firmly than any other musical figure from the 1960s who is still working at the outset of the
21st century, which is all the more remarkable an achievement for someone who didn't even
aspire to a musical career until he was in his thirties.
Cohen was born in 1934, a year before Elvis Presley or Ronnie Hawkins, and his background
-- personal, social, and intellectual -- couldn't have been more different from those of any
rock stars of any generation; nor can he be easily compared even with any members of the
generation of folksingers who came of age in the 1960s. Though he knew some country
music and played it a bit as a boy, he didn't start performing on even a semi-regular basis,
much less recording, until after he had already written several books -- and as an established novelist and poet, his literary accomplishments far exceed those of Bob Dylan or most
anyone else who one cares to mention in music, at least this side of operatic librettists such as Hugo Von Hoffmanstahl or Stefan Zweig, figures from another musical and cultural world.
He was born Leonard Norman Cohen into a middle-class Jewish family in the Montreal
suburb of Westmount. His father, a clothing merchant (who also held a degree in
engineering), died in 1943, when Cohen was nine years old. It was his mother who
encouraged Cohen as a writer, especially of poetry, during his childhood. This fit in with the progressive intellectual environment in which he was raised, which allowed him free inquiry
into a vast range of pursuits. His relationship to music was more tentative -- he took up the
guitar at age 13, initially as a way to impress a girl, but was good enough to play country & western songs at local cafes, and he subsequently formed a group called the Buckskin Boys.
At 17, he enrolled in McGill University as an English major -- by this time, he was writing
poetry in earnest and became part of the university's tiny underground "bohemian"
community. Cohen only earned average grades, but was a good enough writer to earn the
McNaughton Prize in creative writing by the time he graduated in 1955 -- a year later, the ink barely dry on his degree, he published his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies
(1956), which got great reviews but didn't sell especially well.
He was already beyond the age that rock & roll was aimed at -- Bob Dylan, by contrast, was still Robert Zimmerman, still in his teens, and young enough to become a devotee of Buddy
Holly when the latter emerged. In 1961, Cohen published his second book of poetry, The
Spice Box of Earth, which became an international success critically and commercially, and
363
established Cohen as a major new literary figure. Meanwhile, he tried to join the family
business and spent some time at Columbia University in New York, writing all the time.
Between the modest royalties from sales of his second book, literary grants from the
Canadian government, and a family legacy, he was able to live comfortably and travel
around the world, partake of much of what it had to offer -- including some use of LSD when
it was still legal -- and ultimately settling for an extended period in Greece, on the isle of Hydra in the Aegean Sea. He continued to publish, issuing a pair of novels, The Favorite
Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), with a pair of poetry collections, Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) around them. The Favorite Game was a very personal
work about his early life in Montreal, but it was Beautiful Losers that proved another
breakthrough, earning the kind of reviews that authors dare not even hope for -- Cohen
found himself compared to James Joyce in the pages of The Boston Globe, and across four
decades the book has enjoyed sales totaling well into six figures.
It was around this time that he also started writing music again, songs being a natural
extension of his poetry. His relative isolation on Hydra, coupled with his highly mobile
lifestyle when he left the island, his own natural iconoclastic nature, and the fact that he'd avoided being overwhelmed (or even touched too seriously) by the currents running
through popular music since the 1940s, combined to give Cohen a unique voice as a
composer. Though he did settle in Nashville for a short time in the mid-'60s, he didn't write
quite like anyone else in music, in the country music mecca or anywhere else. This might
have been an impediment but for the intervention of Judy Collins, a folksinger who had just
moved to the front rank of that field, and who had a voice just special enough to move her
beyond the relatively emaciated ranks of remaining popular folk performers after Dylan
shifted to electric music -- she was still getting heard, and not just by the purists left behind in Dylan's wake. She added Cohen's "Suzanne" to her repertory and put it onto her album In My Life, a record that was controversial enough in folk circles -- because of her cover of the Beatles song that gave the LP its title -- that it pulled in a lot of listeners and got a wide airing. "Suzanne" received a considerable amount of radio airplay from the LP, and Cohen was also represented on the album by "Dress Rehearsal Rag."
It was Collins who persuaded Cohen to return to performing for the first time since his teens.
He made his debut during the summer of 1967 at the Newport Folk Festival, followed by a
pair of sold-out concerts in New York City and an appearance singing his songs and reciting
his poems on the CBS network television show Camera Three, in a show entitled Ladies and
Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen. It was around the same time that actor/singer Noel
Harrison brought "Suzanne" onto the pop charts with a recording of his own. One of those who saw Cohen perform at Newport was John Hammond, Sr., the legendary producer
whose career went back to the 1930s and the likes of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, and
Count Basie, and extended up through Bob Dylan and, ultimately, to Bruce
