by Charles K. Ribakoff

No, this is not another Springsteen column.

Writing about how great The Boss is, much as I love him, is kinda like shooting poodles in a barrel. (OK, just wanted to see if you were paying attention). Not all that obvious, but there’s not all you can say that’s new. And it’s been…done. Enough.

For today’s music fable, boys and girls, we’re going to have to return to the great folk music scare of the ‘60s, when all that fiddle and banjo crap nearly caught on. It was powered by the beginning of the singer / songwriter phenomina, the hip to be miserable scene. The old, “I’ve suffered for my music, and now it’s your turn,” routine.

In that group, which likely was propelled by some guy named Dylan (who, in truth, had his moments), there was a singularly depressed and depressing Canadian (no redundancy intended) named Leonard Cohen.

You’ve likely never heard of him, and there’s not a lot of reason why you should. He had the voice of a man who gargled regularly with razor blades, and he had mastered, I think, 3 whole chords he could play on his acoustic guitar. He never liked to perform, and not without some cause. Concert footage of that era, which you can track down on You Tube, shows a close to totally self absorbed, inanimate performer with no… affect, never acknowledging the players in his band, or the audience

And yet he wrote some achingly beautiful songs, covered by the hot folk girls of the day, and had a seriously nasty sense of humor, which is what attracted me to him. He wrote a song, “Chelsea Hotel #2,” about a brief…ummm… encounter he had with Janis Joplin (you can look her up), in which, after singing (as it were) her praises, he concludes, “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. That’s all, I really don’t think of you that often.” Or, as he croaks out in the lyric to “Tower of Song, “I asked Hank Williams how lonely does it get / Hank Williams hasn’t answered me yet / but I hear him coughing, all night long. He’s a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.” Or, in the same song, “I was born like this, I didn’t have any choice, I was born with the gift of the golden voice…”

So, another Tragedy of Rock story: a couple of obscure albums, a volume or two of incoherent but really dirty poetry and then…vanish.

It turns out that Leonard got tired of being…semi famous…and went off to India to live as a Buddhist monk (I swear I’m not making this up) on Mount Boobie. This is years before the Maharishi and The Beatles made India part of the Must See To Have a Life Tour. Cohen could have well vanished into (or stayed in) obscurity.

So, what, you are wondering, as so often happens when I make the turn at 500 words, is all this about, and what does it have to do with anything?

As is so often the case, relevance is always where you find it (like Silver is always under The Lone Ranger, but I digress).

So it turns out that, for whatever reason, the Monk gig got tired after 40 years or so, and Cohen returned home. Where he found that his Manager had stolen all his money (another car story), and that he was a man in his mid-seventies, with no marketable skills and…nothing. I respect the Dalai Llama when he says all he wants is…nothing…but that’s not a way of life for everyone.

Rather than hanging himself in his closet, or coming to some other suitably artistic tragic end, Cohen puts together a concert tour, a few dates in major cities where enough people might remember, and want to visit the memory museum. Kind of brave for a man who showed his audiences of 40 years ago pretty complete disdain, and…nothing…since, whose books and records are pretty much out of print, a kind of footnote to a long ago time remembered by few except music trivia nut cases, and people like me, if that is not redundant. Sounds like a recipe for a disaster, 20 minutes of off key singing, then call the Hotline.

But because we live in the age where the cocoanut telegraph is powered by Facebook, Twitter, old fashioned e-mail and such, word got out immediately, and it was everywhere at once. People have better memories than you would think. The first show, in London in March, was moved several times to accommodate ticket demand, and finally opened to about 8000 people.

Dates, including Boston, were added, and I got to see the show in May.

Surrounded by mostly older musicians, Cohen showed he had learned something about graciousness in all those years on Mt. Booby. He looks truly…old, with that turkey thing going on on his neck, liver spots on his hands, dressed in a dark suit. He acknowledged each musician by removing his hat – an old Hamburg—at each solo, bowing gracefully, and thanking them by name. Songs were re-arranged from Way Back When, and played with emotion that seemed real. He might have even been having a good time.

He pointed out that it’d probably been 15 or 20 years since he had been in Boston, “A kid of 60 with a wild and crazy dream.” He apologized for not being dead, and thanked us for keeping his music alive. He played and played and played – nearly 3 hours worth.
It was remarkably better than I had dared to expect – an all time great evening.

So the point is that life can have you wind up in a different place than you thought you’d be. The thought of a 9,000,000 a year new car industry in America? That’s so…1960s. GM and Chrysler bankrupt? Impossible. Severe restrictions on individual and business credit? Couldn’t be – that’s what makes everything work, doesn’t it? Municipal cutbacks? Couldn’t happen – those budgets just keep getting bigger.

It’s not the stuff that you don’t expect that gets you – it’s how you deal with it. Harr and MHQ are very different companies than they were just a year ago, and they are very much better. We have adapted to a market that, frankly, I didn’t expect. We have worked ourselves into a position that is sustainable, and stand to benefit when things get better.

So what I learned from the Man With The Golden Voice is to keep going forward, adapt to whatever you have to, keep going forward. And I didn’t have to spend 40 years on Mt. Booby to learn it.