Leonard Cohen
Death Of A Ladies Man
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When I first met Leonard Cohen, he was telling a good friend of mine that his mother was seriously ill. My friend, whose father had recently died, was so moved by Cohen's mesmerizing familial compassion that she quietly began to cry. Seeing this, Cohen jumped up, left the room and quickly returned with his famous blue raincoat. "Please cry on this," he said. "It soaks up the tears." And you wonder why I like Leonard Cohen. Unfortunately, the tales surrounding Cohen's seventh album, Death of a Ladies' Man, produced by the once-famous but lately infamous Phil Spector, are neither poetic nor kind, and the LP probably has fewer admirers than buyers. Cohen himself, though he feels
Read More the songs are unusually strong, has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the record. Spector, it seems, simply took what the singer felt were tapes still in progress, kept them under lock and key, mixed them like a solitary mad genius and released the album without bothering to consult with his artist. Not everyone likes a surprise, but Cohen has both dealt out and dealt with enough superromantic irony in his lifetime to walk through it as if it were a fine spring rain. With such a history, it's fitting that Death of a Ladies' Man more than lives up to its notoriety. It's either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and I'm betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world's most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world's most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving. To me, both men would seem to belong to that select club of lone-wolf poets, Cohen haunted by new skin and old ceremonies and Spector by the reverse. While the latter apparently begs to differ with most of the contemporary world, the former has been known to defer to amatory begging to gain all the experience he possibly can from the sisterly sea around us. Both these guys know what fame and longing are. But it's silly to take sides about this LP because so much of it is first-rate. Contrary to popular opinion, Leonard Cohen's lyrics, arguably the best in rock & roll, are easily decipherable through the calliopean claustrophobia of Phil Spector's sometimes-padded wall of sound. Actually, except for the very minor "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On" (a rather pointless wallow in raunch) and "Fingerprints" (wrongheaded country music), Spector displays a good deal of sensitivity toward a type of material (chansons, for want of a better word) with which he's never worked. Though his rock & roll hits were often delicate and deliberate mixtures of the simple and the grandiose, it was usually the music that was grandiose, not the words. With Cohen, everything's the other way around. A self-taught singer, Leonard Cohen can get by with six strings and a homemade melody if he has to, but his words are so moody and complex you can't tell up from down, implosion from explosion. Yet Spector's melodies,
Considered an artistic disaster in 1977, this "only in Hollywood" collaboration between low-key poet Cohen and control-freak producer Phil Spector has aged very well and paints a vivid portrait of middle-aged hipsters confused by the libertine world they helped create. Cohen was afraid of Spector (wonder why), but the wee man's studio bombast helps make this a unique work.
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