Cover Up

How A 1991 Tribute Album Made Leonard Cohen Safe for Slackers

In the fall of 1991, I moved to New York City, started my freshman year in college, and, after always having a room to myself, I suddenly had two roommates.  I got the top bunk.  It was the first time that recorded music was no longer for a private space. It had to be negotiated; it had to be cool.  An exception was made for me when Miles Davis died, but mostly, music was half a loaf.  At 16, Spin Magazine told me that Songs of Leonard Cohen was necessary for living, and I found that they were absolutely right.  Cohen told Judy Collins that he had a “very human voice.”  He did.  It was all too human for some, including my roommates.  How could I indulge in my habit and survive the initiation to college?

I found the answer at the HMV at 86th and Lexington.  I’m Your Fan—a play on Cohen’s “I’m Your Man”—was a tribute to the great man, by artists that were mostly younger, or at least sounded younger.  18 year olds tend to think that they have reinvented everything, including the way records should sound, right down to the production, the attitude, diction and intonation.  Nirvana’s Nevermind had just come out, and you couldn’t go near a dorm room without hearing it.  The first time I did, at NYU’s Rubin Hall, I had to go outside, look at the Washington Square arch, and take in the beauty and the feedback.  There were other bands that people thought sounded like Nirvana, but, as Leonard Cohen would say, if you couldn’t tell the difference, “You don’t really care for music, do ya.”

I took I’m Your Fan home to my roommates, and, lo and behold, I created converts.  The collection started with REM singing “First We Take Manhattan,” and 1991 was the year of Out of Time, when their only sin was success, and this was not a problem with this demo.  Plus the Pixies singing “I Can’t Forget”? The Pixies were strong poets. Black Francis imposed his mass on this song and found the raw ebullience beneath.  This was a party that could never end.   Those were the headliners.  Then there was Ian McCullough singing “Hey, That’s No  Way to Say Goodbye,” a figure of echo, a bunnyman, an exegete who, like Nick Cave, spread the gospel of Cohen to young, brooding Goth kids.  I had seen Concrete Blonde open for REM with their cover of Leonard’s “Everybody Knows,” on the soundtrack for Pump Up the Volume but not on this disc, though it would have been a perfect fit.  From hearing Nick Cave’s catharsis with “Tower of Song,” where he keeps changing his mind about which form his worship would take, I wondered if it was possible to love Leonard Cohen too much. (I liked the thrash one the best, for what it’s worth.)  James invented a new verse for “So Long, Marianne,” which didn’t so much gild a lily as run over it.  John Cale’s “Hallelujah” was there—stunning, and before everyone else and their mother had a “Hallelujah” cover, and I did not need to explain that this was an original member of the Velvet Underground, and, quick, name another important Welsh disciple of La Monte Young  in rock and roll.

REM and The Pixies were breathing new life into these songs.  REM were the moody art students and The Pixies took this song about uncertainty, pumped up the feedback, and you got to hear Black Francis and Kim Deal pant “I can’t forget” to each other.  Bands with names like That Petrol Emotion and Dead Famous People took this great man’s wisdom and made it sound like these slackers were groaning with the tongues of angels.  This was the year Nevermind was released.  Everyone wanted some flannel negative capability.  A couple of years later, Cobain sang, “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally.”  Cobain knew that Leonard Cohen singing was forever, and that anyone who needed convincing would catch up. 

Everyone was striving for what Fredrico Garcia Lorca called duende, the “Deep Song,” the mystery within.  Cohen knew everything about this.  He even named his daughter Lorca.  You are 18 and need approval from other 18 year olds because you are sharing space, but also because, even if you know what’s good, you want it to be cool. Keep going, keep your own space separate from the herd, if you can. (If you can’t, find a way.) Let that voice reach you. Leonard Cohen is your confidant, your teacher, your dark side, your highest aspirations. “You live your life as if it’s real,” he told us. Living your life as if it’s real includes taking your beauty and truth where it is reaching out to you. Press play, and he will entertain you, while also providing a master class, on love, lust, wisdom, and, sometimes, hanging in til closing time.

Walter Yetnikoff, the label boss, who initially declined to release Various Positions in America—an album that had “Dance Me to the End of Love,” “If It Be Your Will,” and “Hallelujah,” for God’s sake—said, “We know you’re great, Leonard, but we don’t know if you’re any good.”  Leonard Cohen was 50 when he had to hear that. It must not have been easy. But then think about what made Leonard’s voice the one that guides you, the one who suffers in public, then attains wisdom, faces love, sex, and death—all of it. He had a manager who stole his money, then got another one who showed him how to get it back in other ways. After playing a little over 300 concerts between 1972 and 1993, he played more than that between 2008 and 2012, when he was in his 70s. Leonard’s career started with Judy Collins covering “Suzanne.” Now there are so many covers of “Hallelujah,” there is a documentary about it based on Alan Light’s book. When a song as complicated as “Hallelujah” reaches the masses, many people are hearing themselves in it, which is ok, but they might be hearing what they want to hear and disregarding the rest. A song that huge belongs to everyone. The nuances will probably be lost, and they cannot be rescued from banality when the song is over. I’m Your Fan is not on Apple Music or Spotify, though it lives on YouTube. The great stuff is still great, and the period pieces are what they are. By my Sophomore year, I transferred to Sarah Lawrence and eventually got a private room, where I was listening to a lot of Mahler and Bach and Beethoven while constantly, compulsively reading great books and writing about them. How uncool. Leonard belonged among the music and books and ideas that would last forever. “The maestro says it's Mozart, when it sounds like bubblegum,” he sang. Leonard may have been a hard sell among grunge kids in 1991, but Kurt Cobain knew better. He was looking forward to the Leonard Cohen Afterworld. 1991 was a long time ago. I will never forget that fragile place where I clung to books and records to know myself and the world a little better. I know Leonard Cohen knew the feeling.