I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons Page A

Simon too had moved on; he was now producing the band Blood, Sweat and Tears and, he said, pretty sure that he was not in the studio when Leonard and the Kaleidoscope played. Simon felt that he had done all he could for Leonard, and if Leonard wanted to change what he’d done, yes, he was disappointed—“But,” he said, “it was his album. Plus he was older than I, so I was conditioned to back off graciously.”
    Talking to Simon more than forty years later, he still rhapsodizes about the album. “ ‘Suzanne’: fucking gorgeous, I love this track; the strings and the girls together with the rich vocal and guitar make a lush blanket of sound. ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ is another of my favorites—this and ‘Suzanne’ both have a guitar line in thirds with the vocal. I like the girls’ parts a lot—they’re mine—and I love the instrument that sounds like a Brazilian berimbau or a low-pitched Jew’s harp, which must be the Kaleidoscope. The mandolin on ‘Sisters of Mercy’ is probably the Kaleidoscope—talk about elaborate. ‘So Long, Marianne’: I heard somewhere that Leonard specified there be no drums on his album; well, there are drums on this. Incidentally, stereo was so new and strange to me—or to whomever mixed this; who knows at this point?—that I placed the bass and drums fully to one side of the stereo, a no-no. ‘The Stranger Song’ made me think about his lyrics. Although Bob Dylan paved the way for the lyricists who followed him, in that he got an audience to accept lyrics that were more thoughtful, less banal than the average pop lyric, Leonard’s seem to show more finesse. His scansion is stricter, his rhymes truer, as a rule. Whereas Dylan’s language had a connection to ‘the people,’ in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, blues and folk, Leonard’s lyrics reveal a more educated, exposed, literate poet. But Leonard was not just a poet who strummed a little. What a marvel the speed of his finger-picking pattern is. I like the humor in the lyrics of ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,’ they have an undercurrent of ardent young lust, but they’re so funny at the same time. As for the questionable taste of the ending with the recorder, the whistle and Leonard screeching way up high, what can I say? We were young.”
    Said Leonard, “I always think of something Irving Layton said about the requirements for a young poet, and I think it goes for a young singer, too, or a beginning singer: ‘The two qualities most important for a young poet are arrogance and inexperience.’ It’s only some very strong self-image that can keep you going in a world that conspires to silence everyone.” 6
    S ongs of Leonard Cohen was shipped on December 26, 1967, in the winter of the Summer of Love. * Leonard was thirty-three years old—by sixties standards antediluvian. He made no attempt to disguise his age in the photograph on the album’s front sleeve, a head-shot, taken in a New York subway station photo booth. Sepia-toned and with a funereal black border, it showed a solemn man in a dark jacket and white shirt, unmistakably a grown-up; it might well have been the photo of a dead Spanish poet. Viewed alongside the head-shot on the back of Let Us Compare Mythologies, in which Leonard looked more buttoned-up, less defiant, it appeared that Leonard’s bottomless eyes had seen too much in the eleven years between his first book and first LP. The back cover was taken up with a colorful drawing of a woman in flames—a Mexican saint picture Leonard found at the store where he bought his candles and spells. It was quite unlike any other album sleeve of its time.
    Then, Leonard’s album was like nothing of its time—or of any time, really. Its songs sounded both fresh and ancient, sung with the authority of a man used to being listened to, which he