There's a whole shitload of guys what I'd rather of bin than my bad self. Guys what had th' handsomeness to attract dames like steaming schnitzengrüben at a yenta tennis brunch. Like Leonard Cohen, who got more tail than a sumo thong. Dames dig bookish types what gaze into their cleavage like they was composin' a poem. Pecking at an old mechanical-type typewriter
before ripping out the paper and yeeting it into the trash bucket overflowing with previous failed attempts to capture some broad's fugitive beauty in the catcher's mitt of poesie. The scene plays out with a bottle of coarse red wine and urgent sexual intercourse, possibly on a nicely faded and stained floor rug, before a starlit stroll to a rustic taverna, more coarse red wine, slurred philosophy and a lot of cigarettes, passing out in each others' arms as the rising sun, having missed out on all the action, peers through the shutters.
Cohen's second album, Songs From A Room, bequeathed unto me the same get-the-fuck-out kick in the pants I got from On The Road a couple of years antecedently. His muse, Marianne Ihlen, in a towel, the typewriter, the exotic locale, all bespoke of a life that was rightfully mine. The man himself stares out inscrutably from a minimalist monochrome sleeve like some wanted poster of a gunslinger. This was hot on the heels of the White Album cover in clearing away the psychedelic debris of the sixties, suggesting a restart with a blank slate. But where the music on the White Album was an indulgent, sloppy mess, Cohen's made good the promise. Ten songs from a room, him and his guitar, singing to women. That's the secret; any man who's singing to women - not necessarily about women - is doing it right. They know.
Recorded, as many singer-songwriter second albums are, as a "correction" to an
over-produced first album,
Songs From A Room made the rest of his career a recapitulation. He could have stopped after the first two albums (both included in the loaddown). Not saying he
should have - that would be nuts - but almost uniquely in the field of popular minstrelsy he accomplished something original and beautiful and perfect right off the bat that distilled the spirit of poetry and love and freedom and all that great shit. Game changing. It can happen.
[Don't miss hyperlinks! - Ed.]
