A singer must cry: Bird on a Wire on DVD

Leonard Cohen’s recent return to the world’s stages after a decade and a half of relative reclusion has, among other things, served to remind us just how magnetic a presence the soon-to-be 76 year old troubadour can be. Few performers combine Cohen’s particular blend of humility and authority, gravity and humour—he’s a consummate showman who seems metabolically incapable of taking his audience’s adoration for granted. Yet Cohen, who only began his career as a recording artist in his mid-30s, who insisted on singing his own material despite the limitations of his voice, whose musical styles have only intermittently dovetailed in any way with the transitory fashions of that have marked his 40+ years in music, has also at times revealed a deep personal ambivalence to touring—which might help explain the hiatus. The tension between Cohen the showman and Cohen the tender, at times mercurial poet obsessed with communion and not “cheating” his audience, his band, or himself with anything less than emotional honesty is very much a part of what makes his concerts as riveting and even transcendental. This tension is eloquently captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire.

The 1972 European tour, which ended in Israel and was plagued by technical problems, which featured Cohen’s famed producer Bob Johnston on organ and the angelic Jennifer Warnes sharing back-up vocals with Donna Washburn, possesses a certain mythical status in Cohen’s biography. I’d read many years ago about the final concert in Jerusalem where Cohen dropped acid and wept on stage during a performance of ‘So Long, Marianne.’ The story always had this apocryphal tinge to it. I never believed I’d actually see the event on film, but here it is. It almost wasn’t. After getting a limited release in a reportedly messily assembled version unauthorized by Palmer in 1974, Bird on a Wire vanished. It was only in 2009 that 294 rolls of original film were discovered, re-assembled and restored by Palmer for its new, first-ever DVD release from Conveyer.

Cohen was 37 then, at one of many career peaks, and clearly magnetic on a number of levels—we actually see him decline invitations from not one but two different Euro-babes who approach him after a performance. He initially seems rather serious but soon enough regains his trademark deadpan humour and sense of mischief and camaraderie. He improvises an ode to a speaker that refuses to stop emitting some galactic-sounding feedback. He invites audience members to come up on stage to hear the music better when the PA shuts down completely. He improvises a self-satirizing introduction for himself: “Leonard Cohen is going to sing songs of anguish and despair… The skulls appear… They’re lowered by wires by a man above the stage…”

Once the songs are properly begun they’re all of them magic. A rendition of ‘Suzanne’ with spectral organ and bubbling bass is especially buoyant. He and the band imbue ‘Story of Isaac’ with an extra layer of portent. ‘Please Don’t Pass Me By’ is used as a sort of call to arms. And of course there’s ‘Marianne.’ Cohen had already left the stage once that night, apologizing profusely but insisting that things just weren’t working. Yet the audience, many of them teenagers, won’t have it. At one point they offer to sing to him if he’d just come back out. There’s a hilarious bit where, while backstage and still uncertain he can continue, Cohen convinces himself that what he really needs is to shave, and shave he does—if he can only stop laughing. Most impressively, he doesn't cut himself. It’s unclear whether or not he ever actually confessed to the audience that he was already deep in the throes of his LSD trip.

Palmer’s career as a filmmaker—he’s also worked in theatre and opera and as a critic—has been grounded in an interest not only in music but also portraiture. His eclectic range of subjects have included Cream, Maria Callas, the Beatles, Ginger Baker, and Benjamin Britten. His most famous film is probably the 1971 batty satirical rock flick 200 Motels, co-written and co-directed by its featured performer, Frank Zappa. Bird on a Wire benefits as much from Palmer’s obvious facility with gaining superb coverage of musical performances with apparently skeletal resources as it does from its wide-ranging access to off-stage business and Cohen’s personal transparency. All of the original coverage, photographed by Les Young, looks terrific, particularly for its distinctive framing of strikingly lit faces during the performances. All of what appears to be new post-production work however—the titles, the cutaways to home movies, the recycling of scenes from Don Owen’s 1965 film Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, or most especially the images of violence in Vietnam—look comparatively hokey, at times in poor taste, and, above all, unnecessary. The image and sound captured during the actual tour easily stand on their own without this additional contextualizing. Thankfully, the original material is about 95% of what we get here, which makes Bird on a Wire essential viewing for fans of Cohen and of tour documentaries in general.

On time, trousers, transcendentalism, and passing once more through The Doors of Perception

Books made me take drugs. Okay, music, general rebelliousness and very likely some fundamental predisposition toward shoe gazing and altered states of consciousness were also significant factors –but books were enormously persuasive, with one in particular holding a prominent position of influence.

Written in 1954, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception is commonly attributed with having turned a lot of middle-aged intellectuals onto psychedelics back in the day, but I’m surely far from alone in crediting Huxley with prompting my own first tentative frisks of various substances in my late teens. While reckless abandon had its allure (see Keith Richards), I felt more aligned with Huxley’s air of calm immersion, his heightened curiosity regarding what lies beneath life’s mundane surface. I wanted to penetrate the fabric of perception, and Huxley seemed a trustworthy guide.

Already 50 and established as a writer of novels and essays (in which drugs played a frequent role), Huxley’s introduction to mescaline was at once soberly approached (the dosage was administered by an “investigator” who monitored Huxley for the trip’s duration) and unrestrained in response. Huxley’s interest in psychedelics grew from his general fascination with mystic experience, yet his considerable intellect and skepticism kept his investigation well on the safe side of flakiness. I hadn’t read The Doors of Perception since my teens, but on returning to it, I suffered none of the disappointment that sometimes accompanies a revisit to one’s objects of youthful enthusiasm. On the contrary, I think I relate to it more deeply now.

“I had expected,” Huxley writes, “visions of many-coloured geometries, of animated architectures ... symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation.” What Huxley actually experienced connected more closely with the texture of immediate sensations. He sees “a slow dance of golden lights” and “sumptuous red surfaces,” but the world Huxley enters via mescaline isn’t the world of alien visions, rather, “it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.”

Huxley does indeed awaken to Blake’s “infinity in a grain of sand,” but he does so through a dialogue with the tactile world surrounding him, through observing the radiant, complex beauty of flowers (and that marvelous awareness of plants breathing), through books and printed images, through sudden awe over the sublime nature of drapery, which he describes as “living hieroglyphs,” and “a major theme of all plastic arts.” Huxley looks at his trousers, at prints of Van Gogh’s chairs, at the undulating textiles in Antoine Watteau’s paintings: “Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles ... ” Though he begins The Doors clarifying the existential dilemma of individuality and irreversible separateness between people, Huxley, who claims to have never been a very visual person, suddenly seizes upon a way of accessing a great painter’s casual method of visualizing life’s intractable uncertainty through the ubiquitous unruliness of surfaces. It’s exhilarating to read his discovery, to witness how Huxley’s ode to drapery ascends from what first appears to be a druggy reverie over minutiae to something of tremendous insight.

Yet while Huxley spontaneously connects with the imaginative inroads of others while on mescaline, he also confesses to having a lack of interest in actual people while tripping:  “This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, for the necessary concerns involving persons.” I’m certainly sympathetic to Huxley’s essentially private rapture—the discoveries he’s making seem to luxuriate fruitfully when unencumbered by the rules of conventional human interaction—but it should be noted that not only was it his first time using mescaline, he was also the only one using it. (I have no doubt he would’ve had a radically different response had he, for example, had sex while high—there are few experiences as potentially rich with a sense of shared wonder.) For all Huxley’s introspection, it nonetheless moves me that it’s when he eventually hears vocal music that he reconnects with other people. Voices, he exclaims, became “a kind of bridge back to the human world.” He beautifully evokes that sometimes-difficult passage from interior to interactive states by falling in love all over again with music.

Huxley gets an incredible amount of mileage from this single venture into psychedelics, and in his posterior analysis, taking into account the dangers of drugs, he’s able to convey a larger idea of how we are always going to be drawn toward methods of transcendence, though some methods seem more productive than others. And in conclusion, Huxley thoughtfully imagines the ways in which agents like mescaline (or peyote or psilocybin) can grace one’s overall sense of awareness: the user “will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.” 

Postscript: On a related note, about an hour after posting this piece I read in the newspaper that Albert Hoffman, inventor, not to mention the first human guinea pig, of LSD, has died at his home in Burg im Leimental. He was 102.