Nouveau Zvi 1983

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A few days ago I was telling Kelley Lynch about those years before she met Cohen in NY in the late 80s and became his agent while working for Marty Machat-- picking up his flagging career and getting him back on his feet with his comeback album I'm Your Man in 1988. She saved his ass - no question about it - at a time when the hometown crowd was declaring him dead. Back in Montreal his future "stalker" -- me -- had moved in next door and was ensconced on St Dominique. My windfall el cheapo on the second floor overlooked Leonard's back fence and the little courtyard he shared with Hazel. How the universe arranged this is, and was, beyond my understanding but I was a witness to his gargantuan/lilliputian empire moves in a decade when he seemed definitively washed up... He was turning 49 that year which was terminal for a pop star back then. He had made a few ill-advised and embarrassing stabs at theater and movies: Night Magic with Lewis Furey, the Leonard Cohen Show with David Blue, and I Am A Hotel with Barrie Wexler. All eye-watering failures if not outright disasters. I believe in his back pocket he always carried a secret weapon. He had his sights set on founding his very own alt-religion aka cult, and had been building up to this when I met him in 1977. I watched it develop over the next few years when he started telling all sorts of women he planned to marry them. Why would he do that, I wondered? Wasn't that just a recipe for unnecessary chaos and heartburn? Eventually the women would find out and start fighting among themselves-- was that the real purpose? Did he need more gossip envy hate and distraction than was already swirling around him? Or was he insane? extremely forgetful? totally dissociative? I think the best answer was that this obsessive micromanager, petty megalomaniac and sex-crazed troubadour was setting up a mostly-female cult and believed that, over time, he could hypnotize his recruits and transform us all into compliant devotees and willing Slaves. Our payoff would be membership in his new Messianic movement-- First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. I truly believe this was his overarching scheme at the time, which got sidetracked by his teenaged daughter's mutiny in the early 1990s -- and by feminism, which was probably the Thing he feared most. By 1990 or so I was getting hip to the plan, which he had told me involved a "holocaust of the gentiles" -- a strange way to come on to an ex-girlfriend. This was when I switched from confused indifference to my next door neighbour, to the firm conviction that he needed to be stopped. If people are going to keep calling me Cohen’s stalker, I might as well own it.

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