After two sold out dates in Boston and one in the dramatic canyon of Redrocks in Colorado, Leonard Cohen will be wrapping up his roundly successful tour of the United States. After a month long respite, Europe will be next to indirectly benefit from the unfortunate financial woes that forced him out of retirement. The septuagenarian genius will first perform two shows in Köln, Germany, on July 1 &2, and will perform on the United State’s Independence Day in Antwerp, Belgium. A lot has changed since Cohen’s previous show in Antwerp, which was covered in the 1981 film by Harry Rasky, the Song of Leonard Cohen.
The companion book to that film, written in retrospect and published in 2001, provides a transcript of a tense and awkward night in Antwerp, with Rasky describing Belgium in a very unfavorable light:
The rationality of Rasky’s commentary aside, his reminiscences clearly recall a very different Europe in the late 1970’s. Never a bastion of musical invention, Flanders in 1979 was more open to the flamboyant sounds of Frenchman Serge Gainsbourg, and especially the exciting Wagnerian rock and soul being produced by American Phil Spector since the late 1960’s. Given these tastes, Cohen may have teased the Flemish too much for his own good by collaborating with Spector on his anomalous 1977 album Death of a Ladies’ Man. The crowd that night, expecting a Spectoresque “wall of sound” were let down by the more typical folksy Cohen, and presented him with wooden faces and flaccid applause. It was enough to get under the skin of the famously mellow Cohen who growled, “They’ll be punished severely. I’m not going to let them get away with this. This is the best music that has been played in Belgium, what’s the, when was the last Belgian composer?” Following the show, the Song of Leonard Cohen documents an awkward and exasperating interview with a Belgian journalist, and shows Cohen as a famous, yet still not entirely understood artist with many more doors yet to open.Belgium, which is a country, much like a green lawn which has been saturated by chemicals to drown the weeds and all other independent living matter. Every blade in its place. None would dare to be different. Belgium is to countries what Robert Goulet is to music… Belgium is, of course, now the center of the new homogenized Europe where the new bland Euro is the currency and politicians are selected to be indistinguishable, erasing all signs of rationality… Gone are the quaint terrible wars the kept Europe constantly off balance.
The upcoming Antwerp show promises to be far less taxing for the now legendary bard. Having easily conquered France and the UK, their Teutonic neighbors soon cracked the coed of his soulful poetry, and now there is virtually no pocket, Flemish or otherwise, left in this world that is not prepared to honor his monumental oeuvre on this twilight tour.
though there are great bands around. 