I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons

days people did a lot of things that were unusual—every kind of approach. A lot of the words to the songs were great, and he had a real understated way of delivering them. And he really seemed to like us, so it was good.” They agreed to come to the studio and play on his album. “I thought, ‘Nothing’s going to come of this,’ ” says Crill, “ ‘but we’re starving to death and we’ll get enough money to eat and do our gigs in Boston then go home.’ It really saved our asses.”
    The Kaleidoscope showed up at Studio E laden with stringed instruments, including harp guitar, bass, violin, mandolin and some of Feldtman’s Middle Eastern assortment. Crill and Darrow found themselves sharing the elevator with Arthur Godfrey. “I remember listening to his radio show on the cab ride back with the guys and he was saying, ‘I had to share the elevator with a bunch of those filthy hippies,’ ” recalls Crill. In the candlelit studio, Leonard was deep in discussion with the man behind the control desk, who was saying, “ ‘We’ve spent all the money, it’s already the most expensive album we’ve ever been associated with,’ blah, blah, blah. Then they would play a track for us and the producer would come on the talk-back and say, ‘We only have one track open so we can’t put two instruments in here,’ and a ten-minute argument would begin. Leonard, poor guy, would be, ‘We don’t want the glockenspiel’—because on every one of these tracks it sounded like there was two orchestras and a carousel. It was like a fruitcake, it was so full of stuff. Making the room for us to play on anything took more time than actually having us play, because of the old technology. And to go from a guy who was sitting in your room, just playing a guitar and singing a song in a nice quiet voice, to the Entrance of the Gladiators—Jesus! His songs weren’t the kind that needed all that orchestration and women’s voices to get them across. It sounded like Tiny Tim’s first album. I felt really sorry for the guy.”
    In the studio, Leonard sang the songs as he had originally played them, before the overdubs. “He went through a lot of songs,” says Chris Darrow, “basically trying to figure out if anybody had any ideas. I remember him playing the guitar and having a hard time myself trying to figure out what the groove was, because he had this sort of amorphous guitar style that was very circular. I think one of the problems that he was having was that he wanted something very specific and he understood what it was that he wanted, but I think he was having a hard time at that time either getting producers or other musicians to understand. I never remember him being disparaging about anybody else or anything, but it being his first record and him not being really known as a musician I think there were things he was having a hard time communicating.”
    There was no rehearsal. The band improvised, and Leonard told them when he liked something and if he wanted them to add another instrument. The latter would prompt a voice from the control room, over the talk-back, telling Leonard that he could only have one. When Leonard protested, Crill recalls, “he was told, ‘We can’t change it; we’re locked into this.’ It was horrible for him. It wasn’t for us, because every minute we were getting more money for getting out of New York.”
    The Kaleidoscope did three Leonard Cohen sessions in all, two long and one short, playing on “So Long, Marianne,” “Teachers,” “Sisters of Mercy,” “Winter Lady” and “The Stranger Song.” They were not in the album credits, but neither were any of the other musicians; as Lindley points out, at that time “it was like dancing bears or performing seals”; you just did the job and moved on. John