One wish was all that was on offer from the fairy – the recession is having it’s effect in Fairyland too. My friend thought for a while and decided that even with loads of money and a flash car, any woman who’d be interested, would probably be a ‘gold-digger’ and that that would inevitably end in disaster.
‘I’d like to be irresistible to women’ he wished.
Now my friend is walking around……..
…. as a really beautiful pair of Jimmy Choos
Leonard Cohen. Dublin Friday 13th June 2008
If John Lennon and George Harrison came back from the dead, teamed up with Paul and Ringo and played a concert in a stadium with Elvis opening for them, it couldn’t, for me have held a candle to the Friday 13th gig in the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainam in Dublin.
When I first listened to ‘The Rock Machine Turns You On’ and heard Cohen sing, ‘All the Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone…..’, I was hooked. I was sixteen and wanted to sing like that or even just sing. I knew nothing about Cohen – information was much harder to come by when there was no Internet.
A couple of years later I’d bought a couple of his albums, a songbook and could play Suzanne, even the in between verses guitar bits, I could figure out. The chord boxes in the songbook would help me figure out fsharp minor and other chords I needed to add to my usual 3 chord trick songs and – while not actually sounding like Leonard, I was happy enough with my own solitary sound, when playing his songs – more so than when trying to create a reasonable rendition of say, Satisfaction or any of the groups’ song from around that time. I was singing songs I didn’t understand the meaning of but I did know they meant something more than ‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah etc.’
Many years later, I turned to these songs in times of confusion and found a lot of answers in his writing – sometimes to questions I wasn’t even asking. I met him in a dream – sitting in his car waiting for ‘Mrs. Cohen’ to finish the supermarket shop and as we were both killing time, even felt free to ask him the burning question about ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’*
He did play in Ireland, at least once before – it passed me by as a was a full-time student running my business in my spare time to support my three children and pay the rent so concerts were out of the question and I didn’t even want to know what gigs I was missing, never mind getting to go to them.
When I heard he was playing in Dublin this year, I didn’t do anything about booking as somewhere in my mind, the guy meant so much to me that he could only disappoint - something about meeting your heroes. I’d buy some records instead.
In the most unlikely circumstance, I was told, on Thursday that there was a possibility of a spare ticket being available for the Friday concert and was asked if I would go. On Friday it was confirmed and so I did.
Stadium gigs usually leave me feeling a bit unfulfilled – the crowd who want to be there so they can say they were at the gig of the year, can make it almost impossible to enjoy the music. This was different. From the minute Leonard Cohen walked on to the stage, this was a special night. While the stage itself was a speck in the distance, the large screen brought an intimacy I’ve never experienced – compliments to the camera crew on an excellent job. On stage, nothing was rushed or even, music aside, seemed rehearsed. It was as if Leonard Cohen had come to see us. His happiness radiated form every fibre of him. His appreciation of the audience, of his musicians, singers, the beautiful location and even the moon was just about matched by the ‘band’s’ obvious love and respect for this man – a legend but also very much just a man. It was as if everything was awe-inspiring and everyone was beautifully in awe. Respect abounded. Cohen took his hat off – literally – to the individual members of the band and gave the stage to each for their solo contributions and then just came right back in as ‘one of the guys’ when it was his turn.
I realize I’m doing a poor job at saying what I wanted to say and if, as I planned to, I’d written this right after the gig I might have been able to express much better all that I felt but, as usual, life got in the way and so ‘rapture light’ is the best I can do.
When I began songwriting, asked about my influences, the four people I always mentioned were Leonard Cohen, John Prine, John Irving and Guy Clark. As of last Friday I’ve seen them all - live.
*I just had to know if it was about the singer Johnny Ray. I don’t know what part of my sub consciousness that came from but the dream features in track 8 on my ‘Losers & Sinners’ album. I’ll put it on my Myspace page soon.
I was baby-sitting my grand-daughter last night. She's 8 and is very bright. She's looking forward to going to Electric Picnic in September and, as soon as I arrived, quizzed me on which singers I knew/had met. The fact that Lisa Hannigan was in there impressed her no end. She's very clued in and a very busy little lady too.I bought a newspaper yesterday. Not that that’s earth shattering news but I usually only buy a Sunday paper – lots of supplements – just bring the wheelbarrow down to the shop and wheel it home and I’ve enough doom and gloom to do me for the rest of the week plus the latest in films, what’s on and what kind of handbag will go with my shoes.
Times are hard. The country’s a bit more bollixed than most of the rest of the world. Pay cuts, job losses ‘an bord snip’ (Monty Python wouldn’t have come up with a better ministry), offering ‘haircuts’ and hair shirts to all but those who got us here in the first place.
I’ve bitched with the guys I work with about how we have to work harder for less and then the taxman takes more etc., etc.
My job is OK. I probably work less than 30 hours a week. I have time to walk my dog, write the occasional song and even knock off early sometimes to go and play a gig. I get a bit less than I used to and – sometimes have to talk more rubbish to close sales but hey, everything depends on how you look at it.
I’ve been passing through the same set of traffic lights, close to where I live, 3-5 days a week for about 4 months now. I’ve been vaguely aware of a guy walking from the stop light down past the waiting cars and selling the Evening Herald. More recently I’ve taken a bit more notice. This guy has a quiet dignity about him, is not at all pushy and just walks up and down as the lights change and will approach a car only if the driver beckons.
A couple of days ago, I paid a bit more attention. There was a bit more traffic than usual and I only moved a little at every light change. I didn’t see anybody buy a paper and when the guy was passing my car, I asked him if he actually sold many. I then realized he was eastern European – probably Polish and he had a bit of difficultly understanding me. When he realized what I was asking, he told me maybe 60, maybe 70 some days. He told me that he got 30c out of every sale.
That’s not a lot and it’s quite a lot of work I said. ‘Yes.’, he said, ‘but – is work’
I like my job.
I was on a train last week and the guy beside me opened up a newspaper, went straight to the puzzles page and began to do the Sudoku. I don’t know about you but if nothing much is making sense in a day, solving a couple of sudoku squares, for me at least, seems to restore an equilibrium. I didn’t have a paper. I watched.
Interestingly he quickly filled in the numbers across the top line of the ‘easy’, then moved to the top line of the ‘medium’ and then straight to the top line of the ‘difficult’. He filled them in from left to right and then moved down to the second line, filled in every number in turn and so on to the third, until he’d finished the three puzzles and then he began the crossword.
I could see that all the lines and small squares on the grid contained the numbers 1-9 and everything looked correct to me. It took him less than five minutes. It took him less than that to do the crossword and that was a cryptic one.
Do you talk to strangers on the train? I did. I told him that I’d never seen anyone that fast at sudoku before and that I rarely ever finish a cryptic crossword. He said it was easy and then, sheepishly told me that he cheated. How? He made me promise not to tell anyone – he didn’t make me promise not to blog it though – and I agreed.
Everyday, he told me, he’d buy a paper at the station and while waiting for the train, pretend to be reading it. As the train arrived he’d put it in his bag and when he was sitting down take it out to do the puzzles. I still didn’t get it and must have looked confused because he then tapped his pen on the top margin of the paper and I saw that it was in fact, the previous day’s.
So you buy the paper and memorize the solutions while you’re waiting for the train? He nodded. ‘You’re Bonkers!’ I said.
He nodded and sang, ‘If I could be anyone I wanted…..’
It would have been churlish not to join in.
