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Leonard Cohen in San Jose

At the HP Pavilion, Leonard Cohen wowed an ecstatic San Jose crowd

by Gary Singh on Nov 16, 2009
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On Friday, Nov. 13, an almost-full HP Pavilion in San Jose saw the future—and it was Leonard Cohen. The 75-year-old singer/songwriter, poet and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer wrapped up his 2008/09 tour by returning to Northern California a second time.
“We don’t know if we’re going to pass by this way again, so we’re going to give you all we’ve got tonight,” he proclaimed early in the show, which lasted 3 1/2 hours. And throughout 29 songs spanning his 42-year career, including two new tunes, Cohen and his tightly knit band did exactly that.

The entire tour itself has elicited rave reviews from across the globe—it was Cohen’s first one in 15 years—and much of what’s already been said is dead on target. After each and every show, fans have emerged from the venues with nothing but superlatives: “The greatest show of my life.” “Religious experience.” “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

San Jose was no different. Since this was the last show of the tour and the only gig on the West Coast this time around, people came from as far away as Vancouver, San Diego and Utah. Others with much more dough flew in from Australia and New Zealand.
All Cohen had to do was walk out onstage—actually, he jogged—and the crowd greeted him with a standing ovation before the show even started.

In fact, the crowd played their part throughout the show, blessing Cohen with quite a few surprises. During “Suzanne,” probably a hundred audience members held up green fluorescent glo-sticks and waved them in the air.

Cohen’s 1992 tune “Closing Time” features the line “The women tear their blouses off/ And the men they dance on the polka-dots.” During that song, dozens of women in the front section obliged, throwing their blouses onto the stage from every which direction. It was obviously planned ahead of time. As a result, the band cracked up, and Cohen appeared to completely lose his place in the song.

But this was not just an aging rock band belting out the same unwavering setlist night after night. The band had clearly played around with some of the arrangements since the Oakland show last spring. Certain songs featured more soulful and jazzier riffs, with different chord progressions thrown in for effect here and there. Cohen even played two new songs, “Feels So Good,” and “The Darkness,” both of which are lumbering bluesy vamps that only he could have written. “Feels So Good,” starts with Leonard playing some acoustic guitar blues before beginning:

Feels so good not to love you like I did
It’s like they tore away my blindfold, and they said we’re gonna let this prisoner live.

And then later in the song:

Feels so good baby just to wake up in the morning by myself
Cup of coffee in the kitchen, fire up a little danger to my health
It’s like the same old broken heart, but it feels like it belongs to someone else.

Performance-wise, Cohen is known for deliberately waiting a few extra bars until he comes back in for a particular verse; the tunes are arranged to accommodate this tactic, and he amped up the drama all night while doing so. He also sings different or entirely new verses for some tunes, which he is also prone to do, since Cohen often writes songs with many more verses than what actually winds up in the finished product. He stores a lot of alternate material in his head.

All in all, everyone in the band appeared to be having a great time, even if they knew this was the last show. They would not settle for a second-tier, half-tired performance. And not many singers even half of Cohen’s age can go 3 1/2 hours on one night and turn right around and do it again the next night. This was a command performance.

For most of this last North American leg of the tour, the band had not been playing “Democracy,” from Cohen’s 1992 The Future album. Perhaps his most scathing analysis of America, the track includes the lines, “I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean/ I love the country, but I can't stand the scene/ And I'm neither left or right/ I'm just staying home tonight/ Getting lost in that hopeless little screen.” Although the song leaves everything open to interpretation (it’s poetry, remember?), many folks have misappropriated the words in all sorts of ridiculous contexts. So at the end of the night, since this was the last show, perhaps his last one ever in the United States, Leonard explained a few things before playing it:

“It's not about this administration. It's not about the last administration. And it's not about the administration to come. It's about you and me.”

That pretty much sums up the show. Leonard Cohen, at 75, has finally become an arena sensation in the United States of America. Hallelujah.



by Gary Singh on Nov 16, 2009
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