In 1991 Leonard Cohen was on a TV show and he sang a cute song about bananas that Chiquita featured in commercials that ran in movie theaters back in the 1940s. I have no idea how it came up or what inspired Cohen to break into the song, but he clearly wants a close pal of his, Canadian poet Irving Layton, to register how much of the song he knows by heart.

The original singer of the Chiquita Banana song was Monica Lewis, who many years later appeared in two of the Airport movies.
 

 
You probably know that on the cover of his 1988 album I’m Your Man, Cohen is depicted munching on a banana. Bananas were even used in the promotional items produced for the album, as seen at the top of this page.

This page would have you believe that Cohen is the second most banana-obsessed musical artist after, well, the Velvet Underground.

The original Chiquita Banana advertisement from 1947:

 
Cohen’s rendition:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Newly unearthed Leonard Cohen talk show appearance, 1985
Sonny Rollins, Ken Nordine, Was Not Was and Leonard Cohen together on late night TV

 
Leonard Cohen had a small meltdown onstage at the end of his 1972 world tour. Facing the audience at Yad Eliahu Sports Palace in Jerusalem, he only managed to sing the first three words of “Bird on a Wire,” falling silent when the crowd began to applaud.

I really, I really enjoy your recognizing the song, but… I’m scared enough as it is up here, and I think something’s wrong every time you begin to applaud. So if you do recognize the song, would you just wave your hand? I would really like to see you all waving your hands if you recognize the song.

I hope you’ll bear with me. These songs are kind of, uh—they become meditations for me, and sometimes, you know, I just don’t get high on it, and I feel that I’m cheating you, so I’ll try it again, okay? And if it doesn’t work, I’ll stop in the middle. There’s no reason why we should mutilate a song just to save face, but here it goes.

But the audience greeted the opening bars of “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” with applause, too, and Cohen got ready to walk.

Now look, if it doesn’t get any better, we’ll just end the concert and I’ll refund your money, because I really feel that we’re cheating you tonight. You know, some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights, you just can’t get off the ground. And there’s no point in lying about it. And tonight, we just haven’t been getting off the ground. It says in the Kabbalah… that if you can’t get off the ground, you should stay on the ground. No, it says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. And somehow, the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem. So listen: we’re going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly meditate in the dressing room to get ourselves back into shape, and if we can manage, we will be back.

 

 
Backstage, Cohen told his band and crew that the show was over and he was leaving. As Ira Nadel’s Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen relates, though, all the singer really needed to clear his head was a shave, a cigarette, and a dose:

In Jerusalem, at the Yad Eliahu Sports Palace, there was pandemonium when Cohen stopped mid-performance and left the stage, agitated and in tears, saying that he could not go on and that the money should be refunded to the audience. Drugs and the pressure of performing the final concert of the tour in the holy city of Jerusalem had contributed to his state. In the dressing room, a distraught Cohen rejected the pleas of his musicians and manager to return to the stage. Several Israeli promoters, overhearing the conversation, walked out to the crowd and conveyed the news: Cohen would not be performing and they would receive their money back. The young audience responded by singing the Hebrew song, “Zim Shalom” (“We Bring You Peace”). Backstage, Cohen suddenly decided he needed a shave; rummaging in his guitar case for his razor, he spied an envelope with some acid from years ago. He turned to his band and inquired: “Should we not try some?” “Why not?” they answered. And “like the Eucharist,” Cohen has said, “I ripped open the envelope and handed out small portions to each band member.” A quick shave, a cigarette, and then out to the stage to receive a tumultuous welcome. The LSD took effect as he started to play and he saw the crowd unite into the grand image of “the Ancient of Days” from Daniel’s dream in the Old Testament. This image, “the Ancient of Days” who had witnessed all history, asked him, “Is this All, this performing on the stage?” Deliver or go home was the admonition. At that moment, Cohen had been singing “So Long, Marianne” intensely and a vision of Marianne appeared to him. He began to cry and, to hide his tears, turned to the band—only to discover that they, too, were in tears.

The concert comes at the end of Tony Palmer’s documentary of the 1972 tour, Bird on a Wire. While the full movie (which includes the shave, but not the acid-eating, as far as I can tell) is up on YouTube, German subtitles swim nauseously all over the frame. Instead, here are clips of that evening’s performance of “So Long, Marianne” and the tearful sequel.

“So Long, Marianne”:

 
After the jump, the end of the Jerusalem show…

 
As tribute records go, 1991’s indie-rock salute to Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Fan, was pretty okay. The high point of the album remains Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ surprising take on “Tower of Song,” which switches from one musical style to another every verse or so.
 

 
The six-minute version of “Tower of Song” the Bad Seeds submitted to the tribute record was apparently edited down from a very long, drunken jam on the song. According to the account in Ian Johnston’s Cave biography Bad Seed, the original DAT of the session was nearly an hour-and-a-half long:

When Cave had first been approached to contribute to the record his initial reaction was that the idea was appalling and flatly refused to be involved. However, during a rehearsal in west London earlier in the year, after a prolonged drinking session in a nearby pub, the group had spontaneously started hammering out a half-remembered drunken rendition of Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’. Their eighty-minute irreverent assault on the composition, which portrays the pitiful lot of the songwriter, was played by the group in every conceivable musical style and was recorded to DAT by engineer Victor Van Vugt. Later the track was reduced to a more conventional length in an abruptly cut-up form, to highlight the fact that The Bad Seeds in their rendition had covered every genre in rock music. [...] When asked about the tribute album in an interview with Q magazine, Cohen himself would praise The Bad Seeds’ ‘really intelligent approach’ to ‘Tower of Song’, considering that Cave had ‘thought about it, and caught the spirit of the song’. Cohen was unaware of the circumstances under which it was recorded.

I’ve never come across a copy of the 80-minute tape, but here’s over half an hour of the Bad Seeds playing “Tower of Song.” As the band switches from style to style, Cave is faithful to the spirit if not the letter of the lyrics–at least, I don’t remember Cohen bragging about his “great big dick” in the original.
 

 
Before Leonard Cohen became known as a singer-songwriter, he was a trust-fund kid struggling to be a writer and poet. This is why the 1966 short Angel (a product of the National Film Board of Canada), credits him with, “Music by poet Leonard Cohen, played by The Stormy Clovers”; The Stormy Clovers were one of Cohen’s early musical projects—here’s their version of “Suzanne”. I’ve seen the film once before, but was excited to see it on Vimeo in high definition—the clarity really highlights the the stark contrast of what looks to be overexposed film that’s been run through an old school analog video switcher.

The premise isn’t elaborate; a woman in decorative wings frolics with a man (an uncredited Cohen), and a dog. The man then tries on the wings, before they are put on the dog. A tryst is implied, then the woman leaves, much to both their resigned dismay. It’s all incredibly lovely, with a striking minimalist aesthetic and an intimate soundtrack. The film received Honourable Mention at the (Canadian) International Annual Film Festival, a Chris Certificate Award in the Graphic Arts Category at the International Film and Video Festival (US), First Prize in the Arts and Experimental category at the Genie Awards (Canada) and Special Mention at the Festival of Canadian Films.
 

 
Our scene opens on the teenage Leonard Cohen attempting to hypnotize the family maid. Here’s Cohen, growing tall and lanky, losing the puppy fat, smiling, precocious, inquisitive, intense, with a zest for life.

Cohen has bought and studied 25 Lessons in Hypnotism How to Become an Expert Operator, a book that promises much—mind reading, animal magnetism and clairvoyant hypnosis—which the youngster hopes will deliver. As Sylvie Simmons explains in her biography on the singer I’m Your Man, the enthusiastic and earnest Cohen worked hard to master these powerful arts, and soon discovered he was a natural mesmerist.

Finding instant success with domestic animals, he moved on to the domestic staff, recruiting as his first human subject the family maid. At his direction, the young woman sat on the chesterfield sofa. Leonard drew a chair alongside and, as the book instructed, told her in a slow gentle voice to relax her muscles and look into his eyes. Picking up a pencil, he moved it slowly back and forth, and succeeded in putting her into a trance. Disregarding (or depending on one’s interpretation, following) the author’s directive that his teachings [on hypnotism] should be used only for educational purposes, Leonard instructed the maid to undress.

Simmons goes on to describe how Cohen must have felt at this “successful fusion of arcane wisdom and sexual longing.”

To sit beside a naked woman, in his own home, convinced that he made this happen, simply by talent, study, mastery of an art and imposition of his will. When he found it difficult to awaken her, Leonard started to panic.

Let’s freeze the frame on this “young man’s fantasy,” as there’s something not quite right, as neither Simmons or the young Cohen, appear to have considered the possibility that the maid was only feigning her trance, and had willingly taken off her clothes. This would turn everything on its head.

Cohen will later fictionalize the incident in his novel The Favorite Game, where the maid is also a ukulele player (the instrument Cohen first taught himself to play before the guitar), which his alter ego mistakes for a lute, and the maid for an angel. As Simmons puts it “naked angels possess portals to the divine.”

Simmons suggests this slim book on hypnotism had a greater affect on Leonard Cohen than just convincing the maid to take-off her clothes. The book was possibly a primer for Cohen:

Chapter 2 of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, ‘Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will if you try to hurry.’

Scientific research has pointed out that some women are attracted to men with deep, low voices. While a touch of “breathiness” suggests a “lower level of aggression.” 

Cohen’s voice is instantly recognizable. He is aware of its power to mesmerize an audience: when he played at Napa State mental hospital in 1970, he jumped down from the stage and sang amongst the inmates, where anyone who could move “followed him around the room and back and forward and over the stage.” At the Isle of Wight concert, he was the only act not to have bottles thrown at him. Kris Kristofferson was booed off during his set, while a flare was thrown onto the stage during Jimi Hendrix’s performance, setting it on fire. Cohen was unfazed by such antics, he was mellowed out on Mandrax, and before he began:

...Leonard sang to the hundreds of thousands of people he could not see as if they were sitting together in a small, dark room. He told them—slowly, calmly—a story that sounded like a parable, worked like hypnotism, and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t like circuses much, but he enjoyed it when a man stood up and asked everyone to light a match so they could locate each other. “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” said Cohen, “so I can see where you all are?” There were a few at the beginning, but as the show went on he could see flames flickering through the misty rain.

As Simmons recounts the episode, Cohen “mesmerized” the audience, with just the power of his voice. Or, as Cohen described his talent himself in “Tower Of Song”:

I was born like this
I had no choice
I was born with the gift
of a golden voice.

 
More of Sylvie Simmons and Leonard Cohen, after the jump…
 

Cohen in Buddhist regalia
 
Celebrities and artists discussing religion is always a tricky business. Fame tends to be a of a very worldly nature and often threatens to cheapen the subject, or distract from the gravity of spiritual matters. This can go doubly awry when westerners project their exotic fantasies on Asian religions—the fantastic book, Karma Cola, by Gita Mehta is an insightful look at the phenomenon of American and European “pilgrims” traveling to India, hoping to find enlightenment. (Since people are people, anywhere you go, many of those pilgrims were defrauded by fake yogis—India’s snake oil salesman and televangelist swindler equivalent.)

However, Leonard Cohen’s narration of the 1994 documentary pair, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life and The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation, is both understated and dignified (with the first film featuring The Dalai Lama himself). Cohen, who was ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk in 1996, is staid in his narration of Tibetan Buddhist theory and practice, but the films are neither dry nor academic—a scene with a man in a hospice dealing with his own mortality is particularly affecting. I have to say, I initially just checked this out looking for something on Cohen’s Buddhism; what I found was an extremely respectful and compelling documentary, devoid of voyeurism, and mindful of the humanity of its subjects.

The series in its entirety is divided into five segments below, four being about 20 minutes long, with a two-minute clip in the middle.
 

 
Last August I wrote a Dangerous Minds piece about Hot Properties, a little-remembered Richard Belzer talk show on the Lifetime network in the mid-1980s. The most notable thing that ever happened on Hot Properties was Hulk Hogan accidentally injuring Belzer on the air, which led to an out-of-court settlement; that incident was the peg for that post.

It turns out I’m not the only one who recalls Hot Properties. Last week a DM reader emailed me, telling of a Betamax recording he had of Belzer interviewing Leonard Cohen on Hot Properties. Since that initial email YouTube user ‘jay sarajevo’ has kindly uploaded the video clip (about 15 minutes).

It’s hard to argue that this interview is anything less than choice material for a Leonard Cohen enthusiast. The best guess on the date is May 1, 1985. Cohen played Carnegie Hall on Sunday, May 5, 1985, and Hot Properties taped on Wednesdays, so it seems that this was taped on May 1. Note that during the call-in section (!) the word “Prerecorded” appears on the screen, which answers a question I had posed in that original DM post—namely, whether the show was aired live. Apparently it was! It seems possible that Lifetime was in the habit of airing Hot Properties a second time overnight or during the next day, so this Betamax video must have been taped at someone’s home as a rerun. It could, of course, simply have run some weeks later as a rerun.
 

Richard Belzer and Leonard Cohen hanging out 23 years later, in 2008

Belzer and Cohen have pretty decent chemistry, and even the callers’ questions are pretty strong. Unfortunately at no point did Cohen elect to place Belzer in a headlock, and history is the poorer for that decision. Cohen did, however, chat amiably about his difficulties getting his material released in the United States, ruefully told a mordant joke about Federico García Lorca being killed in a homosexual brawl with Spanish fascists, told a good story about legendary CBS Records honcho Walter Yetnikoff, and admitted that a lot of his material is “sad, woeful, depressing.” It’s a darn good interview, introduced with the entirety of the video for “Dance Me to the End of Love,” a single off of Various Positions, the album he was promoting at the time.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Cohen muses that “Gums Bleed” by eclectic Australian musician J. G. Thirlwell, performing at that time under the name You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath, is one of his favorite new songs. 
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Leonard Cohen’s rarely seen musical ‘I Am A Hotel’
An hour of Leonard Cohen performing live in Austin in 1988

 
Whenever listening to Leonard Cohen’s “The Story of Isaac”—a song in which war is conceived of as the semi-ritual sacrifice of a younger generation by an older one a la the Biblical myth— I have always savored its mysterious last line.

“Have mercy on our uniform,
Man of peace or man of war,
The peacock spreads his fan.”

In 1968, when Leonard Cohen came to record it for Songs from a Room, he had already seen an impressive amount of action for someone whose name remains a byword for tremulous introspection. Not only had Cohen made a point of visiting Cuba during the fall of Batista (purportedly as a kind of freelance revolutionary), but he had also made a beeline for Israel during the Six-Day War, where he hooked up with an “air force entertainment group” and performed for soldiers going into battle! Cohen’s experience on (or relatively near) the front line was apparently a very rewarding one:

“War is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother.”

The kind of conflict alluded to in the “The Story of Isaac,” though, sounds closer in type to the Vietnam War, which pitched, to an arguably unique degree, the old—who waged it—against the young—who fought in and against it. In 1974, Cohen expanded on the concept behind the song:

“One of the reasons we do have wars periodically is so the older men can have the women. Also, to completely remove the competition in terms of their own institutional positions.”

It’s an especially dark idea, this, that behind the draft and the domino effect and the military industrial complex, lurked (and forever lurks) an aging establishment’s instinct to safeguard its tribal, reproductive privileges—shipping off the emergent generation to distant killing fields.

That Cohen was apparently thinking in the above quasi-Darwinian terms inclines me to think that (as I’ve long suspected) the song’s last line—“The peacock spreads its fan”—is intended to evoke or echo Darwin’s famous misgiving: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Darwin’s point is widely taken to refer to the egregious impracticality of a peacock’s fan, as being inhospitable to the notion of natural selection. The paradox of the peacock’s fan can be applied to the paradox of war—surely both should by now have condemned their native species to extinction. Or inevitably will,
 

 
Here’s a great song that has been beaten into banality by the ever-growing number of people who sing it with none of the sense of humor, sexiness or irony that Leonard Cohen intended when he wrote it. “Hallelujah” has been turned into musical mulch in which the insipid flowers of sentiment and false emotion have blossomed and unfurled their sickly sweet petals.

John Malkovich is using a cheat sheet to inform him of what he’s feeling. Oh, the passion.
 

Edwyn Cohen
 
YouTuber broccoliz has his wires scrambled but this might actually work, if Leonard Cohen decided to cover Edwyn Collins’ pop classic “A Girl Like You.” Just imagine it. Cohen and Collins do share a robust masculinity in their voice. No, yes?

From Leonard Cohen’s Orange Jews period.

Misinformation, the herpes of the Internet!
 

 
I’m sure I’ll catch horrendous amounts of shit for this, because we all know that manufactured pop princesses like Lana Del Rey will be the absolute death of all that is pure, but I don’t think it’s that bad. Personally, I’m not particularly concerned with notions of “authenticity” when a manufactured persona is half of what I love about performance.

Authentic she ain’t, but let’s face it, it’s not like a Leonard Cohen song is sacrosanct anymore after the number of times “Hallelujah” has been badly mangled on American Idol...
.
What say you? Doesn’t it have a certain charm? Or am I simply a sucker for a smokey chanteuse? Or am I angling to write songs for her next album? (Call me, girl!)
 

 
In 1986, Leonard Cohen guest-starred on Miami Vice, playing Francois Zolan of the French Secret Service involved in a plot to blow up Greenpeace boats. The episode was called “French Twist.” His role was all too brief.
 

 
Leonard Cohen sings an indescribably beautiful version of “Suzanne” in Montreal in November of last year. This man is truly a living tower of song, jutting into our consciousness like huge loving fingers of light.

Thinking back on my musical epiphanies of 2012, Leonard Cohen’s performance in Austin was possessed of enormous soul that made me weep tears of gratitude.

This video is pretty extraordinary in its intimacy. Thanks to Mad Lenny Fan.
 

Sonny Rollins, pre-Night Music.
 
Night Music, hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn and produced by Hal Wilner, ran on late-night TV from 1988 to 1990. It was a particularly smart show, featuring many musicians who did not appear that often on television. This episode is a perfect example of its eclectic and sophisticated offerings.

From 1989: Was Not Was, word jazzist Ken Nordine (rare to see him perform live), Sonny Rollins and Leonard Cohen.

Hello Operator (Was Not Was)
Kim (Sonny Rollins)
Tower Of Song (Leonard Cohen)
Winter Sketch aka Don’t You Wish (Ken Nordine)
Who By Fire (L. Cohen/S. Rollins)
I Can’t Turn You Loose (Was Not Was)
 

 
I recently found myself wondering–as you do–what, exactly, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” was all about. Precluding, that is, getting high (Dylan: “I never have and never will write a drug song”). My curiosity led me to the following observation by Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin, who observed that the title seems to allude to the following beauty from the Book of Proverbs (chapter 27, verse 15): “A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.” (Well if that ain’t the Old Testament’s lightest moment!?) Heylin suggests the title was meant to throw off the censors. Better yet, though: a continual dropping: stoning! “Everybody must get stoned”: Every man (the ones that shack up with women anyhow) must get nagged. The “They” being none other than (Rainy Day) “women.”

Well, they’ll stone you and say that it’s the end
Then they’ll stone you and then they’ll come back again
They’ll stone you when you’re riding in your car
and they’ll stone when you’re playing your guitar

It all comes into focus when you picture a henpecked hubby– even, I fancy, “sent down in your grave,” which suggests the dirt dropped on hubby’s coffin lid by the surviving widow.

While Heylin’s sourcing of the title in Proverbs arguably seals the deal, it turns out plenty of sharper-eared listeners have long held this interpretation of the song (fair enough: it’s hidden in plain sight), and I found it suggested online that the “#12 & 35” element coincides with a woman’s peak fertility. “A continual dropping in a rainy day…” The song’s about PMT!

Having finally sussed “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” (it’ll do me!), I moved on to the similarly enigmatic Blonde on Blonde classic “Just Like Woman.” Immediately, of course, we find ourselves assailed by a further “continual dropping” (Bob’s standing “inside the rain,” no less), but – as I chewed again on the song’s famous words – light was shed in an unexpected and entirely different direction…

Does the following verse of “Just Like a Woman” remind you of another famous song at all?

Ev’rybody knows
That Baby’s got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.

How about Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”?

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you’ve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you’ve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

And if you’re still not convinced that Cohen is here (Dylan’s “new clothes” suggesting “no clothes,” after all) paying subtle tribute to the source of his song’s indelible refrain, remind yourself of the following verse also…

And everybody knows that it’s now or never
Everybody knows that it’s me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you’ve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

Which is a stunningly imaginative way to recycle Dylan’s rhyme. Those guys eh!

Finally, here’s Al “right place/time/riff” Kooper specifically reminiscing about recording Blonde on Blonde in Nashville, describing his role as a “human tape recorder” who would go learn Bob’s emerging songs and then go prepare the musicians (sketching the odd arrangement too, by the sound of it).