This is not a review of a legendary concert appearance by Leonard Cohen.
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It’s a meditation on personal power. His. Yours. Mine.
Essentially, I’m trying to figure out here what happens below the surface of your life so you can — how you access your power for career advancement, personal gain and, not least, the good of the world.
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But to do that, I have to tell you a Leonard Cohen story and urge you to watch a 64-minute documentary.
Here’s the story.
In l967, 32-year-old Leonard Cohen — a novelist and poet who was just starting out as a singer/songwriter — walked onstage at Carnegie Hall, looked out at the audience, and started shaking. “I can’t do this,” he said, and left the stage. In the wings, Judy Collins took his hand, led him in front of the audience again and sang “Suzanne” with him.
In 1970, 35-year-old Leonard Cohen agreed to perform at England’s Isle of Wight music festival. It was not a happy event. Angered that there was a wall to keep out those who hadn’t paid, some of the young festivalgoers rebelled. They tore down fences. They crashed the gates. There were fires and fights. There was garbage.
600,000 people. Living outside. For almost five days.
At 2 in the morning of the fifth and final day, Leonard Cohen was awakened and asked to hurry onstage. There was no piano, no organ. Cohen, in his pajamas, insisted on both. And then he went back to his trailer to get dressed.
At 4 in the morning, Cohen took the stage. He looked into the darkness and, gently, slowly, told a story of going to the circus as a kid and liking only the moment when the audience lit matches in the darkness. He asked the crowd to light matches, and he waited while they did, and then he sang “Bird on a Wire.”
And he owned that crowd. He held 600,000 souls in the palm of his hand, and he brought them his brave, sad songs, and they listened to him as if he were a prophet.
This amazing footage is the start of the 64-minute concert DVD that is half of the package. (The other half is a CD of Cohen’s performance. If you are a Leonard Cohen fan, it’s of minor interest; if you’re new to Cohen, it’s even less interesting.)
Here’s my question: On that stage, Leonard Cohen was in a state of calm beyond calm. What occurred in those three years to give him that outrageous certainty in himself? How did the transformation occur?
And then, to make it personal, can I do that? Can you?
I can only hazard a guess here. But it strikes me that, at Carnegie Hall, Cohen stuck a toe in the water of live performance. And he saw that it didn’t kill him, that it pleased him and raised him up, bringing him closer to the self he imagined. And he followed it with another step, and another, until 600,000 people were no big deal.
That’s a very crude formulation. It doesn’t deal at all with doubts and fears, with backsliding; it makes Cohen into a mythic figure, a terminator, resolutely moving forward. I doubt it happened that smoothly for him. I suspect there was a lot of determination involved, and picking himself up when he faltered. But I think the steadiness of the effort served him well — after a while, he was in a new place, and when he looked back, he didn’t recognize his old, fearful self.
It’s what Anne Lamott writes in “Bird by Bird”. Her brother had to write a school report about birds. The kid couldn’t figure out a way to do it. But their father did. “Bird by bird, buddy,” he said.
You want to see how far you can get if you keep at it? Look at “Leonard Cohen Live in London”, captured last year, when Cohen was 75. Or just go to the music. What you get is the same thing again and again — Cohen pays total attention, he’s completely in the moment, and soon you are. He tunes you, just as he tuned the 600,000 in 1970s.
One of the mottoes of the Texas Rangers is this: “Little man whip a big man every time if the little man’s in the right and keeps on coming.” I have trouble believing that; the streets of history are littered with the corpses of little men who didn’t grasp how cruel the powerful can be. But I think Cohen believes it, and I think that simple belief made the difference. And in watching his remarkable 1970 performance, I do rediscover my courage.
Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner has unearthed quite a gem in making this film featuring Leonard Cohen’s mesmerizing Isle of Wight performance from 1970. The 64-minute film deftly weaves modern interviews from relevant performers and associates of Leonard Cohen with the vintage musical performance by Cohen and his band, the affectionately named “Army” comprised of such stalwarts as legendary music producer Bob Johnston.
The audio quality is a sonic revelation, obliterating my expectations for a live multi-track recording from 1970 staged in front of 600,000 fans that had gotten rowdier as the festival progressed. Jimi Hendrix had performed his set before Cohen, with the crowd setting various things on fire like a piano and the scaffolding surrounding the stage. But the music was not to be denied, as Leonard Cohen slowly took the stage after they found a replacement piano and organ.
At 4 a.m. on August 31, 1970, the man introduced to the crowd as “a novelist, a poet, an author, a singer”, began his intimate performance that encompassed most of the hits that had earned him acclaim, from “Bird On the Wire” to “Suzanne” and other well-known songs mainly from his first two albums. A nice surprise are the short stories Cohen shares and poem fragments he uses to introduce many of the songs. The crowd, who had booed previous performers like Kris Kristofferson, sat in rapt attention to the mostly acoustic set. My only quibble is that the complete audio performance by Leonard Cohen is not included on the Blu-ray. The CD version includes a couple of songs not shown in the documentary. I have no idea if the footage simply did not exist or was simply left out at the director’s discretion.
The Blu-ray, on a single BD-25, is transferred from the original 16mm camera negative to 1080i. This is not footage that is going to blow viewers away by its visual quality. In fact on an absolute basis, the BD is well below the norm expected for high-definition titles. Prepare for an experience of limited visual quality. It is true that this Blu-ray replicates as closely as possible the 16mm film source the concert was shot in. The modern interviews, with such luminaries as Judy Collins and Joan Baez, are all in excellent picture quality, but do remind the viewer of the inherent limitations in the concert footage. Still, it looks like much of the other concert footage I have seen from the era on the Blu-ray format. The only notable defect is the continual appearance of an ultra-thin vertical black line that runs down the middle of the camera image on tight close-ups of Leonard Cohen. It looks to be the result of a continuous gate scratch on the original 16mm film. A small emulsion error in the original master also appears in the corner of the frame, later in the concert.
On a technical basis the transfer looks perfect without a hint of artifacting, revealing every limitation and nuance of the source material. The AVC encode consistently runs at very high bitrates, most of the time in the thirties. I would estimate an average video bitrate of 31 Mbps, which allows the fuzzy film shot in questionable lighting conditions to reveal its full resolution on Blu-ray. The image has a low-contrast appearance that is soft and has moments of poor focus. The black levels have some minor exposure problems, revealing a bit of noise. This is not a transfer with remarkable shadow detail, or even average detail, but looks on par with other concert footage I have viewed from the period. The Woodstock documentary on Blu-ray has similar picture quality. Tiny white specks that look like flash bulbs do pepper the image from time to time. It rarely becomes a distraction though.
The picture quality is tolerable enough to enjoy the real benefit of this BD release, the uncompressed high-resolution stereo PCM track at 24-bit/96 kHz and the lossless 5.1 Dolby TrueHD soundtrack. Both are simply spellbinding and really the only way one should listen to this material. Mastering engineer Mark Wilder has done an outstanding job. The music shows absolutely no signs of limiting or compression, and reproduces without fault this live audio document. I wish most music releases were mastered this carefully. There is not a hint of thinness to the sound, and the fidelity is surprisingly great for a project of this nature. At times the songs approach the quality of the studio versions in dynamics and clarity. The producer did not attempt to cover up any deficits in the original recording though. A few microphone pops occur and occasionally instruments bleed into other channels. The audience is barely audible most of the time except during the musical interludes. With both SACD and DVD-Audio being commercially irrelevant for the major music labels, this disc is the best fidelity we will ever see this music presented in a commercial medium.
A lot of care and thought has gone into the packaging and presentation of this release. Included is a 16-page booklet that has wonderful photographs and top-notch liner notes by Sylvie Simmons. The booklet reproduces the same content of the booklet included in the CD/DVD release, but in a much larger format that is easier to read and enjoy. It really makes the numerous archival photographs easier to appreciate. It is rare to see such entertaining and insightful liner notes that significantly add to the product, but that is plainly the case here. Aside from a menu, there are no extras on the disc itself.
Currently this BD is an exclusive title at the Internet retailer Amazon. Fans of Leonard Cohen need to go out and pick this item up immediately. The concert is a window to a much younger looking-and-sounding Leonard Cohen. The sound quality alone is enough reason to buy it, for Cohen truly invests emotion and vigor into the performance that puts a new spin on songs for fans only familiar with the album versions. His vocal inflection adds a bit of emotional weariness to “The Partisan” for example that is simply not there on the album version. The only lackluster performance is “Famous Blue Raincoat”, where it sounds as if Cohen’s voice grows fatigued. The backing musicians all give splendid accompaniment to the music, though the camera rarely shows them aside from the two comely female singers at Cohen’s side.
Subtitles available:
Spanish
English
French
Dutch
Italian
German
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