Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell: Just One Of Those Things

March 31st, 2007 at 9:32 am · DrHGuy · Friends-Family, Leonard Cohen · 1 Comment

From Take This Waltz To Joni Mitchell

I’ve been overanalyzing Leonard Cohen’s Take This Waltz intermittently over the past few weeks, amassing enough data bits to put Heck Of A Guy readers at risk for one of my rambling posts with the length and detail of those New Yorker non-fiction feature articles on water filtration technologies in Saudi Arabia but without the cachet. I have also manufactured a bucketful of fascinating, insight-laden hypotheses, all of which are mutually exclusive. Consequently, the Take This Waltz post, until it matures into coherency, remains a coming attraction.

But, it is only a short leap from Take This Waltz to Lorca. OK, make that “a very short leap.” Heck, given that Cohen himself has explicitly announced numerous times in concerts and interviews that Take This Waltz is his adaptation of Lorca’s “Little Viennese Waltz,” make that “it is only a baby step from Take This Waltz to Lorca.”

From Lorca, it’s – oh, let’s call it a leap, a hop, two skips, and a jump to Joni Mitchell, a connection I’ll explain in a moment. In any case, I have accumulated a few dollops of information about the relationship between Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen that has no significant association with Take This Waltz.

Then, this morning I found that Mimus Pauly at Mockingbird’s Medley had written that [Joni] Mitchell is [Leonard] Cohen’s female equivalent, going on to note that “not only do they write wonderful songs, they engage in other forms of art as well. Cohen writes poetry and likes to draw. Mitchell likes to paint.” [Note: Both portraits at the top of this post are by Joni Mitchell]

And that, at least when I began this peregrination, seemed a good enough excuse to unload my Joni and Leonard tidbits (waste not, want not) into a casual Saturday post.

Just One Of Those Crazy Flings

The widely accepted story is that Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen had a fling in the 1960s that, for unspecified reasons, was short-lived, with Cohen instigating the parting.

Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song

Mitchell’s Rainy Night House¹ is said to be her farewell account of that liaison. The second verse is poignantly bittersweet:

I am from the Sunday school
I sing soprano in the upstairs choir
You are a holy man
On the FM radio
I sat up all the night and watched thee
To see, who in the world you might be

According to Brian Hinton’s 1996 biography, “Joni Mitchell” (and other sources), Cohen appears in at least two other Joni Mitchell songs, That Song About The Midway and The Gallery. These lyrics, to my ear, seem more bitter than sweet.

These excerpts from That Song About The Midway,² seem telling:

I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings, wearing wings
You looked so grand wearing wings

You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice

And the sentiment behind these words from The Gallery³ seems clear:

When I first saw your gallery
I liked the ones of ladies
Then you began to hang up me
You studied to portray me
In ice and greens
And old blue jeans
And naked in the roses
Then you got into funny scenes
That all your work disclose

Lady, please love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart, that’s what you said
You said, I can be cruel
But let me be gentle with you

Hinton’s “own uninformed guess is that A Case Of You⁴ is also about Leonard Cohen,” and, indeed, the chorus does have a Cohen sort of ring to it.

Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
And you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
And still be on my feet

He Said; She Said

Hinton’s book also has some direct quotes from Mitchell about Cohen:

I think I’m rather Cohen influenced. I wrote “Marcie” and afterwards thought that it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for “Suzanne.”

My lyrics are influenced by Leonard. After we met at Newport last year (1967) we saw a lot of each other. Some of Leonard’s religious imagery, which comes from being a Jew in a predominantly Catholic part of Canada, seems to have rubbed off on me too.

Leonard didn’t really explore music. He’s a word man first. Leonard’s economical, he never wastes a word. I can go through Leonard’s work and it’s like silk.

Finally, Hinton notes that, in 1969, Joni is also catching up on her reading. Herman Hesse, Leonard Cohen –”her favourite poet”– and Rod McKeun. …

In a 2001 interview for Border Crossings with Robert Enright, Words and Pictures: The Arts of Joni Mitchell, this exchange takes place:

BC: I’ve often thought that the way you wrote song lyrics - with such intensity and honesty - was similar to what Leonard Cohen was doing. He romanticized his life and in some sense you were doing the same thing.

JM: Leonard was an early influence. I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly. My work seemed very young and naïve in comparison. At the time I met him I was around 24, around the time of my first record. But thematically I wanted to be broader than he was. In many ways Leonard was a boudoir poet.

BC: Was it that you wanted the lyrics to stand for more that just a personal anecdote?

JM: I was scared of the way the world was going. I was disappointed in humanity in general and myself in particular for our lack of evolution, for our pride in technology and our degenerating morality. For example, I wasn’t a fan of the Beats. I didn’t like to see the underbelly revered. I figured it had its place but I didn’t want to be an imitator of it. I’m not a book burner but I longed for something more wholesome. God knows why I longed for the impossible. In high school I did a lot of satire on the Beats and on abstraction. In my show you can still see that attitude. There’s a lot of humour, which you’re not supposed to take yourself more seriously. I give funny names to a lot of the paintings, like Canadian Bacon, but that’s because I’m not in the art game. I paint them, then I hang them in my house and I can say flippant things about them if I want to. I don’t have to adapt or adopt any kind of mystical stance. I always think I don’t have to play the poet like Leonard Cohen does. You have to watch everything you say. I like to be dumb and ordinary because that’s where fun takes place. Leonard doesn’t have a lot of fun; he’s been studying all his life to try. I still like to and I have blessed friends who are capable of it. It’s the spirit of child-play that Picasso was trying to get back. I admire him for his effort, but he said all children are genius painters and he spent his whole life trying to undo the precocious education his father gave him. I’ve been able to get to that impulsive, joyous place by not having to make a career out of painting. By just doing portraits of friends and animals. This show is curated, so it isn’t the whole picture. But the work is very personal. I don’t write for an audience. If there is an audience, it’s just the divine keeping me honest.

It does not require a hot-shot psychiatrist to infer Ms. Mitchell’s point of view from this excerpt of a New York Magazine interview:

[Interviewer:] Were you similarly skeptical about the folk scene in New York in the late sixties?
[Mitchell:] No. I briefly liked Leonard Cohen, though once I read Camus and Lorca⁵ I started to realize that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me.

In that same interview, Mitchell also slammed poets and poetry in general:

I didn’t like poetry. When I read the Shakespearean sonnets, I feel like some of them are mercenary. How many poems can you write where you say, “You’re so beautiful that you should reproduce yourself and I’m the guy to do it”? [Laughs.] They can’t all be inspired. It’s like somebody came to him and said, “Give me a poem like you did for Joe and I’ll give you 50 bucks.” I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic. I agree with Nietzsche on the poets. He said something like: “The poet is the vainest of the vain, the peacock of the peacocks . . . he muddles his waters so that they might appear deep.” I know I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a lot of ways. I guess there are a few poets I like, though, like E. J. Pratt and Carl Sandburg.

Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, appears to have been more circumspect about his relationship with Joni Mitchell. One of the few pertinent comments I’ve found is from a 1984 interview with Robert Sward :

RS: How much connection do you feel with Dylan’s music, or with others, like Joni Mitchell, for example? Whose music is closest to you now…?

LC: Well, like the Talmud says, there’s good wine in every generation. We have a particular feeling for the music of our own generation and usually the songs we courted to are the songs that stay with us all our life as being the heavy ones. The singers of my own period, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ray Charles, all those singers have crossed over the generations. But we have a special kind of feeling for the singers that we use to make love to.

Insight From Today’s Post

Being reminded that most songs dealing with relationships are written about real relationships rather than abstractions, although the most successful works are those that speak to feelings and reactions shared by others, is useful.

Knowing about the origins and referents of a song may make it more meaningful. The realization that the model for a holy man On the FM radio is Leonard Cohen, for example, enhances these lyrics for me.

Finally, on a personal level, I’m incredibly grateful that the audiences for any disparagements, deserved or not, broadcast by my Ex’s are limited to a few friends and family members. Watching a song depicting me as, say, a devil wearing wings become a best seller on iTunes could, one supposes, prove unsettling.

Updated 14 April 2008
1. I only recently found this brief excerpt from As a New Generation Discovers Leonard Cohen’s Dark Humour Kris Kirk Ruffles the Great Man’s Back Pages by Kris Kirk (Poetry Commotion, June 18, 1988), and it’s just too good not to include here, however belatedly. For reference, Cohen is 53 at the time of the interview.

[Interviewer] Another lover was the goddess Joni Mitchell.

[Cohen] “I’m still very friendly with Joni - I had dinner with her before the tour, and I have the same admiration for her as you do. But I think it was Noel Harrison who came up to me in the LA Troubadour and said ‘How d’you like living with Beethoven?’”

2. It is worth noting that on Herbie Handcock’s River: The Joni Letters, the 2007 Album of the Year, Leonard Cohen is a featured artist, reciting the poetic lyrics to “The Jungle Line.”

Footnotes

The complete lyrics to “Rainy Night House” can be found at http://www.twin-music.com/artist_j/joni_mitchell_lyrics/rainy_night_house_lyrics.html↩
The complete lyrics of “That Song About The Midway” can be found at http://jonimitchell.com/musician/song.cfm?id=ThatSongAboutTheMidway↩
The complete lyrics of ” The Gallery” can be found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/the+gallery_20075297.html↩
The complete lyrics of “A Case Of You” can be found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/a+case+of+you_20075257.html↩
This quotation was the connection that took me from Lorca to Joni Mitchell↩

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