Skip to main content

Passing Through: On Leonard Cohen

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

When Leonard Cohen starts singing “Passing Through” on his 1973 Live Songs album, he sounds tentative, like a child who’s been asked to sing a song he learned at school in front of a party of adults. “I saw Jesus on the cross, on a hill called calvary … ” On the record his voice is faint—I’ve spent twenty years turning up the volume—and he sings so casually that it sounds like he really might have seen the crucified Christ, and asked him, deadpan and impertinent, “Do you hate mankind, for what he’s done to you?” Jesus has a pretty mellow, Jesus-like response, delivered in Cohen’s increasingly confident baritone: “He said ‘Talk of love not hate—things to do, it’s getting late.’” He is, like the rest of the Biblical and historical characters Cohen will encounter throughout the song, only passing through. Compare Cohen’s line readings to the declamatory, bugged-out delivery that Dylan gives to the opening lines of his bible pastiche “Highway 61 Revisited.” Cohen is calm, weary, a little resigned; Dylan is providing color commentary at the Belmont Stakes.

Cohen didn’t write “Passing Through,” something I didn’t know until a week ago. The gentle, straightforward melody and slightly hokey lyrics about George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt probably should have given it away as the product of a forties folk socialist songbook that it is, but with Cohen, it’s often hard to be sure what level of irony, if any, we’re dealing with. “Passing Through” builds in strength and spirit as it goes along, Cohen’s perfectly ramshackle country band and backup singers providing a reasonable and sincere-seeming simulacrum of a gospel revival. He puts some extra oomph into the climactic, clumsy sentiment: “Yankee, Russian, white or tan / He said a man is still a man / We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through.” The audience claps along on the final chorus. Does he mean it? At least as much as Roger McGuinn and Gram Parsons mean it when they sing that they “like the Christian life.” Which is to say, absolutely, for the length of the song.

The song’s feverish, distended mirror image, “Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)” appears on side two of Live Songs. I’ve always heard it, because of its placement and linguistic echo, as a response to “Passing Through.” Another sing-along, it replaces the earlier song’s sanguine assurance that all suffering is temporary with an urgent and disturbed plea not to let things go, to remain alert to the world’s agony and injustice, from a blind man on the corner in New York City to “the Jews and the Gypsies and the smoke that they made.” He vamps and ad-libs for almost thirteen minutes. Things get increasingly personal and intense as the song goes on: “I know that you still think there’s somebody else. I know that these words aren’t yours. But I tell you, friends, one day, you’re gonna get down on your knees. You’re gonna get down on your knees … ” He repeats this nine times, then hollers the chorus in desperation as his backup singers half-heartedly try to cushion the mood with their harmonies. The performance segues into a self-annihilating monologue directed at the audience: “My friends, take my dignity. Take my form. Take my style. Take my honor. Take my courage. Take my time, take my time … ” He sounds like a man in crisis, clinging to something slipping away. As the song peters out, the band and singer exhausted, the audience roars.

I don’t doubt, in this case, his level of sincerity. It was the third time he’d played the song live, and he never played it again.

 

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work and the story collection Cool for America.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3uVafAr
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China

Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED . When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discu
Post a Comment
Read more