Author, Sylvie Simmons, I'm Your Man The Life of Leonard Cohen

Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to San Francisco Public Library. Thank you for joining us today to hear about the life and music of Leonard Cohen with biographer Sylvie Simmons. Today's conversation will be followed by uh Q&A. Um so if you have a question to ask, I'll come around uh later in the um program with a microphone. To begin, I'd like to share our land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramatosh Aloney peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramachish community. My name is Lori Telerico and I'm the adult community engagement coordinator here at the library. Today we'll explore the enduring legacy of Leonard Cohen through stories, music, and conversation marking the 10th anniversary of his passing which is coming up on November 7th, 2026. Um, the acclaimed sim singer songwriter and biographer Sil Sylvie Simmons, author of I'm Your Man, the life of Leonard Cohen. the only biography written with Cohen support, will share her insights from her years of working with the legendary artist. She'll answer audience questions, and she's going to perform one selection of Leonard Cohen's music on ukulele. Discover why Cohen's words, songs, and influence contribute continue to resonate with audiences around the world. Sylvia Simmons is an award-winning author, journalist, and singer songwriter. Her biography, I'm Your Man, the life of Leonard Cohen, written with Leonard Cohen's support, is considered the definitive account of his life and work. She has presented programs celebrating Cohen across North America, Europe, South America, and New Zealand, combining stories, audience conversation, and live performances of his music. Please join me in welcoming Sylvie Simmons. >> Hello everybody. Good to see you. Um, I've brought in bits of paper with me to so I try and keep me off of the same subject for too long as we haven't got very long to speak. Um, I haven't got very long to keep my voice by the sound of it unfortunately. But I hope I can keep going on that. The ukulele has to come with me because ukulele was actually the first instrument that Leonard Cohen played. It was just after his father had died. And uh his uncle, who apparently was an uncle who was kind of a lively fellow, shall we say, and hung around some strange places at night, had befriended the Duke of Uke, this great uke teacher and player. So Leonard and I, you know, we got together very much on ukuleles. But let me go back. See you already. I'm digressing from my notes. I was asked not by Leonard Cohen to do a biography of him. He was really not happy at the idea of having them particularly, but I knew I wanted to do it and I'd known it for years, ever since actually I first interviewed him as a music journalist. Those early interviews that I did with him were on the phone. I was in London then, which some might recognize my accent as being from. And there was one particular time where he had just come down from living on Mount Baldi where he had retired for five and a half years to get out of the music business completely and try and somehow come to grips with this absolutely lethal depression that he had. As he said, it wasn't the blues. It was like, how do I live through this? and he had come down and made an album with one of his collaborators and it was called 10 new songs, absolutely beautiful album. And he came out to uh I came to London and did the interviews. And this interview we did lasted for three days, no nights, just three days. And it was an absolutely fascinating and revealing talk. But then at the end of those three days as I was transcribing all of things that he said and looking at them, I realized like most journalists who have spoke to him in the past, u they all kind of come out with a little blush in their cheeks and uh smoking an imaginary fig a cigarette because Leonard is always so charming and so interesting and so articulate with him. I realized that most of the time he was still blowing smoke in my eyes, that there were still questions that he managed very carefully to sound like he had answered, but in fact he hadn't at all. So at that time I decided I needed to do a book on him. And you know, I'm as lazy as anybody is in the world. And every time I thought about it, I thought this is going to take me a long long long time to write. And so in the end I started it and it took three years and uh Leonard was remarkably helpful and good and open and he he didn't have any kind of control over it. It was not like you know he read it and said no change that. That didn't happen at all. Not once. He just said one thing to me. He said, "Do not let them whitewash it." And to hear that from an artist, if you're a journalist, is it's a miracle. So basically, you know, if you need to kick my butt in some for some reason in the book, go ahead and do it. So that was pretty much how that whole kind of thing began. And when the book finally finished and I went around the world with my ukulele playing his songs and talking about him and he was going off on his tour, which was a completely remarkable thing to happen because for the longest time, Leonard had given up on music. He'd given up on it really in the beginning, you know, when he made his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, when I was just a young girl in England, still living with my mom and dad and, you know, being in love with the Beatles until I heard him. When he had done that album, at the end of it, he decided he wouldn't make another one. And he was persuaded into doing it by his a producer who really really wanted to work with him. But it was hard work getting him to do it. So there were constantly these times in his life where it's like, "No, no thanks. I'm not going to do it." So the fact that he was kind of giving up after his album, The Future, which was his highest selling album in America, which meant the one that made him the most money in the world. He at the end of the tour he left his home. He left his fiance, Rebecca Deou, the actress, and uh just took a little duffel bag and went up and lived on Mount Bordi. I went and stayed there for two nights and sent him a note that said, you know, I've committed a sin. I've I've stolen a spoon and trying to dig my way out of this place. It's hellish. So, he he just changed his life on that. There was always this thing of I have to work. I have to keep working. I have to perfect the work. The work is not ready to come out. It's an absolutely fascinating life to try and follow. And it's uh just a few weeks um before the end of his life really very shortly before the end of his life. I would try towards the end of his life. He um he had given an interview to the uh New Yorker to the editor of the New Yorker and uh he had mentioned that you know he was ready to die. He had been very very ill at that time. People didn't know because he kept it quiet but he had cancer and absolutely terrible mess from his spine. and he was in a lot of pain. Um, but that the fact that he was writing a new album at the time, I think probably upset the record company. And so they said, "You better have a little press conference saying that you're not ready to die." But Leonard set something up or something was set up for him in the Canadian consulate in LA and he went there and he sort of was asked about this. you're ready to die. And he said, "Oh, no. I'm going to live forever." And what inspired me to do this particular reading here at my favorite library was that he's right. You know, he seems to be living forever. In the last couple of days, I can't count how many people sent me reels and uh videos of Tom Jones, a British um singer very well known in his 80s of him singing Tower of Songs. So, I keep getting that. And I also uh was interviewing Bernie Topin, brilliant lyricist who works with Elton John. And he kept talking about Leonard Coin for no reason whatsoever other than his absolute love and respect of the man. And I'd said to him in another one of the questions in the interview, who did he count as some of the great lyricists? and he said, "Oh, it was Leonard Cohen." No argument. Nobody comes close to him. And I was looking online pretty much every day since since Leonard passed away nearly 10 years ago. and the number of fan sites and all these different sites that are devoted to him. The absolute crazy number of people who have become sort of uh Len Cohen lookalikes with their fedoras on and doing tribute shows all across the world is again very very remarkable that he just still won't go away. He's still there. So I thought I would come into the library and and talk about a few things about him and what made him so important certainly to me. I think I should probably say how did I get the job of being his uh biographer which is was a very long and wonderful job to have. Oh, I kind of go went after him in the sense that after that 3-day interview in London, there was stuff I wanted to find out. I was being nosy. I just wanted to try and kind of get my grips on this person and how he had moved me so much in my childhood because I can still remember the first day that I heard his voice. As I mentioned, I was living in London with my mom and dad. It was the 1960s and I had a little portable record player in my bedroom that had batteries in it. You can imagine how good it sounded and I always played singles on it, you know, 45s. And I bought this album because it came out at the same price of a single and it was put out by Columbia Records in the US called The Rock Machine. And it had all various artists that were on on the label. And among those artists that I heard for the first time in London was Bob Dylan. I thought, "Wow, this is pretty good. I love this." Laura Nero. I really, really loved it. Simon and Garuncle. Oh, really loved it. And then this voice just came out of my tiny single mono speaker and it was Leonard Cohen singing Sisters of Mercy and it just picked me up and threw me against the bedroom wall. It was just completely overwhelming and I didn't know what it was. I was too young, I guess, to work out what was going on with the music and the sound that would move me that much. But there was something about him, what he was singing, his voice that sounded serious and intimate. And it just seemed like this was a man that knew things and that I would probably it would probably be good if I could learn some of these things myself. So that had been my kind of introduction to Rena. I couldn't afford to buy the LP. I had to wait for my birthday for about another six months or so. And once I got that and saw the picture of him on the cover, I nearly fell over because he looked like a kind of grandfather and not sort of sweet little beetle face or anything. But from that moment, I was uh listening to everything, going to shows, sneaking in because I couldn't afford to have paid the price of the shows even back then. So when I first came to interview him, I was fairly in my own mind knowledgeable as much as you can be for music journals of who and what he was. And when I became a music journalist, as I say, I kind of got to have real interviews with him and find out that he has this kind of interesting wisdom to him and that he is very playful. He will tell you something, but he won't tell you exactly what it was you wanted to hear. So, I thought maybe I should start by reading the very short prologue to the book that I wrote on him, I'm your man, the life of Leonard Cohen, because then you could kind of get maybe a picture of what he was like. He is a courtly man, elegant with oldworld manners. He bows when he meets you, stands when you leave, makes sure that you're comfortable, and makes no mention of the fact that he's not. The discreet stroking of his Greek worry beads that he carries in his pocket all the time gives the game away. By inclination, he is a very private man, rather shy. But if probing is required, he will put his feet in the stirrups with dignity and humor. He chooses his words carefully, like a poet, also like a politician, with a habit of precision, an ear for their sound, and a talent and a taste for deflection. He has always liked smoke and mirrors. And yet there is something conspiratorial in the way he talks, as there is when he sings, as if he were imparting an intimate secret. He is a trim man. There is no excess to him at all and smaller than you might think. Ship shape. You imagine that he wouldn't find it hard to wear a uniform. Right now, he is wearing a suit. It's dark, pinstripe, double- breasted, and if it's off the rack, it doesn't look like it. Darling, says Leonard. I was born in a suit. And he was telling the truth. He is, you know, came from a family of tailor in the past and businessmen. and he always wore a suit. I would when the uh the book was over and finished, if I was in LA, I would pop over and see Lannard for a coffee. And he was still in one of his suits, not the one he would wear on stage. He had them sort of denoted according to how great the suit was. So he really was somebody who had this uniform and and acted in a way as if he was part of his own per uh personal uh army and he was he did that as a way to kind of have a discipline. His work was something he never stopped after those two absolutely remarkable tours that he did at the end of his life because he was forced to do so. He had to go out on the road because his money had disappeared apparently into the bank of his manager while he was uh up in the uh the Zen center for those five and a half years. So in order to get his money back, he had no real choice. That was the only way he could make money. And he came to really love the discipline of being back on the road. He all of his members of his band were kind of remarking about it, how it was so so completely precise with what they were going to be doing. And he said to me that it was much better for his soul and his mind. And you know, the depression hadn't returned, which is remarkable because, you know, if you lose your money suddenly and you're you're going back on stage, which he'd come to really dislike at one point, you know, what do you do? It's interesting about his dislike of the stage. It kind of came about really from the beginning. The person who dragged him screaming off stage pretty much was Judy Collins. Uh Leonard had gone to um gone to New York in order to uh see if he could sell songs for other people to sing. He wanted to be a country songwriter. Uh, funnily enough, though he was in a little band in his teens that played that kind of music and, uh, he had, you know, played banjo and stuff, but he met Judy Collins. She loved his music and she sang his songs before actually he had his record company. Oh, sorry, his record deal, I should say. And they came out. So, um, I lost my train of thought for a minute there because I thought somebody was tapping to say, "Oh, the end. It's time for asking questions, but I'll get myself back into the place I was before I left." So, he um he was very nervous after the end of that uh that first album, wanted to stop touring for certain and had some completely mad tours in his life. you know, the first tour that he did with his second album and was just outrageous where he was riding on stage on a in a horse and and getting completely high as a kite or actually the other way because he got a name as being captain mangandra mandrex being qua in the UK. He took so many of them at the time. Ah, so I'm going to now read another passage and this comes from later in his life. As I say, I'd talk to him sometimes when I went back after he'd finished his last album. And I said, "But what if it's been a mistake all along? This life in word and song, love, sought and abandoned, all the sinning and the prayers that he'd pursued for all those years and documented." Leonard was 78 years old when we were doing that and we were talking or mostly I was talking but uh you know he was listening very very carefully and I just said to him you know if people read the book and it's 600 pages you know they deserve to know what this was all about in the end can you tell them and he said you know this house we're in referring to his small house that he had in LA and shared with his daughter Lora who had lived downstairs. He said, "You know, this house, I never put the house together. I never designed it. I never thought much about it at all. I bought it with two other guys who were students of Roshi that was the Zen teacher and we bought it because it was close to Roshi Zeno. I liked it when I was there where there were wasn't much in it. I want to. So, I don't care if it represents me. There's moments I think, oh, I should do something about this place, but I don't care anymore. I don't care what's in here. He agreed that his work was driven, he said. But I was never conscious of a choice. I don't really know what the choice was. It just seemed to be what I was doing from the beginning and I was doing overtime. And there's something about keeping a record of the thing. The idea that it might help if you keep a record of the approach to sanity, that somehow it could become clearer. I was totally preoccupied with these matters and my work. Well, you know, that's all that you're doing. Whatever you're doing is tiny as hell in the great scheme of things, but on the other hand, it's your work. So, you treat it with respect. Outside of that, there's not really much going on, and it's fine. You don't really want much going on. You're just trying to finish a song. You know that you're leaving pretty soon. This is not going to last forever. your health is going to become more of a consideration. So I would like to bring as many things to completion as possible. That thing about keeping some kind of record was very very important in Lennena's life. He had just endless numbers of boxes full of books and notebooks. I was told by his friends at school and in um Montreal that he was the same then. There was always at least one notebook there that he was always losing a notebook or leaving it in some cafe or another and freaking out about it. But everything was always written down. It was very interesting that when his father died, when Leonard was 9 years old, what Leonard did is he kind of found a piece of paper, took it out of a notebook probably, and went outside into the garden and he wrote some things down. And he he'd already sort of taken one of his dad's bow ties and he cut it open and he folded up this paper and put it into inside. poked it into side and buried it in the garden. He had to have it in words somehow for it to mean something. And of course, I asked him what he said on it. And he said he really didn't remember. I don't think he was telling the truth. I asked a few times, but he said he didn't remember. Maybe he didn't. But that was Leonard. words. Words were absolutely sacred with him. He wouldn't put words out into the public on songs without pretty much torturing himself forever. He was telling me about a a rather sweet kind of meeting or rather just hanging out with um Bob Dylan in Paris. And uh I think par Dylan was there on tour and Leonard was there with his girlfriend and uh they were talking I think it was actually Bob Dylan that started the conversation. He'd said to him, you know, I really like that song of yours. You know, it's it's it's great. You know, they were talking about how long it took them to write the songs. And uh he said, Leonard, how long did it take you to write this song? And the song that he was talking about was he said u maybe about 10 years 12 years and Bob Dylan nearly fell off the seat. He said this one I just wrote in the back of a taxi and so there was this different ways of stuff that he needed to put out the work that was precise and perfect. And so actually let me think I think I'll sing one of his songs about the keeping some kind of record. There are various things in that song in the lyrics that have always surprised me in that he seemed to be so insecure in his kind of love life when pretty much everybody was after him. And uh I don't know if any of you ever saw Bird on a Wire the movie. Um there were pe there was a woman there in the with her husband standing next to her that was hitting on him. So it's a very interesting side to his character. But we've got about 10 minutes left I think for a question. So I hope that you're going to join in and ask some impossible to answer questions to me. I'm ready and willing. >> Uh the song that you sang I've always wondered about that line about going clear. uh was what was his relationship with Scientology? >> He went clear. He did. Um I saw the certificate. So uh he didn't show it to me. I found it by digging through archival material that I had access to. But yes, it was it was another one of the um many many searches he had to deal with depression. pretty much anything you can imagine he did except for the talking cure. He said that he just didn't feel that um you know going to a psychiatrist or anybody like that would help him. I think deep down he probably realized that he was such a charming man and such a talker that he could talk anybody out of any kind of diagnosis that they would give him. But yes, it wasn't I think a look for any kind of meaning of life. um he stayed to the end of his life a Jew. Uh people thought that he had became somebody who was now you know with a completely different religion and so he wrote a poem called I am not a Jew just to just to be sarcastic about it. But he left um Scientology after about a year and a half because at that time his um album had come out and he was getting hit up for money by various Scientologies people and that didn't really appeal to him. I wanted to ask um when did you first learned about Lunard and then the first meeting and how did you decide to do a book on him? Well, the first meeting I was a journalist and I had already been speaking to him for on the phone at least for some time and and I'd known by the time that I had that big interview with him of over the 3-day period that you know I hadn't managed to get to the bottom of that story then. So um why I had I kind of decided that I would go after him initially for if he would allow me to do a biography on him was that I had just written a a book on a French man called Serge Glansborg. I'd been living in France for quite a while and uh Leonard came into our second day with a copy of that book being very cheeky asking me to sign it to him and he said I wish somebody would write a book like this about me dot dot dot after I'm dead and I just decided I would jump the gun and ask and he u gave me the go ahead. Hi. Uh well, it's going to be 10 years then he passed away. And one of things that I always remember that was right about two days after Trump got elected and one of his songs Democracy is resonating with me since then and before but after his passing and after this new era in the US. Uh I wonder if you have any reflection about the how the song become like such a beacon of hope or irony I guess but this time >> well well you know the album the future what can we say the future has come true is something else has happened after his death um he did not like Trump all one bit. Um his estate has made it very clear when I think uh not that long ago Trump was trying to use a kind of victory tour thing from Allelujah which obviously hasn't got much in common with anything that Trump stands for. But yeah was an absolutely remarkable album. Uh yeah, you you've not only written books on Leonard Conn, but other musicians from the same era. I mean, you've interviewed everybody. Uh I looked up your Wikipedia entry and it's so amazing. So, is there a book coming up now? All these people are dying. It's we hear a new one every week. Uh but what are you working on? And and would you write an autobiography about meeting all these people come when this era comes to a close in some way? >> Oh no, my secrets are so dark and deep I couldn't possibly make them public. But I prefer writing about people and it's actually this year is my 50th year as a music journalist. I started when I was 2 years old and um it was pretty decent. But I get to meet these wonderful people which is fantastic. And uh people like Johnny Cash. I think that was a a very interesting one. I spent nearly a week with him writing a book for a big box set that he was putting out. So that was that was very remarkable. And he kept on trying to marry me off to his various exsons. I guess there's lots of divorces in country music book. Actually, I've got a new book out right now, which is an old book, Updated on Neil Young, which I've got with me. I've taken a bought a few copies with me that's coming out next month, I think. So, um it was very long and remarkable life filled with many many es and flows. My question is in those three years, how much were you interviewing and how much were you researching and how much were you traveling to Montreal and when did you sit down to write as a biographer? Were you writing all along? When did the format of the book come into your mind? Because it's a very easil flows very easily. I bought it when it came out and it reads beautifully novelistically, but you did so much research to get the story of this rich life. How did your writing process go with the research and the interviewing is my question. Well, I decided from the outset that um you know, I had to keep in mind that that Leonard was going to try and charm his way out of answering certain questions. So, I figured that I would interview him over and over in depth at the end, almost like a police person because I came in with like, what were you doing on this day at that time? So, I know you weren't because I have proof you were there. It was this kind of thing that we would laugh about over a glass of wine in his little tiny kitchen or or some ginger smoothie or he was always feeding me. It was like a Jewish mother or something. And uh we would just talk about that stuff. But I thought I've got to get everything there first. So I found the people I needed to speak to or pretty much all of them. It was only about two that turned me down, unfortunately. One of them was Joanie Mitchell, which I was sad about. Um, but when I'd spoken to all these people who were either related to him or taught him or went to school to him or even his rabbi that taught his ver his bar mitzvah class, a wonderful old man. I thought, I've got all of this information. I transcribe it as I go. And I kept it over this kind of skeleton that I had made of what would go into this book. And as I looked at that sket, I realized it was actually like a DNA. He didn't just do one thing and moved on. It wasn't a train at a station. It moved on and then he did something else. Everything was interwined. And so at the end, I went in with Leonard and asked the difficult questions and he answered them very honestly. Thank you again for being here and please join me for one more round of applause for Sylvie Simmons. Thank you so much. Thank you.