Leonard Cohen Interview

M: Would you now write a graffitti like " Marita please find Ire - I'm almost 40"?

C: That's a good question - no I'm not involved anymore in prayerful worship, I mean I don't pray that way any longer.

M: Was this a prayer?

C: Well it was an expression of longing.

M: Free concerts in mental wards, why?

C: Oh, it satisfies my notion of virtue, I think the news will get around that I'm a virtuous person.

M: Why not old folks hares? - why only mental wards?

C: I should really extend my Virtuous activity, hardly give these concerts any longer.

M: At one time you said" they were the only people who could understand my landscape..."

C: I gave all sorts of reasons for those kinds of activities I was infected with the general notion of self improvement, and I thought that just giving concerts for money was inconsistent with my own version of self virtue and I thought that this would be the most appropriate place to extend those activities.

M: You are saying this in the past tense.

C: Oh, yah, I'm not going to do anymore of that stuff.

M: Why?

C: I don't know, perhaps I will.

M: Why not this preoccupation with expressing your virtues?

C: I am not attached to my virtues at this practical moment, I think after a couple of children and a few wives and general experience in the market place, you arrive at a more realistic vision of yourself and I don't think that these charitable activities are consistent now with my awn version of myself. I'm much nastier than that, you see I was lying when I was performing those virtuous activities - I don't feel like lying now. Really I'm going on tour now for very professional and specific reasons - I really want to play this music for people and get paid for it.

M: And yet you told me just a few minutes ago that you would like to cover Canada in the north because it was important for you and for the people.

C: Yes- well occasionally I lapse into other frames of mind.

M: Fran time to time you go to a monastary, for one time you retired for quite a few weeks, you also delved in astrology and scientology - and now you are studying zen. What are you looking for?

C: Good company - I like fringe groups, and I like the kind of people that are attracted to somewhat dubious enterprises and activities, and adventures in recreation.

M: But most of these groups are also religious.

C: Yes, religious fanatics I find are very good company.

M: In what way?

C: It's nothing I can go into very deeply - it's just... they seen to have very specific views, and they seen to be in a state of attractive nervousness.

M: All the time - and they are thin - a lot of them are very thin. What does that mean?

C: They are just highly strung.

M: So are people who live in the bush.

C: Yes they are good too.

M: So how come you don't go there and choose the monastary instead?

C: Well, I don't feel exclusive about the monastary.

M: I'd like to get to the bush, Would you bring me up to the bush?

M: Do you study these things as religions?

C: - no entertainment.

M: What about Cabala?

C: The Cabala - I don I t feel like much of a student these days - I think I've let my studies slip a bit.

M: So you are going as a voyeur, really?

C: Yes exactly, what do you mean as a voyeur?

M: Well if you don't go to study, do you go to experience or as an onlooker?

C: I don't have any high purpose in my activities, I'm just going - so that I don't have to keep still.

M: When you go to the monastary or Zen, do you feel any conflict you being Jewish?

C: No, I don't, I have no sense of conflict, my Jewish background is extremely hospitable to all kinds of investigation.

M: So you really go to investigate.

C: Well you are determined to picture me as some sort of seeker, so I'll have to get to that sort of frame of mind.

M: I didn't use the word investigate.

C: No, but I feel as the evidence builds up a certain kind of serious responsible seeker is being described and that isn't the way I am at all - I just look into things here and there. If I described some of the other things I've looked into, you'd have to describe another name for me, but these things are easy to put your finger on, you know, it's like the famous story, "Bridge Builder"..."Cock Sucker" ...

M: What are the other interests that you have gotten into?

C: You knew that there is a great deal of interest in self improvement and the whole spiritual seeking and adventuring - seems to have a great deal of publicity these days, so that if you do one or two things on that scale, people want to characterize you as sane kind of spiritual - you know that kind of person. But you know, I'm also very interested in Freud. -I like cooking, there are a whole range of interests that don't have the kind of prestige that spiritual enterprises have today. So interviews have tended to over emphasize the spiritual aspect of my nature, which I'm hardly aware of, I've just looked into a few things - but without any special emphasis on religion.

M: Well, maybe it's because some of your poetry and songs use religious images.

C: Yes, that's just because that was the only mythology that I was presented with as I grew up - was a religious mythology. But you know, we talk of the flood and we speak of the ark, and Noah and the dove, all those are symbols arid allegories that have entered our consciousness and language through religious channels, but they don't necessarily extend for religious experience today, they stand for an experience that includes religion, but does not exclude other kinds of experience. But that was the mythology that I inherited, so I use it for all experiences, not specifically for religious experiences.

M: Why did you start singing?

C: I never thought too much of why, I thought there were a number of things that I knew how to do- and I played guitar and sang, so I thought I'd look into that. (one word to cover everything, "look in to that " )

M. When was that?

C: The first time I was on stage as a professional musician was in 1954, I was part of a group called the "Buckskin Boys" Bara Dance Group, we went around the... There were three of us, and then the years went by and I thought I was a writer for a long time so I wrote a few books, and during the last book, I used to listen to the radio a lot and I started listening very carefully to the singers, just listening to their voices and I thought that was an interesting kind of effort that was very close to the writing effort-they always talk about a person's voice. In poetry, and the music of a prose or verse and it was a very short step to actually being concerned with the voice and music, so I made the transition very painlessly.

M: Didn't you find it strange - writing in solitary, music group?

C: I don't remember what it was like to be a writer- I haven't - yes I did - last winter - I do remember looking at myself for 3 to 4 hours everyday. But to tell you the truth there are so many voices crowded in my head and I feel I live so close to people that even if I do happen to lock myself in a roan for 3 or 4 hours a day to write prose, I never get a feeling that it's solitary and similarly even if I am with a band playing with musicians and two girls beside me - I never get the feeling that I have lost anything -solitary it seems to be about the sane whatever you do.

M : What about those different voices in your head?

C: "those voices in my head, they don't care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through"

M: let's move to the ladies...

C: Would you blow smoke at me - I've given up smoking...

M: Why?

C: Why did I give it up, it's part of this interminable interest in self-improvement. I think I will be more acceptable to myself if I give up smoking.

M: Going back to the ladies you said at one tine that "I'm a glutten, I will try to have something to do with every woman I meet."

C: I remember I said that in Toronto, you have to be excused for things you say under duress.

M: Is it a put on?

C: That remark, it's the truth, but I don't want to make to much of it.

M: What do you mean?

C: I mean, you say, you say a thing or two here and there and it gets around and you are asked about it, and you start composing footnotes to casual observations that you make in a moment of irresponsible sympathy with an interviewer and before you know it, it's an official description that you continually have to elaborate and magnify- but I think it's true that we are all rather obsessed with each other these days. And one does not like to make contact.

M: What about the ethics of monogamy?

C: The ethics of monogamy... I think marrying is for very very high minded people and it is discipline of extreme security - I would say that marriage today is a much more grueling severe discipline that any monastic order could impose on it - marriage today is the monastary the monastary today is freedom, it just depends if you have a monastic nature - because that's what marriage today requires. and like other monks, in other kinds of situations, there are backsliding monks and there are enthusiastic monks and there are monks in all states of accomplishments and achievements so that as rare as the great monks were, so are the great married couples. But it's a high discipline requiring high minds and great effort that's monogamous marriage - most people lead a rather slip shod - conduct their marriages in a slipshod way that they conduct their other affairs - I am more or less one of those.

M: Why do you think it's different now?

C: Well, I think the choices, the alternatives, what we call freedom is a tremendous burden to the imagination and when the imagination is provoked and excited, titilated and irritated in so many corners today that it is a real form of oppression, discipline to confront those invitations without making it oppression, to transcend it, and really make a choice and to really turn your back on all the other possibilities and all the other experiences of lave of passion, ecstasy and to determine and find it within one embrace is a high and righteous notion - only compatible with the strangest kind of will and most gifted individuals.

M: you also said that you have an ideal sort of love, but haven't been able to attain it.

C: I don't know when I said these things or how you found out. I have a song, the last verse goes -
"I'd like to take you to the ceremony that is if I remember the way
You see Jack and Jill are going to join their misery
I'm afraid it's time for everyone to pray
You can see they've finally taken rover
You can see they're willing to obey
their vows are difficult they are for each other
so let nobody put a loophole in their way"
that's a song that investigates these ideas that we are talking about.

M: In so much of your poetry and songs your lovers are forever parting.

C: That's true.

M: Do you know why?

C: I don't remember the songs I wrote a long time ago-they are all saying goodbye.

M: Well they are leaving each other.

C: Well I have some here in which they are condemned to each other for eternity, on my new record, for instance I have this sang that goes like this-

This is a monogamous song.

M: You still use the word, "condemn"

C: Lovers condemn like mated beasts to tie same cage with a long embrace and fighting over scaps of freedom there is aversion of the thing, which is very unattractive. I think anyone who has lived with anyone else knows what I mean.

M: So much of your work is in terms of relationship between man and woman. Why?

C: I think it was because I was very badly educated and never taught how to work with things, if I had really learned a skill and another relationship with the world in which the emphasis on the social world were not so strong, I might have been able to treat other subjects. But when it all comes down to it, all subjects are just an allegory, a metaphor for human activity. I don't know- that was my experience. I didn't really have significant experience with the world, the forests, the rivers or with machines and ideas. I had very simple and limited relationships. One was with my am mind that is writing and the other was with the people that I lived with

M: You say there is a war between men and women, now what do you mean?

C: I don't have much to say about this war, we are not always in the aspect of warriors, I wrote a song that starts:
"there is a war between the rich and poor
a war between the man and the woman
there is a war between the ones who say
there is a war, and the ones that. say that there isn't."

But I don't, I am not a politician, and I don't have to be bound by any aspect of any particular thing that I have treated, I've described the war between the man and woman, it's a fact that everybody recognizes it, not significant experience with the world, the forests, Any man over 30 knows that there is a war between man and woman. I mean even before women became vocal, and their own interpretation of the war. But that isn't the only aspect between man and woman.
It's just one of the aspects that I've treated in my work, and in my life - I mean sometimes I'm in a state of war with a woman and Sometimes there's a truce. Sometimes it feels that there never was a war. And sometimes there never was a truce.

M: What do you mean by war?

C: Fight to the death.

M: I still don I t understand.

C: Well, you know what war is...

M: Yes.

C: Well, that's what it is, we have to assure with each other in a conversation that we both know what we are talking about, and I think you have to assure listeners know what we are talking about. We have to agree that there is a war. That there is, often a fight to the death; a fight to the psychic death between men and women, a struggle for supremacy, and ruthless ambitions, contest of wills. Now this is only one aspect. This is by no means a total description of all activities between man and woman. I mean a marriage or a long association between man and woman. Such a subtle and complex event and mysterious that writers, singers, and poets will be engaged from now on and all the time up to now trying to illuminate this awesome mystery.

M: Do you think that it is now more than before? Because of women's lib?

C: No, I don ' t think there is any more or less. I think this is an aspect of struggle and I have no idea what it

M: (Laughter)
I am going to read for you another quote: "I don't think of; myself being a writer, a singer or whatever, the occupation of being a man is so much more."

C: I consider myself that kind of worker and I think what I was trying to say is that it is hard enough to keep life and limb together these days without burdening yourself with a particular description of woo you are. But in a sense we are amateurs and dilatants and this notion of getting by and having to examine all possibilities, rather than meet every situation as a singer or as a writer or as a poet.

M: I took it to mean a

C: I have tremendous resistance describing ideal arm-types, I think there are so many different ways of getting by and I wouldn't like to contribute to any of the tyrannies by adding my own version of what behavior might constitute.

M: So if this is what you meant, what is a

C: That's a good way to look at it, I think maybe I meant it.

M: I'd like to get back to the singing and a poem of yours:
"the 15 year old girls I wanted when I was 15...is it all so wonderful, this fame?"

C: You see, anybody that is interested in constructing a large body of work, is going to have to treat all sorts of versions of himself and the reality as he sees it and I completely refuse to be burdened by any of my past work, I don't mean it as definitive, and I don't mean it as a guide to behavior, anybody who puts down everything he is doing and decides to become rich and famous as a way out, he has his own risks to take in that matter. That was written with a sense of irony and it only has meaning within the context of a large body of work, so that there is nothing I can say about my interest in 15-year-old girls. My interest is renown or money, I have the sane kind of normal appetites as anyone else, and anyone can examine those within himself. I just gave articulation to a moment of irony and greed.

M: What is it like to become famous after a time when you really put out some fabulous work, and you were known to a few people, but not an such a large scale as after you started singing - what was it like?

C: The actual experience I certainly haven't sorted out, and I haven't even sorted out that particular experience from the ordinary experience of growing older. I don't know which is which. What is more shattering, I certainly feel my mind in a bit of a muddle and certainly I have experienced the claps of a lot of interior structures that I was once more certain of. As I say, I don't know whether it has to do with the particular experience that I have undergone or just the normal process of aging and destruction and recreation which we all go through, so I can't really tell you -- the experience of the 60' s was an extremely rigorous experience for a lot of people, whether they were in the public eye or not, the challenges and the revisions and transvaluations that went on were so severe and rigorous that many people were overwhelmed. Then there were many casualties that time, I can't really sort out and never will know what I contribute to fame or what I contribute to just the experience of the age.

M: I remember when we were talking before you told me that you were taken after you became famous -- you met charlatans.

D: Well, any fool with money in his pockets is going to hassle charlatans or double dealers of any kind. It's only when you do have money, not even when you have money, it's when you represent the possibility of money to others that you begin to have experiences in the market place that you never had, and never dreamed of. I never knew there were dishonest people. It was a revelation to me, I don't know why, I grew up in a very honorable family, there wasn't such a thing as cheating or dishonesty in commerce, and I assumed that that was the rule of business practice. This sounds terribly naive, but it is true, I thought that all business men were gentlemen and that if a word was given that really stead for something, and this does as I look reck even at these words, seem totally uninformed. After I've been in the market place now for a few years, I really see how innocent I was when I came into it, so that was an education I'd never have gained. I only knew that there were red people and dishonest people from literature. I'd never encountered anybody that I knew to be dishonest. It was only in so called business affairs that I first discovered that there was dishonesty in the world. You know, patent, overt dishonesty,the people that were actually trying to cheat you and take away things that were yours, I never knew it existed.

M: Was it painful?

C: Yeah, it was painful. It is painful to lose something you think is rightfully yours, but on the other hand, it is such a gossamer thing to make money out of a song. It is such a, strange consequence, that losing part of it doesn't really seem so terrible because there is an aspect of unreality to the whole thing. It I S so strange to write a love song and to suddenly have it bring you in cash, and credit cards and airplanes and create a whole material world that you never experienced or had hoped or wanted, or greatly desired. I had known what comfortable life was. I came from a comfortable life. I tasted the other stuff too, but it was never something I dreamed of, never something I wanted. I suddenly
had access to material possibility ties that I never had before, so when I found out that someone had taken away some of that access and had gnawed at it for sate of their own reasons, I was hurt more from the personal point of view that someone would actually want to cheat me. I thought that there wasn't anyone that would want to cheat me. I was too nice so that was the part that hurt more than the actual loss of money, because the things that money bought seemed so unreal at the time, and were not particularly important. But now I feel differently. Now I consider it an assault, an act of hostility. In the early days, I was hurt because someone would cheat me -- my own self-image was impaired. But now I see that there is a war in the market place, and it was never anything else. In a few remote provincial areas like my part of Montreal, business was conducted honestly. But now, by and large, in the world, business is not conducted honorably and a man must be aware of what the real situation is.

M: So why do you do it then -- stay in the market place?

C: I found that my standard of living went down very sharply after I started to make money and became known. Before, I lived in a lovely white house on a Greek island. I had credit with all the storeowners, and I never thought about money at all. I swam every day and had a good suntan and everything was very light and very easy and with the advent of money, I found myself spending more and more time in New York City, in taxies, airplanes and other unpleasant circumstances - living in air conditioned rooms and sitting around tables discussing

M: What about the benefits that you gained through this fame?

C: I think that it's a very interesting place to be. It certainly was an education for me, one I would never get anywhere else. I think that money; love and war are areas out in which you find things out about other people and about yourself that no other situations can disclose contracts and leading that mole like existence you do when you're mixing a record, when you never see the sunlight. All you see is the control board of a record studio and the quality of life certainly has deteriorated considerably. The real luxury today is to be sane place beautiful so that the air is clean and you can swim.

M: So why do you sing etc, and have all this luxury?

C: Well, one thing is that I have to make a living now and since I've concluded all these contracts with people born and unborn, I have to make money like everyone else to take care of my responsibilities. The other reason is that it becomes a challenge in itself -- the making of a record, a book or construction of a peen has its laws and its own series of
dynamics which are there to be mastered if you can, and it and it becomes a point of interest and honor to master these dynamics.

M: You mentioned that you are quite satisfied with new record because music is more in the foreground than ever before.

C: Well, when I say I'm satisfied, I mean that I find it endurable. I'm not totally humiliated by the work. I have a lot of reservations about it, that goes without saying, but I'm pleased that there is another record because I never thought that there would be another record. I had a number of unfinished songs that I couldn't seem to finish. I thought that for a very good reason, the muse had deserted me and that I would not stand
scratching at her door and I would have the courage to turn my back on the whole thing which I was quite prepared to do and had done, even though there was pressure on me to make another record. But I had turned my back: on it and abandoned all the unfinished songs and pretty well closed the book on it, and for some reason or another I had a golden
fortnight and a lot of songs presented conclusions to me, so I found myself with some finished songs, which was very refreshing. I hadn't had this experience for a long time.
Then I was very lucky to meet John Lissaur who completely understood the nature of my music and the intention of the lyric and could translate this into music. Also a man with high command of the studio. So this was a very fortunate meeting and it made the actual recording possible.

M: You mentioned that before the music was not expressed properly in other records.

C: Well, I felt that I had a lot of trouble translating my ideas into… You did an interview with Joni Mitchell where I think Tan Scott spoke to the effect that Joni didn't know the technical language of music -- that he could translate her vision into music. Well, I've come across such a man and he can translate intentions into music. Not only that, but the can augment than and elaborate on than so that the effort can satisfy his own high intentions, so that I'm quite pleased with the music that has cane out. I think that it is just a scanty beginning, but it ' s a respectable beginning of what I hope will be a collaboration that lasts for another record or so.

M: You said before that for a very good reason the muse had left you.

C: I think that there is a tremendous justice and equilibrium in the psychic world and that we are always completely responsible for our own condition and when I say that I was no longer visited by inspiration; I felt that was quite justified. It's hard to go into the actual reasons for… it's just that I knew that if the poems weren't coming, that either I was resting, which was the charitable description of what too process was, or that I was not leading the kind of life that invited that kind of inspiration.

M: Which is what?

C: It's had to say exactly what it is - it's a thing of degree. It's a subtle thing, everyone understand that. They can be off one day or two, but then when they are off continually,
they generally knew why. They can either adjust their direction or if they are particularly pig headed or stubborn and irresponsible, they can persist in their course and endure sterility. Generally, we are responsible for this kind of situation ourselves, anyhow, I have the illusion that the correction of it is in our own hands too

M: Reading your poetry and listening to some of your songs, it seems that you draw some of your inspiration from relationships with people, with women in particular.

C: Yes, I certainly think in the past that's true. I don't feel that so much any more.

M: Did you ever get any feed back from people that were associated with you that you've used these experiences in such a public way?

C: I've never been accused of betraying anything that should be left unsaid, I don't I do feel that -- no I don't think that I've exploited under that level, if you can make something
that is beautiful out of something you've experienced, I think that everybody concerned is happy about it.

M: Well, I'm thinking of Zelda and Fitzgerald. She seemed to resent that he had used all their experiences in his work.

C: Yes, well, she wanted to I guess she had ambitions as a writer, but I don't know -- I don't think I've taken anything that anybody could use anyway, an other way.