Paul says: Here's a really interesting concert that it a "must have" for any Leonard Cohen fan. It's a professionally recorded yet unreleased concert from very early in his career. It also was an extremely unusual and memorable concert, for reasons I'll explain below.Before I describe the events of this concert, let me explain this recording. In 1972, Cohen did a concert tour of Europe. It was only his second concert tour, after he did one in 1970. Most of the shows were professionally recorded at the time, in order to create a live album. That album, "Live Songs," was released in 1973. In 2022, the all recorded concerts were released, but only in a "blink and you miss it" kind of way. In many European countries, there's a law that if a recording isn't released within 50 years of it being created, the copyright rights are lost. So these concerts probably released for an hour or less in the middle of the night on some obscure platform, as was the case with other similar releases. These releases are so rare that very, very few people have them to this day. I was lucky that I was eventually able to trade for them.
There's one annoying problem with these concerts, however. All that the record company had to post to keep the copyrights was the music, and they did the bare minimum. So the audience quickly fades out a second or two after the songs stop, and there's no banter between songs whatsoever. Luckily, though, this concert is kind of an exception, for two reasons. One is that a soundboard bootleg of about 43 minutes of this concert has existed for many years, and that includes all the applause and banter.
The other reason is that a documentary movie was made of Cohen's 1972 tour, called "Bird on a Wire." That movie featured a lot of footage from this concert, as well as one he performed in Jerusalem a day later. That's because with Cohen being Jewish, having him perform concerts in Israel was a big deal for the public and for him personally. So I was able to use audio from the movie to fill in more of the banter. I still am missing the banter before many songs, but we have to make do with what we've got.
Because this was a pivotal concert in Cohen's music career, we luckily have a good account of it in a biography of him, "I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen," written by Sylvie Simmons. I'm going to quote it extensively here:
"He was looking forward to playing Israel. He was terrified of playing Israel. ... The first show, at the Yad Eliyahu Arena, was on the same day that Leonard and the band flew into Tel Aviv. Airport security was slow and grim, guns everywhere, but they arrived at the venue in good time. When they came out onstage though, the floor was completely empty. The audience was packed into the stands around the edges, like they were there to see an invisible basketball game. Security had been told to keep everyone off the floor, which had been newly varnished. When Leonard, disturbed by the distance between them, invited the audience to come down, they were set upon by armed guards in orange boiler suits. 'They freaked out and started clubbing everybody, beating kids up,' [tour manager Bill] Donovan remembers. 'Leonard jumped off the stage into the crowd and a guy ran onstage and grabbed [band member] Ron's guitar. I knocked the guy offstage and then somebody hit me from behind and knocked me out. It ended up as sort of a riot.'" [Band member] Peter Marshall says, 'I was hiding behind my string bass and there was some guy raising a chair, like it was a movie, and he's going to hit me in the face, but somebody grabbed the chair from behind.
"The band reconvened backstage. [Backing vocalist] Jennifer Warnes said she was scared. Leonard wondered aloud, 'Maybe I pushed too hard.' Then he led everyone back onstage. 'I know you're trying to do your job, but you don't have to do it with your fists,' he told the guards, then dedicated a song to them. He urged the audience to sit down and enjoy the concert. 'Eventually,' says Marshall, 'he got everybody to calm down, and he completed that show.' As soon as it was done, they dashed out of the hall and into the tour bus."
Only two shows in Israel were planned, to end the tour. The second and last one, in Jerusalem the next night, was even stranger. At first, the concert started okay. According to the biography quoted above, "The songs sounded beautiful as he sang, and the band seemed to be wired into his nervous system. But Leonard felt that it was not good enough, that we was letting down this precious audience and these precious songs. He tried to explain this to them, but his explanation kept getting more and more complex.'"
Eventually, he gave up, and told the audience, "We're going to leave the stage now and try to profoundly mediate in the dressing room to try to get ourselves back into shape and if we can manage. We'll be back." But backstage, Cohen was having an emotional meltdown. He felt he couldn't go back on stage. However, the audience refused to leave, and sang songs to encourage him to come back. Apparently, Cohen took some L.S.D., and did some rituals to help calm down, such as shaving his face, and eventually managed to return to the stage and finish the concert.
You don't just have to read about this, because both concerts are shown quite extensively in the documentary movie I mentioned above, "Bird on a Wire." When it was finished in 1974, Cohen didn't like it, and the BBC, which had paid for it, didn't like it either. So it got only a very limited viewing in a few places, and then was pretty much forgotten. However, the footage was rediscovered decades later, and painstakingly restored. The movie was rereleased in 2012, and shown it some theaters. You can now watch it on DVD. It shows the battles with security guards in the Tel Aviv concert, the troubles in the Jerusalem concert, and much more. Here's a Wikipedia entry about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen:_Bird_on_a_Wire
A few years ago, I posted a Cohen album here I called "Live 1972." It compiled songs from different concerts during the 1972 tour, the relatively few that were available with soundboard level quality. More than half of it was that 43 minute long section from this concert. I have removed that link now, in favor of this album.
In 2024, an album was released called "The Bird on the Wire Concerts." It contains songs from the 1972 tour, apparently from the concerts in Stockholm, Paris, Tel Aviv, and London. But it's very rare and I haven't been able to find a copy. (It seems to only be available as part of a box set with the DVD of the movie.) I also don't know which songs on it are from which venue. But it contains "We Shall Not Be Moved," which I would guess is from this concert. If anyone has it and knows more about it, please let us know. I'd be especially curious to find out if it contains any more banter that I don't have here.
This album is an hour and 30 minutes long.
01 Passing Through [Edit]
02 So Long, Marianne
03 Bird on the Wire
04 Independence Day [Improvised Song]
05 Lady Midnight
06 The Stranger Song
07 I Need Ya to Sing My Song [Improvised Song]
08 You Know Who I Am
09 Famous Blue Raincoat
10 Instrumental
11 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye
12 talk
13 Song for the Machines [Improvised Song]
14 talk
15 Sisters of Mercy
16 Chelsea Hotel No. 1
17 Avalanche
18 talk
19 Suzanne
20 talk
21 We Shall Not Be Moved
22 talk
