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In 2002, Columbia released another in their inessential line of Essential discs, this one celebrating the work of Leonard Cohen. It's a worthy purchase for those who don't insist that he's been an easily ignored cult act since the mid-seventies, or, even more strictly for some, since 1967's college smash Songs of Leonard Cohen. The Essential offers the same eye-opening snapshot of the singer's formative years as 1975's The Best of, but it also wrangles later gems like "In My Secret Life" and "Everybody Knows", a morbidly entertaining song expertly used in the underloved Atom Egoyan film Exotica. The thirty-one tracks were picked by Cohen himself, and disc one skips from "Who by Fire", from 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony, to "The Guests", from 1979's Recent Songs. And so it's possible to own both prominent Cohen collections and not even realize that he released a -- pardon the cliché -- misunderstood masterpiece in the interim. The Best of has a fine excuse -- Death of a Ladies' Man hadn't even been released yet. But Cohen's own neglect of the album shows that his initially hostile response to it lingers today. He may have hinted at coming to terms with the album in interviews, but the truth lies in his 2002 song choices. He still thinks it's crap.
In Cohen's view there's only one man responsible for the album being so -- in his words -- "grotesque" and "gutless", and that's Phil Spector, legendary genius producer and murderer. Erector of the "wall of sound" and sculptor of hits like "Be My Baby" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling", Spector was the last person anybody would have expected to work with the perpetually melancholy and hushed Canadian poet. In reality, though, the collaboration was more what-the-hell happenstance than a career makeover to save a doomed career, a la Spector's job producing the Ramones' still-great End of the Century. Introduced by their mutual lawyer, Cohen spent a night at Spector's place and grew bored of the latter's shouting at servants and "Medici pose with guns and bodyguards", so he suggested they make some music. After just three weeks, they had the album written.
As one would expect of any album with liner note credits like, "All liquor purchased from John & Pete's liquor store. All pizza from Piece O' Pizza", the recording sessions were a decadent boozefest with a heavy undercurrent of potential violence provided, as always, by Spector and his guns. Cohen was reeling from a dying mother and a personal life going to shambles. Spector was just reeling, literally, waving a .45 and a bottle of Manishevitz. At night, Cohen would watch his own ownership of the songs slip away as Spector retreated to secret locations to edit, accessorize and generally Let it Be them as much as he saw fit.
Happily, what Cohen's ego and the album's initial critics saw as a desecration of the poet-singer's delicate gifts, I and the album's many other champions see as a deliriously fun and indeed successful intersection of two brilliant artists' visions. Albums like Songs from a Room and Songs of Love and Hate might be a truer shortcut to Cohen's profoundly expressed inner workings, but Death of a Ladies' Man puts a gin-soaked silk robe on those workings and projects them in glorious pornographic widescreen. For once, Cohen's lyrics aren't the focus, and even though they're as great as ever, their relegation to supporting role in this gaudy tapestry feels oddly liberating.
Over thirty guest musicians and seventeen backup singers helped contribute to Spector's vision, and you can hear every one of them. They help provide the drunken sing-along hugeness of songs like "Memories", an unabashedly nostalgic slice of fifties doo-wop that concludes with Cohen animatedly moaning like Otis Redding, an incredibly far cry from his bedroom folk beginnings. For the backing choir of the raunchy, adult public service announcement "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-on", Spector roped in a crowd that included Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan, and continued to lacquer the song with handclaps, flanged guitar, piano stabs and audacious brass wails. Elsewhere, saxophonist Steve Douglas's solos add a woozy, boozy heartbrokenness to songs like the Nino Tempo-arranged boot-stomper "Iodine".
Cohen's lyrics do follow a similar thread, and the death in the album's title is really the death of all ladies' men, an empathetic goodbye to those seventies swingers (including Cohen himself) who are and who will be left stranded by the effects of aging, changing gender roles and an upheaval in society's mores. Such characters are merely joke fodder these days. It's the tragic flipside to Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy that you didn't know was there. As the narrator of "Paper-Thin Hotel" listens at the wall to his cheating lover in the next room, he realizes the jealousy of his youth has faded as he hears "the grunt of unity when he came in" and "learned that love was out of my control". Tragically, this newfound lifting of his soul's "heavy burden" also leaves numbness -- "I felt so good I couldn't feel a thing".
Other songs wallow in the fleeting hedonism, though always with a hint of impending tragedy. Cohen's arrogant pick-up artist on "Memories" is at a nightclub,
Frankie Laine was singing Jezebel
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel
I walked up to the tallest
and the blondest girl
I said, look, you don't know me now
but very soon you will
So won't you let me see...
your naked body
There is some disconnect between chorus and verse on "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-on", but it adds to the album's overall mix of decadence and death. Cohen sneers, "here comes your bride / with her veil on / approach her, you wretch / if you dare" and laments "I'm chained to the old masquerade...I follow my father's trade", that trade being hairdresser-slash-pimp. The chorus, however, is pure rowdiness, the inebriated crowd of dirty old men letting you know that going home unsatisfied "will only drive you insane / you can't shake it or break it with your Motown / you can't melt it down in the rain".
The concluding title track is the album's emotional centerpiece. Loping along at a weary, laconic pace, it tells the tale of our ladies' man and a kiss-of-death sendoff with a younger girl. "So the great affair is over," Cohen sings, "but whoever would have guessed / it would leave us all so vacant / and so deeply unimpressed". Its an epic, sad masterstroke, and the one most regrettably missing from any collection that claims to be the "essential" Cohen.
Death of a Ladies' Man is comparable to another oft-skipped work in a legend's discography, John Lennon's Walls and Bridges. That was his "lost weekend" album, and it shares both Death's debauchery ("Whatever Gets You Through the Night") and sense of doomed calamity ("Nobody Loves You"). It's not a Spector production, but his madness haunts it. On this album, his hand acts not as destructor, but as inebriated, defibrillating re-energizer.
-- Justin Stewart
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