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Leonard Cohen’s ’72 tour documented on DVD
By jose
Thursday, 16 September 2010
It’s April 21, 1972, and Leonard Cohen is backstage weeping, visibly moved after an emotional concert in Jerusalem that ended a 20-city European tour.
Poster advertising the Israeli shows
The month-long tour was filmed by veteran English filmmaker Tony Palmer and released in 1974 as Bird on a Wire. After a brief, limited run, the movie seemingly disappeared. However, last year the original raw footage was re-discovered and Palmer was able to restore this historic movie for DVD release.
Bird on a Wire is an amazing documentary of the Canadian troubadour in his prime. Palmer was given complete and intimate access to Cohen, filming him on stage, backstage, on the bus and in hotel rooms. In one scene, we see Cohen sitting on the ground, smoking a hookah in the Old City of Jerusalem, taking it all in like any other tourist.
The movie begins a couple days before the Jerusalem concert, at a sport hall in Tel Aviv where Cohen is performing. There seems to be a lot of commotion offstage, and we see Cohen berating the hall security “the men in orange” for their heavy-handed tactics in keeping people back from the stage. “Let’s not end this in violence,” he says. “There’s no point in starting a war right now.”
“They were nasty, those people,” he says backstage about the security after he was forced to end the show early.
Bird on a Wire follows Cohen and his band, which included singer Jennifer Warnes, performing at intimate venues across Europe. It’s not just a concert film. The live performances are interspersed with interviews in which Cohen talks about a range of topics. From his voice – “I don’t have a good voice, everybody knows that” – to the difficulties of performing personal songs night after night on stage, and to Judaism:
“Are you a practising Jew?” he is asked. “I am always practising,” he says. When asked if he knows Hebrew, he says, “I can read the prayers but don’t know what they mean.”
The film shows see him engaged with a young woman with star-struck eyes who’s trying to seduce him after a show in what might be Germany, and a similar incident in Israel, with a woman inviting him to a party. Both times, Cohen turns them down.
Depending on his mood, Cohen frequently engaged in banter with his audiences between songs, inviting them onstage if they couldn’t hear him well, or ironically invoking the ghost of Joseph Goebbels, asking his Berlin audience, in German, “Do you want total war?”
At one show he tells his audience, “This is the first day of Passover.” When one fan reminds him that it’s actually the last day, Cohen laughs. “See, that’s how confused I am.”
That tour of ’72 was marred by numerous sound problems. After one show in Denmark, some fans complained to him offstage that they weren’t able to hear anything. Cohen pulls out his wallet and offers to hand them their money back. Amazingly, the fans complain that he’s ripping them off with the currency exchange.
It’s the final show in Jerusalem that is the most striking. Before the show we clearly see Cohen licking what looks like an LSD blotter. Halfway through the show, Cohen walks off stage, quoting Kabbalah and telling his audience that he just wasn’t delivering a good show that night.
Backstage he tells his manager that he isn’t going back out and they should give the audience their money back. His manger (I think that’s who he is) tries to convince him otherwise. “Some of those people out there didn’t want to be in the army and kill people,” he tells Cohen. “Sometimes you just have to do it.”
A stoned Cohen jokes about being “bombed in Jerusalem” and after chain smoking cigarettes and shaving, he goes back on stage to deliver an amazing encore that included Famous Blue Raincoat.
After the encore, his fans call him back onstage. Emotionally, he comes out and tells his audience he is too broken down to sing anymore. Backstage, tears dripping down his face, he says, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
One small bit in this movie was hard to watch. During his performance of the song Story of Isaac, the filmmaker threw in needless, graphic footage of people burning from napalm fire in Vietnam. Keep your finger on the fast-forward button for that. I also felt that bonus footage, especially a commentary track putting the tour in context of the time and place, would have been appreciated.
Otherwise, Bird on a Wire, out this week, is a must-have for Cohen fans. Songs on the DVD, shot at various cities across Europe, include Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Chelsea Hotel and So Long, Marianne.
---Arlene
