I have seen Leonard Cohen in concert three times.
1. “LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE, LIKE A DURNK IN A MIDNIGHT CHOIR, I HAVE TRIED, IN MY WAY, TO BE FREE”
I drank a lot Jack Daniel’s and Coke on the afternoon of what would be my first time seeing Leonard Cohen – it was at the Wiltern Theater in the late 1980s. A bunch of us went. Tom Tyson was the cat who turned me onto LC and he was the one who got us tickets and he was the one shaking me passed out at 6 PM saying to get up, get ready let’s go.
There were plenty of Coke cans at his place to drink with enough caffeine as out with the group I went. When we walked up to the entrance I was halfway thru a can of Coke knowing they were going to make me throw it away but if there was one thing I was intent on doing (back when I drank and to a lesser extent even today) when confronted by minimum wage security – it was in making a scene.
So as I am walking into the Wiltern one guy then another then a lady and then some other guy all were politely saying “Sir Sir Sir” and panicking over that Coke can, I milked it to get about eight steps into the massive Art Deco Lobby and turned, you see by stopping and turning I had de-escalated the situation because they were going to be able to address me without racing after me any longer or physically stopping me, but as I was about 45 degrees into my 180 degree turn I began belting out a missive…
“Ah fuck, Tom they’re all fucking yuppies in here”
In case you are wondering – the lobby of the Wiltern has an amplification when one shouts aimed upward at the rising ceiling. Every yuppie with good taste in music within ten feet of the entrance and all those who had already made it inside heard my indictment. Every employee who had been chasing me for my can of Coca Cola had abandoned the front lines of ticket taking – it was me and them and a horde of people waiting at the gate – including Tom and the rest of the Starvin’ Band and various other minstrels, outcasts and vagabonds who tagged along on those buzz-seeking weekends of the late 1980s. I’m loaded enough to be enjoying this and thespian enough not to smirk as I perfectly time looking at the security chick who just took a breath to tell me that I cannot bring my can of soda into the the theater and ask her “Where can I dump this?”. The four of them look at each other as the space around us is now empty – there are hundreds of people in the Wiltern headed to their seats and hundreds more waiting to get in and there is an island in the middle – me with three ticket takers, a security guard and a can of Coke. I follow up quickly to the ticket taker “Is there a trash in here?”
It is the deepest advice I can ever confer on you to never speak precisely when dealing with anyone who is on the clock. If I had said “Is there a trash CAN in here?” it would have been insulting to associate their job with garbage. If I had asked “Where can I throw this away” it would have implied that they were hired to think for me. The subtext of saying it the way I did was to underscore that there would not have been this situation at all if there were obvious receptacles at the entrance. By asking it that way, i was blaming the Wiltern – their employer. I had caused a scene and put it all on the man. I was wearing a white dress shirt with no tee shirt under it and it was only buttoned on two buttons at the belly and belt. One of them took my can and soon the flow of fans trickled up to me.
We sat sat in the highest rafters of that place. Leonard played “Avalanche” and it was as powerful as Christ reciting the Beatitudes. The rest of it blurs but the memory stands, longing for the four sips of cola left in that can.
2. “I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone.”
Years later, early 1994 to be exact, I am newly sober and working to extract myself from this codependent mullata trustafarian Los Feliz musician and she is nagging me about some shit – it was weird, I quit getting loaded and all she did was turn on the nag amplifier – and I tell her I am going to go to the Wiltern and try to buy a scalped tickets to Leonard Cohen. Well she couldn’t give two shits about LC because her snotty aesthetic was her Master but she can’t let go of the leash that easy so we traipse over there, outside and see the lines and I’m actually ready to give up, they were ridiculously around the block and the scalpers wanted way more dough than those days afforded me.
But she is all of a sudden seeing musicians there that she knows from the scene, probably had fucked them all, and all of a sudden she is too damn down to turn around and, well to her credit, to her tenacious rotten soul’s credit, she finagles someone she knows to pull out two extra tickets they are holding for someone else and suddenly we are sitting in the eleventh row on the floor, wow we have come a long way, and i know I am about to go a long way from her to something more like this, the sobriety is clearing my head and Leonard’s words were nice like knives of what one might dodge but now they are tools to carve out a space of my own. And she doesn’t know anything or get anything but she sure loves it when the guys from the clubs come over to say hello to her. And I don’t even look up or sneer, I already know I am bailing but some things need an exit strategy.
And the lights dim and the master comes out – and it is nice to be close and the show adds years to my soul and screams that life is worth living and I stock up on those tools, deeper understanding of existence in a ninety minute stage show and he comes back for an encore and the bitch says “we have to leave.” Yeah, there was always a pressing reason to manipulate the world to one she could control with extreme prejudice and ever more some drama following her to make it sloppy and plenty of blame for me for sticking around, but this was indicative of one reason getting clean was great – as it made me see the script she was writing each day to avoid living her own life.
She pushed me to get up and I didn’t fight it, I didn’t make a scene in aisle or in the lobby. There was no can of Coke, just more certainty that sobriety means aspiring to something like the greatness on the stage not the distracted comfort of her cage. I would not be dragged around by my dick a month longer. I found a set list on the internet years later. I think we missed six songs. What a witch.
3. “Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn / Dance me to the end of love”
For years it seemed he would never come down from the mountain. Leonard was up there meditating and the songs were just out in the universe reaching more folks. To tell people I had seen him twice was to flat out brag. But then Tom C from high school emailed and said he had extra tickets for LC at the Nokia, did Leigh and I want to go. Oh and by the way, second row. Well that was a treat, the best show, the longest, mist-involved, most revelatory show of the three and no drama for me or Leigh, just adults getting together with a few other couples before and after the show for pleasant talk.
LC opened the show with “Dance Me To The End of Love” and we were all still going thru metal detectors – no cans of Coke, no Coke at all – and we miss it so after almost three hours he closes the show with that for all the folks who missed it the first time. By this point I am exhausted, Leigh is in ecstasy, we are both limp from being in the presence of majestic genius. But this time I do have the dough to at least buy us each a shirt and she has the time to wait in line as we are walking out.
We’d seen all that a poet, prophet could deliver and the only way to tie it up was to know that we were in the right place at the right time in our lives and that is when dancing to the end of love really means forever. No other performer can inspire the range of emotions from raging loaded to bitter scorn to the bliss of a soulmate like Leonard Cohen does for me.
So on his 80th birthday I just had to rewind the tape of my life and see if the blurry memories could unite as semblance.
There.
Happy Birthday, Leonard.
Dance Me To The End of Love.