Writer digs deep for Leonard Cohen bio (San Francisco Chronicle)
To write her definitive biography of Leonard Cohen, "I'm Your Man," Sylvie Simmons had to go back and relive his entire life in just three years. But the British journalist who has called San Francisco home for the past decade didn't spare any details: She dug deep into the iconic 77-year-old Canadian songwriter's travails with religion, poetry, women, music, fame, depression, drugs, money, family and, most of all, facial hair.
"I basically stalked everything on the poor guy," she said last week, sitting in the living room of her sun-filled Mission District flat, still reeling from the onerous task of writing close to 600 pages on her characteristically elusive subject.
Simmons started before the beginning, landing in Cohen's native Montreal in the dead of winter to discover as much as she could about his kith and kin going back several years before he was born. "I thought I would start the book in Montreal because that's where Leonard started," she said.
She spent months hanging around the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Cohen lived on and off while romancing the likes of Janis Joplin and Nico, interrogating old flames and neighbors. She visited the studios where he recorded beloved albums like "Songs of Love and Hate" and "New Skin for the Old Ceremony," and went to great lengths to contact all the people who were involved in making them.
Simmons nearly reached a breaking point when she checked into a monastery at Mount Baldy, where Cohen spent five years studying Zen Buddhism in the mid-'90s. She barely made it through a week.
"When I finally sat down with him last December, I basically said, 'Being you wore me out,' " she laughed. "I told him, 'There were times I wanted to shake you and say, 'What are you doing? Why are you leaving this woman?' And he would just pat my hand and say, 'Yes, I know, I know.' "
Simmons, a regular Mojo magazine contributor whose previous literary subjects include Neil Young and Serge Gainsbourg, put off "I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen" (Ecco; $27.99) for as long as she could. "Writing a book on Leonard Cohen had been harboring in the back of my mind for so long, and usually I managed to just kick it back there and put the lid on the box," she said. "I just knew it was going to be three years of solid work. There was no way around it."
Ultimately, she felt as if she had no choice.
Even though there were several books already written about Cohen, few felt complete. "I really think he deserved a really good biography," Simmons said. "You look at Bob Dylan - who I think Cohen is on the same level with as far as songwriting, if not above him - there are shelves full of books on him. But Leonard Cohen has been so underserved."
Meanwhile, the man who was long regarded as a cult figure in America was in the midst of a late-career reappraisal, fueled by the rediscovery and countless reinterpretations of his song "Hallelujah" (which his label Columbia declined to release when it was originally recorded in 1984) and a comeback tour prompted by the fleecing of his retirement fund by his former business manager.
What a life. Even though he was born into an upper-class Russian Jewish family in Montreal, Cohen never settled into the role set out for him. He published poetry, immersed himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, floated among women, lived for a long spell on the Greek island of Hydra, then a homestead in Tennessee. He flitted among religions and belief systems. He once made a record with Phil Spector.
Despite a constant stream of adulation for his richly textured, deeply depressive songs from his musical peers, Cohen never really became a household name until he launched a two-month American tour in 2009 - his first time onstage here in 15 years - that included performances at the Coachella festival and Radio City Music Hall.
"He was moving around all the time," Simmons said. "He was constantly with different women. He was constantly trying new spiritual paths. All of these things were going on, but at the same time there was this amazing consistency to him. He seemed to stay in the same place as a human being."
Simmons, on some level, could relate to Cohen's itinerate lifestyle. The London-born author started her music journalism career in the late '70s, working as the Los Angeles correspondent for the highly influential British weekly Sounds, where she wrote about acts like Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe. She moved back to London in the '80s, then spent three years living in Paris, before somehow finding her way back to the West Coast.
"I had come out to San Francisco on a bit of a whim, an adventure," she said. "I found this student apartment on Divisadero where I actually did find myself in the middle of the night going upstairs in my Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt saying, 'In my day, we weren't that noisy when we had sex and we did it in 10 minutes. And you don't put Dave Matthews on afterwards - it's just so icky!' "
She took a similar tack with "I'm Your Man." What makes the book different from other Cohen biographies is not just the abundance of research that went into it but also the fact that Simmons avoided dwelling on the notorious ladies' man's sex life.
"One of the things about Leonard is ladies adore him," she said. "Always have. He's a charming, flirtatious man. I just think it's not that interesting. It's not like the Michael Jackson story where nobody was sure what his sexuality and taste was. I wouldn't want to write that book. I feel like when the door closes, it's their own business."
In the end, she felt as if even the 600 finely spaced pages weren't quite enough. "The Leonard Cohen book needed to have everything," Simmons said. "It needed somebody to go back to the source and write about him as if he had never been written about before."
She's still recovering. The most difficult part, she said, is going back to writing magazine-length features. She's easing back into it.
"The next book, if I can't fit it into a Facebook post, then I can't do it," Simmons said. "I'm going to have to redevelop the skill of having to toss one off quickly."