"Nadel is keen to analyse LC as a literary writer of the tradition of the first half of the twentieth century . . ." Mind if I respectfully disagree? I didn't find Nadel's bio a "literary biography" at all. Yes, he referenced Leonard's works (sometimes, as in his "discussion...

RE: Leonard's politics " Back in the day," as they say, a lot of "us" with countercultural/leftist tendencies saw in Leonard's dissatisfaction and angst a sense that he was on "our side" politically. In fact, part of his popularity in countries like Poland is due to his...

Long story, Goldin -- I'd just graduated from college and had gone back to my folks' house for what I hoped was going to be a very brief time . . . I saw that Leonard was coming to the Shaboo (the concert was announced on pretty short notice, if I recall) -- I'd always wanted to be a writer, but I h...

Heh -- it's a little-off topic, but have you seen that photo of Leonard on a park bench, bending over as if he's going to polish his shoe (it was in the program for the I'm Your Man tour)? He's wearing a very dapper pinstriped suit, and around his wrist is a band that looks for all the world like th...

Good point about the Trickster -- I can see how that's the role Breavman was filling in that scene. Yes, usually the Trickster has a dispensation to do things that would normally be forbidden outside the context of the ritual . . . even so, though, that scene has always unsettled me, and assuming th...

Looks as if someone has fixed things and replaced "dark" with "dove" in the review . . . . . . The reviewer tries too hard to evoke Leonard's sardonic self-depracating tone, especially at the beginning (and he says virtually nothing about Sylvie's book itself, which seems more th...

"Ten years" during "the '60s"??? That's the whole decade! He was pretty busy behind bars, I must say. I've never read a prison diary like Spice-Box of Earth , Parasites of Heaven , Flowers for Hitler , The Favorite Game , or Beautiful Losers . . . and that prison must have had on...

"She said there is a table set in Heaven
But I don't like to eat there all the time . . ."
-- from "Guererro" [unrecorded early version of "Iodine" -- I heard this in concert in 1975)

Didn't one of those TV talent shows actually feature a clip of its participants singing "Hallelujah" for the Newtown victims? I'm guessing, thought, they conveniently neglected to include the verse: Maybe there's a God above All I ever learned from love Was how to shoot at someone who outd...

The very first time I saw Leonard was in early 1970 at the University of Hartford. He said it was his first time performing live, which we know wasn't technically true. But it does seem to have been a warm-up for his first actual major tour (the band was the original "Army" with Charlie Da...

Sorry -- don't know how to quote from a previous post . . . . . . but I was at the Shaboo in Willimantic Connecticut for both nights in 1975; in fact, I wrote a review of the show for the Harford Advocate . It was my first-ever published article, and Leonard was the first artist I ever interviewed. ...