Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the award was announced last October, people who care about such things were either elated or outraged: Fans of the man felt that Dylan’s work deserved such lofty accolades, but writerly snobs — the worst snobs — looked down on the troubadour, his popular music, and his “poetic” lyrics.

I’m a Dylan fan since I was a kid listening to my mom and dad’s Peter Paul & Mary – In Concert album: Mary was so beautiful on the record jacket and just hearing her sing on “Blowin’ in the Wind” made feel like I’d been born too late. I didn’t think too much about the award at the time as Dylan’s ambivalent reaction to the thing will no doubt go down as one of the jester’s best pranks. I was too busy laughing to think too hard on it all.

This week the prize committee released a lecture Dylan wrote — a requirement for receiving the award. Hearing about the lecture I began to ponder the arguments for and against Dylan again. As a songwriter and a poet I can assure you that musical lyrics and literary verses are completely different animals that flourish is mostly separate universes. That said, there is also some overlap and I’ve always believed that the best poetry is musical, and the best musical lyrics are poetic. One way to understand the difference between the two is to consider the ideas that Dylan brought poetry into pop music, but his comrade Leonard Cohen brought music to poetry. These two songsters have a lot in common, but their works lineup alongside one another like mirror images full of similarities in opposition.

You might not agree with me, but I think Dylan would. Here’s a bit from The New York Times take the lecture…

What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”

Here’s the full lecture…

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A pic I edited in 2014 for a post celebrating Cohen’s birthday…

Antonia and I had been talking about Leonard Cohen tonight, eating a hotdog down the street, watching television screens displaying both Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 as well as the original Highlander film. With the sound off – Cleo had subtitles – it was interesting to see the parallel themes of the existential problem created by mortality playing out in vibrant, violent sword fights as well as quiet conversations in a black-and-white French park.

All those points came together when I got home and found out via social media that Leonard Cohen had died. Cohen is in my pantheon of great songwriters – Dylan, Williams, Waits, Berry, Robinson, Springsteen, MacGowan. I just tweeted this while writing this post:

#LeonardCohen’s death worse for #Canada than @realDonaldTrump election for America? Detroit connects to Windsor as tonight so does our grief

Earlier this year Marianne Ihlen – Cohen’s former lover and the muse behind the songwriter’s eponymous hit, “Marianne” – passed away, but not before receiving this lovely last letter from the poet…

“It said well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine”

“And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that.”

“But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

I posted this video in 2014 when we celebrated his 80th birthday. Here’s a bit of that post…

I’ll finish up three days of Leonard Cohen posts with this last gem that reminds us that it’s Cohen’s dazzling songs and intensity as a performer that have won him almost five decades of attention from music listeners with ears to hear his erotic prayers and sensual meditations on love, sex, ecstasy, women, death and God.

Bird on A Wire captures Cohen’s triumphant 1972 tour of Europe and Israel with his band, The Army. Capturing candid scenes of Cohen and his musicians off stage and travelling on the road, this flick is also a repository of amazing live performances captured by the acclaimed British director Tony Palmer.

For Cohenphiles, the gem here is the famous, final concert in Jerusalem when Cohen and the band all take acid before taking the stage. A well documented event in Cohen’s biographies, this performance comes to a sudden halt when Cohen quotes the Kabbalah and explains that the band can’t seem to transcend and “get off the ground.” He informs the throng that they will return to the dressing room to meditate and see if they are capable of continuing. After a shave and a cigarette, Cohen and band regroup once the entire audience sings to them, encouraging the ensenble to re-take the stage. The show ends with an intense rendition of “So Long, Marianne” that finds Cohen and the rest of the group breaking into tears before ending the show.

Here is Bird on A Wire…

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I dedicated one recent Halloween post to the all too real ghost of Lou Reed who died three years ago this past October, 27.

I’ve had a productive week this week: I handed in a final proposal for a community arts grant; I turned in a feature story about the challenges of being homeless in the winter time; I cranked-out a review of a new painting exhibition in Nashville; I started it all off with my first gig at the new Radio Cafe last Friday night. One of my favorite breaks during so much word mashing has been reading Flipboard where I found this Rolling Stone rundown of must-hear Lou Reed records just the other day…

I actually kind of hate the article — its far too reverent for any look at Lou. That said I love some of the selections on this rundown…

Loaded (1970)
Reed disbanded the Velvets before this release, but the swan-song fourth LP featured some of his most refined songwriting, especially the classics “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” “New Age” is a slept-on highlight of Reed’s ballad catalog. And “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” blueprints the spirit of Seventies rock from the wreckage of the Sixties.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal (1974)
The live set where “Lou Reed” the character – a gender-blurring, hypodermic-wielding rock & roll id monster – took center stage. Reshaping Velvet Underground classics for a new generation, this also stands as a high point in Seventies guitar rock, epitomized by an epically jammed-out “Sweet Jane.”

Coney Island Baby (1976)
Metal Machine Music’s follow-up was a deliciously tune-driven love letter to doo-wop, Brooklyn, a fictional football coach and a factual trans lover named Rachel. Still underappreciated, it’s ripe for rediscovery.

New York (1989)
Shaken by the AIDS crisis, Reed wrote a set of uncharacteristically political songs rooted in storytelling detail. Robert Quine is gone, replaced by Mike Rathke’s leaner sound, giving Reed more room to serve up vignettes like the inner-city love story “Romeo Had Juliette” and “Halloween Parade,” a doo-wop-steeped, “Walk on the Wild Side”–like requiem for departed friends.

“The Bells,” The Bells (1979) 

Reed enlists trumpeter Don Cherry on this nine-minute spiritual-jazz elegy for a man standing on a ledge, which at the time Reed surely was.

“I Love You, Suzanne,” New Sensations (1984)
Reed retools his sound for the Eighties, with clipped funk-rock underpinning and a touch of the Shangri-Las. A shoulda-been hit.

“Sword of Damocles – Externally,” Magic and Loss (1992)

An elegiac folk rocker about cancer and radiation therapy from an LP that stares mortality squarely in the eye. Chilling and redemptive.

I’ve added this video to past posts, but it never gets dull. Is this the best music video of all time?

And by the way, Rolling Stone, Lou Reed wasn’t a “storyteller.” Lou Reed was a songwriter who showed us how to bring the novel to melody in the same way that Bob Dylan brought poetry to song. Leonard Cohen brought song to poetry, but we already knew that.

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If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen my ornery post last week wherein I linked to an announcement about Leonard Cohen’s new album, and complained about my Nashville music peers constantly celebrating “great” songwriters who shouldn’t even be allowed to mutter Cohen’s name in their prayers. GREAT is a big word, and while I certainly stand by all my friends’ and peers’ rights to love what they love, there aren’t a lot of songwriters in this world that I would call GREAT.

Lyrics are almost always the weak spot for me when people mention less than GREAT songwriters that they love. Frankly, melodies are the easier part of the job, and my GREATS list all have great melodies too, but they’re not still toying around with silly story songs, and dumb near rhymes, and they actually manage to get some sense of rhythm into their words. Cohen is one songwriter on my list, and Tom Waits is another.

When I discovered this video on YouTube I thought it was just a fan tribute, but it turns out that No Visitors After Midnight is an actual DVD release that collects two live Tom Waits performances from BBC Studios, London, July 27, 1979 and PBS Soundstage, Chicago, 1975.

Here’s a GREAT songwriter…

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Leonard Cohen turned 81 on September 21. A year ago, on his 80th birthday, he released a great record called Popular Problems. Here it is. Happy Birthday, poet…

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I’ve blogged about Leonard Cohen’s use of LSD on this illuminated scroll before. Today as I was sorting stories for the Remnants Flipboard when I came across this bizarre report from Abel Danger about Leonard Cohen’s involvement with early CIA LSD experiments in the 1950′s. Here’s the word…

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He’s wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb’s famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door to him, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

We now know that D.O. Hebb’s sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb’s research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous “rat” study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind-controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics – and probably still is today.

I don’t have any proof that any of this is true or false, but it’s interesting to note that Cohen may be counted among early countercultural revolutionaries like Ken Kesey who were part of similar LSD experiments and went on to create groundbreaking works of art. Here’s the man himself speaking on the poetic mind…

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I’ll finish up three days of Leonard Cohen posts with this last gem that reminds us that it’s Cohen’s dazzling songs and intensity as a performer that have won him almost five decades of attention from music listeners with ears to hear his erotic prayers and sensual meditations on love, sex, ecstasy, women, death and God.

Bird on A Wire captures Cohen’s triumphant 1972 tour of Europe and Israel with his band, The Army. Capturing candid scenes of Cohen and his musicians off stage and travelling on the road, this flick is also a repository of amazing live performances captured by the acclaimed British director Tony Palmer.

For Cohenphiles, the gem here is the famous, final concert in Jerusalem when Cohen and the band all take acid before taking the stage. A well documented event in Cohen’s biographies, this performance comes to a sudden halt when Cohen quotes the Kabbalah and explains that the band can’t seem to transcend and “get off the ground.” He informs the throng that they will return to the dressing room to meditate and see if they are capable of continuing. After a shave and a cigarette, Cohen and band regroup once the entire audience sings to them, encouraging the ensenble to re-take the stage. The show ends with an intense rendition of “So Long, Marianne” that finds Cohen and the rest of the group breaking into tears before ending the show.

Here is Bird on A Wire…

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My last post about Leonard Cohen’s early recordings has me excited to curate this conversation about someone we all seem to care so much about. Leonard’s not everyone’s bag and it’s really wonderful to see so many folks interested in the man’s complex, felt lyricism.

Not sure if I can find more unique documents to share about the man, but this film is another great take on Cohen’s beginnings that I’ve never seen before. This one delves back just a little farther into the roots of Cohen’s aesthetic which can seem mysterious and even self-generated without a closer look.

When we think about Bob Dylan’s work, it’s easy to draw the line directly through Ramblin’ Jack Elliot to Woody Guthrie and then out from there to the 1000 starry points that make up the constellation of American vernacular music. As a Canadian with a connection to the French language, Cohen’s music is particularly European, but it all starts with his high school Country/Western band, The Buckskin Boys. In Cohen’s songs, Hank Williams drinks a shot with Allen Ginsberg and Federico Garcia Lorca while the Buddha reads the Torah to L. Ron Hubbard. Here, Ray Charles’ rhythm and blues becomes entangled with the chanson traditions embodied by Jacques Brel, and they both find their place in the exquisite verses and high melodies of this most gifted singer/songwriter.

Here is Leonard Cohen’s Lonesome Heroes…

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Bob Dylan brought poetry to rock ‘n’ roll, but Leonard Cohen brought rock ‘n’ roll to poetry, recording a remarkable string of records — beginning with his 1967 debut, Songs of Leonard Cohen — which married the studio sounds of the day to his already-established voice as a nationally celebrated poet in his native country of Canada.

This year we celebrate Cohen’s 80th birthday, his five decades of music, and his brand new release, Popular Problems.

Here’s a great documentary that captures Cohen as a young poet and as a breakthrough recording artist, establishing his unique voice as one of the most important singer/songwriters of all time. Featuring lots of great images and footage from throughout the first decade of Cohen’s career this film also includes lots of input from critics, putting the importance of Cohen’s music in context and creating a wonderful retrospective for long-time fans and newbie listeners alike.

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Bob Dylan brought poetry to pop music and Leonard Cohen brought pop music to poetry, but it was Lou Reed who brought the literary ambitions of the great American short story to the 3 minute single. An iconic New Yorker, Reed’s place among American rock’s most important singer/songwriters was secured through an inspired, intoxicated, cantankerous, contradictory five decade career which ended on Sunday (10/27/13) with the loss of the singer’s life. At this writing, the cause of death is thought to be complications from a recent liver transplant.

“Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart” (PBS’American Masters, 1998) traces Reed’s art from the early inspirations of doo-wop music and fifties rock ‘n’ roll to his classic records with The Velvet Underground, through his challenging, experimental solo works like Transformer, Berlin, Metal Machine Music, New York and Magic and Loss — Reed’s tribute to his friend and mentor, songwriter Doc Pomus.

Linger on, Lou.

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