Tag Archives: 2008-2010 Leonard Cohen Tour

Leonard Cohen, Musicians, And Audience Suffuse “So Long Marianne” Performance With Intensity

Albert Noonan’s spring cleaning of his video archives has yielded a second gem:¹ an emotion-laden rendition of “So Long Marianne” that begins with Cohen energetically re-appearing on the stage for the first encore via his patented skipping entrance, a beaming smile on his face.

By the first chorus of

Now so long, Marianne, it’s time that we began
to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

… Cohen, the musicians on stage, and the audience are singing in unison, earning the crowd the much sought after Cohen accolade, “Ah, you sing so pretty.”

Caught up in the moment, Leonard Cohen’s phrasing, stage choreography, and voice become extraordinarily expressive. The words of the last two lines of the third verse,

I forget to pray for the angels
and then the angels forget to pray for us.

… are drawn out to the point that the words, “pray for us’ are achingly prolonged.

Cohen starts the next round of “So long, Marianne,” but then stops to listen to the audience complete the chorus.

The high intensity continues, peaking with Cohen singing, with clenched fist, an unusual variation of the familiar lines,

just when I climbed this whole goddamned mountainside,
to wash my eyelids in the rain!

At the song’s conclusion, Cohen’s enthusiasm and joyfulness are unmistakable.

Leonard Cohen – So Long Marianne (Sligo 7/31/2010)

Video from albertnoonan

1. The first find was the New Video Of “Born In Chains” From Final 2010 Leonard Cohen World Tour Concert featured in yesterday’s post [↩]

Sharon Robinson and Leonard Cohen - Born In Chains

Leonard Cohen And Troupe Perform Born In Chains At December 11, 2010 Las Vegas Show

Delayed by technical adjustments, the Albert Noonan video of “Born In Chains” from the final concert of the Leonard Cohen World Tour was uploaded for viewing only yesterday (20 March 2011).

This video not only proves to be a high quality recording worth the wait, but its unexpected appearance three months after the performance itself qualifies it as a treat not unlike a belated Christmas present.

Leonard Cohen – Born in Chains (Las Vegas 12/11/2010)

Video from albertnoonan

The Little Appreciated Big Finish

The December 11, 2010 Las Vegas concert that concluded the 2008-2010 Leonard Cohen World Tour has been described, examined, and critiqued in newspapers, journals, and newsletters as well as online.  It has been dissected, reviewed, and lauded in conversations and in the discussion threads of forums.  Videos of the performance have been viewed thousands of times.

Despite this plethora of attention to this even, I have yet to discover a single reference to what is clearly the Big Finish of  the show. Consequently, Heck Of A Guy, in fulfillment of its mission to convey the essential elements of Cohenism, especially those issues somehow overlooked by other sources, to its readers,¹ today showcases

The Cohen Complete Curlicue Concluding Concert Closing

At the end of his final remarks following the final rendition of “Closing Time” at the final concert of the World Tour, Leonard Cohen, for the first time ever, made his final stage right exit by executing a perfect 360 degree skipping twirl.²

The Replay

Both of the following videos feature Leonard Cohen and the Unified Heart Touring Company performing “Closing Time” at  the December 11, 2010 Las Vegas concert. Both videos are configured to begin as Cohen kneels immediately after finishing his concluding remarks in order to lay his microphone on the floor. He then arises to leave the stage, skipping.

The first video, from albertnoonan, provides the best view of the performance but does not keep Cohen completely in frame throughout the entire maneuver.

The second video, from dsotm07, displays production values which suffer only in comparison to Albert Noonan’s stellar videography and offers the advantage of clearly showing all of Cohen’s movements throughout the complete exit.

More Leonard Cohen Skipping Extraordinaire

Two other posts focus on special exhibitions of Cohen’s skipping expertise:

• Leonard Cohen In Belfast … Possible Best Skipping Of Tour
• Leonard Cohen Swings, Skips, Romps Through “Closing Time” In Venice

1. This mission statement is perhaps better known in its colloquial version: “Who else is gonna tell you this stuff?” [↩]
2. It is, of course, possible that Leonard Cohen’s unprecedented acrobatic skipping during the final concert was noticed and documented or that the Cohen Complete Curlicue Concluding Concert Closing is actually the Cohen Complete Curlicue Common Concert Closing, having been performed in prior concerts. If anyone is aware of either phenomenon, please pass along that information to Heck Of A Guy. [↩]

Everybody Knows That Leonard Cohen Is An Artist

Bob Lefsetz, music industry critic, commentator, and curmudgeon publishes The Lefsetz Letter, a newsletter that is widely read (albeit sometimes as a matter of self-defense) in the entertainment community.

Much like surgeons who are characterized as “sometimes wrong but never in doubt,”  Lefsetz is rarely ambivalent or ambiguous regarding any issue  or topic he addresses.

Consequently, it is not surprising that his take on Leonard Cohen and the Canadian singer-songwriter’s recently completed World Tour is concrete and absolute. In this excerpt, he even does the math for his readers:

Canvass the populace.  Send Jay out walking.  Everybody does not know who Leonard Cohen is.  Hell, he never even had a hit!

But Leonard Cohen just completed a three year tour.

There were 168 shows.  And a total gross of 96+ million dollars.

Hell, there were 55 shows in 2010 alone.  And the average attendance was 8,150.  And the average ticket price was $104.30. The only acts in the Top 50 with a higher average ticket price were superstars, Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Roger Waters, Whitney Houston and Cher.  Hell, Leonard Cohen is number thirty on the chart, higher than Eric Clapton, Carrie Underwood, Elton John and the Jonas Brothers.

Everybody knows that Leonard Cohen is an artist.

Everybody knows that Leonard Cohen is about meaning first.

Sure, everybody knows he’s not going to live forever, that this might be their last chance to see him, but they EMBRACED IT!

Everybody knows what’s got value, what touches their hearts, what lasts.  Ignore the hypemeisters, because everybody knows.

The truth.

There is more about Leonard Cohen – as well as about iPad apps, Don Henly’s cover of “Everybody Knows,” the inanity of cutting taxes for the rich, the feelings that erupt when a loved one is lost, how “sex only works when you throw off your inhibitions,” the suspect qualifications of life coaches, and – yep – much more.

It’s an intriguing read for anyone and a must-read for Cohen fans. The piece can be found at Everybody Knows.

Credit Due Department:  Adrian du Plessis, personable manager for Allison Crowe, alerted me to the this Cohecentric issue of the Lefsetz Letter.

Best Hook For 2008 Leonard Cohen World Tour Schedule Announcement

An Encore Posting

This post was originally published at Heck Of A Guy under the title, Best Hook For 2008 Leonard Cohen World Tour Schedule Announcement, May 15, 2008 – before the 200+ concerts, before it was certain Leonard Cohen would even tour the US, before many of us knew where or what Fredericton, the site of the first World Tour show, was, before the Irish concert singalongs, before Leonard Cohen quoted Yeats at the Lissadell House concerts, before the Webb Sisters turned their first onstage cartwheel, before the magnificent, rain-soaked Weybridge event, before the blouse-hurling in San Jose, before Albert Noonan had uploaded his first video of a Leonard Cohen performance to YouTube, and yes, even before Leonard Cohen met DrHGuy backstage in Chicago.

Now that the Leonard Cohen fan community is reluctantly, haltingly accommodating to what passes for reality since the World Tour ended in early December, 2010, it seems the right time to take a look back at the Daily Mail’s 2008 article taking a look back at the 1960s iteration of Leonard Cohen. It’s a meta thing.

The Daily Mail Goes Anachronistic On Leonard Cohen

The decision to release the concert schedule for the Leonard Cohen 2008 World Tour to the public and the press the day after the singer-songwriter’s¹ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame may or may not have qualified as the cagey PR tactic to which it aspired, but it was certainly embraced with enthusiasm and gratitude by the legions of reporters, copywriters, and bloggers responsible for reformulating the bare facts of the schedule into a newsworthy event for publication, each scribbler frantically attempting to compose a piece distinguishably more appealing than that produced by his or her equally desperate competitors working with the same raw data.

The timing of the official notification handed every wannabe entertainment journalist an easy to manage hook for the story,² but, in fact, the then-impending honor had already been used for this purpose in an earlier fusillade of articles.

Heck Of A Guy readers will recognize that a similar situation occurred when the Cohen World Tour, sans schedule, was made public in January. At that time, the results of an extensive, intensive meta-analysis of Internet coverage³ of the Tour’s announcement was summarized in The Leonard Cohen Tour: Posting Permutations and Pix Mix thusly:

… the spectator [is afforded] not only a light amusement but also an opportunity to assess the personality of the publication based on its selection of photos and nonessential facts in the attempt to create a very special post about the tour. From my casual and unofficial count, these extraneous elements occur most frequently in these posts:

• Leonard’s Cohen’s age: 73
• Time since last tour: 15 years
• Reference to the tour announcement appearing at leonardcohenforum.com, with or without a caveat (e.g., “if the posting is legit”)
• Speculation that tour is motivated by financial losses secondary to the theft of Cohen’s funds by his former manager
• Mention of Cohen’s impending induction into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

That Leonard Cohen’s Hall-of-Famedness was so blatantly conjoined with his tour schedule may have emphasized the point but added nothing new to the mix.

The Jingoism Hook – O Canada

On the other hand, the list of concert sites is a genuinely fresh addition to the available facts. Moreover, it is a data domain that enables the emergence of gloriously chauvinistic provincialism. The blurb from The Canadian Press is instructive:

Leonard Cohen Announces World Tour
After Hall Of Fame Induction

Hot on the heels of his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen has announced a world tour. It’s being hyped as the first time the Montreal-born performer takes to the live arena in 15 years. Cohen, who was inducted into the hall of fame Monday night in New York City, will kick off the tour June 6 and 7 at Toronto’s Sony Centre for the Performing Arts. He’ll give three shows at the Montreal International Jazz Festival on June 23, 24 and 25 at Place des arts. He’s expected to play Europe for the rest of the summer.

This piece has a couple of the essentials, the reference to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and the 15 year gap since the last tour.⁴

The article goes on to list the dates and specific venues of the five Canadian performances, appending as an afterthought the wonderfully nonspecific and even a bit skeptical comment “He’s expected to play Europe for the rest of the summer.” ⁵

I suspect only the civility and and tact seemingly inherent to Canadians prevented a final paragraph on the lines of “And he isn’t scheduled to appear anywhere in the United States. Suck on that, Yanks. Nanner, nanner, nanner.”

The first lines of the Globe and Mail article, Cohen tour his first in 15 years, are equally revealing:

He may be Montreal’s man, but Toronto might just be his mistress.
Iconic Canadian singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen has revealed plans for his first proper tour in 15 years, and it kicks off in Toronto, at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, on June 6 and 7. And it’s not the first time the cloistered Cohen has picked Toronto for a comeback.

So, not only is the alliteratively cloistered Cohen an “iconic Canadian singer-songwriter,” he is an “iconic Canadian singer-songwriter” with a special connection to one particular Canadian city – Toronto – where the Globe and Mail is the hometown paper.

The nationalism angle is uniquely appealing in that, by its nature, reverting to pride of place renders the exposition automatically superior to analogous essays originating in other areas. And, this phenomenon is hardly an exclusively Canadian aspect. Heck, if Leonard’s tour had begun – as God surely intended – in Chicago, we would be reading headlines that start with USA! USA! USA! …

Still, xenophobia has its limits – namely ones geopolitical boundaries – and while an invaluable tool, is thus insufficient on its own to establish ones story as better than the rest.

For that lesson, DrHGuy spotlights …

The Daily Mail’s Time Warp

The Daily Mail article by Tahira Yaqoob is an exemplar of creative hook formulation followed and supported by a masterful sequencing of the elements that have become standard for this story.

First and foremost is the headline,

Sixties Crooner Leonard Cohen
Makes Comeback Concert Tour

Well, it turns out that, although I had never, before reading the Daily Mail piece, thought of Leonard Cohen as a “crooner” and even now I’m uncertain of the definition of “crooner,” there in the list of singers of that category in the Wikipedia “Crooner” article is one Leonard Cohen, [update: when checked on August 11, 2010, Leonard Cohen was no longer on Wikipedia's list of crooners] along with Regis Philbin, Paul Anka, Justin Timberlake, and Tom Waits. And, Leonard Cohen did begin singing professionally in the 1960s. Finally, given the 15 year lapse in live performances, one can justifiably call this tour a “comeback.” Think of this headline as the lexical equivalent of a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens – the data in both instances are correct, but the presentation of that data is skewed.

Factual accuracy, however, does not distract or dilute the implication set forth by the headline, especially combined with that great photo of the young, clean-cut Cohen performing early in his career (albeit in the 1970s than the previously referenced 1960s), that Leonard Cohen, once a star, hasn’t been heard from since the days of The Monterey Pop Festival.

There is more.

Again With The Cult

The lede, “His morose tones attracted a cult following in the 1960s,” especially taken in conjunction with the headline, leaves the reader with the picture of a charismatic singer who developed a group of devoted fans in the Swinging Sixties but, returning to the theme, then went into suspended animation until the time was deemed right for his comeback.⁶

In the next line, Leonard Cohen is not just 73 years old, he is “at the pensionable age of 73.” The 15 years since the last concert tour is apparently insufficiently impressive for the Daily Mail’s purposes. Their story focuses instead on Leonard Cohen making “a comeback more than 40 years after he first took to the stage.” [emphasis mine]

That it isn’t until the third sentence that there is an appeal to nationalism – “The Canadian singer-songwriter – named by Prince Charles as his favourite musician … ” [emphasis mine] by now seems a show of extraordinary restraint.⁷

The remainder of that line does incorporate the 15 years since the last world tour factoid (waste note, want not).

Let’s see, what’s left? How about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Yep, that’s in the fourth line.

And the money issue? The fifth line references “the successful and lucrative reunion of classic bands such as Led Zeppelin, whose comeback world tour could match the £250 million reaped by the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang tour.”

The piece begins to ramble at this point, but it hardly matters. If there is more, by golly, folks are going to read it – because they are hooked.

Yep, The Daily Mail’s take on the Leonard Cohen World Tour Schedule is the hookiest of them all.

1. The talking heads on the Chicago major television network affiliate I watched after the awards ceremony repeatedly referred to “Leonard Cohen the songwriter.” It isn’t clear to DrHGuy if (1) no one producing, writing, editing, or reading the news at that station knew that Leonard Cohen sings as well as writes songs, (2) this selective omission was a sly deprecation of his singing skills, (3) they confused “Leonard Cohen” with “Samuel Cohen,” the birth name of Sammy Cahn, the songwriter responsible for “Three Coins In The Fountain,” “All The Way,” “Call Me Irresponsible,” and many others, who died 15 years ago, or (4) all concerned are brainless ninnies who don’t see the need for fact-checking. [↩]
2. DrHGuy, it should be noted, is not demeaning narrative hooks. On the contrary, he is altogether wild for hooks. Consider, for example, the preceding post, Is It The Leonard Cohen 2008 Tour Or Is It A DrHGuy Parody?. In this case, DrHGuy is, as is true for many topics, all hook all the time [↩]
3. Based on whatever I happened to remember from the posts I happened to skim that morning [↩]
4. I’m unclear why the time since the last tour is characterized as being “hyped.” “Hyped” typically indicates an attempt to publicize an element of a story in an exaggerated or misleading manner; the 15 year gap seems to be nothing more or less than simple arithmetic [↩]
5. This classic structure is forever exemplified in the perhaps apocryphal Sunday Post headline, “Titanic Sinks. Dundee Man Drowned!” [↩]
6. Update: the Cohen Cult motif was the focus of an article in The Star less than two weeks later – see Oh My Cohen! They’re Calling Us A Cult [↩]
7. For the Prince Charles likes Leonard Cohen story, see item #7 of Ten Lesser Known Facts About Leonard Cohen. [↩]

More Wonders From The September 21, 2010 Leonard Cohen Marseille Concert

This is the eighth post in the Heck Of A Guy Leonard Cohen World Tour: Best Audience Gifts series.¹

The Spanish Cohen Brigade points out (quite correctly) that the September 21, 2010 Leonard Cohen Marseille Concert included not only an especially gorgeous bouquet² but also a rose presentation (see above) that rivaled the previously posted Roses At Lisbon, Auckland, & Las Vegas, Bouquets At Marseille And Nimes.

Further, the Marseille show also served as the celebration of Leonard Cohen’s 76th birthday. Consequently, it featured the audience serenading the Canadian singer-songwriter with a chorus of “Happy Birthday To You.”  The video below showcases not only the crowd singing but also a rose landing at Cohen’s feet.

Mr Leonard Cohen 76th birthday in Marseille

Video from rpan1000

And, during “Suzanne,” candles were held aloft by the crowd in honor of the occasion.

Those candles, a specimen of which is shown in the photo below, were procured and distributed by Beatriz Salles and Maritxell Cardelus, stalwart members of the afore mentioned Spanish Cohen Brigade.

Meritxell Cardelus (left) and Beatriz Salles (right)

The effect can be viewed in the video of Cohen’s performance of “Suzanne.”

Leonard Cohen – Suzanne (Marseille 09/21/2010)

Video from albertnoonan

Bonus Photo: Leonard Cohen Bracelet

A shot from this concert also displays to good advantage the bracelet Leonard Cohen wore through much of the 2010 Tour.

Credit Due Department:  The shots of the single candle and Meritxell Cardelus and Beatriz Salles were contributed by asdeguia, a candle-bearer at Marseille as well as another member of the Spanish Cohen Brigade. All other photos were taken by Meritxell Cardelus and forwarded to Heck Of A Guy by CHEMA.

1. Leonard Cohen World Tour: Best Audience Gifts is an ongoing Heck Of A Guy series reliving some of the 2008-2010 shows by spotlighting the most interesting, oddest, most moving, funniest, most dramatic, … offerings contributed by audience members at one or more of the Leonard Cohen World Tour concerts. Previous posts include Boxing Gloves & Stethoscope At Colmar, Roses At Katowice And Nashville, Roses At Lisbon, Auckland, & Las Vegas, Bouquets At Marseille And Nimes, Green Glow Sticks At Tel Aviv, Blouses At San Jose., Goodbye Signs At Bratislava, Vancouver, Portland, Las Vegas. Singalongs At Lisbon, Dublin, Belfast, & Venice [↩]
2. See Bouquets At Marseille And Nimes [↩]