Crude Transcript of Leonard Cohen Video

just been watching and just completed a documentary entitled Allelujah Leonard Cohen a journey and a song it’s not a masterpiece but it accomplishes really the the only important thing to me that’s such a thing it showed what an extraordinary um human being and artist Leonard Cohen is or

was I would like to try to characterize what I think it is is extraordinary about him you know how what it is he’s he is and is doing but let me just say that one of the things you see in this video um I mean in this documentary is that when he stood on the stage and sang audience es some sometimes really huge audiences were having a essentially a uh a religious kind of an experience I would say it was um the phrase a church-like moment occurs a few times in the course of this almost two hour

documentary it’s not what you usually think of as a what happens with an audience an enthusiastic audience listening to uh uh some singer um there’s all kinds of uh effervescing of uh big Collective spirits but there’s something uh spiritual but that’s not all there is and what’s happening with what Leonard Cohen has created and is performing and the audience is taking in and responding with a feeling that’s you know it’s it’s not swooning like Bobby Sockers for Sinatra or or the Beatles uh you know in their Heyday with all the young girls that’s not the energy it it’s it’s not like it has no erotic content but it is not that’s not where people are coming from in responding to him because he’s done something which is extraordinary and that’s what I want to try to characterize I think that what the essence of it is is that Leonard Cohen is living simultaneously on a very downto Earth fleshly human level with the all the emotions and the lusts and all that stuff and he’s also at the same time bringing to it a real

spiritual aspiration he’s constant I mean there’s a lot of talk about a search that he was on and I think that there are a few people who uh can do as well as he did in putting those two things together in a meaningful way that brings in the fact that he’s well he’s gifted first of all as a poet I mean if you’re going to try to talk about say sexual romantic manwoman relationships in a way which is Also spiritually uh infused it helps to have the language to be able to embody uh that combination you know sleepy golden head upon the pillow I know others love before us rivers and in forests there’s a a kind of a perspective that’s coming on coming in you know Sisters of Mercy in the song about uh Suzanne takes you down to the river by the water he’s living a human life and at this and and I guess he’s a guy who’s very intense about it maybe had his issues about it but he’s also bringing to it a spiritual aliveness it’s uh somewhat rare and I would I would associate it with from what I’ve read about his life that he grew up in a um Montreal a Jewish family that was Jewish in a way that led to thinking about uh the place of the Divine or God or whatever in the whole thing and so this particular video U is organized or I mean it’s not well organized that’s the defect but I don’t care about that they fed you the the the images and the information you see Leonard Co and you hear him talking about his life and his work and you get to hear the songs performed by him and by others and you see the audience’s reactions and I I could just watch you know in any sequence any one of those things would have been uh okay for them to just throw together and it’s too much thrown together but it doesn’t

matter and so he it’s all built around the song

Allelujah which is of course a Hebrew word and it’s it it it it ties directly into one’s relationship with God and that’s the heart of the song but at the same time he strug struggled for years about how to uh put that song together I I I think that they tell you that he wrote uh 990 some different verses some of which are uh you know you couldn’t play on the U you know Mass Market uh because of their explicitness about one thing or another but he ended up with a a set of verses that swept the world they tell you all about that and I I’m not the master of of what that whole story is but it wasn’t it wasn’t like it was easy I mean he had he had a whole Record Company Columbia record company that uh just regarded him as as a nonstarter we’re not interested at all I can’t the history of me with respect to lonard Cohen was uh in 1968 I followed the McCarthy campaign to uh Berkeley and there uh I was exposed at some party to this black record with picture of Leonard Cohen it singing songs like so long Maryanne uh and um Suzanne takes you down and and and all the others including one whose name I forget that they use at the beginning of a movie called mccab and Mrs Miller where he brings in lots of uh the holy Game of Poker and and images of Jesus uh only drowning men could see him uh continually working on um putting the struggles of a human life into the context of uh the the the spirituality of our of our culture and our attempt to um ground ourselves into the the basic meaning of things and with his poetic gift compounded by some kind of a musical gift he was a poet before he was a songwriter he finds powerful impactful ways of tying the those levels together and I that record Leonard Cohen didn’t sound like other people it was something where you sort of felt like you needed to stop and listen to the words and experience whatever it was that they evoked with their various ambiguities and uh subtle ways of making contact with Salvation Army this and uh it’s one struggles to understand and yet one also feels the impact and that seems to be um one of the powers of of song is that it touches one in places that go deep emotionally and in this case Also spiritually I mean sometimes you can have a song you know like Frank Sinatra singing my way which has an emotional thrust to it but I don’t think it leads one to any kind of deep spiritual contemplation whereas Leonard Cohen does and that’s pretty rare I heard his first record that was his record was I think published in 1967 I heard it I think in ‘ 68 and oh wow that that’s really something and I didn’t know quite what to think of it but he was in a category by himself then we get to uh Allelujah and there’s something about that song that um that touches people so deeply that you see in this thing that uh people responded to it performers responded to it they would hear it and they would say well we’re going to do this tomorrow and and it becomes a song that becomes almost an Anthem to the world I wasn’t particularly aware of it I was aware of the song but I didn’t know I didn’t know that it was like having like 200 100 people do a cover of it and then when Donald Trump won the election and Saturday Night Live uh had a show immediately there after and we we were all in such deep

pain and Kate McKinnon I think is her name sat down at the piano and uh played Allelujah and sang Allelujah and it spoke so deeply to the pain I was feeling because somehow the United States had elected a man like Donald Trump to be president and for a couple years I I couldn’t listen to Allelujah because of what it

meant there’s

a very brief bit of footage in the last I think 25 minutes 20 minutes of the of the video of him performing in tve this is I think 2009 uh before things in Israel had become as dark as they are now I don’t know what it would be like now that’s a whole another story but he there he’s there in Tel Aviv and

he he calls for peace in a moving way from from the uh from the stage and uh presents a kind of a vision of U Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arab Muslims uh living in some kind of a peace and The Crowd Goes kind of wild over this and then uh Jewish boy from Montreal that he is who had a bar mitzvah he’s able to speak uh what I think is reasonably good Hebrew in reciting a prayer the Lord make his face to shine upon you and give you peace that that whole thing I think it’s from Micah but I’m not not sure about that but anyway he he gives that out to the crowd and and he bestows I think with his hands uh a Priestly uh blessing onto the crowd and I I I have a sense that what’s happening in that crowd is not trivial and not necess

necessarily not necessarily without consequences in the world I I had a feeling that because of what this man had made of himself a spiritual Seeker living a very human life I mean there was a time when he went off to a monastery I think Zen Monastery for three years or five years in in the in the hills of uh the mountains of California that’s shown in the the thing but eventually he leaves and he’s searched and he’s come up with whatever it is he’s come up with but one of the things that he’s come up with is that this is a man who has achieved peace he’s achieved a place in the spirit which leads to him to be generous and giving appreciation to the people on the stage with him the women who are seeing the these little Coral backgrounding things and the musicians who are playing and and being grateful to the audience I mean there’s a man who’s gone through a

lot not a holy man exactly in the sense of pure he’s asked what why is your voice so much deeper here in your older years than it was back in your 30s and he he didn’t become a songwriter until he’s in his early 30s and he said well my voice been uh changed as a result of 50,000 cigarettes and enough whiskey to fill a few swimming

pools there’s a man who wasn’t necessarily removed from all the Temptations of Being Human human all the addictions of Being

Human but he always was working on

becoming a more what are the words spiritually enlightened a better person a more complete person but there’s something about the guy that we see in his late years uh performing that tells you that he’s if not exactly arrived if he hasn’t found what he was searching for something like it I was very very impressed and I was also somewhat

envious um as one who’s seeking to have an impact on on people and in my case it’s not with songs and I’ve just I’ve been very aware that you know uh Taylor Swift I’m not sure exactly what she’s putting out or what swifties are receiving I I can see that something’s happening that’s important and it’s not like from Sinatra or Elvis and the you know and and young girls going wild this is young girls going some kind of wild and I don’t know what that is

but I can see that um there’s something about the song which is a combination of music and lyrics that combines to um have an impact that the stuff that my life’s work been has been about creating um is further removed

from in justification I would say that if you something of the sort of way of understanding that I I seek to get out there if it’s correct it’s sort of a useful thing for an ongoing basis of this is how one orients toward what the world is what’s going on in the world around us it’s a it’s a long-term good thing to have a good systematic way of understanding what’s happening in the world and that’s what I claim to offer but the song is very immediate the the intellectual understanding is something I don’t know how how much of that was going on around the campfires of hunting hunting gatherers but the drumming and the dancing and the song and the singing that goes back a long way and it touches us much more readily where we live so with my ambitions you know I I I I will watch

uh I watched Leonard Cohen on the stage performing Allelujah and all these different ways and pouring his soul into it and touching the hearts and souls of of so many people with that because he’s he’s become such a fine artist and he’s learned his craft so well that he can deliver that good that gets to you right here hallelujah it’s a wonderful thing to behold and I recommend uh I recommend it it made me Meander around and you look for the structure of how do you get from here to there doesn’t matter Behold a man a great man in a unique sort of way a poet that weaves

together moving images and the flesh the spirit and what it means to live a human life thank you

bye-bye for