You can't shake it (or break it) with your Motown

Listening to Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man recently, I realized it was the fulcrum on which his styles are balanced. When I started writing this, it was not an album I ever listened to much because, frankly, it's a mishmash. A mishmash with merit, but difficult to play all the way through. The more I play it, and I'm up to about 20 listens in the last week or so, the more it's grown on me.

Note that it's the only (pre-Dear Heather) studio album not represented on The Essential Leonard Cohen (which Cohen himself compiled.) Leading up to it we have mostly acoustic arrangements that are increasingly complex culminating in 1974's New Skin for the Old Ceremony which is musically akin to the music Dylan was creating at the time with the Rolling Thunder review.

Three years after the Old Ceremony, Cohen stepped into the studio with Phil Spector and off the map. It's not as unlistenable as I thought a few weeks ago, but rarely do two songs back to back actually fit together.

Of the subsequent albums, 1979's Recent Songs is almost as bare as his very first album. Various Positions and I'm Your Man are noteable for having human drummers but sounding preprogrammed. (Alas the only album of his I've not heard all the way through is The Future, which I think disproves my thesis somewhat, if "Closing Time", "Democracy", and the title track are representative.) However the last two albums certainly hold up my assertion, given the stripped nature of the production and the absence of almost anyone else in the studio. Ten New Songs is in fact a collection of demos that Cohen found good enough to release. It's beautiful and I love it, don't get me wrong, but he seems to have shied from actually working with more musicians than was absolutely essential. One could argue that this retreat evolved from the mania that comes through so well on the 1977 production. (An aside: It's quite interesting that just 3 years later, Spector saw no need to fuck up the Ramones' sound on Road to Ruin - it's a clean production, and a little slower then what the band had done on its previous albums, but it's not so crazily out of line.)

While the later work has much perfection to it, I still think that experimentation in the studio, and in fact letting go at all, has been absent since Ladie's Man. I'd argue that Spector's arrangements, mangling of perfectly good lyrical and musical ideas, and insistence on the singer filling several unnatural (to Cohen) roles - folk rock singer, sinatra-style crooner, 50s heartthrob and texas swinger to name 4 - none of which are Leonard himself as displayed on every other recording, seem to have put a fear of recording into the artist, and each album he's done since feels sterile in comparison to the ones that came before. There's also the problem that about half the songs here are produced and arranged to the hilt. Strings, horns, backup singers, layered over the original recording. (Beatles fans spent 35+ years bemoaning what Spector did to Let It Be for the same reasons.) The songs that escaped unscathed from all the bricks in Spector's Wall of Sound are "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On" (my fave song on that when I first heard it, and still) and "Fingertips". The Motown stylings of "Hard-On" have less in common with either Leonard's or Spector's other recorded output and sits well next to Dylan's "Rainy Day Women" (Y'know, everybody must get stoned) and Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance", in that it feels like everybody's in the same room at the same time all in the same groove.

"Fingertips" is wonderful in a Hank ("How lonely does it get?") Williams kind of way and sounds as though it were similarly fun to record. It is also a nice example of how well Cohen's songs can work in a country arrangement, and works well coming after "Hard-On", but halts jarringly before the closing number, the understated title track. In terms of execution, and arrangement, the song "Death of a Ladies' Man" stands with Cohen's best. The combination of piano/drums/voice suits the lyrics. It just doesn't stand with the rest of the album. Other Cohen albums flow with some grace, by design I'm guessing, but also as a by-product of the harmony of the songs' arrangements.

Back to the beginning, however, the album starts with "True Love Leaves No Traces", an effort on Spector's part, it seems, to cram Cohen's square tenor into a round Tony Bennet-style croon. Doesn't work.

"Iodine" is reverb-soaked pop with jazzy horns. Like a few songs on this album, it sounds as though the back-up singers are tuned to different instruments than those used in the song. In fact, everything on the song seems to have been laid down slightly out of sync, and the listener can feel the physical space between Cohen and everything else in the song.

"Paper Thin Hotel", already the weakest song on the album lyrically, suffers from an musical emphasis on the rather clunky rhyme scheme (soul/control, face/place, heart/apart). The almost spoken-word arrangement bares an oddly strong resemblance to the title track of Dear Heather, which, I must say, is not a point in either song's favor. Also, the treacly ooooh/aaaah backing vocal is not as difficult to listen to as the backing on "Iodine", but still detracts from the song.

Now, the more I listen to "Memories", the better its arrangement sounds, though it's also the closest song on the album to the original Philles recordings on which Spector's established his Wall of Sound style in the early 60s. In this song, Spector pushed Cohen towards an early 60s Frankie Avalon-style vocal, which he pulls off with some aplomb (his limited range notwithstanding). However the repeated mock-angel chorus before the line "your naked body" is only amusing once (maybe twice if repeated at the end), not four times. It just seemed tiresome.

Finally, "I Left a Woman Waiting" feels almost like something left off a Rod McKuen album. The arrangement is sappy in a late 60s AM radio sort of way, to match sappy Southern California couplets like "Free as running water / Free as you and me". Whatever Spector was doing with the arrangement, though, is subverted by the gorgeous line "Quick as dogs and truly dead were we", which jars the listener right out of the song.

Death of a Ladies' Man was Cohen's fifth studio album in ten years of recording. His next five studio albums would take 24 years. While his poetry has become more and more incisive in these later albums, it has never been as musically exhilarating as what came before.

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