The holy or the broken : Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the unlikely ascent of "Hallelujah"

165 Pages·2012·1.9 MB·English

by  Alan Light

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CONTENTS
Epigraph
“Hallelujah”
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgments
Selected “Hallelujah” Discography
Links
About Alan Light
Index
For Suzanne and Adam,
with all my love
Hallelujah is a Hebrew word which means “Glory to the Lord.” The song explains
that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist. I say all the perfect and broken hallelujahs
have an equal value. It’s a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious
way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion.
—Leonard Cohen Whoever listens carefully to “Hallelujah” will discover that it
is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth. The hallelujah is not an
homage to a worshipped person, idol, or god, but the hallelujah of the
orgasm. It’s an ode to life and love.
—Jeff Buckley
“HALLELUJAH”
Words and Music by Leonard Cohen I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played to please the Lord
but you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth the minor fall, the major lift;
the baffled king composing Hallelujah!
Your faith was strong but you needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof; her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair
she broke your throne, she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew the
Hallelujah!
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!
I did my best; it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with
nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!
(Additional verses)
Baby, I’ve been here before.
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch, but love is not a victory march, it’s a cold
and it’s a broken Hallelujah!
There was a time you let me know what’s really going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
I remember when I moved in you,
and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!
Now maybe there’s a God above
but all I ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
And it’s no complaint you hear tonight, and it’s not some pilgrim who’s seen the
light— it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah!
INTRODUCTION
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum sits on the Columbia Point
peninsula of Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. It is housed in a striking I. M. Pei
building, situated in dramatic isolation on a reshaped former landfill.
This brisk February Sunday in 2012, President Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, is
opening a ceremony by invoking one of her father’s speeches. “Society must set the
artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him,” she quotes him as saying in a 1963
address at Amherst College, honoring Robert Frost. “The highest duty of the writer,
the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself.”
The occasion is the inaugural presentation of a new award for “Song Lyrics of
Literary Excellence,” given by PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists)
New England. The award committee, chaired by journalist/novelist/television
executive Bill Flanagan, includes Bono, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Paul Muldoon
(poet and poetry editor at the New Yorker), Smokey Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and
Paul Simon. The first recipients of the award are Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen.
The honorees are both dressed in their latter-day uniforms: Berry in a sailor’s cap
and windbreaker, Cohen in a dark suit with a gray shirt, topped by a fedora. In truth,
the spotlight mostly stays squarely on eighty-five-year-old Berry. Paul Simon presents
Berry’s award—which the event program says “reflect[s] our passion for the
intelligence, beauty and power of words” and celebrates these songwriters for “their
creativity, originality and contribution to literature”—with a heartfelt, slightly rambling
speech, reciting some of the rock and roll pioneer’s most evocative lyrics, which Berry
admitted at the time he couldn’t hear.
Costello performs an impassioned, slowed-down version of Berry’s “No Particular
Place to Go,” and Flanagan reads a congratulatory e-mail from Bob Dylan, who calls
Berry “the Shakespeare of rock and roll” (adding, “Say hello to Mr. Leonard, Kafka of
the blues”). Instead of making a speech, Berry straps on Costello’s guitar and delivers a
haphazard verse of “Johnny B. Goode.” The whole thing winds up with Costello and
surprise guest Keith Richards—perhaps Chuck Berry’s greatest acolyte—swaggering
through a glorious rendition of “The Promised Land,” with the beaming Rolling Stone