Books

ATORONTO 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.”

Leonard Cohen: Untold Stories – The

Early Years shows how this scion of a 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 frst 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 frm, 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 of my chair at all three,” she recalls. “But it was ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’ that I recorded soon afer.”

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 gif for words, Cohen would have struggled to tell his story better himself. FIFTIES R&B star LaVern Baker found a novel way to fght 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.”

REVIEWED THIS MONTH

LEONARDCOHEN: UNTOLDSTORIES–THEEARLYYEARS 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 Cohen with Judy Collins at the Newport Folk Festival, July 15, 1967

“Leonard was a very good marketeer of pain”

In Black Diamond Queens,

anthropologist Maureen Mahon fnds that while black women helped to invent rock, they rarely reaped the full benefts. Elvis Presley made his name by cannibalising Big Mama Thornton’s 1953 version of Lieber and Stoller’s “Hound Dog”, but she was swifly 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 diferent from mine,” she sighed. The Shirelles faced similar visibility issues. The archetypal girl group scoredUSNo1swith“WillYou Love Me Tomorrow”and“SoldierBoy”, but were deemedtooblackforTheEd Sullivan Show –andindeedtheirown record sleeves –theirlabelfearfulthat the colour of theirskinmightharshthe everygirl buzz.

British invasionstarsacknowledged their debts to AfricanAmericanwomen (producer GeorgeMartinoncesaidThe Beatles were “likeamaleShirelles”),but as ‘white’ rock wasquietlyuncoupled from ‘black’ soulandR&Binthelate 1960s, black womenfoundthemselves shoved sidestageasbackingsingersor characterised assexobjects.Mahon notes how The RollingStones’“Brown Sugar” (workingtitle:“BlackPussy”) “treats the institutionofAmerican slavery as a settingforanedgybodiceripper”, while thelyricsto1978’s“Some Girls” (“black girlsjustwannagetfucked all night”) refectsomeofthetoxic stereotypes of thetime.

Betty Davis andLabelleexploredthose hypersexualisedtropesastheytried to forge rock careersinthe1970s,butif Tina Turner didsomoresuccessfully in the 1980s, the“QueenOfRock”was branded inauthenticbyblackandwhite purists alike. Ifthatisameasureofwhat still awaits blackfemaleartistswho cross zealouslypolicedgenrelines, Mahon is encouragedthatthelikesof Brittany Howardcontinuetoignorethose boundaries; sheremainsconvincedthat distinctions betweenpop,rock,souland funk are only skindeep. JIMWIRTH