Heck Of A Guy

A pastiche of posts, featuring song, dance, snappy chatter plus notes on prose, poesy, love, lust, life, and beyond

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Leonard Cohen & The Sweet Smell Of Indifference

March 4th, 2010 · Confessionals, Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s Fragrance Marketing Proposal


When last we heard from Sleep66, she was recounting the story that has already become a classic and has been immortalized for the benefit of future generations of Leonard Cohen fans as the post entitled  Leonard Cohen, The Cat Whisperer.

Now, in response to a Heck Of A Guy query, she reports the following:

Leonard once told me he was going to come out with his own cologne. It was going to be called “Indifference,” and its slogan was going to be “I don’t give a shit what happens”

The Indifference Ad

This entrepreneurial vision is so perfectly congruent with Heck Of A Guy fundamental principles that its only downside may be the difficulty of convincing folks that it really, literally, factually, seriously, I’m not kidding around (this time) originated with Leonard Cohen rather than DrHGuy.1

Since the Cohen corporate machinery seems absorbed by concerts, tour schedules, and the like, the Heck Of A Guy Creative Department has stepped into the breach to construct the prototype ad for Indifference,2 the first entry in the new Leonard Cohen Cologne line.3 Click on image to enlarge.

Available wherever New & Improved Leonard Cohen Merchandise4 is sold.

fedoradivider
This is a Heck Of A Guy Confessional post. For the description and background of this format, see Meet The Confessionals.

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  1. Implicit in this similarity of ideas emanating from Leonard Cohen and DrHGuy is the inescapable conclusion that there is a little bit of DrHGuyness to Leonard Cohen – scary thought, eh?
  2. For the graphics-impaired, the ad reads “Indifference – When I want her to know … I don’t give a shit what happens. Viva la Indifférence
  3. In anticipation of the successful release of Indifference, Sleep66 and DrHGuy have begun planning future entries to build the Leonard Cohen fragrance line. For example, the street crowd might go for the colloquial overtones of Who Cares and So What while the average middle class can’t-take-a-risk suburbanite might feel most comfortable with Apathy (as if I cared). For the ex-frat rat who just signed on as a broker at his uncle’s Wall Street firm, we have Cavalier. That brooding, introspective guy with the paperback copy of “No Exit” stuffed into his hip pocket? He gets Anhedonia. His little brother who’s into grunge? Numb, of course. But for the way cool, DrHGuy sort of dude, the only acceptable brand has to be Insouciance.
  4. For information about and background of the Heck Of A Guy Leonard Cohen New And Improved Merchandising effort and the Leonard Cohen souvenirs from that line, see Leonard Cohen Fan Affliction Medical Alert Bracelet, The “I (Unified) Heart Leonard Cohen” T-shirt, The Heart With A Companion T-shirt, Venue-appropriate Headgear, The Leonard Cohen Bobble Head, The WWLCD? T-shirt, The 2010 Leonard Cohen Tour Serenity Prayer, and More Dino Duds & Len’s Beach Towel

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Heck Of A Guy Blog Four Years Old – Wild Rumpus Now Starting

March 3rd, 2010 · HOAG Site

What A Long Strange Blog It’s Been

Since the publication of the aptly titled Opening Statement on March 3, 2006, Heck Of A Guy has accumulated 1,666 more posts (counting today’s), 72 pages, and beaucoup tags, comments, and footnotes.

There are a dozen or so videos on the DrHGuy YouTube Channel and one bootleg of unreleased Leonard Cohen songs that are Heck Of A Guy creations. Heck Of A Guy even has its own spin-offs at Leonard Cohen Search and GoodCleanWholesomeFun.

As has been my practice on previous blog birthdays, I’m limiting this post to the acknowledgment of the annually occurring coincidence of dates that marks this arbitrary celebration and a note of appreciation to those folks who inexplicably return to this site for reasons no doubt too perverse to ponder. Thank you.

Happily, on this occasion, I can also offer this two minute mini-documentary completed by one of those international commissions located in Sweden (English subtitles provided) that includes a bit on Heck Of A Guy.

The video may take 90 seconds or so to begin the first time it’s viewed (the next 20 or 30 times you watch it, it will start immediately). Clicking on it, tapping your fingers, making obscene gestures, … will not hasten its progress.

((Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See <a href=”http://1heckofaguy.com/the-julie-story-faq/”>Julie FAQ</a>) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces (at <a href=”http://1heckofaguy.com/category/julies-writings/”>Julie’s Writings</a> and <a href=”http://1heckofaguy.com/category/julies-writings/unpublished-julie/”>Unpublished Julie</a>.))

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Variations On Leonard Cohen's Tonight Will Be Fine

March 2nd, 2010 · Leonard Cohen, Music

Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen’s “Tonight Will Be Fine”

“Tonight Will Be Fine” was originally released on Leonard Cohen’s “Songs From A Room” (April 1969). Cohen’s 1970 Isle of Wight performance of “Tonight Will Be Fine” was later included on  his 1973 compilation, “Live Songs” and more recently published as part of the CD/DVD set, “Leonard Cohen Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970.”

iow-70-col-cohen

While both renditions reflect Cohen’s embrace of country music, the Isle of Wight version is significantly further toward the Grand Ol’ Opry/Hootenanny pole of the spectrum. It features a distinctively slower yet almost bouncy tempo and prominent fiddle (Charlie Daniels), banjo (Elkin “Bubba” Fowler), and harmonica parts in contrast to the more modulated studio production found on “Songs From A Room,” on which Cohen is accompanied only by guitar and Jew’s harp. The Isle of Wight performance also includes two verses not found on the  “Tonight Will Be Fine” track from “Songs From A Room” and a  more aggressive  singing style with Cohen shredding his voice and shouting sections of the song.

The lyrics are less adorned and complex than in many of Cohen’s songs but no less striking. Cohen’s metaphor for both his music and his personal psychological strategy, for example,  is evident in the following couplet:

I choose the rooms that I live in with care
The windows are small and the walls almost bare

The last line of the last verse (the last verse of the original studio version) is a poignant manifestation of the concept of bittersweet:

Oh sometimes I see her undressing for me,
she’s the soft naked lady love meant her to be
and she’s moving her body so brave and so free.
If I’ve got to remember that’s a fine memory.
[emphasis mine]

I am also taken by the penultimate line, “and she’s moving her body so brave and so free,” the last phrase of which, an elementary but effective anaphora, is echoed in the second line of “Chelsea Hotel #1:”

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so free.
[emphasis mine]

Leonard Cohen – Tonight Will Be Fine (Songs From A Room version)

Video from Ciccinocicciotto

Leonard Cohen – Tonight Will Be Fine (Isle of Wight, 1970)

Under Cover With Teddy Thompson

One can find 20+ covers of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (including non-English versions) listed at LeonardCohenFiles, the most well-known of which is Teddy Thompson’s rendition.

“Tonight Will Be Fine” has, in fact, become a Thompson signature song, appearing on the soundtrack of the 2006 film tribute, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, and the setlist of most of Thompson’s own concerts.  Reaction to Thompson’s cover by fans reflects, albeit  in a less dramatic manner, the Jeff Buckley – Hallelujah cover phenomenon, i.e., a large number of fans favor the Teddy Thompson cover over the original and many believe the song originated with Thompson and have never heard Cohen’s own rendition. And, many of the covers by other artists are more accurately characterized as covers of the Teddy Thompson “Tonight Will Be Fine” rather than the Leonard Cohen “Tonight Will Be Fine.”

In this video, Thompson sings “Tonight Will Be Fine,” accompanying himself on guitar, sans country inflections, as a nostalgic elegy to love lost. The carpe diem theme and the premonitions of imminent disaster, particularly salient in Cohen’s Isle of Wight version, are attenuated to the point of absence here.

Teddy Thompson – Tonight Will Be Fine

Video from MerluzodeCuenca

“Tonight Will Be Fine” – Score It Cohen To Thompson To Crowe

The video featured in yesterday’s post is shown below for the convenience of viewers.

Tonight Will Be Fine (Leonard Cohen cover) – Allison Crowe

Video by – ahem – DrHGuy

No musicological sophistication is required to note the similarities, whether intentional or incidental, between the versions sung by Allison Crowe and Teddy Thompson.

Thompson’s rendition of “Tonight Will Be Fine” is so well established in its own right that he holds the equivalent of a home field advantage in comparisons with other artists covering the song, including Crowe.  And as for the popularity of Cohen’s own versions – well, everybody knows Leonard Cohen fans are peculiarly contentious in promoting the proposition that no one sings Cohen songs like Cohen.

Nonetheless, to my ear, there is something in Crowe’s voice,  richer and more melodious than Thompson’s, that  is especially well suited for conveying what is, after all, a simple scene – the acknowledgment of  the loss of love through the act of consummation itself.  Cohen himself  described a similar sense of “something in [a singer's] voice” enriching a song beyond the denotation of its words:

You want to hear a guy’s story, and if the guy’s really seen a few things, the story is quite interesting. Or even if he comes to the point where he wants to sing about the moon in June, there’s something in his voice … when you hear Fats Domino singing, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” whatever that’s about, I mean, it’s deep.1

Cohen’s own  gift of a  golden voice proves  an extraordinarily efficacious instrument for portraying a more dramatic interpretation of the same event; the Isle of Wight performance uses the same song as a canvas to portray a clashing, complicated mix of deep affection, rapacious physical longing, and the absolute conviction of impending catastrophe.

And that’s why I admire – and need – both Leonard Cohen’s and Allison Crowe’s versions of “Tonight Will Be Fine.”

Because sometimes I feel like an apocalypse is  coming; sometimes I don’t.

Credit Due Department:

The photo of Leonard Cohen singing at Isle of Wight was taken by Col Underhill and found at  The Archive: A History of UK Rock Festivals.

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  1. Leonard Cohen’s Nervous Breakthrough by Mark Rowland. Musician, July 1988

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