In 1967 Leonard Cohen changed my life with one song. I was already writing songs at fifteen but when I heard the second verse to “Suzanne” (And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water …) the sacred and the profane were united in one holy apostolic existential church where the goats get to slow dance with angels.
I heard it first not from Leonard nor even Rex Harrison’s son, Noel, who had an AM hit with the song. The mention of Jesus or any religious figure would have been death to an AM song of that era. Sure Brian Wilson wrote “God Only Knows”, one of the best pop songs ever, but that was just a figure of speech. So when Harrison recorded it he only sang verses one and three which referred to Suzanne and just made it seem enigmatic. He is better remembered for his version of “Windmills of Your Mind” which appeared during Steve McQueen’s glider scene in the first “Thomas Crown Affair”.
No, I heard it played live in a lounge in Snowmass by a guy fresh out of the Chad Mitchell Trio, John Denver. He was booked as an apres ski act in the lounge for several weeks and that night he was playing to my parents and I, one other couple and the bartender. This is the pre-Rocky Mountain High Denver, primarily playing covers although I might have heard “Leaving On a Jet Plane” for the first time that night. But he introduced “Suzanne” and talked about the writer and then he sang that second verse. The top of my head blew off.
When we got back to Phoenix, I spent hours in record stores looking for Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t find his record but I found a singer who covered several of his songs and bought her record, “Wildflowers”. Judy Collins covered another writer, Joni Mitchell, and that led me to her first record, “Song to a Seagull”. When eventually I found “Songs of Leonard Cohen”, I felt like a total folk insider, possessed of a secret that no one else knew and I wore that sucker out. It had a dangerous painting of Joan of Arc awash in flames on the back.
As a budding acoustic guitarist I learned most of those songs but when I tried to play them for others, they were deemed too depressing and dark. I thought they were mysteriously meaningful and kind of funny (I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me/But the room just filled up with mosquitoes, they heard that my body was free). My girlfriend asked, what does that mean? If you don`t get it, it`s not that funny.
Over the years though I met others who did get it. My high school friend Doug got it and a banjo playing buddy I met at college was a fan. I recall our gleeful discovery of a used copy of “The Favorite Game” in a book store in Greenwich Village. That same friend just sent me the first draft of his first novel whose protagonist bears some resemblance, at least in spirit, to the Breavman character of Cohen’s novel.
I once had a girlfriend named Jane who was treated to endless spinnings of “Famous Blue Raincoat” (And Jane came by with a lock of your hair/She said that you gave it to her that night that you planned to go clear/Did you ever go clear?). Bob Ward, fellow brother in song, and I bonded the night we first met over our shared enthusiasm for Leonard’s use of language and wicked sense of humor.
In 1993, Deb and I played a set for John Denver’s 50th birthday party, in Santa Fe at Georgia O’Keefe’s old house under the same ficus tree where the Dalai Lama had sat and taught …. it was a moment. John and my cousin, Cheryl Charles, were dear friends and collaborators and that’s how we came to be there. John also claimed that he was going to record “Mama Start the Fire” but he didn’t live long enough. I did get a chance to tell him the story of how that one night and that one song had set me on an irreversible path and I think he appreciated hearing that.
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And just when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
Now Leonard Cohen, the man his own self, comes to Phoenix, driven to perform in the states by having been bilked out of his modest fortune by his manager (I’m just about over the management class). April 5, Dodge Theater and I’m gonna be there with my baby, Bob Ward, and one of the dancing cigars from his band. Just trying to do our part to stimulate the economy by soakin’ in the culture and paying homage to a hero in the seaweed.