"I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen" by Sylvie Simmons (San Francisco Chronicle)
Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and novelist who decided, in the mid-1960s, to move to New York City and become a singer-songwriter at the height of the pop-rock era, seemed as unlikely a candidate for stardom as Tiny Tim. He spoke-sang his downbeat ballads of erotic and spiritual angst in a low and somber voice, to the accompaniment of a Spanish-tuned acoustic guitar, and was so shy he trembled at the prospect of performing in public. When John Hammond, the renowned recording-producer and talent scout, told colleagues at the Columbia label he intended to sign Cohen, one of them exclaimed: "A 32-year-old poet? Are you crazy?"
Indeed, Cohen's evocative but mordant songs, more reminiscent of dead bards such as Lorca or Brecht than of Greenwich Village folk-rockers, though popular when done by other artists, especially Judy Collins ("Suzanne," "Dress Rehearsal Rag"), proved on his own discs to be out of sync with American tastes. He was perceived as moody, self-absorbed, "serious" - a downer. Cohen's LPs should come packaged with razor blades, music folk joked, because he wrote songs to kill yourself by.
Europe, though, loved Cohen's work from the first - "for the very things," Sylvie Simmons writes in her pleasurable biography, "that had turned the North American music industry off: his dark humor, old-world romance, existential gloom and poetry."
And over decades of persistent excellence, and through many twists of fate, Cohen (and for that matter Hammond) earned vindication: The reluctant performer from the winter of the Summer of Love evolved into a polished stage presence, Simmons writes, "in his sharp suit, fedora and shiny shoes, looking like a Rat Pack rabbi, God's chosen mobster," as he held crowds sometimes of 20,000 to 100,000 spellbound for concerts lasting as long as three hours.
Cohen has had hits in the United States as well as Europe, and those hits became anthems: "Dance Me to the End of Love" - inspired by an account of the orchestra at Dachau - is now a wedding-reception staple. "Hallelujah," covered by hundreds of artists, shot to No. 1 on the download hit parade. A line from another Cohen song - "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in" - has entered the scripture of rehab clinics. Cohen's latest album was one of his most popular ever, and at age 78 the artist continues to tour with great success.
Simmons, the author of previous biographies of Neil Young and Serge Gainsbourg, does a superb job telling Cohen's long, strange, self-complicated story: a saga full of colorful characters (including such figures as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Phil Spector), artists, schemers, seekers and beautiful muses almost too numerous to count.
Granted access to Cohen's archive and to Cohen himself (for a series of conversations whose excerpts appear in italicized chunks), drawing on original interviews with many others, the author traces Leonard's history from infancy to 2012, in a graceful style with more than a few of her own poetic touches.
Raised in privileged circumstances by a doting mother, Cohen would crave and need the company of loving, attending, enabling women all his life. "Deserted" at age 9 by a Montreal father who died, Leonard found an eventual substitute in an almost 100-year-old cognac-drinking Southern California Japanese Zen master: "the constant in Leonard's life," Simmons writes, "the good friend, the wise father figure who disciplined and indulged him and never left, not even when Leonard had left him."
At last, in his eighth decade, it seemed the complex Cohen - avowed Jew, ordained monk, inveterate ladies' man, sometime-ascetic, recluse and celebrity - was able to reconcile his seemingly conflicting needs and impulses in the rigorous disciplines of writing and touring - creating his art in private and presenting it in public, just as he had all along.
"I'm Your Man" is more celebratory narrative than psychological X-ray; Simmons proves as indulgent as any Cohen muse, mentor or matriarch. But she does tell him, near the end of her absorbing chronicle, how she came to wonder what the heck his problem had been most of his life; just what was it he wanted?
"Right, right," Cohen acknowledges her point - but at once this former debating champ, master Torah student and wearer of masks deflects it: "I've always found that examination extremely tedious," he tells his own biographer. "[A] deliberate investigation of my life to untangle it or sort it out or understand it ... I don't find ... compelling at all."
Fortunately, the author did.