“Poetry Crept Through Everything”

John Cale on Cohen’s humour and his ability to cross the lines of mortality.

He was a gentle soul who affected an awful lot of people, but he was a poet first. Poetry crept through everything. He came to see the Velvets in ’67? I didn’t know that. I first ran into him in London and later I bumped into him in a Starbucks in LA. I really wanted to ask him about Zen and how he reconciled it with his Judaism. He always had this way of crossing back and forth between the lines of mortality. He could talk one minute about mysticism, and the next minute there would be a strong dose of reality. It’s a unique style. I saw him play at the Beacon Theatre in New York [1988]. He was playing with a full band, backing singers, and of all the songs Hallelujah stuck out for me and I went looking for it. Then Les Inrockuptibles were putting together this tribute record [I’m Your Fan, 1991] and this song came to mind. So I called him up to ask him for the lyrics. He sent me 15 verses – practically broke my fax machine! I looked at them and they had predominantly religious references – he sings about Yahweh, which didn’t really ring for me. I don’t have any religion myself that you’d notice, except maybe Gareth Bale. So I told him, “Look, I’m not comfortable with these”, and he said, “Do whatever you want with them.” So of the verses he sent me, I picked the cheeky ones. I always thought the humour in them was great. “All I ever learned from love / Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you”: that’s competitive language, mate! The way he writes about sex is always entertaining, always makes me smile. It’s a rich song, because I can pick any number of different personas through which to sing it – however I’m feeling at that particular time. On the Fragments Of A Rainy Season tour, the versions I did live were all a little different, and I benefited from that. It made me feel like there was a different thing waiting for me every night that I took it on. My version on Shrek 2 I suppose made a difference to how the song was disseminated. When I first bumped into him in LA the topic of Hallelujah came up, and he said, “Yeah, it’s your fault…” Leonard always set a high standard. When I was listening to [New York ‘free radio’ pioneer] Bob Fass on WBAI, he was playing Leonard every night practically. And it became kind of an obligation to write that honestly, because that’s what Leonard was doing. You definitely felt the pressure, that here was a guy who was doing something very important. What was unique about him? He could talk about something secret without making it secret, and at the same time not divulging it. Some trick.