Leonard Cohen turned 70 last week.
I was surprised to hear he's still around.
Not that I thought he was dead. He's such a fixture of my past that when I think of him I think of him as being stuck back there, as though the past's a place I stupidly bumbled my way out of and can't find my way back to, like Ronald Colman tossed out of Shangri-La at the end of Lost Horizon. That's the way it is with a lot of the heroes of my childhood and youth. Alan Alda is still 36 and filming the second season of MASH. Tom Seaver's on the mound in July of '69. My parents are still loading all of us into the car for a trip to Cape Cod.
It's a shock when I see them all walking around in the present and Time hasn't left them alone.
Cohen wasn't really one of my heroes. But he was something almost as important. His songs got a grip on me at a very impressionable moment in my life, like Altman's Nashville, The Family Arsenal by Paul Theroux, Eva Dorsey's cheekbones, and the Marx Brothers.
There's a section of my brain built around his music, where all the synapses are linked in a perpetual chorus of "Hallelujah."
Just by conjuring up "Suzanne" in my head---and I do a fairly passable impersonation of Cohen...in my head---I can bring back my freshman and sophomore years. Not any particular event or person. But I can re-experience my mood from the time, vividly.
In a word, miserable.
I didn't own my own copy of "Songs of Love and Hate," but just about everybody I knew did. Definitely all the girls I dated did. I hung with an intellectual and angst-ridden crowd. You couldn't get through a night without hearing it spun on somebody's turntable, although I knew his songs better from my friends' singing. I had several friends who were musicians and did the college coffee house circuit. And, frankly, I still don't think a flute solo belongs in "Suzanne," but I wasn't about to tell her that.
This is a very long introduction to my pointing you to this post by the redoubtable Ken Layne. Cohen was and is one of Layne's heroes. And he says it better, in fewer words.
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