A Hundred Floors Above Me

When Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins Scaled the Tower

You have no idea what you are doing in place like this at this point in your life.  It’s February 13, 1989, you are in the mid 50s.  You used to be a crazy kid with a dream.  Now you’re just crazy.  Dylan is still 47.   His whole peer group are in their 40s.  The abyss is staring back at you, and it gets more abysmal with every year.  Dylan was the first person of note who gave any love to “Hallelujah,” while Sony wouldn’t release Various Positions—the album with “Hallelujah,” “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “If it be your Will”--in the US.  Leonard, we know you’re great, but we don’t know if you’re any good.   Did Leonard think he was great?  He felt that he was 100 floors below Hank Williams. 

Nothing to do but write and sing a Leonard Cohen song about it.  The voice has gotten deeper, more gravely. He prefers it. He has a new swagger. He’s your man.  The neurosis and uncertainty are less palpable.  Way down there, there is gravitas.  His actuarial odds are more bleak, but he sounds tougher.  If there will be a last word, this is what it will sound like.  Even though Songs of Leonard Cohen came out in 1967, his American television debut was just a year earlier, on Austin City Limits, in 1988.  Television, this thing that put The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and Dylan on Steve Allen and Joni on Dick Cavett had finally made its way to Leonard as his 50s are getting serious. It is a show called Night Music, hosted by alto player David Sanborn.   I was 16 in 1989, and I was a jazz snob, and I had jazz snob friends I played with in an ensemble at an arts high school in Dallas.  We thought he prostituted his talent, but at least he had talent to prostitute.  Sanborn could really play, he was just making a living.  He had a beautiful tone, impeccable note choices.  He had played on television with Joni Mitchell a couple of years earlier.  Now he was riffing behind Leonard and making his bleakness sound palatable enough for late night television.  Michelob was the sponsor, and, to keep the show afloat, the title was changed to Michelob Presents Night Music.  If that’s what it took.  Guests included Sonic Youth, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Richard Thompson, Pharoah Sanders, Al Green, Donald Fagen, Joe Cocker, Branford Marsalis, Lou Reed, John Cale, Philip Glass, Debby Harry, The Pixies, Sun Ra, Todd Rundgren, Abbey Lincoln, Warren Zevon, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Charlie Haden and the Liberation Jazz Orchestra.  Nothing like it had ever happened on television. This was a long time before YouTube.  If you didn’t tape it on your VHS, you needed a friend to do it and invite you over.

There was a time when architects aspired upwards.  To God.  Or if you’re Leonard, to G-d.  Where else? If an architect had a job, just as if JS Bach had a job, it was to aspire upwards, a building with celestial ambitions. “Tower of Song,” which Leonard sang on Night Music, was about a hierarchical tower, but he’s at the bottom.  He's looking up, but it could be a council flat, a glass office building, a Brutalist high rise.

Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song

I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song

How lonely does it get?  Williams didn’t make it past 29. He had spina bifida and died in a car on a freezing new year’s day, 1953.  Leonard had read and studied and kept on searching.  But none of his studies could get anywhere near writing “Lost Highway.”  Yet feeling unworthy was a muse of its own.  You ache in the places where you used to play.  You’re crazy for love, but you’re not coming on.  You can hear Hank Williams coughing all night long, even though he’s 100 floors above you.  

The song sounds like last call at a Ramada Inn, with a bunch of seedy characters, who are all requesting drivel.  But there’s Leonard, who knows that there is something of value way up there.  This song is dark and desperate and over, but the singer knows there is more.  They may be in a dive, they may be in a basement, but up there, way up there, are heavenly muses.

Now I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back
They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song

This verse is why I don’t imagine a beautiful Gothic cathedral when I think of Leonard’s tower.  They’re getting moved, like catalogues getting sold to Universal or Sony.  And the Universal fire hadn’t happened yet.  When Leonard left us in 2016, people were already subscribing to streaming services where you could get the whole tower and the basement for the modest price of a subscription.  Those of us who know what things are worth are aware of the tower, but most people aren’t, or the towers in their mind include hacks with names that have no business in this conversation.  The hacks have taken over, and those of us who try to separate wheat from chaff are in the minority.  The praise for the chaff keeps getting bigger.  If you want a soundtrack to your dissent, “Tower of Song” is your anthem. “They have the numbers; we the heights,” said Thucydides. 

As the song was ending, Leonard slithered between his backup singers, and they walked arm and arm up the stairs while the song was still playing.  No one was going to call HR. 

When he walked back out, he sang “Who By Fire,” based on the Unetanneh Tokef prayer, a prayer Leonard knew as a boy. 

And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of may
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

God used to know the answers to who died, when, and how.  Now it’s a question: who shall I say is calling. “Your faith was strong, but you needed proof,” he sang on “Hallelujah.” Here is is, in search of it. But there was still a tower, and on that song, Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus—who has been called God more than any other musician I know of—was there to raise the roof.  His solo had the weight of the world on it.  He sped through variations upon variations, even including a quotation of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”  He opened the song with some ruminative blowing. For anyone else, it would have been a climax. He was just clearing his throat. This is a morbid song, a prayer for atonement, an inevitability. Sonny knows all that, but he is going to be fully alive while he’s here. You live your life as if it’s real. Sonny lived his life in his horn. You feel the power. He’s standing right there, but he’s beyond. Leonard provided the ultimate morbidity against Sonny’s ultimate affirmation. Sonny is going to play beyond last call, and he even made The Prince of Bummers smile and applaud.

I ran with Diz I sang with Ray -
I did not have their sweep -
But once or twice, they let me play
A thousand kisses deep

The closest thing to a tower of song I’ve ever been to is Manhattan Plaza, at 43rd and 10th Avenue, artist’s housing with subsidized rents.  They look like any other public works building from the 70s.  Dexter Gordon lived there, as did Charles Mingus in his final year.  I interviewed Walter Bishop, Jr. there, a bop pianist who played with Charlie Parker. I interviewed John Hicks there, too, and alumni of the Ellington orchestra lived there, too. 100 floors above—all of them.

I asked Sonny Rollins if he and Leonard Cohen had a conversation, but he said they hadn’t, even though they would have had a lot to talk about. After the rehearsal, Sonny did ask, “Does Mr. Cohen like what I’m doing?” The footage speaks for itself. For the entire performance, Sonny is at the top of the tower, maybe even higher. When the solo is over, we have to go back to earth. But we got a hell of a final chorus before all that.

The tower is really a tower of the mind.  Leonard lived long enough to witness a future where it would all be available, if someone could show us where to look among the garbage and the flowers. Sonny said he didn’t want to think about what he was playing. He wanted to be beyond. Leonard wanted to go there in his way. Leonard kept revising til he got it right, or as close to right as it could be, and that was what Sonny was chasing on the Williamsburg bridge and everywhere else he could til pulmonary fibrosis laid him low at 82. There is no such thing as perfect, yet we keep revising. Leonard is gone, but Sonny is still among us at 92. The music still plays in his head.

Scaling the tower is the most we can do. Leonard liked to say, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”  The tower is the place. Press play.  You can visit anytime.