his guitar, his back to the audience, and says a few words to the band. Then he turns, adjusts the microphone and begins to softly tell a story about his childhood, how his long-dead father took him to the circus. And how his favorite part was when the ringmaster would ask the crowd to light matches, so that they might better "locate one another."
"I don't want to impose on you," he says, "... could I ask you, each person, to light a match?"
The camera searches the pitch-black field, picking up only a few flares here and there. Cohen remarks that there seem to be a lot of people who don't have matches. He gazes out and observes, "It's a large nation, but it's still weak. Still very weak. It needs to get a lot stronger before it can claim a right to land."
It is difficult to imagine a poet--a writer more in the tradition of Mordecai Richler, Saul Bellow and Abraham Moses Klein than Mick Jagger--holding sway over a mob in these days of escalating sensations and callused sensibilities, when politics have devolved into entertainment. But those were bad times too, and ugly, when it felt as though the world might fly apart.
Leonard Cohen quelled the waters. He communed with more than half a million. He soothed them. He soothed us.
Now he is gone. Another light gone out.
Once again, we are sore in need of matches.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/15/2016