Bird on a Wire: Going for a Song.

At midday on 23rd January 2011 legendary rock and roll manager and lawyer Steven Machat will put the 294 reels of original raw footage of the epic Leonard Cohen film ‘Bird on a Wire’ up for sale to Cohen fans and investors.

Steven Machat has negotiated business deals for the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, ELO, Snoop Dogg and Peter Gabriel in his stellar career but this sale represents something deeply personal.

Machat explains ‘,I am selling the Leonard Cohen Bird On A Wire movie reels, as I believe the fans should own them.

The reels were returned to me by Cohen when he and I settled our differences that existed when he and my Dad's secretary left our offices with all the books and records concerning the Machat and Machat past involvement with Leonard Cohen.

To get the film back, I gave up substantial claims of his sale of copyrights that he did not solely own and had no right selling without contact with Machat and Machat. Upon selling the rights, he also kept all the proceeds.

I got the film back. The same reels Cohen told the world was lost when asked. And many have asked over the years. Leonard offered me this film as he knew it was mine as well as he knew he was wrong in not paying Machat and Machat for our percentage owed for the copyright sale. My specific purpose for releasing the film was to give my Dad back his legacy.

Dad was Cohen’s lawyer, manager and protector for twenty years, which ended when Dad died. Dad financed this film for he saw that Cohen was a worthy artist and he knew this film would one day be a historic record of the young Cohen.

When Cohen and I settled and he gave me back what was mine, he neglected to give me the edited version of the film my father paid for. He simply gave me the reels of raw footage.

He never thought I could redo the film. But I loved my father and would not let Cohen’s ruse stop me. I found the original Director, Tony Palmer who found the original soundtrack for Bird On A Wire in his archives. With this soundtrack and absolute perseverance, the artistic integrity of the film was put back together and commercially released. This remake cost in excess of 100,000 dollars.

I did this solely for Dad and the legacy that Cohen stole.’

The reels of film footage are in individual cans and each one has a Certificate of Authentication signed by Tony Palmer and Steven Machat. Each is different: some cans contain just audio or picture footage and some both (intended to be played together). Finally some contain trims of film.

Included amongst the footage there are home movies of Leonard Cohen and his family – including footage of the artist as a young boy, playing with his parents.

The cost of each roll containing picture footage and trim is £1000 and they will go on sale for one month through www.leonardcohencafe.co.uk.

Once a collector chooses to make a purchase they will be entered into a lottery draw to decide which of the cans they will be allocated. 

Some of the rolls are extremely rare and have been described as ‘a bootlegger’s dream’ as they include original sound recordings of Cohen’s concerts in Jerusalem, Stockholm, Dublin, Paris and at the Royal Albert Hall. These rolls can be purchased independently from www.leonardcohencafe.co.uk.

-ends-

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of this new release, just the cd and not the dvd.   This is the first time I have listened to this concert, although I have a video of the concert somewhere in the office.   What a great concert that must have been, surely the greatest rock concert of all time.   Look at some of the all-time greats who performed:

Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Free, Donovan, Moody Blues, Joni Mitchell, ELP, Kris Kristofferson, Family, Joan Baez, Miles Davis and the list goes on and on...and on.   It reads like a list of the greatest artists ever.

Leonard Cohen, on this cd, is at his best.   His voice is great now but, when you hear this cd, you may change your mind.    I haven't taken this cd off the stereo since I got this; my wife and kids are threatening to leave me.

"You've won me
You've won me,
My Lord..."

The long awaited biography of Leonard Cohen is due out on 2 Nov 2009, and the good news is that the Leonard Cohen Cafe has been promised a small number pre-launch.   This book should prove very popular, especially as Xmas approaches.   Copies available for reservation in the shop.

Well, I hope I never have to go through that again for a long time.   The news from the Cohen camp is:

Famous artist and writer Phil Fountain has lindly agreed to let us share his wonderful review of one of Leonard's concerts with you ( http://anewscafe.com )

"Leonard Cohen
The Paramount Theatre
April 13, 2009

Now, in Vienna there are ten pretty women
There’s a shoulder where
Death comes to cry
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows
There’s a tree where the doves love to die

It can be argued that artists, at least those whose work survives the bonfires of the mass-marketplace’s cruel idiocracy, do not really teach anyone much of anything. They don’t discover cures for our ailments or truly heal our all-too-fragile human “condition.” It seems those poets, painters, singers, filmmakers, musicians and playwrights we cherish most are the ones who simply remind of us of what we already know. They tell us our story in our own words, as interpreted by their muse, to our own tunes, in the pages of a book we swear we must have written ourselves. There is a connection made, a bridge transcended, a heart entered … our own … the one we recognize in song. The one we share with the world, meaning to or not.

Each and every one of us has had our heart broken. And, in another moment, has experienced sublime joy. We have all been lonely, happy, angry and wistful. Yet there are those among us who sometimes, with nothing more than a few stanzas of prose or a few well-chosen guitar chords, can awaken the often deeply buried diamond of our own brilliant lives and place it, lovingly, into our plush theater seat for us to pause, and gaze into — and remember to laugh, and cry, and cry, and laugh about it all again.

One such artist, who began his career as the young poet prodigy, the heir to Byron, the Canadian Lorca, and who later became the thin Zen rabbi elder in Armani — who has, for the past 40-plus years, sung my songs, written my poems and lit the candles in every cathedral that housed my prayers, just for me, and a million others like me who are afflicted by the same life and loves that forces him, by some will not altogether his own, to be our poet. He is Leonard Cohen, and no artist anywhere has developed a more personal relationship with his audience. If you are a Leonard Cohen fan you are a Cohen fan completely. He’s touched your perfect body with his songs, hasn’t he?

He has been many things in his life. He’s written novels, he’s been poetry’s enfant terrible, he’s been portrayed as a great ladies’ man and he’s been a pop star. He’s been a father, a mixologist, a Zen monk, and a licensed (by San Bernardino County) food preparer and kitchen worker. He’s been on stage in front of thousands and he’s disappeared for years to embrace solitude. He’s a megastar in Europe and a beloved “fringe folkie” in America. In his native Canada, he is a national treasure. On Monday night, April 13, on a stage in Oakland, he was all these things. He was able to hold and captivate an audience for nearly four hours without once appearing that he would rather be anywhere other than with us. He seemed humbled, and quite taken aback, by the ferocity of the ovations, though they occur at every stop he makes on the tour.

He has sat, upright and silent, for hours upon hours, in rigid lotus pose (a posture not designed for Jewish singers in their ’60s) the minutes coming and going with each breath atop a tall slab of granite and scrub brush in the San Gabriel Mountains which is called Mount Baldy by the rugged Rinzai monks with whom he shared his barracks for several years in the ’90s. He, along with these hardened Buddhist Marines, marched in whispered circles around piled stones in a monastery courtyard carrying a grand piano on their backs, bent under the weight, simply for our shared love of Mozart. Our monks , and our artists, do the heavy lifting for us. This, for their gift they share so freely, is why we bless them with our thoughtfully generous alms. Alms that run in the $300-a-seat realm for these Oakland shows where the monk known as Jikan, and the pop star known as Leonard Cohen, plies his trade in front of an adoring throng, kindred hearts who stand with wild applause at least a dozen times throughout the evening.

He, our bodhisattva with his cocked and bent fedora which he removes and holds over his heart with each wave of applause, and wearing an impeccable gray and black (ordained Zen monk colors, naturally) pinstriped rebbe gangster suit, has been the strong and handsome lover, riding a white horse years ago onto an open stage to sing for a thousand women who willingly sleep with him completely, if only until the final bow and the curtain closes. He has also, just as naturally, been the humble hermit, offering his songs as if they were cups of tea poured at a quiet table for dear friends that he has only just met (though you know he’s known you forever).

He is now, on this stage, mostly your kind grandfather, wanting you to remember the songs he sang for you when you and he were younger. Songs you still found useful as you lost your way from time to time. They were still there, on a shelf, or perhaps transformed to ones and zeroes to be unscrambled for you on your iPod, whenever you needed them. He is motivated by art… but circumstances involving a shady manager who pirated away our Mr. Cohen’s retirement funds also play a part in the necessity of being a pop star again. He is, after all, 74 years old, with eyes that sparkle brightly like ancient stars in the spotlight, far from losing their luminescence, and belie the fact that he is condemned to be an “act,” but is indeed happy to perform for you again… no matter the reason for such a grand undertaking as a world tour. Tours covering Europe, North America and the far reaches of the Pacific are grueling to even young and enthusiastic performers. But on this night in Oakland, after an already mind-numbing 103 concerts, each running at least three and a half hours, Cohen manages to skip like a child to and from the stage for encore after encore, displaying no sign of weariness or boredom. A remarkable feat. Perhaps those hours atop Mount Baldy toughened the old bird into a spring robin.

There’s a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues

My daughter, Hannah, our child born with a poet’s soul and an empathy for the world that keeps her heart in a constant state of being torn and stained (the most common trait of any Cohen fan),  surprised me with scalper’s Orchestra seats for tonight’s show. We drove for the few hours that separate Redding from the Bay Area to what we both imagined was the Opera House in Vienna that is home to the 10 pretty women of “Take This Waltz,” temporarily transported to a nearly tawdry Broadway in Oakland for the singer whose voice now, in this millennium, has the raspy sound of the scribe’s pen scratching against the brittle parchment that he surely used to write the lines he sang to us first, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin,” — and whose words are older now than our time but show no more age than the elegant Rabbi kneeling with microphone cupped in his pantomiming hands while he offers the next line, “Dance me through the panic ‘til I’m gathered safely in.” But the quill’s point in his voice is still bold, and the cursive enunciation of his couplets still clear. “Lift me like an olive branch, and be my homeward dove, dance me to the end of love. Dance me, to the end of love.”

Cohen elected to rest on one knee, like a suitor wooing his audience, and sing in the smooth baritone that has aged inside what must be an oaken throat, his right hand clutching the microphone, his left hand occasionally fluttering like a pantomime dove being released into the lights. He would strap on his black guitar for many of the older numbers that require his rolling, finger-picking style, long associated with his “somber” folk sound. Often cited by frivolous critics as an artist to “slit your wrists by,” Cohen offers songs that may be more “serious” than one usually encounters, but are by no means nihilistic paeans to early death. He’s certainly outlived that bit.

He had taken the stage from our left, leaping and skipping like a much younger, well-appointed Jewish scarecrow/gnome to thunderous applause from the 3,000 souls who found their way to the gilded and plush Paramount Theatre that actually reeked of a Vienna Opera House by the time of the icon’s entrance. His entrance accompanied by the sweet, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la…” of his three singing “beautiful angels” and the playing of an ensemble, so tight, you couldn’t squeeze an errant note through them if you tried.

The show continued in the same vein as the previous 100 shows since his mammoth three-year world tour commenced last year,  beautifully documented in the recent CD and DVD release “Leonard Cohen: Live In London,”  a very fair representation of the current North American Tour, though I believe they’ve tinkered with the set list since London, which improves the pacing of the show, and the band has become even more precise and yet maintains an agility that suits the needs of a 74-year-old front man. I particularly enjoyed the addition of “Famous Blue Raincoat” to the set. It was, for me, one of the marathon concert’s highlights.

The promoters deserve special recognition for having the foresight to open the Paramount early allowing fans to relax and chat around the many bars and souvenir stands while a large a capella group (The Bearded Gentlemen) sang Cohen tunes from the mezzanine to the appreciative early arrivals gathered in the main lobby. This helped avoid the usual last-minute crush at the box office and the jammed doorways to the theater proper. The atmosphere was both relaxed and elegant. Smiles were on every face.  Underlying the joy of sharing the evening with one of rock’s most revered artists (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Class of 2008) was the inevitable thought that this was, quite possibly, the last chance any of us would have the opportunity to hear this magnificent poet sing his songs to us. Fittingly, after the ovations, and it was clear the marriage of artist and audience had been spent, Cohen left us with a benediction. The band joined him for a sweet, quietly sung hymn, “Whither Thou Goest,” which sent us back into the soft, ornate aisles and back into the world.

Take this waltz, this waltz
With its “I’ll never forget you, you know!”
Take this waltz, this waltz, this waltz…
… It’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

He gave us a monk’s humble gassho before skipping away off the stage. He had sung his songs for us, recited his poems and danced his jig, maybe for the last time. But, both he and we know that they really are our songs. We’ve heard them all our lives. We just needed our kindly grandfather and poet to remind us where they are, and that they do, indeed, belong to us. The Beautiful Losers.

Phil Fountain and his daughter, Hannah Lane, have shared a love of poetry and the love of Cohen’s work for as long as each can remember. It was Hannah who put the beauty of the show in her father’s heart with the smile in her eyes as Cohen sang to her that night. She also bought the tickets so they could share this marvelous evening.

The setlist (for those interested in such things):

Oakland, April 13, 2009

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
Chelsea Hotel
Waiting For The Miracle
Anthem

Second Set
Tower Of Song
Suzanne
Gypsy Wife
The Partisan
Boogie Street
Hallelujah
I’m Your Man
A Thousand Kisses Deep (recitation)
Take This Waltz

Encores
So Long, Marianne
First We Take Manhattan
Famous Blue Raincoat
If It Be Your Will
Democracy
Lullaby
Closing Time
I Tried to Leave You
Whither Thou Goest