Revisiting the albums of my youth: I’m Your Man

In my university years, my musical tastes started to stray from the pop charts, but mostly on a quest for the newest thing, and what was fun to dance to. The Sugarcubes, The Pogues and The Smiths, house-y hits like Inner City’s “Big Fun” and the slick delights of Black Box. If the band was British, like Fine Young Cannibals, or from Narnia, like the Cocteau Twins, so much the better. This was before Canadian music went global with the likes of Alanis, Shania and Celine. National acts like Glass Tiger, Corey Hart, Doug and the Slugs, and Haywire were starting to feel uncomfortably provincial. National treasure? I’d probably have said Anne Murray with an ironic laugh.

I had a roommate who played a passable guitar and I have to admit that I did not find his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” compelling, no matter how many times he played it. Hippie Canadiana from the 1960s. Ugh. Even my admiration for Joni Mitchell leaned toward the overproduced Dog Eat Dog and the guest-laced Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (Peter Gabriel! Don Henley! Billy Idol! So many indicators of global hitdom!) over Blue, which seemed like a quaint artifact (history loves proving people wrong). 

“Suzanne” was driven by little more than a plink-plunky guitar; no Thomas Dolby in sight. The voice was whiny. The lyrical imagery, I felt, was something between Medieval and “White Rabbit,” far beyond my experience and interest. I think my roommate also played me “Who by Fire,” which I found repetitive and naively romantic (not a good thing when you're in your early 20s). I have no memory of hearing “Hallelujah” in those days, which has come to be a song that I, along with the rest of the world, love. But if I had, I imagine I would have dismissed it as quickly as something by Gordon Lightfoot or any singer my dad might like.

So when Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man started to filter into my consciousness, I was initially resistant. “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” the first song from it that I remember, had radio-friendly production—a little meh. But its chugging bassline reminded me of John Waite’s “Missing You (I Ain’t Missing You at All),” which I had liked a few years earlier. Yes, I am framing my discovery of Leonard Cohen, one of the last century’s towering artists, by way of a one-hit-wonder. But that’s how the process of musical discovery works.

The black and grey album-cover design was decidedly of the moment. But what was he doing, dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses? Eating a banana? He was definitely an old guy. That was a strike against him. I wasn’t totally dismissive of music that was sought higher meaning and deeper emotions, that sought to qualify as poetry. I loved Bruce Cockburn (always timely). I loved Suzanne Vega (and still do). But Vega was only 10 years older than me, a wise older sister, really, whose sharp observations could be applicable to my own life. Cohen was definitely of my dad’s generation, though definitely not to my dad’s taste.

On I’m Your Man, the voice that had irritated me on “Suzanne” had grown deep, growly and menacing. The voice was so deep, it almost seemed capricious, like he was doing it on purpose, like Prince using his falsetto to bring other characters into a song. Now that kind of playfulness and pretence was appealing! I loved the band Shriekback for their tribal rhythms and primordial imagery (“We drink elixirs that we refine/ From the juices of the dying”) and The Cocteau Twins for their perverse avoidance of any lyrical sense. As an over-caffeinated student in my early 20s, I welcomed any sort of audacity.

It was probably “First We Take Manhattan” that sold me and built the foundation of my future Leonard Cohen fandom. The churning bass synth sounds seemed dated—but, I was realizing, knowingly so. The violins, the choir in the background, the fluttering sci-fi sounds were all apocalyptically over-the-top, allowing for another reading of Jennifer Warnes’s otherwise MOR vocals. This was like the devil’s misjudged attempt at huggable that ends up scorching its recipient.

Digging into the album, “Jazz Police” seemed to confirm my suspicious that the whole thing was a dark joke. (I remember being at a party and forcing people to wait in silence while I cued up the song over and over again on cassette, perhaps in an effort to drive my fellow students crazy.) The cheesy drum machines sounded as if someone was gleefully testing out how many beats their new Yamaha Portasound could jam into each measure. The silly high notes of the background vocalists, the lyrics about being mad about turtle meat. Here was an old geyser pulling a Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

In hindsight, I can see that only a couple of the songs were that wacky (Cohen took the grand apocalypticism even further on his 1992 follow up The Future), though it’s what got me hooked. Pushing past the leftfield production and getting used to the voice, I started to appreciate the lyrics. Oh, man, the lyrics. These days, I love Cohen’s poetry as much as his music. I chuckle at it. I memorize it. I try to learn from his poems even as they cleverly thwart any attempt to marshal them into a fixed world view, ideology or something you’d see on an inspirational poster.

Where the lyrics of “Suzanne” had seemed like a rambling chore (I’m still not a fan of it), every line on I’m Your Man was a potential quotable quote. There was built-in irony: “Everybody knows that you've been faithful/ Ah, give or take a night or two.” But there was knowingness a listener could bring along too. You can chuckle or feel wise at how a lover’s declaration of “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” mixed the sacred and the shallow.

That very line is one I put to use back in my university years. “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” is what I once said in reply to a classmate’s tender confession of a growing attraction for me. I sang the line a few times, warbling on “clothes.” At the time, it seemed like both a way forward and a way out. A sly reciprocity. Now I realize it was a way of being an ass without entirely betraying another person’s vulnerability.

Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man was simultaneously of this world and beyond it, a love letter to the human condition and an escape hatch from it. It's an album that divides his career into two halves, the first of which was, for me, merely a sketch for the masterpiece of the second.