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Words & Music

November 2012

  • Phil Kakulas

Memories
 Leonard Cohen

You won’t find the song Memories on any of Leonard Cohen’s greatest hits CDs, nor any other tracks from Death of a Ladies’ Man – that remarkable and monstrous collaboration between Cohen and the legendary 60s pop producer Phil Spector. Fraught with liquor, guns and lunacy, the album’s notorious recording sessions led Cohen to disown it even before its release in 1977. Critics and fans followed suite, panning it as a dire musical mismatch. Yet flawed as it may be, Death of a Ladies’ Man is worthy of reappraisal for its masterful songwriting and extravagant vision, perhaps best realised in Memories.

Memories was composed by Cohen and Spector during a three-week period spent writing and boozing at the producer’s Los Angeles mansion, initially as a way for Cohen to amuse himself after Spector locked them together in his house one night. Together they wrote some fifteen songs in what Cohen says were enjoyable but chilly conditions, the mansion’s temperature maintained by Spector at a crisp zero degrees Celsius.

Cohen’s lyrics recall the teenage dances of his adolescence at Westmont High School in Montreal. In this fantasised version of a classic teen ballad, Frankie Laine is singing Jezebel as a lustful schoolboy finds the courage to approach the ‘tallest and blondest’ girl in the room and ask her the one burning question that is really only his mind – will she let him see her naked body? Balloons and streamers float down around them as they move toward the ‘dark side of the gym’ where physical desire and spiritual longing intertwine in characteristic Cohen style.

She says, you’ve got one minute left to fall in love
In solemn moments such as this I have put my trust
 And all my faith to see her naked body

Spector’s music takes the doo-wop form and blows it up out of all proportion, his grandiose arrangement combining choirs and brass to create his signature Wall of Sound. Together with Cohen’s impassioned imaginings the effect is both ridiculously melodramatic and incredibly potent – like a B-grade teen drive-in movie with an auteur director. The heightened atmosphere also inspired one of Cohen’s finest vocal performances, as he abandons all restraint to scream, moan and plead his case over the outro, the song fading away to the strains of You Cheated, You Lied by The Shields – a nod to one of the song’s musical inspirations.

Although the writing sessions had been fruitful, in the studio things rapidly deteriorated as a megalomaniacal Spector took complete control of the project. ‘People were armed to the teeth’ said Cohen ‘and everybody was drunk… so you were slipping over bullets and biting into revolvers in your hamburger’. The dysfunctional recording sessions have become the stuff of legend. The most infamous story of all concerning when Spector turned a gun on Cohen himself, declaring ‘Leonard, I love you’ as he put the weapon to the singer’s throat. ‘I hope you do, Phil’ replied Cohen, ‘I hope you do’.

When it came to mixing the album Cohen was not invited. In his absence Spector buried many of his vocals in the thick aural soup. Cohen declared it a ‘catastrophe’. ‘I think in the end Phil couldn’t resist annihilating me,’ he said. ‘I don’t think he can tolerate any other shadows in his own darkness.’
For me, the fascination with Memories started as a teenager in the late 70s when I first performed it as a schoolboy myself in an early line-up of The Triffids. In the early 90s The Blackeyed Susans recorded it and we’ve continued to play it ever since. In 2009, when the group performed with Leonard Cohen we agreed amongst ourselves that we would only play the song with his blessing. It fell to me to ask him and graciously he consented, adding with a wry smile that he ‘hadn’t heard the song in a long time’. As the opening chords rang out across the Yarra Valley that afternoon and Frankie Laine sang Jezebel once more, my thoughts turned to Cohen and I wondered if he was listening, quietly singing along with this extraordinary paean to youthful desire.

Phil Kakulas is a songwriter and musician who plays double bass in The Blackeyed Susans.

 

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