Leonard Cohen at 70 and His Continuing Appeal to Boomers

Leonard Cohen is not technically a baby boomer –he just missed the wave of this famous demographic wave. Born in 1938 he is now the grand old man of 70 and looks the part of a wise old sage enough for a documentary to be made about him recently, “I’m Your Man” featuring Bono everyone’s favorite global conscience pricker and a cast of the younger generation of his admirers—most notably Nick Cave and RufusWainwright. But Cohen has made his impact on boomers in more subtle ways than say someone like Dylan, who at 67 can be entitled to the crown boomer popular music artist in chief. Cohen is what we listened to in the 1970s and 1980s as the hope of free love and peace romance faded. The rise of Reaganism, the murder of John Lennon, the corporate takeover of youth culture gave us all some very bad days—not that Cohen’s music was the only solace, but it was good to know that the old man of song was still being faithful to his lonely muse, even when Dylan was turning to Jesus.

What was it about Cohen’s melancholy that struck such a chord for boomers? His songs are often about betrayal and loss—beautifully expressed as with the Famous Blue Raincoat—how can we not be moved by the dark chords that open that great song

It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

His personae is akin to Dylan wishing his former lover well—in songs like “Girl From the North Country”—but he knows something about the bleakness in her heart that Dylan did not suspect about his lovers

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now,
I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.

The song though turns out not to be about either of them but the person who deserted both of them

She sends her regards.
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way.

Dylan of the early and middle period at least could not go near these kind of complex emotions. Emotions that seem always shadowed by a faint masochism—an early theme in Cohen and one that seems to be part of a willingness to be naked, vulnerable in a shocking way akin to the picture of the naked Lennon and Ono taken by Annie Lebowitz as one of the most iconic Rolling Stone covers.


Cohen is always after what it means to be in despair –to be absolutely naked –and alone-and therefore religion with its huge weight of language imagery is always playing near or at a distance from his lyrics. That sense of the sacred as never far from the personal if not the profane maybe part of the reason boomers are drawn to his lyrics—because while a mass of us rebelled from organized religion and its power to suppress individuality Cohen’s insistence that the iconography still had meaning (as in his great anthem to love in “Hallelujah") a meaning that we were free to interpret in a personal way gave his songs a Biblical resonance that Dylan had once aspired to in a song like “A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall” and returned to again in “Every Grain of Sand.” You don’t need to be a believer he seems to be saying in “Hallelujah” to understand the spiritual nature of the world,

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

The man seemed not to be posing—as Dylan who changed his image and style every decade might be accused of –Cohen’s theme of finding meaning through suffering and failed love was there from the beginning. Cohen confirms in a recent BBC interview that he actually met with Bob Dylan, - “a lovely afternoon just of shop-talk” but was careful to note the difference in the time it takes Dylan to compose his songs as opposed to the time it takes Cohen – two years for “Hallelujah” as against fifteen minutes for one of Dylan`s songs. The boomers who are for the most part re-discovering him today are returning partly because of nostalgia for a bygone era—but also they are now ready for the denser material that Cohen had created than the typical pop lyric of their youth. They were also ready for a further challenge—now that they had passed on their love for artists like the Beatles and the Stones was it not time to try to pass on a few other greats?

It was no surprise that while boomers were getting rich—Cohen was shedding his wealth—having been defrauded $5 million dollars by an agent he trusted while he sojourning during some of this period in a Buddhist Monastery. It seems that the period spent in the monastery—a period he now sees as a kind of failure—was the spur for the latest reintroduction of Cohen. Bono and others in the pop fraternity were clearly concerned that the loss of Cohen’s nest egg would pauperize the singer, which might explain Bono’s hyped praise for the singer—comparing him a few times to Keats and Byron. The fact that "I’m Your Man" may disappoint boomers and their children –with the new generation of singers like Cave and Wainwright only supplying us with hints of the singers’ power and Cohen equally only a few glimpses into his creative drive, should not be seen as too much of a setback. Cohen is now being talked about again by the people who cared for him back in their youth and the upcoming world tour—a massive challenge for any boomer is being taken on by this septuagenarian although as he admits in Tower of Song whose friends are gone and whose hair has turned grey still

“ache(s) in the places where I used to play”
And I'm crazy for love but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day”

As optimistic and as life affirming as Leonard Cohen can get in person and in any lyric.