STATE OF GRACE
IT’S the last weekend of the summer of 1970 and Leonard Cohen arrives in England leading an army. On the face of it, he’s at an all-time high. Songs From A Room, his austere second album, released in April 1969, spent over a month in the higher reaches of the UK Top 10 – only held off the top spot by The Seekers and The Moody Blues. His songs have become unlikely modern standards, covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Fairport Convention. He’s finally making money, too. After a decade scuffling around Europe, living on publishing advances and cadging from friends, he’s now picking up tabs and worrying about real estate.
“I was singing in folk clubs at the time, and I already had two or three of Leonard’s songs in my repertoire,” remembers Jennifer Warnes, an early adopter of Cohen. “‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’ was certainly in there, ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong’. His songs had layers of meaning. I was a fan of Brel and Charles Aznavour and Kurt Weill, European art songs, and Leonard seemed to fit right in. It had a little more teeth than the American folk music.”
“HE DID THE DAMNEDEST THING… HE CHARMED THE BEAST”
KRIS KRISTOFFERSON
Finally cajoled into touring by Columbia Records, Cohen had called on the producer of Songs From A Room, the irrepressible Texan maverick Bob Johnston, to play keyboards and round up a band, including Ron Cornelius on guitar and Charlie Daniels on fiddle, to tour the great capitals of Europe.
Johnston saw the tour as a chance to get out of the studio and let his Lone Star spirit out for a canter. Quite literally. Booked to appear in Aix-en-Provence, but finding the road to the festival blocked by a convoy of French hippies, Johnston commandeered a stable of horses for the band to ride through the Provençal fields. Astride a white stallion, dressed in a khaki safari suit and brandishing a whip, Cohen took to the stage and proceeded to lecture the audience, in French, about the competing claims of art and revolution. That night Cohen was the 1970 counterculture world spirit on horseback, fulfilling every Napoleonic dream that the small, studious, ambitious Jewish boy from Westmount, Montreal, had ever had.
But at what cost? On the evening of Friday, August 28, the Army – as Johnston had named the band after the triumph in France – pulled up outside a psychiatric institution in the heart of English commuterland. Henderson Hospital had been founded in 1947 as a trauma unit for shellshocked soldiers struggling to reintegrate back into civilian life after the end of World War II. By 1970, it had become a “democratic therapeutic community”, fostering a communal approach to helping “outsiders and misfits” who had been failed by conventional approaches to mental distress. A member of the community’s writers group, known only as John, took it upon himself to invite Leonard Cohen to play at the hospital, and seeing an opportunity to warm up for the Isle Of Wight Festival, Cohen graciously accepted.
Cohen felt right at home in Henderson. Playing for over an hour in an attic room in the tower of the hospital, before 50 or so residents and staff, he sounded positively happy. “I really wanted to say that this is the audience we have been looking for,’ he enthused at the end of this set. “I never felt so good before playing before people.”
The show was taped by charge nurse Ian Milne, and the recording now survives in the Planned Environment Therapy
