London (ON) tour article

[bridger15]

Canada's rock poet
Sat, May 23, 2009
By JAMES REANEY
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/Today/Music ... 6-sun.html

Hallelujah- Leonard Cohen is back in town.

Not that the Canadian icon would ever put it that way himself.

Cohen is the man who accepted a 1993 Juno by saying, "Only in a country like this, could I be voted male singer of the year."

Cohen is the man who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and observed: "This is a very unlikely occasion for me. It is not a distinction that I coveted or even dared dream about."

He is the man who returned to triumph in New York this year. "It's been a long time since I stood on a stage in New York," he told the cheering crowd. "I was 60 years old -- just a kid with a crazy dream."

The Montreal-born Cohen, 74, brings his enormous and influential songbook to the John Labatt Centre tomorrow night. Songs from the set list are likely to include Suzanne, Hallelujah, I'm Your Man, First We Take Manhattan, I Tried to Leave You, Dance Me to the End of Love and Bird on the Wire.

The basic approach has already been celebrated on a CD and DVD Leonard Cohen Live in London (Sony BMG) looking back to his July, 2008 concert at London, England's O2 arena.

He returns to Europe this summer.

Tomorrow's concert will put the downtown London arena on the tour hit list for Cohen, who has made mercurial and moving appearances here for decades.

When the pre-LP Cohen visited London in 1964, he had just arrived from a Greek island to take part in a "fab four" touring show of four great Canadian poets along with Irving Layton, Phyllis Gotlieb and Earle Birney.

A 1965 NFB film, Ladies and Gentleman . . . Mr. Leonard Cohen has a few moments seemingly taken during the tour.

The entourage did stop at UWO for a reading, but it's not clear if any footage is from London.

Among the most memorable scenes is the young poet, already a star, writing "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) on a bathroom wall. It is just one of many jests to go with the shapely words and haunting looks from the poet.

Soon after, Cohen was adding albums of his songs to the poems and novels that had already made him a hit on campuses. Soon after that, people were complaining about his singing. They were inclined to say, as they did with his Columbia labelmate Bob Dylan, that the songs were beautiful -- when somebody else was singing them. Now, somewhere in what he's called the Act III of his life, there seems to be an acceptance that if we're going to hear Hallelujah, for instance, Cohen is our man.

When he does play London, he always brings his wit.

At Alumni Hall, in 1975, he worked his way through a song and story involving an Inuit showing porn movies. "A flute-like solo," produced by Cohen blowing into his hands, climaxed the affair. "You people really know a hand player when you hear one," he told the crowd to acknowledge the applause.

Back in London more than 18 years later, he played Centennial Hall in 1993. Again, he was happy to acknowledge the roar of the crowd.

"Ah, thank you so much. It makes me forget I've come with all my bad news," he said.

The new wasn't really bad at the time. Cohen's 1992 album The Future was a hit, the Juno honour came his way in 1993 and the tour went well.

Cohen was not to tour extensively for more than a decade. During the period, the news was grim.

In this decade, Cohen determined his former manager bled his savings and investment accounts dry when he lived in a Buddhist monastery, Mount Baldy Zen Center in Los Angeles.

"It's enough to put a dent in one's mood," he said a few years ago of the betrayal by his manager, in charge of his career for 17 years. "Fortunately it hasn't," he added after a short pause. Cohen's former manager Kelley Lynch misappropriated millions from his retirement fund.

In 2006, a U.S. court awarded him $9.5 million. It is not certain here if Cohen has recovered any of it.

As he has rallied and returned to the road -- partly out of a simple need for "financial survival," he has told interviewers -- Cohen fans have rallied to their icon.

The anthem has come to be Hallelujah, a song that emerged in the 1980s. Hallelujah has been covered by everyone from winners of British Idol-style competitions, ex-Velvet Underground man John Cale, Canadian stars k.d. lang and Rufus Wainwright to U.S. singer Jeff Buckley. Cohen's version has been a Top 40 hit in Britain and keeps company with K.C. and the Sunshine Band and Billie Holiday on the Watchmen soundtrack.

Cohen is pleased that the song came from a 1984 album -- Various Positions -- Sony "wouldn't put out (and) didn't think was good enough" for the U.S. market. He also told CBC Radio's Jian Ghomeshi he was happy that Bob Dylan was, at first, the only person to recognize Hallelujah as a great song and make its case in live shows.

"There was a certain mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart," he sweetly told Ghomeshi about the acclaim for the song in more recent times.

But, Ghomeshi wondered, didn't Cohen agree with the critic who said it's all too much and time for "a moratorium" on Hallelujah?

Cohen paused. He likes the song and enjoys hearing other singers' version of his songs, he said.

"I kind of feel the same way," he murmured of the "moratorium" suggestion. "I think people ought to stop singing it for a while."

That murmur from the master does not mean we will not hear it tomorrow night.

Hallelujah.