Leonard Cohen
Swinging Modern Everyman

London’s The Independent calls him “the world’s most famous Canadian.” As with artists Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen sparked the singer/songwriter tradition within modern pop music. Today, after 40 years as a performing artist, he is a rock ‘n’ roll icon – recording, touring, posing coolly in videos and romancing young starlets like Rebecca De Mornay.

While reviled by some critics for morose lyrics and droning vocals, the charismatic Cohen is responsible for late ’60s standards like “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire” and ’90s hits like “Democracy.” He cuts a deeper spiritual swath than most of his folk/rock contemporaries, and, he has found a loyal audience among Baby Boomer and post-punk generations. He outsells Michael Jackson in Poland, and his popularity in France prompted one journalist to observe, “If a Parisian housewife owns one record, it would be a Leonard Cohen.” In Canada, he won, in 1993, a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement.

But Cohen was well established as a poet/novelist before embarking on a recording career in 1967. He penned the internationally lauded Beautiful Losers in 1966 and Canadian bestsellers such as Stranger Music (1993). Inspiration for Cohen’s psalm-like prose comes equally from the Romantic and Beat poets, Judaeo-Christian tradition and Zen meditation, drugs and drink, relationships, and politics. Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century writes, “This artist/seer is a modern Everyman swinging the maelstrom.”

Leonard Cohen's International popularity is as great in the '90s as in the 60s when he first was venerated as a novelist, songwriter, poet, and singer. [Photo, courtesy The Toronto Star]

Born in Montreal in 1934, Cohen was shaped by his Jewish heritage and the death of his father when he was only nine. In 1951, he enrolled in McGill University and blossomed under Irving Layton, A.M. Klein, and Louis Dudek, favourite professors. In the off-hours, he played guitar in a C&W combo and read his poetry to jazz accompaniment in local coffeehouses.

By 1956, the 22-year-old Cohen was featured on the CBC recording, Montreal Poets, and published his first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies. In 1959 he received a Canada Council junior fellowship to work on a novel in London, England, proclaiming that “writing is the only form of self-discovery.”

Another poetry book, The Spice Box of Earth launched in 1961, was followed by the internationally acclaimed The Favourite Game, which won for him, in 1963, Quebec’s $4,000 Prix de Littérature. Ten years later, approximately 800,000 copies had been sold worldwide.

In 1964, Cohen bought a cottage in the Agean. Here he wrote Beautiful Losers, deemed by Stephen Scobie, a Cohen biographer, as “the most radical and beautiful experimental novel ever published in Canada. For this novel he received the esteemed Governor General’s Award for Literature, 1968, but turned it down, declaring his work “too private” for such an honour.

By this time Cohen was performing his songs in public and suddenly became hot property after folk star Judy Collins used his material. He appeared at the famed Newport and Mariposa Folk Festivals in 1967 and was subsequently snapped up by John Hammond Sr. of CBS Records who had earlier launched Dylan. The Songs of Leonard Cohen, containing such classic tunes as “Suzanne” and “So Long Marianne,” was released to raves. In 1969, Cohen enhanced his reputation with Songs From a Room, joined the late Jimi Hendrix and others before a crowd of 100,000 at the Isle of Wight Festival in England, and was named The Globe and Mail’s Entertainer of the Year.

The singer/guitarist’s North American popularity waned during the ’70s: five records and two books received mixed reviews. He struggled with the breakup of his marriage to Suzanne Elrod (with whom he had fathered a son and a daughter). A low point was his 1977 collaboration with Phil Spector on the R&B-flavoured Death of a Ladies’ Man, which Cohen declared “a disaster.” A five-year recording absence prompted rumours of his retirement....

But Cohen has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance beginning, in 1986, with Famous Blue Raincoat by his long-time background vocalist Jennifer Warnes, an album selling 750,000 copies worldwide. The hip-sounding I’m Your Man (1988) – which yielded the international hit single, “First We Take Manhattan” – spent 17 weeks atop the charts in Norway. That same year Prince Charles received him in London. He also directed and starred in I am a Hotel, a documentary which took first place at the Festival International de Télévision de Montreux, Switzerland, and flashed his face around the world in high video rotation.

In 1992, Cohen released his most well-rounded, hugely popular album, The Future, which included state of the rock world manifestos like the title track (with the chilling chorus, “I’ve seen the future, brother, and it’s murder”) and “Democracy” (performed by Don Henley at the MTV Ball commemorating President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration).

Over the years, Cohen has been the subject of several tribute CDs by a Who’s Who of rock stars. His songs have been turned into major hits by such artists as Rex Harrison and the Neville Brothers. As well, movies such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Natural Born Killers include Cohen compositions. He has won three Canadian JUNO music awards (including Songwriter of the Year in 1991) and, in 1991, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for being “one of the most popular and influential writers of his generation ... whose images of beauty, despair, outrage, and tenderness touch a universal chord in us all.”

While having lived for extended periods abroad, Cohen has always maintained, in Montreal, a Canadian residence “because it is my native land, my home, with all the feeling one has for his homeland.”

Michael Beggs