Photo: Sony Pictures
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
In 1967, at age 32, Leonard Cohen walked into a recording studio for the first time and laid down a classic, “Suzanne.” It was not his last memorable song. During the ‘60s, when Bob Dylan set a high bar for literary mindedness in popular music, Cohen arrived on the scene with a decade already behind him as a published poet and novelist. He possessed a depth for which younger songwriters could only aspire and began his musical journey at a point in life when many singers are already has-beens.
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song examines his vocation in music through the lens of what became his most universal song, a contemporary standard, the solemnly joyful “Hallelujah.” Cohen said it took seven years to write, and after recording it in 1984, a decade passed before the public took notice.
Directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine double-down on “Hallelujah’s” lyric as exemplary of Cohen’s aesthetic and spirituality, embedded in the broken material world, especially through erotic yearning, where the sacred and profane are the obverse and reverse of the same reality. Interviews with Cohen reveal the Judaic origins of his sensibility in a tradition insisting that the world came into being through speech, where words are sacred, language is sacramental. Cohen’s was not a mindless faith but a conversation with eternity where God is endlessly questioned.
One of the documentary’s chief sources is New York rock critic Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who first met Cohen on assignment for Rolling Stone in 1974. “My goal is to become an elder,” Cohen told him. He was 40 then, and Sloman reminds us that 40 is the traditional age when study of the Kabala, the cryptic side of Judaism, is permissible. The palace of wisdom can only be reached through experience.
Hallelujah surveys Cohen’s music through the many phases through which it travelled, including his admitted “low point,” an absurdly bombastic collaboration with Phil Spector, 1977’s Death of a Ladies Man. In contrast, John Lissauer, who produced the original recording of “Hallelujah,” was a subtly elegant arranger for Cohen’s words. However, Columbia Records refused to release Various Positions, the album where “Hallelujah” first appeared. By 1984, the Philistines were in charge. Various Positions was finally released two years later with no fanfare on an indie label.
Despite its initial obscurity, “Hallelujah” was kept alive in concert, not only by Cohen but first by Bob Dylan and then by John Cale, who pieced together some of the various verses (Sloman thinks Cohen wrote 150 of them) into the familiar lyric, complete with “I remember when I moved in you/And the holy dove she was moving too/And every single breath we drew was Hallelujah.” Afterward, Jeff Buckley and hundreds of other recording artists spread the gospel of “Hallelujah,” a lyric based on a word that has been chanted for 3,000 years and an erotic-spiritual poetry harkening back to Song of Songs.
With “Hallelujah,” Cohen reached a career peak in the final years before his death in 2016. As he once told an interviewer, in one of the flashes of mordant humor, heard in the film, “I feel I have a huge posthumous career ahead of me.”
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is screening at the Oriental Theater.
