Leonard Cohen

(Image from discogs.com.)

When I found out Leonard Cohen had died, Thursday evening, I was listening to a show I like on KTCU, a station here in town (that didn't want me as a deejay even though it does have non-student deejays), called Night Skool.  I had to turn the station off.  I was completely wrecked.  & since I had been posting stuff on Facebook, I wrote a bunch on Facebook.  I started with this:

I first became aware of Leonard Cohen when I saw the video for "First We Take Manhattan" on 120 Minutes on MTV in 1988. That guy who hosted it, Kevin whatever, laughed when he announced the video, like, "What the fuck?" But I was intrigued by the first lines of the song:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within

I went out & bought "I'm Your Man" as soon as I could. I didn't know anything about him. I just felt I needed that album - & boy did I.

I continued:

Later I saw a best of collection at a used record store in Garland, which I snatched up.  I put the record on with my friend Dale probably in 1989 or 1990.  The song "Suzanne" was first.  Both of us looked at each other when the song was over like "This is the shit."

My relationship with Leonard Cohen deepened to utmost importance.  I became obsessed.

I remember walking - walking! - on a damp November day in 1992 across the fields that are now the townhomes & shops that are "The Triangle" in Austin to get to the Sound Warehouse (or whatever chain store it was) on Burnet Road just to buy a copy of "The Future."  It was a cold day by Austin standards but the album had just been released, it was confirmed in stock by a phone call, & I had heard "The Future" on the radio - probably KUT.  I consumed that record.

I consumed all his records. They are sacred to me. I listened to his new one last week & was a little disappointed, although I love the title track. He could disappoint, but he was never disappointing.

One thing I feel so lucky about is that I got to see him in 1993.  Here is me from Facebook talking about it:

I got to see him live just once, in 1993, at the Backyard, back when it was in the middle of nowhere. He was amazing. He did four sets, two of them all by himself. I went with my friends Lauren & Russell. Lauren remarked about how strange it was that there were all these women her mother's age who were swooning like teenagers over the Beatles. At one point, he came out with just a guitar, & sang a few songs without his band, & he was doing "A Singer Must Die," & you could hear a police car approaching in the distance. He stopped, & he said, "Listen." The audience waited quietly, reverently, as the doppler sirens faded, & he said, "What a sad & beautiful sound," & he started a different song.

At the end of the show, as he was wont to do, the band & he sang a hymn acapella.  As we were leaving - as we were feeling better than any human ever really should feel, as we were all part of whatever beauty & truth & darkness & light he could conjure up with a whisper or impart with a growl or melodic & tunelessly sing, someone behind us was complaining.  He said, "What the hell?  After all that making fun of religion, & he ended with a hymn?"  My friend Russell said to me, "It's weird to think someone could sit through such an experience & that was all that could take away from it."

My conclusion was this:

I've read both his books - The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers - I prefer the former - & all of his poetry.  I've listened to all of his albums so many times that they're a part of my fucking DNA.  I am weeping over the keyboard as I write this, because there isn't anyone like him, & there never really was anyone like him, & I owe him so much.  That gracious, gracious man, who had only a dim understanding what vitriol was, who could put into a simple words the deepest of feelings, whose voice, as it deepened with every cigarette he smoked, sounded like it was something that came from before humans knew how to speak, observations of a kinder cosmos to people who thought they needed redemption especially when they didn't, that lovely, lovely man, from whom I've taken so much & given so very little.

Or as he would say to me, "Hey, that's no way to say goodbye."

I have nothing else to say.  This is a tremendous loss to me, to the world.  But how fortunate to have lived for a time in a world where Leonard Cohen lived!

In the new year, I'll do a tribute radio show for him.  For now, the wound is too fresh.