Leonard Cohen may be the only important singer-songwriter who arrived on the music scene already recognized as a significant poet and novelist. But as shown in Anthony Reynolds' biography, Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life (Omnibus Press), the singer-songwriter label, suggesting saccharine confessions and secondhand folkie influences, is too weak to adhere to an artist of his stature. Among all the poets and wannabes who surfaced in 1960s music, only Dylan can stand close to Cohen for literary merit.
Cohen gained his recording contract in the wake of Dylan's success and enjoyed an easier journey. After all, no one ever supposed the author of "Suzanne" or "Bird on a Wire" was the oracle of a generation or the drummer boy of social upheaval. He was never a protest singer. Cohen spoke more softly on the quandaries of the flesh and the spirit, of love and lust. Although he was tagged by ignorant pundits in the early '80s as a '60s has-been, his songs transcended time and place with little difficulty. In 2011 Gary Numan and The Go-Go's sound dated. Cohen's work will survive.
Culling from press accounts and his own interviews with Cohen and associates, including the son of a longtime manager who strongly dislikes the singer, Reynolds presents a plausible chronicle of a creative life that began amid the poetry classes of Montreal's McGill University against a backdrop of the folk music revival. Cohen was never a Beat poet and his excursions into jazz were one-offs. Unlike Dylan, he was already in college when rock 'n' roll broke and was a few years too old to be swept up in the frenzy.
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Cohen emerges from A Remarkable Life as a man of the world firmly grounded in his Jewish heritage, a Talmudic cosmopolitan who lived on a remote Greek island and loved many beautiful women who returned his desire for a time. He was over 30 when his debut LP was released to the youth-obsessed audience of the '60s, but he was embraced by discerning listeners as the older brother and world traveler who had already lived through those things younger songwriters could only fantasize about.
It turned out to be a great vocation for an artist who viewed music as his second calling and never troubled himself with voice or guitar lessons. Cohen was always one of a kind, playing grave tunings that slipped between the music staffs in a craggy voice of profound empathy for the human condition.
Some of A Remarkable Life is written sloppily. In addition to redundancies, there is an overuse of the weasel word "arguably" and a lack of awareness that Canada is considered part of North Americaa mistake made more than once. And yet there are many strong insights. "Cohen had never actively or consciously courted fashion, but for a while in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the two had got along purely fortuitously," Reynolds writes. By the early '00s fashion was less important than Cohen's enduring style.
