First three albums re-released today

[Kjelling]

It seems Cohen himself chose the bonus tracks. For some reason he did not choose "Priests". And who knows whether the master tape is still intact.

[~greg]

Of course, in the sixties there weren't that many of us visiting Greece,
and perhaps the record producers felt that listeners wouldn't understand what he was singing about.
Those beautiful roadside shrines, always with a wick burning in a pool of oil, and a bottle of water
waiting for the thirsty traveller, are as far as I know unique to Greece, a country where the word
for 'stranger' and 'guest' is the same.

That is interesting.
From search, I think you must mean the word 'zenos',
= 'stranger', 'enemy', 'guest'.
(english "xenophobia" -from this.)

My guess is it's due to one of Zeno's paradoxes:

Since Greeks can't get rid of a stranger by means of arrows
(-since it takes time for an arrow to go half way from bow to stranger,
and then more time to go half the 2nd half way,
and so on, --until it takes forever to hit the "stranger")
- then the Greeks must figure that by that time he's more of a "guest"
than a "stranger". I guess.

Cohen must have learnt at least some Greek.
And 'zenos' is just the kind of word that he almost certainly
would have learnt. Which may add even more color
to "The Stranger Song". (Although I'm not sure exactly how.)

~~
I doubt however that the obscurity of road side shrines
had anything to do with 'Priests' not appearing on the album.

For one thing, they aren't all that obscure.
They're quite common in all the major Catholic countries, and in Mexico,
and even in the USA -
(see: http://www.fisheaters.com/roadsideshrines.html
and: http://images.google.com/images?svnum=1 ... rch+Images
for more images)

Also, after WWII, in the '50s and '60s, there were a lot
of American tourists around. And they always noticed
the shrines, and made stupid comments about them being
so weird. ( That's when the term "ugly American"
really began to mean something.)

In any case, lyrical obscurity could never possibly have
been a reason for dropping a Cohen song from a Cohen album!

I think the real reason must have been the impossibility
of Cohen performing it anything remotely the way
Judy Collins did it on her "Wildflowers" album.

The other 2 Cohen songs on Wildflowers
- Sisters of Mercy, and Hey, That's Now Way to Say Goodbye,
and Suzanne, and Dress Rehearsal Rag on her earlier "In My Life" album,
and Story of Isaac, and Bird on a Wire, on her later
"Who Knows Where The Time Goes"album,
---- all those songs she did in a much less
purely art-song kind way than she did "Priests".
And Cohen then did them not so different
from the way she did them.


It's important to remember that the concept
of "Singer-Song-writer" didn't really exist until the
very end of the '60s. And it was Judy Collins
that had the most to do with creating an audience
that wanted to hear the original writers sing their
own songs. Not that anyone didn't like the way
she did them. It's just that all the songs
she chose were of such an extraordinarily
higher literary quality than virtually everything else
back then, that it only occurred to people then that
the writers may have interesting ways
of presenting the songs themselves.

And that includes Dylan, and Joni Mitchell,
and even the Beatles, among others!

I think it may even be argued that nobody
- not even those 3, -were thought of as
"singer-songwriters" before Collins put them in that context
by doing a few of their more artful songs.

And maybe when people first got a craving to hear
the writers do their own songs, then they probably
wanted to hear them do them in essentially the same
way that they'd heard them done before, - the way
Judy did them. Or at least not in completely different
arrangements. Or at least I think that maybe the record
producers thought that way. In any case, again,
there was simply no way that Cohen could do "Priests"
anything like Judy did it.

(Also, every one I knew back then got and
played both Wildflowers and Songs of Leonard Cohen
at the same time.

(After which we began to play them one at a time.
Which makes them a lot easier to listen to.)

My point is that if it turns out that 'Priests' was not, in fact,
mistakenly printed on the sleeve of Song of Leonard Cohen,
-or, in other words, if that's a mistaken memory,
- then it's probably due to having see it on the
Wildflowers sleeve, - the two sleeves
having gotten mixed up in the pile.



~greg

[blonde madonna]

Musings on ‘priests’ have wandered on to the emergence of singer-songwriter/artists during the sixties and brings me to more thoughts on the re-issue of Cohen’s first albums, very much artifacts of their time. When I think of the sixties I think of Joni Mitchell’s words:

‘And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning’

Even though she actually didn’t make it to Woodstock she seemed to sum up a feeling of the time. A big part of that was the reaction to the Vietnam War (compare it to today’s reaction to the war in Iraq). Cohen, as he does, gave us the other side:

‘Well I stepped into an avalanche,
It covered up my soul;
When I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
You must learn, learn to serve me well.’

It was a time of serious thought about where the world was heading and optimism about being able to determine or change that direction with song. It was a time of collective and individual ‘consciousness raising’ (such an archaic term now). I came to this music after its time but in the late seventies, in my backwater/neck of the woods, we were still feeling the effects of it as if it had just/never happened.

As I have been reminded by reading this thread, singers like Judy Collins introduced Cohen and Joni Mitchell to a lot of people, just as Joan Baez introduced Dylan. Yet, beautiful soprano voices like theirs seem to have gone out of fashion today. Joanna Newsom comes closest for me in capturing the feelings of listening to Collins, Mitchell, Dylan and Cohen for the first time (her voice is untrained, strange and her songs/stories need further listening).

Still it’s like spumante after champagne, like trying to read Vonnegut again when you are no longer 18, like watching Clockwork Orange and trying to remember what all the fuss was about. In the end I can’t escape a sense of yearning and loss.

So, my jumbled nostalgic thoughts and then I wonder whether these re-issues are alive/relevant today or dead/artifacts for collectors? So it goes.

[tomsakic]

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0718, ... 33,22.html


Intriguing parallels to Dylan, and/or Jesus
photo: Michael Putland/Retna UK

Songs of Free Love and Hate
Glorious moping, whether over Altamont or poor album sales
by Michael Hoinski
May 1st, 2007 4:31 PM

Somewhere, it's the witching hour, and a sad sack is holding on for dear life while Leonard Cohen, with his brooding, monochromatic voice, sings, "Well I stepped into an avalanche/It covered up my soul"—the opening line on "Avalanche," the opening track on the masochistically delightful Songs of Love and Hate. Released in 1970, the lyric can be interpreted as a post-Altamont statement of lost innocence, but more likely it was a far more personal cry from a man disillusioned by his fledgling career as a singer-songwriter.

Three years prior, on the heels of the Summer of Love, Cohen released his debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen. He was 33, a late age to come to the game, though it was—not so ironically, for a religious zealot who in '96 was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk—Christ's age at passing. But Cohen's nouveau folk, which bucked the genre's trend of earnest protest, benefited from his maturity. The album also introduced Cohen's long line of lady friends living out the repercussions of "free love."

It was followed, in '68, by Songs From a Room. Cohen's tune had changed from casual to political. Songs like "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes" and "The Old Revolution" were obvious admonishments of the Vietnam War. But it took a deep thinker like Anthony DeCurtis, who wrote the liner notes to these three reissues, to draw parallels between Cohen's "Story of Isaac" and Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited."

A celebrated poet and novelist in his native Canada even before he released his first album, Cohen's subsequent musing on avalanches was probably a reaction to the commercial reception—or lack thereof—of his first two albums. Come to think of it, "reactionary" is the perfect theme for these reissues, since the majority of these songs are thinly veiled indictments of the '60s. Other than the liners, what's new here are five previously unreleased songs, including less morbid versions of "Bird on the Wire" (originally called "Like a Bird") and "Dress Rehearsal Rag." But only "Store Room," a perky (for Cohen) number about the Man take, take, taking without consequence, proves a real breakthrough. Beyond that, it's all packaging—a curious homage to the antithesis of superficiality.

[tomsakic]

I wonder did you notice any difference in sound quality of Sing Another Song, Boys?

Namely, the track apparently wasn't remastered - it's easy to hear how voice on the previous and subsequent track is more clear, upfront and present, as well as the band.

I guess that means that all tracks on all three albums were remastered and mixed from the original studio tapes, while there was no help for this live track (no four-channel mastertape or whatever).

I guess Sony didn't care to find out is there any kind of original, unreleased master recording of Isle of Wight in Britain (there is - BBC has it, probably - as the fact that Tonight Will Be Fine from BBC's 1995 broadcast is much better than the same track on Live Songs CD.)

[DBCohen]

My point is that if it turns out that 'Priests' was not, in fact,
mistakenly printed on the sleeve of Song of Leonard Cohen,
-or, in other words, if that's a mistaken memory,
- then it's probably due to having see it on the
Wildflowers sleeve, - the two sleeves
having gotten mixed up in the pile.

~greg

Great piece, Greg. I don’t think that “Priests” appeared on the sleeve of Songs of Leonard Cohen. However, it did appear in the songbook of the same name, which was published in London (in 1969, it seems), with many beautiful photos, and which has all ten songs from the first album, nine from the second album (“The Partisan” is not included), as well as “Priests”. I still hope that LC’s own recording of it will turn up sometime.

I got the three remastered albums through Amazon, and I’m enjoying them very much. As Tom had written in the beginning of this thread, the sound is great and the packaging very nice, although they should have included more information about the original recording, as well as the photos. The two John Hammond-produced songs added to the first album (“Store Room” and “Blessed Is The Memory”) are quite intriguing. What would have happened had Hammond in fact produced the whole album? Would it perhaps made LC more accessible to the crowds, more popular? Perhaps, but once again, as Tom says, I too think that the way the album was actually produced is better.

The two extra tracks on the second album are just early steps leading to the released versions. The one on the third album, though, the earlier version of “Dress Rehearsal Rag” recorded during the sessions of the second album, is again intriguing. The heavy arrangement (too heavy, indeed, at some points) has a slightly Greek flavor, something that will not appear again until Recent Songs. There are also many variations in the lyrics, most of them very small, but a few are interesting, for example:

First line: “I got up sometime in the afternoon”; the album version is much better: “Four o’clock in the afternoon”.

Third stanza: “And you climbed the highest mountains”; again, the album version is much better with “the twilight mountains”.

Fourth stanza: here the album version has the lines: “But you’ve used up all your coupons/ except the one that seems/ to be written on your wrist/ along with several thousand dreams”; the earlier version has only one word different, “tattooed” instead of “written”, which I think is actually much stronger, and may be an allusion to the Holocaust.

I don’t have the Judy Collins album, and I wonder if someone can check and let us know what version of these lines she actually sings. Thanks in advance.

[tomsakic]

First line: “I got up sometime in the afternoon”; the album version is much better: “Four o’clock in the afternoon”.

As Judith F. wrote in one of her earlier, famous essays (I believe it's on The Files, but I can't find the exact quote), it's deliberate, to make counter-point to "it's four in the mourning" of Famous Blue Raincoat. I believe that the outtake have original lyrics, and that this line exactly was changed with that purpose;-)

Speaking of which, Store Room says "well it's five in the morning" while in 1976 Leonard sang "it's four in the mourning", again making references to the song which is repeatedly claimed to be his best.

Now, Judy Collins's versions, I'd like to compare it also. Hmm, I have 2005 CD, I think it's compilation of *all* her LC covers (plus new, one from VP, and Democracy I think) which means 1. I can check it, and 2. you can get it.

Only interesting thing that comes to my mind is the interview in which somebody asked Leonard - this is important I think as it speaks about his memory (and probably means that Collins sings the version which is now released as an outtake) - why she changed the so important lines in Story of Isaac, from the great twist "When it all comes down to dust / I will kill you if I must, / I will help you if I can. / When it all comes down to dust / I will help you if I must, / I will kill you if I can" to "When it all comes down to dust / I will kill you if I must, / I will help you if I can. / And may I never need to scorn / The body out of chaos born / The woman and the man."

When Songs From A Room was released on March 17, 1969, careful listeners noted that the lyrics to Cohen's version of "Story Of Isaac" differed from those on Judy Collins's version. The song, a retelling of the Biblical story of God's testing of Abraham by ordering him to kill his son Isaac, connects the story to the current day, admonishing, "You who build the alters now / To sacrifice these children / You must not do it anymore." "When it all comes down to dust," both singers declare in the final verse, "I will kill you if I must / I will help you if I can." Cohen then reverses the sentiment: "When it all comes down to dust / I will help you if I must / I will kill you if I can." But Collins sings entirely different words: "And may I never learn to scorn / The body out of chaos born / The woman and the man."

Cohen is surprised when the interviewer points out the difference and asks if he reshaped the lyric for Collins. "She must have put that in," he says. "That was a kind of an ideological bowdlerizing that was going on at that time. Also, Joan Baez did that with 'Suzanne' when she used to sing it in concert. She wouldn't say, 'Touched her perfect body with your mind.' She had some resistance to the occult or spiritual implications of the thing. Until finally, at the Rolling Thunder concert at the Forum in Montreal [December 4, 1975], she sang the song, and I met her backstage, and she said, 'I finally got it right, Leonard.'"

This quote comes from what's claimed to be the best biographical piece written about LC. Stephen Scobie said that, I agree. It's Goldmine article from 1993, written by William Ruhlmann, "The Stranger Music of Leonard Cohen", available @ http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/gold1.htm - maybe these reissues are good occasion to re-read it.

Leonard forgot that he sang exactly the same last lines before the song was released, namely on BBC Sessions in 1968. So, he wrote it. Anyhow, he said to Rasky "The Story Of Isaac, I don't remember much that one."

[Kjelling]

I agree with Tom. The new remasters sound good. Compared to the previous releases it's like having some dirt removed from your ear.

I find that the bonus tracks sound even better. They were mixed in 2006, in the style of the original records, and this is what all the early recordings could sound like were they mixed today with modern equipment.

Although making a new mix of a classic record may be sacrilege to some people, I do hope that Live Songs will receive that treatment. The current release is unusually lo-fi, and I believe the original multitrack tapes are much better. Combined with bonus tracks, a remixed remaster of Live Songs would make one hell of a live album. Sony/Columbia should give this some thought.

For example, "Sing Another Song, Boys" on Songs of Love and Hate sounds fantastic compared to "Tonight Will Be Fine" on Live Songs – and these are from the same show.

(By the way, Tom; the new remasters are not remixed. I also claim that "Sing Another Song, Boys" is remastered, although it is the track with the least difference.)

[tomsakic]

I was thinking that they're remixed in a way that they remastered it from original tapes, as you mention it can be done. My impression is, as you great said, exactly "the dirt is removed".
I hope that what you say about Live Songs can be done, as it seems to me that Sing Another Song Boys, only live track here, is in lower sound quality than rest of the remastered tracks. I thought it's because of the fact it's live recording, so maybe they couldn't remaster it well as the studio tracks.
Still can't wait for *real* challenges: Various Positions and Recent Songs. I particularly wonder how DOALM will sound like, with all those scratchy vocals, messed up mix and mud. Also, there's sudden problem in mix on Memories, when song loses the sound in right ear, staying only in one channel for half minute. I guess that's deliberate or can't be repaired (as I hoped that crazy effect in Sisters of Mercy, when the sound goes from back corner of one ear to another, like 3D echo, will be leveled to normal. But I can stand it now better than on previous releases).
As you see, I am ignorant in audio stuff so my talk is more like trying to say what I hear:-)
About Live Songs, I don't think there's reason to remaster it as it's very short - it's more logical (at least to me) to remaster that songs and add 10 or 15 more from 1970 and 1972 tours, and release double live album from early period. Maybe one day...

[Sherry]

“It's important to remember that the concept
of "Singer-Song-writer" didn't really exist until the
very end of the '60s.”<< Greg

Hi Greg,

I understand you point in relation to modern popular music,
but I think we shouldn’t forget that the concept of ‘singer-songwriter’
actually goes back hundreds, perhaps even thousands
of years, in many cultures. Bards, minstrels, skades and
griots are just a few of the names by which they were
known. In many cultures, they still exist.

Sherry

[Kjelling]

It's easy to confuse the terms remixed and remastered. Sony did make new duplication masters for the three 2007 releases, from the 2-channel final mixes made in 1967, 69, and 71 – but they did not go back to the multichannel (8 or more), unmixed studio tapes and make new 2-channel mixes.

(Which is what was done to the bonus tracks, since they were not mixed until 2006, and which is why they sound best. Same with Field Commander Cohen, which is why it sounds fantastic.)

This process could have levelled out the instruments panning from left to right, "3D echo" etc.; but as I mentioned, it can be seen as sacrilege when done to already released material … (After all, the story goes that LC himself performed the final mix of his debut album.)

I also think that the original nature of "Sing Another Song, Boys" – a live track added to the final mix of Songs of Love and Hate only at the "last minute" – is the reason why it sounds different from the rest of the new remaster.

As for Death a Ladies' Man, it could use a proper remixing. It's been done before, when The Beatles' Let It Be was de-spectorized … (The so-called Let It Be ... Naked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Be_._._._Naked)

[osmachar]

....
I particularly wonder how DOALM will sound like, with all those scratchy vocals, messed up mix and mud. ...

I like the songs on DOALM but I think it sounds very 'tinny' and you can't really hear Leonard Cohen's voice properly for all the backround. Would be nice to get this album in a better quality.

[BoHo]

+/-

[tomsakic]

First line: “I got up sometime in the afternoon”; the album version is much better: “Four o’clock in the afternoon”.

As Judith F. wrote in one of her earlier, famous essays (I believe it's on The Files, but I can't find the exact quote), it's deliberate, to make counter-point to "it's four in the mourning" of Famous Blue Raincoat. I believe that the outtake have original lyrics, and that this line exactly was changed with that purpose;-)

Hey, it's in Stephen Scobie's anthology, and also on Marie's Speaking Cohen site: "The Dancer and His Cain" ->>
http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/fbr.htm

What's also of interest, Judith also came with suggestion, as now Doron, that "written on your wrist" is the Holocaust reference; I always thought (or didn't taught at all) that it's something like "maps of blood and flesh", your blue wrists are making the ticket to death, showing you the pattern for cutting with that infamous razor-blade that should be given with every Leonard Cohen record.

In the structural long view, "Famous Blue Raincoat" neatly mirrors (or reflects back upon) the album's third side, "Dress Rehearsal Rag," earmarking its organisational counterpoint in the binary narrative played out over eight interconnected compositions (balanced as four songs of love and four of hate or four in the morning and four in the afternoon). Commonly considered Cohen's grimmest representation of the squalor of the achingly impoverished and incomprehensibly surreal marginalisation of the contemporary individual, "Dress Rehearsal Rag" is, no doubt, music to eat a gun by. Then, it was four in the afternoon (anticipating the grieving doubles of "four in the morning") and, of paramount importance to the coherent dualistic vision Songs Of Love And Hate embodies, now, its sonic epiphanies are wrapped in the cut of the cloth as an inversion of the rags-to-riches narrative culminating in the coupon "written on your wrist" (a sign Holocaust survivors know too well, particularly since the numbers are indelibly branded in an unforgiving gun-metal blue on the inside of the forearm).

[tomsakic]

It's easy to confuse the terms remixed and remastered. Sony did make new duplication masters for the three 2007 releases, from the 2-channel final mixes made in 1967, 69, and 71 – but they did not go back to the multichannel (8 or more), unmixed studio tapes and make new 2-channel mixes.

Thanks, Kjelling. That's generally what I was thinking, that they made new masters from final original mixes, and not remixing the whole thing all over again. I would think that's sacrilege also. But I think that I would like that in DOALM case.

The story goes that Simon left for Xmas holidays and that LC decided about the final mix. But it also adds that 4-channel tape was used so he couldn't remove all the "kitschy sounds" so he quieted some channels, keeping instruments he didn't like deeply in the background.