Thursday 17 November 2016

This Bird on the Wire has flown

Leonard Cohen passed away last week and has been lauded as one of the great musical poets. I remember hearing Cohen's stuff, Suzanne in particular, from way back in the day. The gravel voiced delivery didn't appeal then, but in recent years I've started to get it. And my better half and I now realise the piece of music we've much enjoyed dancing the waltz to in recent years is a version of Cohen's "Hallelujah" - we hadn't realised where it came from, even though it's one of Cohen's best known songs. And we've seen Shrek.

It's reported that it took Cohen 2 years - or 5 depending on the source - to write Hallelujah and it was certainly a slow burner in terms of success. He originally wrote some 80 verses for the 5 verse song as he was reduced to sitting in his underwear banging his head on the floor. On release in 1984 it met with little reaction until it was covered by John Cale in 1991. This was to be the first of over 100 cover versions of the song (I suspect the version we waltz to is not counted in that number. It was recorded by our neighbour Richard Keeling in his Coppicewood Studios - actually his house in a similarly named road - in strict 3/4 time for his series of ballroom dance friendly CDs). Cale's album including Hallelujah was bought by a Brooklyn based woman for whom an unknown young musician called Jeff Buckley house sat. This led to Buckley covering it in a live performance at a bar, where a Columbia records executive heard the song and signed Buckley who recorded it for his 1994 for an album. But even then it didn't sell big until well after Buckley drowned in the Mississipi in 1997. Subsequently Cale's version was used in the film Shrek in 2001, though strangely Rufus Wainwright's version is on the soundtrack album, possibly because he was signed to Dreamworks. And then Buckley's version went big: number 1 in the States and 2 in the UK in 2008. So it took a decade and a half or more for the song to become really famous and it's now in the common consciousness.

Like my favourite musical poet, Roy Harper, Cohen deals in both high concepts and everyday life, in particular the intimate relationship between a man an a woman. For me Cohen doesn't have the range and depth of content, lyrically or musically, of Harper but then no-one does in my personal distortion of the world. Unlike Harper, who is vitriolically anti-religion, Cohen carried his Jewish beliefs through life, while also embracing Zen Buddhism, studying it for 5 years and becoming a fully ordained monk. But he seems to have a healthy degree of scepticism on religion, for example in Hallelujah:

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah


Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah


And there is a playfulness in his lyrics, for example (also from Hallelujah):

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof


I read a story in the papers about Bob Dylan meeting Cohen when they both lived in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Dylan said "As far as I'm concerned, Leonard, you're number one. I'm number zero".

I'd have loved to have been there for this pronouncement of Dylan's to hear his tone of voice, because it seems to me that it could have come across as self-deprecating (you're the top and I'm a nothing) or as the opposite (your number 1 but I'm an even lower number, so of higher standing). Of course if it was said in a whimsical, Mona Lisa smile type of way, it would be rather more Delphic and open to interpretation. In which case this could actually be one of the more subtle things Dylan ever said.....

Anyway, Leonard, sorry I came to appreciate a small amount of your stuff rather late in the day, but at least I got part way there.

"Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free"
From Bird On The Wire", 1969

Sources include: Why it took 15 years for Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah to get famous: http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-hallelujah-jeff-buckley/93632656/

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(Leonard_Cohen_song), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Buckley and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrek

Lyrics are all over Google e.g. http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/hallelujah.html and
http://www.metrolyrics.com/bird-on-the-wire-lyrics-leonard-cohen.html

The Dylan story was in Josh Glancy's Sunday Times tribute on 13 Nov 2016

You can see and hear Cohen perform Hallelujah live in an official video from 2009 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q.




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