Lyrical Legend Performs Songs of 'Love and Hate'
By: Hank Drew
Posted: 11/16/09
HP Pavilion was packed to the gills Friday night as 75-year-old Leonard Cohen delivered words of love, death and religion with his sonorous baritone.
The stage was covered in deep red Persian rugs and was bathed in lush backing curtains that shifted colors when the stage lights changed.
Cohen - decked out in a black suit, white shirt and black fedora - bounded onto stage to a thunderous standing ovation befitting perhaps the greatest pop wordsmith of the past 100 years.
The band immediately whipped into "Dance Me to the End of Love" with Cohen deeply intoning: "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin / Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in / Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove."
This is why Cohen as a pop music manifestation matters. His lyrics transcend the medium.
As if to punctuate this point, Cohen would pause at certain points of the event to deliver lines from his songs as spoken word versions.
I could have spent three hours just listening to this man speak with his wizened voice.
Instead, I was happy to spend three hours listening to the words delivered in song.
Cohen's backing band is the standard backing band - technically proficient, but lacking that individual spark of genius. But, that is the point of a backing band.
The night was Cohen's, and the backing band faded into the corners of the stage. The smooth sounds of the band actually accentuated the grain of his dark voice.
Cohen was a gracious leader, though. He introduced each member of the group twice and allowed individual members to shine with moments of their own.
One of the highlights of the first set included "The Future," a song that seems to have predicted the current state of the world: "There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code / Your private life will suddenly explode / There'll be phantoms / There'll be fires on the road and the white man dancing / You'll see a woman hanging upside down / Her features covered by her fallen gown / and all the lousy little poets coming round tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson and the white man dancin'."
Another highlight was "Chelsea Hotel," a recounting of Cohen's tryst with Janis Joplin, which peels away the layers of love and reveals truth behind the lies of modern pop music: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / You were famous, your heart was a legend / You told me again you preferred handsome men / But for me you would make an exception."
This song highlights another important aspect of Cohen - his ability to see himself as he is.
He isn't a handsome fellow by any standard and by all accounts suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life. All of these feelings crept into his lyrics and present a portrait of a life that is perhaps a little too close to the bone for mainstream audiences.
This could explain how Cohen has existed along the margins of pop music. The masses are more interested in imagining that there is a higher order to life, love and death.
Cohen explodes those myths.
After a short 15-minute intermission, Cohen returned to the stage to perform 19 more songs, including three encores.
As he grabbed his microphone, he said, "Thank you for returning after the break. Some people have called my songs depressing."
The live version of "Suzanne" was a very lush affair. The original was mostly Cohen's nasally tenor voice lilting over finger-picked guitar and pretty female vocals.
"Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river / You can hear the boats go by / You can spend the night beside her / And you know that she's half crazy / But that's why you want to be there."
What makes these lyrics so poetic is that he provides concrete images that allow the mind to wander. This is the essence of poetry, and Cohen always nails this.
In the end, this night was more than I could have ever expected from my first time seeing Cohen perform live.
I first discovered Cohen after hearing an '80s cover version of "Who by Fire" by the band Coil. When artists I respect cover other artists, I tend to take notice.
This set off my love affair with lyrical poetry and a weary graveled voice. © Copyright 2009 Spartan Daily
Please, someone post it to YouTube!
