Hammond got Cohen signed to Columbia Records and he created The Songs of Leonard
Cohen, which was released just before Christmas of 1967. Producer John Simon was able to
find a restrained yet appealing approach to recording Cohen's voice, which might have been
described as a appealingly sensitive near-monotone; yet that voice was perfectly suited to the material at hand, all of which, written in a very personal language, seemed drenched in
downbeat images and a spirit of discovery as a path to unsettling revelation.
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Despite its spare production and melancholy subject matter -- or, very possibly because of it -
- the album was an immediate hit by the standards of the folk music world and the budding
singer/songwriter community. In an era in which millions of listeners hung on the next
albums of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel -- whose own latest album had ended with a
minor-key rendition of "Silent Night" set against a radio news account of the death of Lenny Bruce -- Cohen's music quickly found a small but dedicated following. College students by
the thousands bought it; in its second year of release, the record sold over 100,000 copies. The Songs of Leonard Cohen was as close as Cohen ever got to mass audience success.
Amid all of this sudden musical activity, he hardly neglected his other writing -- in 1968,
Cohen released a new volume, Selected Poems: 1956-1968, which included both old and
newly published work, and earned him the Governor-General's Award, Canada's highest
literary honor, which he proceeded to decline to accept. By this time, he was actually almost
more a part of the rock scene, residing for a time in New York's Chelsea Hotel, where his
neighbors included Janis Joplin and other performing luminaries, some of whom influenced
his songs very directly.
His next album, Songs from a Room (1969), was characterized by an even greater spirit of
melancholy -- even the relatively spirited "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" was steeped in such depressing sensibilities, and the one song not written by Cohen, "The Partisan," was a grim narrative about the reasons for and consequences of resistance to tyranny that included
lines like "She died without a whisper" and included images of wind blowing past graves.
Joan Baez subsequently recorded the song, and in her hands it was a bit more upbeat and
inspiring to the listener; Cohen's rendition made it much more difficult to get past the costs presented by the singer's persona. On the other hand, "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,"
although as downbeat as anything else here, did present Cohen in his most expressive and
commercial voice, a nasal but affecting and finely nuanced performance.
Still, in all, Songs from a Room was less well received commercially and critically -- Bob
Johnston's restrained, almost minimalist production made it less overtly appealing than the
subtly commercial trappings of his debut, though the album did have a pair of tracks, "Bird on the Wire" and "The Story of Isaac," that became standards rivaling "Suzanne" -- "The Story of Isaac," a musical parable woven around biblical imagery about Vietnam (which is also
relevant to the Iraq War), was one of the most savage and piercing songs to come out of the
antiwar movement, and showed a level of sophistication in its music and lyrics that put it in
a whole separate realm of composition; it received an even better airing on the Live Songs
album, in a performance recorded in Berlin during 1972.
Cohen may not have been a widely popular performer or recording artist, but his unique
voice and sound, and the power of his writing and its influence, helped give him entrée to
rock's front-ranked performers, an odd status for the now 35-year-old author/composer. He
appeared at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival in England, a post-Woodstock gathering of stars
and superstars, including late appearances by such soon-to-die-or-disband legends as Jimi
Hendrix and the Doors; looking nearly as awkward as his fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell,
Cohen strummed his acoustic guitar backed by a pair of female singers in front of an
audience of 600,000 ("It's a large nation, but still weak"), comprised in equal portions of fans, freaks, and belligerent gatecrashers, but the mere fact that he was there -- sandwiched
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somewhere between Miles Davis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer -- was a clear statement of the
status (if not the popular success) he'd achieved. One portion of his set, "Tonight Will Be Fine," was released on a subsequent live album, while his performance of "Suzanne" was one of the highlights of Murray Lerner's long-delayed, 1996-issued documentary Message to
Love: The Isle of Wight Festival.
Already, he had carved out a unique place for himself in music, as much author as performer
and recording artist, letting his songs develop and evolve across years -- his distinctly
noncommercial voice became part of his appeal to the audience he found, giving him a
unique corner of the music audience, made of listeners descended from the same people who
had embraced Bob Dylan's early work before he'd become a mass-media phenomenon in
1964. In a sense, Cohen embodied a phenomenon vaguely similar to what Dylan enjoyed
before his early-'70s tour with the Band -- people bought his albums by the tens and,
occasionally, hundreds of thousands, but seemed to hear him in uniquely personal terms. He
earned his audience seemingly one listener at a time, by word of mouth more than by the
radio which, in any case (especially on the AM dial), was mostly friendly to covers of
Cohen's songs by other artists.
Cohen's third album, Songs of Love and Hate (1971), was his most powerful body of work to
date, brimming with piercing lyrics and music as poignantly affecting as it was minimalist in
its approach -- arranger Paul Buckmaster's work on strings was peculiarly muted, and the
children's chorus that showed up on "Last Year's Man" was spare in its presence; balancing them was Cohen's most effective vocalizing to date, brilliantly expressive around such
acclaimed songs as "Joan of Arc," "Dress Rehearsal Rag" (which had been recorded by Judy Collins five years before), and "Famous Blue Raincoat." The bleakness of the tone and subject matter ensured that he would never become a "pop" performer; even the beat-driven
"Diamonds in the Mine," with its catchy children's
