The most beautiful loser
The cult of Leonard Cohen
ILLUSTRATION BY RAFFI ANDERIAN/TORONTO STAR
Leonard Cohen as he always seems to appear: brooding, dark and mysterious.
His album output is sporadic and he hasn't toured in 15 years. So how does this music icon still command such undying devotion from his fans?
Mar 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Francine Kopun
Feature Writer
A guitar. A creaky voice. Poetry, black suits and a mournful expression.
If you guessed Leonard Cohen, you are a longtime fan, or you've been watching American Idol, where a young man in dreadlocks sang "Hallelujah" two weeks ago, making the song a bestselling single in cyberspace 24 years after it was first recorded.
Cohen is back, again. At 73, he's on tour for the first time in 15 years. His three shows – one of which was added to fulfill demand – at the Sony Centre June 6-8 are sold out. Premium orchestra seats are being auctioned at ticketmaster.ca. Bidding starts at $310.
Rumours abound more shows may be added in other Southern Ontario cities.
Cohen may be working because he has to – his former business manager allegedly siphoned $5 million from his personal accounts and investments, leaving him about $150,000 – but the reunion is no less sweet to longtime fans because of it.
Aficionados like Anne Mitchell, 36, a University of Toronto administrator, have bought tickets to multiple shows. She plans to see him twice in Toronto and once in Montreal.
"He seems to get the emotional truth down to me," she says by way of explaining her lifelong interest in Cohen's work.
Cohen inspires devotion among people one doesn't typically associate with fandom – doctors and accountants, prison guards and high school principals.
He works at it. Cohen donates unpublished poems, poems-in-progress, drawings and archival material – like his old student passport – to the Finnish accountant who runs a popular Leonard Cohen fan site on the Web.
"This is his way to show some appreciation maybe, of all his loyal and longtime fans," says Jarkko Arjatsalo, founder of
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com.
Cohen gave him the news of his tour and tour dates before he gave it to the press, so Arjatsalo could break the news on his website. Since then, traffic to the site has jumped from 1,000 to 10,000 visitors a day.
Cohen first contacted Arjatsalo in 1997, two years after Arjatsalo launched leonardcohenfiles.com. At the time, Cohen was living at a Zen monastery, on Mount Baldy near Los Angeles, which had just got an Internet connection, says Arjatsalo. Cohen offered to contribute to the website. In 1999, he invited Arjatsalo and his wife and son to Los Angeles for a visit.
"It was really exciting, of course. We were surprised to see how nice he is in real life. He's a very humble, friendly guy who wants to listen to what you have to say," says Arjatsalo.
Cohen also met with the organizer of an annual Edmonton celebration of Cohen's September birthday, University of Alberta physician Kim Solez, 61.
"He has the most interesting thoughts in the world," says Solez, who has had his own share of interesting thoughts – Solez established the standard by which kidney transplant biopsies are interpreted. A fan since coming to Canada in 1987 from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Solez is also organizing the bi-annual International Leonard Cohen fan event in Edmonton this summer – it has so far been held in Montreal, New York City, Berlin and Hydra, the Greek island where Cohen often lived.
It is this kind of devotion that may help explain how the Montreal-born Cohen can spend years out of the spotlight, go years without releasing any new material, and still return to acclaim and honours.
It helps, of course, that he has Dustin Hoffman-like looks, and his poems and songs so often deal with love and desire, half-mad women in rags and feathers enchanting men with oranges and tea; sex in the Chelsea Hotel.
A year after news of his financial difficulty broke, he published a book of poems called Book of Longing. In March, 2006, Indigo Books president Heather Reisman declared it the No. 1 bestseller in the country, the first book of poetry in Canadian history to do so.
In March, Cohen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – his songs have been recorded by everyone from Bono to Billy Joel; "Hallelujah" has been on soundtracks including Shrek and the television series House.
"He's our Bob Dylan, in a way," says Bryn Davies, 59, a retired high school principal in Burlington who is moved to tears at the thought of the excitement the concerts have generated among young fans who have never before seen Cohen perform.
Davies plans to attend all three shows with his wife, Susan Eaton-Davies, 58, also a retired principal, who has her own reasons for attending.
"He'll be a sexy 74-year-old," she says, laughing.
Correctional officer Vernon Silver, 53, a married father of two stepchildren, will travel from Sault Ste. Marie to see Cohen this June.
Silver has been a fan since he was 17 for this simple reason: "Leonard says the things I wish I could say when I talk to women."
