The Anti–Rock Star

Leonard Cohen never liked touring. “It’s like being dropped off in a desert,” he once said. “You don’t know where you live anymore.” By the time he hit his late 50s, he hated it so much that, after supporting his 1992 record, The Future, he moved into a Zen monastery and all but retired from the music business. Even after he returned with More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997), a wonderful celebration of his mid-career prime, he refused to cash in with a fresh calendar of live shows. Then, in 2005, he discovered that his bank account had been nearly emptied by his business manager.

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Cohen spent months in rehearsal with a band, fine-tuning his songs as he now wanted to play them—more quietly, more elegantly than ever. In 2008, at 73, he went back out on the road. Other than at a book signing, he hadn’t performed live in more than a decade. But something had happened in the interim.

His audience was larger—lines curving around blocks, scalpers demanding hundreds above face value. More striking, though, was the depth of feeling. Leonard Cohen, master of a cool, ironic, deadpan remove, had come to signify something new that mystified the performers themselves. “I saw people in front of the stage shaking and crying,” a backup singer noted after opening night. “You don’t often see adults cry, and with such violence.”

The highlight of the tour came at the Glastonbury Festival, where Cohen played the main stage in front of listeners young and old. As the sun set and Cohen sang “Hallelujah,” concertgoers “sang along, clutching each other’s arms,” an Australian journalist reported, “and many were openly weeping.” Cohen hadn’t been dropped off in a desert.

How to account for such emotion, felt across generational divides? Where does the widely perceived authenticity—hardly an untroubled term—of this music come from? And why has its power to move listeners sustained itself so forcefully, turning Cohen’s afterlife into one long canonization?

Read: Leonard Cohen never left Earth

With some optimism, I turned for answers to Christophe Lebold’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall. Lebold has written three dissertations about Cohen (master’s and doctorate, and one in between), and, as a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg, in France, created two college courses on him. His subtitle captures the guiding insight of his book, and is a plausible starting point: Cohen’s music is devoted to the idea that human beings are inherently fallen creatures, and therefore, as Lebold writes, “frivolity sucks; gravity heals.”

Lebold describes his portrait, newly translated from the French, as “part biography, part analysis, and part ode,” though over 500 pages, “ode” comes to predominate. Along the way, Lebold compares Cohen to (among others) Joan of Arc, John Donne, Steve McQueen, Casanova, and King David. Garrulous excesses aside, stretches of the book are beautifully and sympathetically written, and please don’t mistake me, especially now, in 2024—love need not be the antonym of truth.

But by the 20th or so invocation of Cohen as an “archangel,” the heartfelt panegyric starts to backfire. Cohen’s music is distinctive in its utter lack of bombast, preening, or rhetorical inflation. To my ear, the tone always presumes in the listener the presence of an equal and thus forbids the aura of cultic idealization that pervades Lebold’s book. In many respects, of course, Cohen was a garden-variety rock celebrity. He sold a lot of records (if mostly outside the United States) and, his disdain for touring notwithstanding, his life was full of the usual slurry of hotels, roadies, groupies, gurus, and drugs. But at his core, he was the antithesis of a rock star.

I’d go further: In his music and person, he bore a kind of witness against the messianic redeemer who has dominated the Boomer entertainment complex, and who’s now the default paradigm for the winner at the top of a winner-take-all society. Over and over, Cohen slipped away unseduced, terrified that such a life would kill the muse he’d courted so assiduously as a young poet. He created an astonishing musical persona, not to mention catalog of songs, because he never lost touch with his fealty to ordinary experience, and his lonely intimacy with an immense sense of failure.

Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall

By Christophe Lebold

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That his music sounds like nothing else in the universe is owed to the quiddity that is Leonard Cohen, no doubt, but also to an accident of timing: His career happened substantially apart from the dynamic of apotheosis and adulation that converts teenage boys with guitars into that salvific demigod, the rock star.

Canonically speaking, the rock era unfolded as follows: Elvis Presley appeared in 1956 and, in a stroke, invented the rock star, established rock and roll as a dominant commercial force, and remade the inner lives of, among others, Bob Dylan (who called him “the deity supreme of rock ’n’ roll religion as it exists in today’s form”) and John Lennon (who, upon hearing “Heartbreak Hotel,” said he “thought of nothing else but rock ’n’ roll”). They then came of age and, starting in the early ’60s, turned rock and roll into rock by giving it literary and avant-garde aspirations.

Read: The deadly certainty of Leonard Cohen

It was a series of begats (Elvis begat the Beatles, the Beatles begat Jann Wenner, etc.) involving identity-famished teenagers and their heroes, and it soon coalesced into “the full-blown phenomenon of rock stardom” as “a career path” to emulate, the scholar David Shumway writes in Rock Star (2014). Cohen is absent from this narrative for one simple reason: He was the same age as Elvis.

Cohen was born in 1934 and grew up uninfluenced by rock and roll because it didn’t exist yet. For a teenage Cohen, the guitar never took on the priapic mystique invested in it by Elvis, or Chuck Berry, or Duane Eddy. (He liked Hank Williams and Pat Boone.) His first one was a pawnshop cheapie, a nylon-stringed Spanish guitar that he learned to play at sleepaway camp, working through the rudimentary tunes in The People’s Song Book over a summer. This was about as non–rock-and-roll a childhood as it gets.

If anything, playing the guitar fit right into his role as sweet, pampered, well-to-do nerd. He was born in Montreal and grew up in Westmount, a predominantly English Protestant enclave in a predominantly French Catholic city. The Cohens were among the most venerable families in the area’s affluent Jewish population. In the depths of the Depression, the household employed a gardener, maid, and nanny.

With all due respect to I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons’s still-definitive 2011 biography, the best portrait of him is the one in his own surprisingly good debut novel, The Favourite Game (1963), a thinly fictionalized memoir published when he was 29. Implicit in its exquisite turns of phrase and imagistic condensations is Cohen’s future greatness as a songwriter. In remarkably few pages, he conveys the essence of his childhood, ascribing it to his alter ego, Lawrence Breavman: the early loss of his father; his sense of diminishment in the face of so prominent a social inheritance; his suspicion of a “prosaic adult world, the museum of failure”; and, most curiously, a growing dismay at what he fears are his own powers of hypnotic influence over others—a poetic power, yes, but also a demagogic one. It’s worth remembering that the defining charismatic of Cohen’s childhood was not Elvis Presley, but Adolf Hitler.

The idea that charisma—his own especially—is ugly carries over into Breavman’s young adulthood, as into Cohen’s. At McGill University, Cohen was a star campus litterateur, and his first book of poems, published in 1956, a year after he graduated, began the process of turning him into a literary celebrity in Canada. Breavman is a literary poseur—“The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy”—taking advantage of a small pond. “Canadians are desperate for a Keats,” he says, and he begins to hate himself for servicing their need.

But Cohen appears to have found an escape. In real life (this would be the early ’50s), he formed a country-and-western trio at McGill, though by his own admission, he was an “indifferent” talent: “I banged the chords,” he later said. “I never in a thousand years thought of myself as a musician or as a singer.” But along the way he became a nimble player, and in a style all his own, combining country with flamenco. In the novel, the guitar makes two cameos, one of them oddly moving. Breavman is in his early 20s and has agreed to entertain guests at a party, but he’s wary—he never knows whether he will play well or poorly. The risk is part of the allure. That night, he plays beautifully:

Breavman never seems freer than he does here, for a reason that is all but explicit: His performance is entirely detached from the machinations of literary fame that have come to define his life. The instrument itself, meanwhile, is invested with mystique, but not the crowd-mesmerizing rock-and-roll kind. When he’s done, he puts “the guitar away carefully, as though it contained the finer part of him.”

In 1964, rock’s annus mirabilis, the year of Meet the Beatles and “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” Cohen won the Prix Littéraire du Québec for The Favourite Game, published his third volume of poetry, and sold his collected papers to the University of Toronto. He was 30, a respectable junior member of the Canadian literary establishment with a bohemian troublemaker inside struggling to get out.

He had hung around the beatnik scene of Greenwich Village, and one biographer claims that Jack Kerouac inspired him to take up writing prose. But if The Favourite Game is to be believed, Cohen was a simulacrum in that subculture and knew it: a cosseted figure playing Canada’s token hipster. His third poetry collection, Flowers for Hitler—a parody title for a self-serious book—was a desperate attempt, he admitted, to move “from the world of the golden-boy poet into the dung-pile of the front-line writer.” His efforts were met with his first scathing reviews. (And meager paydays. “It was very difficult to pay my grocery bill,” he later said.)

And so in 1966, now 31, he brought his guitar with him to readings. Among his earliest compositions was a curio titled “Suzanne.” A woman, a cup of tea, oranges; a river and a savior, now broken in spirit by our “wisdom” as he once was broken in body on the cross: This isn’t, as the honeyed arpeggios first hint, a troubadour’s paean to one-off sex. What begins as a Vermeer, a simple enough still life of a man and a woman, defined by an atmosphere of hovering expectancy—they’re sharing, we sense, the romance of not becoming lovers—ends as a Chagall, a dreamworld of juxtapositions linked not by linear sense, but by a mood as pervasive as it is unplaceable. And all of it is held together by a simple but spellbinding melodic lilt.

Imagine not knowing, with this one in your pocket, whether you’re a songwriter. For now, though, Cohen had no clue. That year, through a chain of mutual connections, he found his way to Judy Collins and played “Suzanne” for her. She was already a folk-scene eminence, but she didn’t yet write her own material and felt that something was missing from a forthcoming album. Charmed by Cohen, she fell for his music and recorded “Suzanne.”

Suddenly, Cohen was a songwriter. In February 1967, Collins invited him to perform at a fund-raiser in Manhattan. “From the wings I could see his legs shaking inside his trousers,” she recalled in Trust Your Heart (1987), and as soon as he started singing, he stopped; said, “I can’t go on”; and abruptly exited the stage. In a letter he wrote to his partner, Marianne Ihlen, he described how elated he’d felt, “how relieved … it had all come to nothing.”

Another setback that the golden boy felt he needed. Then (though, tellingly, he left this out of the letter) he recovered: He returned to the stage and, together with Collins, finished the song, and brought down the house. Cohen had taken up music to escape the more sinister aspects of his own charisma, yet here he was, electrifying a crowd of 3,000. Nuanced ambivalence was getting harder to sustain.

That spring, he auditioned for John Hammond, the Columbia Records legend who discovered Billie Holiday (as well as Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, and, later, Bruce Springsteen). Hammond found his songs “hypnotic” and offered him a contract on the spot. The recording itself proceeded in agonizing fits and starts. Tentativeness, intimacy, a fragile sense of himself as a musician—all were preserved on Songs of Leonard Cohen, a hushed and ravishing affair that is considered one of the finest debuts in pop history. The singsong dirges, many in waltz time, are so delicate, so self-assured and precise, but what to even call their mode? The conversational sublime? Melody, so unaccountably a product of unconscious forces, had placed his ego in abeyance, allowing a forbearing tenderness to emerge.

The album was released in December 1967, about a month after the first issue of Rolling Stone hit newsstands, and the clash of sensibilities could hardly have been starker. To Jann Wenner, the magazine’s co-founder, rock musicians weren’t just singers. They were tutelary deities to the young, supplanting all elders. Thanks in no small part to Rolling Stone, the absolute veneration of the rock star was made into an acceptable attitude for young males, and with this veneration came various cults of personality (rock star as Dionysian overlord, Blakean visionary, Byronic aristo). Lebold’s book falls squarely within this lineage. At one point, he even calls Cohen his “master”—a perversely inapt way of honoring an artist who brought together the limits of the pop form with a heavyhearted embrace of the limits of the ego.

The boys’ club over at Rolling Stone must have been baffled by how beautifully Cohen played to antitype: He trimmed his hair, wore exquisitely tailored suits, carried a briefcase into the studio. Nothing about the man, his music preeminently, flattered the worldview of the credulous teenager. Take “Famous Blue Raincoat,” from Songs of Love and Hate (1971), his third album, and one of the most beautiful and unsettling songs ever written. It opens with the singer awake in the early-morning dark, his wife asleep next to him. He’s composing a letter to someone who, for a spell, was her lover, and the song tells, in its oblique way, the story of a man who cannot separate his anger from his habits of self-blame, or from the realization that his wife liberated some part of herself when she cheated on him:

Here was a new possibility for rock music, one that Dylan, in his empyrean self-regard, hadn’t yet touched: to break free from the wounded grandiosities of boys. Joni Mitchell, who cited Cohen as “an early influence,” understood what he was up to from the beginning. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly,” she said in an interview. “My work seemed very young and naive in comparison.”

For Cohen, worldly maturity ushered in an altogether different woundedness, a mesmeric—and distinctly not adolescent—sadness, deep-seated and temperamental but intensified by crippling doubts about his gifts, about his singing especially. “I hated the sound of my own voice. I thought it was weak and full of self-pity,” he said later. He enjoyed celebrity status in England and parts of Europe, but his wasn’t a traditionally radio-friendly voice, which meant relative obscurity in America, the largest commercial market for recorded music. As the decade came to an end, Cohen would not have disputed the judgment that he was yet another spent force of the 1960s.

Cohen, lost as a musician in the early ’80s, needed, as he told an interviewer, to “resurrect not just my career but myself and my confidence as a writer and singer.” He chose to do the riskiest, most potentially dangerous thing of all: He laid aside the guitar. He flew to New York and called an old producer of his. “Leonard had this shit-eating grin on his face,” John Lissauer told Sylvie Simmons. “He had this little crap Casio synthesizer which he’d bought at … one of these camera shops for tourists, where you push your finger down on a key and it’ll play a dinky rhythm track.” Cohen sang Lissauer a new song, “Dance Me to the End of Love.”

Something about the switch from a holy object to an impious one forced Cohen to break himself down, then rebuild himself from scratch as a songwriter. The gamble paid off in a batch of songs bracing in their freshness, the best of which arose out of an ever-shifting jumble of notebooks that he’d been poring over for years. Lissauer took charge of the music for a while, tinkering with the chords to give it some uplift, and when the time came to record, he assembled a small gospel-style choir to lift it up some more. In “Hallelujah,” he and Cohen thought they’d created a modern standard, and they believed Various Positions (1984) was an album that would mark Cohen’s arrival as a star in America. But once again, he was out of step with the timeline.

In the ’80s, the entertainment business was becoming a global multimedia oligopoly dominated by a tiny handful of publicly owned players, among them CBS Records, all in pursuit of Wall Street–pleasing superstars—artists who, ideally operating across all media, could act as reliable mega-earners. Walter Yetnikoff, in charge at CBS Records, listened to the tape, hand-delivered by Cohen himself, and said, “We know you’re great, Leonard, but we don’t know if you’re any good,” and declined to release the album in the United States. That same year, 1984, Springsteen emerged as an MTV mainstay and thus an arena draw, giving CBS Records proof of concept for multiplatform synergies. “Born in the U.S.A.” became an era-defining anthem; “Hallelujah” all but disappeared.

There was no rescaling Cohen to the ethos of bigness, as rock star began its semantic drift away from its musical origins toward its current “king of the heap” meaning. Having hit an all-time low in his career, Cohen worked mostly alone and often in Montreal, producing new songs still without the aid of a guitar. The pulsing menace of the synthesizer continued to suit his mood; his raspy, deep singing voice lowered further, becoming a richer, altogether stranger instrument. Pursuing a strain of prophesying (“Everybody knows that the Plague is coming / Everybody knows that it’s moving fast / Everybody knows that the naked man and woman / Are just a shining artifact of the past”), he refined his persona: part lounge lizard, part chansonnier, part ancient mariner—a man whose last delusion has been shed. In 1988, at an age when most rock auteurs have long since fallen back on self-plagiarism, he put out I’m Your Man.

If a rock star is someone who gets arrested, developmentally speaking, in their early 20s after being mistaken for a demigod, then sells to a mass audience a fantasy of being a teenager forever, Cohen emerged with I’m Your Man as the perfect counterpoint. There was no aging out of being Leonard Cohen, only aging into. He was ready to bear a special kind of witness. Throughout the record, scorn is directed at specific targets—the rich, the bigots, those criminally indifferent to the AIDS crisis, the perpetrators of the Holocaust—but overall, this is an After Times document. The flood has happened. “I got some sense that the thing has been destroyed and is lost,” he told an interviewer; “this is the shadow, this is the fallout, the residue, the dust of some catastrophe, and there’s nothing to grasp onto.”

Here, Cohen’s timing was finally apt. A considerable portion of the music-buying public was now ready for someone to testify against a society remade to suit a child’s ideal of adult self-realization. (All the seigneurial privileges, none of the responsibilities. What’s not to love?) Cohen’s witness had a special trenchancy for being levied against himself as much as anyone—against a man who, in erratic jags, had for decades flirted with, fled, returned to, and fled again the temptations of stardom.

And then, the irony of ironies: In late middle age, he became a rock star by standing in pitiless opposition to the type. I’m Your Man was his most commercially successful album, and from there the irony compounded further. A proliferation of tribute albums and cover versions of songs (by the Pixies, R.E.M., and Nick Cave, among others) was already making Cohen relevant to younger audiences when Kurt Cobain, bearer of every last hope for rock and roll as a genre, name-checked him in a song in 1993. And in 1994, Jeff Buckley recorded “Hallelujah.”

Read: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” belongs to everyone

To sing praise to God is to praise the God we’ve got, with the larynx he gave us; from the evidence that Cohen presented in his version of the song, neither deity nor voice is kind or forgiving. But Buckley, a virtuoso rock performer, possessed a soaring vocal range, supple across multiple octaves and able to achieve euphoric liftoff without the aid of angelic overdubs. Pitting his own tendency toward over-reverence against Cohen’s self-undercutting ironies, he achieved an improbable gestalt, and turned a song from a half-forgotten Cohen album into the modern standard that John Lissauer had hoped for.

Cohen was now a kind of double figure—the man turning into a timeless icon for having written “Hallelujah,” and his shadow, a man unafraid of personifying, for his growing fan base, the realities of aging and death. These two Cohens—the rock star and the anti–rock star—came together on the 2008 tour to make a single performer, a man sufficiently liberated, at last, from remorse to lean into the maudlin sorcery of “Hallelujah.” Watching the clips now, I’m struck that he is saying something moving in its generosity: Yes, it’s nice to play this arena. But these are, and have always been, songs from a room; eye-level songs. They can take or leave you, and you can take or leave them. And that is why, big as I may be now, as I may yet become, I will remain forever scaled to nothing but your love and respect.

His celebrity grew bigger, his witness-bearing more lucid, ever less self-regarding and only more humane. In October 2016, he released You Want It Darker, a farewell album, and it was greeted with universal acclaim, winning Cohen a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance. The title cut, with its “Hineni, hineni / I’m ready, my Lord” chorus, has been commonly interpreted as a gesture of completion and peace.

But hineni (Hebrew for “Here I am”) is Abraham’s response when God asks him to sacrifice Isaac, his only son. Never forget, Leonard Cohen was a Cohen—which is to say, a Kohen—a descendant, as he was told as a child, of Aaron, the older brother of Moses. He didn’t trace his existence as a musician to Elvis, but to the liturgies of the synagogue, which, when he was a boy, “sent shivers down my spine.” His songs were love songs in the deepest sense: gestures of reconciliation with the mystery of Creation, and the painful anomaly of human consciousness within it.

Read: Leonard Cohen, Judaism’s bard

In addition to its aura of spiritual magnanimity, then, “You Want It Darker” offers up a ferocious lament, and it has taken on a distinctly prophetic cast over the years. Leonard Cohen died on November 7, 2016. His lifelong battle with a particular kind of shameless male grandiosity was over. The following day, Donald Trump—a “rock star” politician, he’s been called—was elected president of the United States.

This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Anti–Rock Star.”