Leonard Cohen with Judy Collins at the Newport Folk Festival, July 15, 1967
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TORONTO hotel room, some time in the mid-1960s. Canada’s young poetdu-jour Leonard Cohen is being interviewed by journalist and socialite Barbara Amiel (the future Mrs Conrad Black). Unsettled by the sound of a couple having sex next door, Cohen drops a bombshell: “I think I’m going to record myself singing my poems,” he says. Slightly revulsed at the sound of his nasal voice, Amiel replies, “Please don’t.”
well-to-do Montreal family stubbornly resisted career advice to establish himself as the great bedsit voice of his age. In fact, many of the hundreds of friends and family members interviewed in the first instalment of Michael Posner’s three-part oral history discouraged Cohen from singing, but his competitive streak won out; as one cohort put it, “Leonard was extremely ambitious, expressly, to overtake Dylan.” And while Bob Dylan was recovering from his motorbike accident in 1967, Cohen almost did just that. A job at the family clothing firm, Freedman Company, never seemed a likely option for the dreamy Cohen, who established himself as an all-round mensch working at children’s summer camps while bewitching women with his poetic side. “He was a very good marketeer of pain,” one friend remembers with a roll of the eyes. “It awoke empathy. Poor man. The women lined up to comfort. He did that very well.” Cohen came of age in the late-’50s, but despite prodigious LSD use, never became a real beatnik face. By the mid-1960s he had published several volumes of poetry and a couple of novels, but as he entered his thirties he was well aware that the written word would never fund the kind of gilded bohemian lifestyle he yearned for. Realising, in the words of one associate, that “a minor poet… could become a major lyricist”, he linked up with manager Mary Martin – formerly an assistant to Albert Grossman – and was invited to play three of his songs to folk star Judy Collins in 1966. “I fell off my chair at all three,” she recalls. “But it was ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’ that I recorded soon after.” Posner’s endlessly quotable interviewees track Cohen’s subsequent emergence as a recording artist on Songs Of Leonard Cohen and Songs From A Room. Not everyone appreciates his voice, his work or his womanising (“the phrase ‘naked body’… appears in every one of his songs,” snarks his sometime bedfellow Joni Mitchell), but these multiple perspectives capture man and myth in tandem. For all of his gift for words, Cohen would have struggled to tell his story better himself.
REVIEWED THIS MONTH
LEONARD COHEN: UNTOLD STORIES – THE EARLY YEARS MICHAELPOSNER
SIMON&SCHUSTER, £25
8/10
BLACK DIAMOND QUEENS: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND ROCK AND ROLL MAUREEN MAHON
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £25
7/10
“Leonard was a very good marketeer of pain” FIFTIES R&B star LaVern Baker found a novel way to fight back when white singer Georgia Gibbs kept having hits with note-for-note replicas of her recordings. Heading to Japan for a concert tour, Baker took out a $125,000 insurance policy, payable to her nemesis, writing in an open letter to Gibbs: “This should be at least partial compensation for you if I should be killed or injured, and thereby deprive you of the opportunity of copying my songs and arrangements in the future.” In Black Diamond Queens, anthropologist Maureen Mahon finds that while black women helped to invent rock, they rarely reaped the full benefits. Elvis Presley made his name by cannibalising Big Mama Thornton’s 1953 version of Lieber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog”, but she was swiftly shut out of commercial rock’n’roll, spending the rest of her career swigging gin and milk on the blues and R&B circuit. “He makes a million and all this jive because his face is different from mine,” she sighed. The Shirelles faced similar visibility issues. The archetypal
girl group scored US No 1s with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Soldier Boy”, but were deemed too black for The Ed Sullivan Show – and indeed their own record sleeves – their label fearful that the colour of their skin might harsh the everygirl buzz. British invasion stars acknowledged their debts to African American women (producer George Martin once said The Beatles were “like a male Shirelles”), but as ‘white’ rock was quietly uncoupled from ‘black’ soul and R&B in the late 1960s, black women found themselves shoved sidestage as backing singers or characterised as sex objects. Mahon notes how The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” (working title: “Black Pussy”) “treats the institution of American slavery as a setting for an edgy bodiceripper”, while the lyrics to 1978’s “Some Girls” (“black girls just wanna get fucked all night”) reflect some of the toxic stereotypes of the time. Betty Davis and Labelle explored those hypersexualised tropes as they tried to forge rock careers in the 1970s, but if Tina Turner did so more successfully in the 1980s, the “Queen Of Rock” was branded inauthentic by black and white purists alike. If that is a measure of what still awaits black female artists who cross zealously policed genre lines, Mahon is encouraged that the likes of Brittany Howard continue to ignore those boundaries; she remains convinced that distinctions between pop, rock, soul and funk are only skin deep. JIMWIRTH FEBRUARY 2021 • UNCUT • 109
JOHN BYRNE COOKE ESTATE/GETTY IMAGES
Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories – The Early Years shows how this scion of a
