![]() ![]() He showed up in Judy Collins's living room and tentatively strummed a few chords and sang Suzanne and one or two others. The story I heard had him coming to New York with a sheaf of songs, hoping to get Peter, Paul & Mary or someone like that to record them. The fact that he even tried is down to Dylan, whose example led Cohen to come back from his never-ending Greek vacation to see if there was a place for him on the folk scene. How lucky that he could also come up with melodies, or find the right collaborators to create them, to hang his brilliant words on, and could deliver them in a voice that, post-Dylan, seemed at first rather sweet and which was always persuasive. There are endless lines to quote, from love songs to apocalyptic prophecies, words to puzzle over, and words to take to heart. The Columbia guy was right about one thing: Cohen was great, one of the greatest poets to grace the world of music. I guess those head honchos were not yet aware of the " long tail" - and it's a good thing John Cale buys import records! How ironic that the album containing one of Cohen's most covered songs wasn't deemed fit for wide release. Perhaps it was at that same meeting that Cohen was informed that Columbia was done releasing his albums in the U.S., putting out the album on Portrait, a subsidiary label, and only in Canada. ![]() I think it may have been Various Positions that caused that uncomfortable conversation with his label boss in the first place. ![]() In fact, the transition from Various Positions, the 1984 album that contains the original recording of Hallelujah, to 1992's The Future (via I'm Your Man, 1988), is a quieter but even more startling musical transformation than when Bob Dylan went electric. He was no good at toeing the folk music line, moving further and further away from being a guitar-toting troubadour into his own chilly blend of synth-noir-gospel-muzak. Cohen was no good at being a cog in the pop music machinery that keeps the music business humming. "I know you're really great," a Columbia Records exec once said to Leonard Cohen, "but are you any good?" The answer, thank god, was no. "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen, Anthem ![]()
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