On a lighter note, I’ve been thinking about Leonard Cohen a lot recently. His most recent greatest hits album (The Essential Leonard Cohen (Sony 2002) is the one album I keep playing and replaying these days. Just this week I saw a blurb that claimed that he’s Prince Charles’s favorite singer. Yesterday, driving to work, I heard part of an interview Leonard just did with Terry Gross on the NPR show “Fresh Air.” He has just released a new book of poetry, The Book of Longing. He’s moved beyond the Zen monastery in California where he’s been living the past five years. In response to a question that assumed he’d become a Buddhist, he said softly that that was wrong, he wasn’t a Buddhist, wasn’t looking for a religion, already had one.
Over the decades my three favorite singers have always been Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen. I always think of the three as a set. All three are Jewish. All three are brilliant musicians. All three are even better writers. All three put a tremendous amount of explicitly Christian and Christian/mystical symbolism in their songs, although that goes over the heads of some people. Bob Dylan even went through a born-again Christian phase, though he’s gone back to Judaism as far as I know. I’ve never tracked this down for Paul Simon, but as far as I know he’s always been Jewish. I’m a Catholic, and I was a gifted and industrious poet for more years than I’ve been a lawyer, and I’ve always had a special love for Jewish writers and artists.
As I said, I think these three guys are the greatest. I’ve loved all three all the way back to the 1960s. I got Leonard Cohen’s second album Songs From A Room in 1969, when I was 14. My mother used to joke that she asked the people at the store for a record called “Songs From a Womb,” having heard me wrong. The very first album I bought was Sounds of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel in 1967 (the second album I ever got was Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles–setting me up for an exaggerated view of the quality of the average album!). And of course, the 1960s and 1970s were all-Dylan all the time. I’ve never seen Leonard Cohen in person so far, but his 1985 Halloween show on Austin City Limits is my all-time favorite music video. The first I saw in person was Bob Dylan at the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in 1970. I’ve seen Paul Simon many times. His Concert in Central Park is greater than great, and his Rhythm of the Saints is a candidate for all-time greatest single album by anybody.
I was thinking tonight that my ranking of the three has changed over the years. Bob Dylan has certainly had the greatest fame. Paul Simon has possibly had more commercial success. For a very long time I would have said Bob Dylan was the greatest. There was a period in the 1980s and 1990s when I would have said that Paul Simon was the greatest. But since about 1999 I’ve come to think that Leonard Cohen is the real gem of the three, and that impression keeps getting stronger.
Among other things, Leonard Cohen is by far the strongest as a pure poet. His poetry is very strong, very original, very beautiful, and very spiritual.
Of the three, I also think Leonard is the more serious thinker about politics. His song stories of partisan resistance, and explorations of the mind of the extremist, go far beyond anything the other two have written.
It’s a frivolous topic, but I’m curious what the rest of you might think. <more below>
Here are the lyrics of two Leonard Cohen songs I particularly like these days, among many, many others. As you may notice, the second one is extremely serious, and extremely prescient, and extremely timely. It also rocks if you hear it.
Alexandra Leaving
–by Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs (2001)
Suddenly the night has grown colder
The god of love preparing to depart
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder
They slip between the sentries of the heart
Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine
It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this
As someone long prepared for this to happen
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing
Your firm commitments tangible again
And you who had the honor of her evening
And by the honor had your own restored
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Alexandra leaving with her lord
Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this
As someone long prepared for the occasion
In full command of every plan you wrecked
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect
And you who were bewildered by a meaning
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost
*****
The future
–by Leonard Cohen, The Future (1992)
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It’s lonely here,
There’s no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby,
That’s an order!
Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give me back the berlin wall
Give me stalin and st paul
I’ve seen the future, brother:
It is murder.
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
When they said repent repent
I wonder what they meant
When they said repent repent
I wonder what they meant
When they said repent repent
I wonder what they meant
You don’t know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I’m the little jew
Who wrote the bible
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
But love’s the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold:
It’s over, it ain’t going
Any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil’s riding crop
Get ready for the future:
It is murder
Things are going to slide …
There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
Hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets
Coming round
Tryin’ to sound like charlie manson
And the white man dancin’
Give me back the berlin wall
Give me stalin and st paul
Give me christ
Or give me hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby:
It is murder
Things are going to slide …
When they said repent repent …
Always appreciate a lighter note, Arminius — though I wouldn’t say any discussion of American creative artistry is frivolous.
I heard the entire ‘Fresh Air’ interview with Leonard Cohen. Certainly wished, in this case, that the interviewer had been up to the task.
In any case, if the best poetry consists of complex concepts expressed in the simplest terms, Cohen’s definitely the one. On the other hand, Dylan’s best work reflects a very timely surrealism, encapsulating complexity in simplicity the same way, so he’s also great.
As for Paul Simon, his work with his partner Art was some of my very favorite music as a young kid, so there’s always a place in my heart for their music. I wouldn’t quite place him in the same category as the other two, though. Offhand I’d say he’s more a composer than poet.
Just my .o2.
Don’t quite feel I can respond to the poll fairly, as I see it as something of a comparison between a famous blue raincoat, a leopard-skin pillbox hat & a bow-tie that’s really a camera.
😉
Cool. That’s a great comment. Thanks!
Once upon a time I would have agreed with you about Paul Simon. He has certainly emitted a lot of silly froth. In 9th grade, I did a pretentious class report on “The Poetry of Paul Simon,” and looking back, I think his early work was pretty crappy. “Sounds of Silence” is not good poetry! But I think he really kicked it up near the top level with some of his later work, especially Rhythm of the Saints. That album is so complex. I hated it the first three or four times I heard it. But it’s miles deep. It’s the real thing, not just the composing, but the deep poetry.
Gotta admit, I haven’t heard much of the recent work of any of the three, so I should’ve probably sit this one out.
Had to pipe up, though, on the NPR interview: ‘Golly gee, Leonard Cohen, what made you write that?’ Oy.
🙂
the others. I was in college when his Rhythm of the Saints was released, and I loved that album. Wonder if I can still find my old cassette tape of it? The stuff with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, back in the 1980s when world music wasn’t just a click of a mouse away for most of us — it opened things up for me, artistically and also politically. It made Africa into something worth knowing, for a young kid in Texas.
My 16yo, like the “thinking” set of his peers, is into 1970s music in a big way — he finds it so much better musically and conceptually than the stuff on the pop charts today. He recently spent $35 of his own money to hear Bob Dylan in concert (something his parents sadly couldn’t afford for themselves, sigh).
I recently heard “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” on the radio, and it gave me chills. Poetry and prescience. My stepson informs me that Dylan read the Bible every day? Not sure where he heard that, but it’s not inconceivable given the imagery and structure of Dylan’s songs.
For me its Dylan by a mile. True story. I’m in 4th grade music class and we are singing all these songs and one of them is “Blowing in the Wind” I think that this is the best of all these old songs, and it is too bad nobody writes like that anymore, a couple of years later I am sitting around with my favorite cousin who is 6 years older and she puts on “Bringing it all Back Home” and I’m blown away-Who is this, I ask. Bob Dylan, she says, and hey I guess someone does still write like that.
A lot of Simon’s early work is unlistenable now, though he sure did do some nice work his staying power is not great. Cohen did great work, and is still there, but with Dylan one does not even know where to start. There are the great songs that you have heard so often that it is hard to listen with a fresh ear, there are the hidden gems that never get much play, the sort of forgotten ones from some of the mid-70s albums, the great Oh Mercy album.
I remember after being divorced and not having the kids around I could barely stand to listen to Carribean Wind…”Atlantic City by the cold grey sea/Hear a voice calling, ‘Daddy’, I always think its for me…. There are the songs of courage and the songs of anger and understanding, the great humor, the comprehension and the sheer vibrancy of language that really neither of the other ever captured. I’ve seen him lots of times, some with The Band other times with touring musicians and the shows have ranged from trancendent to forgettable but the man stomped on the terra.
I’m happy to get some reminiscences like this. I agree that Bob Dylan’s songs get under the skin like nothing else. I’m probably just going through a period where Cohen’s more somber tones are most appealing.
“Everybody knows the dice are loaded”
Caused me to go back and listen to Paul S earlier works-actually a greatest hit album I’m somewhat ashamed to say-and really enjoyed it. Hazy Shade of Winter, Cecelia, Faking It, actually did hold up pretty well.
Thanks for that.