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THE MINOR FALL THE MAJOR LIFT
Three amazing things. First, in my 30-plus
years of concert-going I've seen a helluva
lot of concerts by performers known for their
live shows. I've seen U2, Tom Petty, Elvis
Costello, The Who, The Kinks, The Stones,
Springsteen... at this point, the only act that
could get me into an arena would be a Beatles
show with the original lineup and Jesus on
keys. The best show I've ever been to, how
ever, was Leonard Cohen's gig at the Fox a
couple of years ago. In terms of musicality,
showmanship, beauty and sheer endurance
(three hours without flagging), the then-75-
year-old Cohen and his band put on a show
that was nothing less than transcendent.
Cohen has just announced new tour dates, and
if he comes back this way, go. Find the money
and just go.
The second amazing thing is about Cohen's
near-ubiquitous anthem to love, sex and
faith, "Hallelujah": It witt shut people up at
karaoke. At Dr. Fred's Thursday night gig at
Go Bar my wife will occasionally get up and
do "Hallelujah" and the usual incessant and
often damnably rude
audience chatter
will cease, as if God
pushed the "mute"
button on His
Universal Remote,
the moment the
opening bars kick in.
And then people will
sing along, often
in harmony, softly
and reverently at
first and then build
ing until the entire
bar???hipsters and
tourists, straights
and freaks???is a ver
itable "Hallelujah"
chorus.
The third amaz
ing thing is that
"Hallelujah" has
become such a per
vasive song in the
musical firmament???
countless covers,
performances on
glory-notes competition TV shows the world
over, and for 20 years the go-to song to
accompany any filmic montage on the theme
of "melancholy"???and yet it originally tracked
on an album that was shelved by Cohen's
label, Various Positions, recorded in 1984. The
song has been used so often (incredibly, I've
seen it in a book of wedding songs) that even
Cohen, who collects the royalty checks on it,
has mused publicly that people should perhaps
stop performing it, and yet its success was
purely by accident and sheer dumb luck.
It is a fact that, despite Cohen's undeni
able power as a songwriter, the downbeat
sensibility of his songs and his limited range
as a singer kept him at a distance from the
mainstream success enjoyed by peers like Bob
Dylan. For a long time, Cohen was a cult figure
for musical pilgrims willing to forge into the
hinterlands. It's also a fact that while cer
tain of Cohen's songs???"Suzanne," "So Long,
Marianne," "Who by Fire?"???can only be done
justice by Cohen's trademark smoker's gravel,
others have been covered by other artists and
vastly improved. "Hallelujah" is one of the lat
ter sort and is far better known as a track on
the late wunderkind Jeff Buckley's sole album
Grace than as a Cohen composition.
Alan Light, former editor-in-chief of Spin
and Vibe, tracks the history of the song in his
new book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard
Cohen, Jeff Buckley and the Unlikely Ascent
of "Hallelujah" (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and
the result is fascinating. Beginning with a
microscopic dissection of the song's elements,
its juxtapositions between Old Testament
imagery and modern sexuality, its shrewd dip
into music theory (the lines "the fourth, the
fifth, the minor fall, the major lift" are placed
precisely on a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall and
a major lift, respectively), its meditations on
searching for the sacred in the profane and
failing and its playfulness, a point often lost
in consideration of the piece, Light then fol
lows the song like one follows a paper boat
from a gutter stream all the way to the vast
ocean. He asks countless artists to give their
take on the song and receives many answers.
And then there's the parallel story of how
Jeff Buckley, long-lost son of the folk art
ist Tim Buckley, heard John Cale's cover of
the song and developed an obsession with
it, incorporating
it nightly into his
apprenticeship in
Village clubs and
building his reputa
tion on his quietly
powerful delivery
and making the song
his own. By the time
it was included on
the Grace album,
"Hallelujah" was
mistaken by many
for a Buckley com
position, while for
others it became
an introduction to
Cohen's music and
the start of a fandom
that has since grown
far beyond anything
Cohen had achieved
on his own.
Light goes on
to note the song's
appearance in the
movie Shrek (Cale
in the movie, Rufus Wainwright on the sound
track album), its use as an anthem behind
widely disseminated montage footage of the
events of 9/11, and then its ubiquity in TV
shows like "Scrubs," "The West Wing" and
"House," among many others, and its now-reg-
ular place as a reliable show-stopping number
for international artists and their would-bes
on Simon Cowell talent shows. Whatever
Cohen's original intent for the song may have
been, he created a malleable masterpiece, a
Rosetta Stone of a song that fits so many dif
ferent interpretations that it is no longer his
but now belongs to everyone.
The notion of building an entire book
around a single piece of music is hardly new???
Greil Marcus made a cottage industry out of
it???but Light's book is a poignant reminder of
how a song, the right song, can evolve from
a piece of disposable pop in a sea of musical
flotsam into a genuine cultural artifact. Light
demonstrates how a single piece of art can
pass into the world's possession. He shows us
why this song in particular shuts people up
at karaoke, because it shuts people up every
where, in the best possible way.
John G. Nettles
EWB
EAST WEST BISTRO
ESTABLISHED 1995
351 E. BROAD ST.
(706) 546-9378
WWW.EASTWESTBISTRO.COM
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JANUARY 23, 2013 ??? FLAGPOLE.COM 11