The story behind the song - Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen

I started thinking about this new idea for the blog when I was listening to Leonard Cohen's 1985 live when he dedicates Chelsea Hotel to Janis Joplin. In that moment I thought that some songs in particular have entire personal stories behind them, so I will try to discover them, analyze the songs' lyrics and, when relevant, music videos.

Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel no. 1 in 1972 and then replaced with Chelsea Hotel no. 2. I will now publish both songs' lyrics to see their differences, and the one thing they have in common, a splendid elegy by a songwriting's master to another, in memory of the great woman, and lover, Janis Joplin was. Nonetheless, with the glorious New York Chelsea Hotel as setting.

Chelsea Hotel #1  

                                                                                   
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel  

You were talking so brave and so free
Giving me head on the unmade

bed
While the limousines wait in the street
And those were the reasons and that was New York
I was running for the money and the flesh
That was called love for the workers in song
It still is for those of us left.
But you got away, didn't you, baby?
You just threw it all to the crowd
You got away, they can't pay you now
For making your sweet little song
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
In the winter of 67
My friends of that year they were all trying to go queer
And me I was just getting even
And those were the reasons and that was New York
I was running for the money and the flesh
That was called love for the workers in song
It still is for those of us left
But you got away, didn't you, baby?
You just threw it all to the crowd
You got away, they can't pay you now
For making your sweet little song

 Chelsea Hotel #2

I remember you
well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.
Ah but you got away, didn't you babe,
you just turned your back on the crowd,
you got away, I never once heard you say,
I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you
and all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, "Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music."

And then you got away, didn't you babe...

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that's all, I don't even think of you that often.  

As we can notice, the first version is a proper elegy focused on the singer's death, whereas the second one is more universal and focused on the world of music, on the pros and cons of success, and on the lust that accompanied them inside room 424.
Before performing the song, Leonard Cohen explained how they met in the hotel's elevator... In his words:

"Every concert that I give, I dedicate this song to a great American singer that I met one night in an elevator in a shabby hotel in New York City. It was a fine elevator, we found ourselves there often. I don't know what she was doing there, I think she was looking for Kris Kristofferson, I told her that I was Kris Kristofferson, but she said: "I thought he was bigger." I said I used to be bigger, but I've been sick. And we spent a little time together, and I love the way that she sang, and she died, and sometime later I think I was sitting at a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami Beach, I don't know what I was doing that either. I have no programme, no five-year-plan. I just move from hotel to hotel, and from bar to bar, and by the grace of the one above, the song comes. And I remember sitting at this particularly abnotious Polynesian restaurant where they served a kind of coconut drink that was particularly little and sinister, which contained no alcohol, but a certain chemical that demoralized you entirely. And I remember writing on one of their very badly designed napkins  "I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel..."

Link to the 1985 live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVq9K3lGtN4

Lana del Rey recently covered the song and gave it an amazing hommage through her terrific performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_myXdOLV0 

What shall I read today? Part 4

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1966)

Disturbingly true, amazingly written, incredibly touching. This is a book that makes you think, about the past, about the human mind, about justice. The story? The multiple murder of the Clutter family in 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas. The book is a thoughtful and deep reflection on this family's last day, and Capote crosscuts between them and the planning of the murder by Richard "Dick" Hickcock and Perry Smith. It took Capote six years to complete the it, and it immediately gained a huge success. It's Capote's first non-fiction book, and it asks its readers to think about some universal questions: What leads two young men to plan and kill an entire family without knowing it? What lies behind the human psyche? And, above all, aren't we all guilty in some way?

Favourite quotes:

“It is no shame to have a dirty face- the shame comes when you keep it dirty.”

“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ”

“As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.”

“You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction."

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”

“The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.”

“I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.”

“I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.”

Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen (1966)

Leonard Cohen is one of those artists who can do pretty much everything: singer, song-writer, poet, and writer. One of the aspects I love the most about his art is that both his music and novels think about the boundaries between sacre and profane. His art sounds like an eternal Hallelujah and Beautiful Losers, his second novel, is a very good example of this. I'll write one of the statements written behind my book's cover: "A tale of religious obsession, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint, its transcendence lies in its humanism; it is the lesson of what happens when the sacred infects the human, when a lust for the unattainable trumps he will to love a person." I couldn't find better and more concise words to explain it. We should not forget that it is also a very complex book in its writing style, but this doesn't stop the reader from loving every single page and feeling the widest range of emotions at the same time.

Favourite quotes:

“Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore”

“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?”

“Do not be a magician - be magic!” 

“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”

“..you wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent” 

“Dream after dream we all lie in each other's arms” 

“Please make me empty, if I'm empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I'm not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness.” 

“It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.”

Next "What shall I read today?":
Jean-Claude Izzo's noir trilogy: Total Kheops, Chourma, and Solea.