lenny

[david]

Here's what I got last night:


Place des Arts, Montreal
Monday June 23 2008

(First Set)
Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye
Take This Waltz

(Second Set)
Tower Of Song
Avalance (Tour Debut!)
Suzanne
The Gypsy's Wife
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
Democracy
I'm Your Man
Thousand Kisses Deep (recital)
Anthem

(Encores)
So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Sisters Of Mercy
If It Be Your Will
Closing Time
Famous Blue Raincoat
I Tried To Leave You
Whither Thou Goest?


Including intermission, it went on for 3 1/2 hours, longer than some Springsteen shows I've been to. For the encores, he just stayed on and on, pulling out one song after another. A helluva show.

[Cat Stevens]

Wow........ wow.

[manho]

ornella vanoni, la famosa volpe azzurra (translated by fabrizio de andré):
www.sendspace.com/file/z5kdai

Le quattro di sera di fine dicembre
Ti scrivo e non so se ci servirá a niente
Milano é un po' fredda ma qui vivo bene
Si fa musica all'"Angolo" quasi tutte le sere
Mi dicono stai arredando la tua piccola casa
In qualche deserto
E che per il momento stai vivendo di poco
O soltanto di quello
Sì, e Lucio, sai
Parla ogni tanto di te
Di quella notte in cui tu
Gli hai detto che eri sincera ...
Sei mai stata sincera?

L'ultima volta ti ho vista invecchiata
Con la tua volpe azzurra famosa e sciupata
Lì alla stazione a contare mille treni
E tornartene a casa come Lili Marléne
Hai trattato il mio uomo come un fiocco di neve
Che si scioglie da sé
E un attimo dopo non era più l'uomo
Né per te né per me
E ti vedo lì con una rosa tra i denti
Un trucco nuovo per nuovi clienti
Ora Lucio si é svegliato
Anche lui ti saluta ...

Che cosa altro dirti, sorella assassina
Che cosa altro scriverti adesso non so
Se non che mi manchi se non che ci manchi
E certo alla fine ti perdonerò
E se tornerai da 'ste parti
Per lui o per noi
Troverai una rivale che dorme
E il suo uomo, se vuoi

E grazie per la noia che gli hai tolto dagli occhi
Io mi c'ero abituata e così
Non mi ero neppure provata
E Lucio, sai
Parla ogni tanto di te
Di quella volta che tu
Gli hai fatto fa notte più bella
Ti saluto, tua

Ornella

[dino]

la famosa volpe azzurra?? hehe

[manho]

The high priest of minimalism

Simon Schama
Saturday June 28, 2008
Guardian

Tea and ... what? Toast? Sympathy? No, oranges. From the start Leonard Cohen was out to surprise by cunning. No wonder, then, that he had to struggle for attention in the golden age of screamers. Janis's ecstatic rasp, Hendrix's maddened guitar, Lennon's glottal roar, even Dylan's adenoidal faux-country all made sounds through which their lyrical inventions had to fight for air, and if not quite up to snuff, those words could hide behind the wall of noise. But Cohen's minimalist drone was the drowsy couch on which his poetry lay, fully exposed, with nowhere else to go.

In the 60s, his lyrics grabbed attention through teasingly incongruous unions: "Like a worm on a hook / Like a knight from some old-fashioned book". For all I know, Suzanne did feed Leonard tea and oranges, but it was the coupling of the prosaic and the exotic (oranges, as Cohen well knows, did indeed come originally "all the way from China"), the yoking together of serenity and sharpness, that makes the line jump from the chant. Suzanne is, after all, "half crazy" so when she takes "you down to her place near the river" it may not be entirely for a picnic. On the other hand, "that's why you want to be there". OK, then, peel me an orange.

More than many great singer-songwriters of his generation (Dylan excepted), Cohen makes no bones about reaching for the heavy literary hitters for inspiration. Lorca gave him the spooky, beautifully sinister Take This Waltz - although Cohen's free translation of the Spanish arguably makes a more unsettlingly powerful poem than the original - "a forest of dried pigeons" (Lorca) becomes "there's a tree where the doves go to die" (Cohen); "take this waltz with its closed mouth" (Lorca) turns to "take this waltz with the clamp on its jaw" (Cohen).

When Cohen does invoke the canon it's usually with a shrewd knowledge of how it's been used and abused through the generations. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Sail On, O Ship of State, the anthem on which Cohen's Democracy builds to the marching beat of a snare drum, was written in 1850 as fears for the endurance of the Union were grave. After the civil war, the poem, set to music for choral performance, accompanied routine displays of patriotic chest-beating. But the tone of Cohen's Democracy could scarcely be less rah-rah; it's more a scalding spit in the eye. "It's comin' ... from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay ... From the homicidal bitchin' / That goes down in every kitchen ... From the wells of disappointment / Where women kneel to pray." Compared to the freakshow ferocity that dominates The Future, in which Cohen turns porno-totalitarian: "Give me absolute control / Over ev'ry living soul"; "Give me crack and anal sex / Take the only tree that's left / And stuff it up the hole in your culture". Democracy is, if not exactly warm and cuddly, at least a qualified redemption: "I love the country but I can't stand the scene". The starchy Longfellow anthem gets made over, in the election year of 1992, into a disabused song of possibility.

For a while, projecting his own bouts of depressive melancholy on to the state of things, Cohen specialised in acid-burn nihilistic jeremiads, demonic impersonations of the forces of darkness, growled at the mic. The Book of Revelation took over from New Testament sweetness, which came as a relief to those of us who had had enough of his gentle Jesus, the kind that shows up at music festivals in knee-hole jeans smilingly beatifically, ready for dope and three days of love. Cohen's gospel people stalk through contemporary streets and bedrooms, so the card dealer of The Stranger Song turns out to be: "Just some Joseph looking for a manger". But every so often the more adamant Yahweh of the Old Testament shows up, bringing the year's transgressions to a mighty reckoning. A cohen is, after all, a high priest.

As seriously as he takes this persona of Satan deploring sin, it's the more inward meditations on his favourite subject - "L. Cohen" (as he styles himself at the end of Famous Blue Raincoat) - that have always drawn from him the most intensely felt and precisely visualised writing, and have challenged his melodic composition to go beyond minimalist dirge to match the force of the poetry.

Cohen's subjects in this vein of mutilated romanticism have been the usual post-Renaissance suspects: valedictions, loss and remorse, emotional cruelty (inflicted and received), the inseparability of tenderness and pain. Sometimes images, often of wistfully recollected visions - "Your hair on the pillow like a sleepy golden storm", in Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye - are allowed to hang in the song for the sheer metaphorical hell of it. They work so seductively they disarm the carping lit-crit who might pause to wonder if storms, unlike the lover, can actually ever be "sleepy"?

If there's just a touch too much of happy self-regard about some of those early ballads, from the mid 70s on, the onset of years Cohen saw in his musical mirror encouraged him to use imagery as building blocks in beautifully constructed, authentically poetic narratives. In the sad love triangle of Famous Blue Raincoat, Cohen transfers a garment he wore to fraying point to "my brother, my killer", who had run off with his wife, and had given her just "a flake of your life / And when she came back she was nobody's wife". In the strongest songs of this period, Cohen makes sure to skid away from self pity - "Well, my friends are gone / And my hair is gray / I ache in the places where I used to play" - into something more akin to rueful gratitude: "I'm just paying my rent every day / In the Tower of Song."

So perhaps it's not surprising that Hallelujah, the song in which music making and love making wrestle with each other, is the one most covered by other singers, and without draining the power of the piece into empty rhapsody. But to get the heartache you want from Cohen - and you know you do - you need to hear the old(ish) baffled, battle-scarred Cohen himself sing "The minor fall, the major lift", his voice falling for the forbidden Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof, where "Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you". But nothing works out as planned. The overthrow happens as the music soars, the omnipotent sovereign-psalmist is bound and shorn, and it's from that moment, when the composing-lover is pierced to the quick, that music gets born. Hallelujah.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[manho]

"(oranges, as Cohen well knows, did indeed come originally "all the way from China")"

but then again, so did tea.

[Cat Stevens]

interesting entry in dino's blog today:

gamblin--ramblin.blogspot.com/

thanx for the review, man.

[Cat Stevens]

lenny's coming over in september:

www.blic.rs/culture.php?id=4359

[cripes]

Good for you.

I wish the fucker moved me. I think he's a really cool guy.

I got my son and his wife good seats for his show in Oakland (cuz his wife wanted them). She cried...my son was glad he saw laughing Len....all hail the Lenny tour. Here's hoping he'll come visit manho.


So.....um.....whussup with the new Yusef?.....you can tell us.....we won't tell anybody....so...is it like, good? Does it move you?....does it embarrass you? I really want to know.

My brother was a big Cat fan when we were kids. Cat Stevens was my brother's guy. I was the older brother so I owned all the cool groups. I actually really liked the 'Foreigner Suite' back in the day. I read some of the interview with him in the new Mojo....he seems like a douche.

[Cat Stevens]

Like I said before - Cat the tillerman & this Yusuf 'blame it on the Serbs' character are two completely different personas to me. I wish him all the best tho.

So... "whussup with the new Yusef" and does it really move me? I wouldn't know.

I must admit that I haven't listened anything from his two 'comeback' albums (except for the promo video he made for one song), although someone actually sent me the whole album (first comeback one).

Last I've heard about him is that he was suing Coldplay for plagiarising your fav Cat number.

www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/05/coldplay-yusuf-islam

I think dino is more familiar with the new secular Yusuf, especially since (may I mention this, dino?) our very own Italian will be interviewing the man himself on the 17th of may.

[manho]

plagiarised by coldplay? that has to be about the most embarrassing thing that could happen to a songwriter.

[dino]

i prefer an other cup, the 2006 come back - the new one sounds plain boring -

that other one was kind of fun, some pop, some celtic/arabian mix, some of this and some of that

this one is pretentious, he want to be the old cat stevens and who needs cat stevens these days

yeah, coldplay stole the foreigner suite idea

coldplay steals everything, not even boby is like them

[digit]

I read some of the interview with him in the new Mojo

i just read the title "after years of bla bla bla........now he has found his voice" and said fuck right off you cunt

[dino]

Yusuf, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, returned to the American stage for the first time in over 30 years when he performed at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles on Monday night (May 11th).

Selections from his new album included 'All Kinds Of Love','Welcome Home' and 'Thinking 'Bout You' and were as warmly received as long-time favourites 'Wild World', 'Where Do The Children Play' and 'Father And Son'.

Audience members included Celtic soul legend Van Morrison, actor Colin Farrell and film producer Steve Bing.

Click here to read Rolling Stone's report of the concert and here for USA Today's coverage.

Though no further U.S. concerts are scheduled, Yusuf is confirmed to appear on the following TV shows this week:

Wednesday 13th - Jay Leno (NBC, 11.34pm EST)
Thursday 14th - The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 11.30pm EST)
Friday 15th - Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (NBC, 12.35am EST)
Friday 15th - Charlie Rose (PBS, 11pm EST)

[Cat Stevens]

Thanks for the info.

[Some king]

Supposed to go see Cohen in a week or two...gotta say, I'm not even a little bit excited. Pretty comfortable saying I'll be asleep in my comfy, comfy chair at the National Arts Centre after no more than 12 songs. Hopefully I make it through hallelujah and tower of song.

[Cat Stevens]

"2 more weeks to lenny show, lenny show, lenny show..."

in the meantime - great news:

www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16895

finally, finally, finally!

[Cat Stevens]

Len da man in Beograd --

[dino]

liked it?

[Cat Stevens]

Hi dino, sorry for the late reply (hard disk broke down, ugh).

It was great! Epochal! Monumental! Over 3 hours...


Belgrade, 02.09.2009.

First Set (20:40)

Dance Me To The End Of Love
The Future
Ain't No Cure For Love
Bird On The Wire
Everybody Knows
In My Secret Life
Who By Fire
Lover Lover Lover
Waiting For The Miracle
Anthem (21:50)

Second Set (22:10)

Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Sisters Of Mercy
The Gypsy's Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I'm Your Man
Take This Waltz (23:10)

Encores

So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
---------------------------
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye
Closing Time
---------------------------
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest (23:55)