FREE IM YOUR MAN: THE LIFE OF LEONARD COHEN PDF Sylvie Simmons | 560 pages | 06 Jun 2013 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099549321 | English | London, United Kingdom I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen - Wikipedia Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Leonard Cohen, one of the most important and influential Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen of our era, is a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the essential issues of human life—sex, religion, power, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies' man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whos Leonard Cohen, one of the most important and influential artists of our era, is a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the essential issues of human life—sex, religion, power, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and a ladies' man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose name, Jikan—"ordinary silence"—is quite the appellation for a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary. I'm Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Starting in Montreal, Cohen's birthplace, acclaimed music journalist Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where Cohen launched his career in music. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties and his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen's journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen's life and presents a deeply insightful portrait of the vision, spirit, depth, and talent of an artist and a man who continues to move people like no one else. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published September 18th by Ecco first published October 18th More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about I'm Your Manplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jan 01, Paul Bryant rated it really liked it Shelves: music-biographies. Revived review in honour of this great singer, songwriter, poet, novelist, comedian and graceful human being. He's been with me almost every step of the way in my life, his sorrowful black humour was often a small kind glimmer in my own sometime darkness. I saw Leonard in concert in in London. After one song he thanked the audience. But I have to say… they didn't help a bit. How Leonard became Cohen - fastforwardstyle Nathan Cohen high end formalwear manufacturer, Masha Cohen, 16 years younger, recently arrived from Russia; Montreal, a thousand miles away from where they were killing all the Jews; Nathan dead at 52, Leonard aged 9; The Buckskin Boys a country music trio ; Irving Layton; year of Elvis, year of Howl aged 22 first book - Let Us Compare Mythologies we pinned Jesus like a lovely butterfly against the wood — original print run, ; New York, back to Montreal, rejected first novel A Ballet of Lepers, you couldn't make it up! Beauty at Close Quarters unpublished novel No 2 ; The Spice-Box of Earth ; Jerusalem; Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen : "everything you saw was beautiful, every corner, every lamp, everything you touched, everything" — including Marianne Ihlen. We met when we were almost young. Back to Montreal with Marianne; the brightest young poet in Canada visits Cuba; Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen to Hydra - no electricity, no Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, no water but a lot of speed and Mandrax "as handsome a pair of pharmaceuticals as a hard-working writer could wish to meet… providing backup harmony, hashish, opium and acid" says Sylvie. Back to London; Michael X hanged for murder Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen said he would appoint Leonard Minister for Tourism when he established his revolutionary government in Trinidad. And why not? I sure would. Back to Hydra. Third novel. Is it called The Perfect jukebox? Fields of Hair? No — The Favourite Game. Says Sylvie. Now he's 30, applying for grants, taking bits of jobs, Hydramontrealing. Next poetry book Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Opium and Hitler. His publisher objects to the title. LC says it will appeal "to the diseased adolescents who compose my public. Ah, compromise. Then Suzanne Verdal takes him down to her place by the river. Endless drugs, writing Beautiful Losers at breakneck speed on speed. Published indidn't sell. At all. Decides he needs to make some kind of living and poetry and novels are clearly not it. Thinks he'll try singing. New York — introduced to Mary Martin, a Canadian in the music management biz and she knows exactly who Leonard should meet : Judy Collins. Now it comes into focus — JC loves everything LC sings to her, immediately puts 2 songs on her new album, which is a hit, and LC finally makes some public appearances as a singer. All the way down the line he seems like he's posing as the frail, sad poet with a capital P, it's his schtick, all folorn and droopy and soulful and deep lines round the mouth, in order to get the girls, which he does because he's good at it, and handsome in a Dustin Hoffman Al Pacino kind of way, even now, and his lyrics are often pure tripe, gestures towards profundity, deliberately obscure, just a collection Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Pavlovian words to tickle our godbone, and my God what a one track mind, women this, women that, did he ever write a non-sexual song? I must have missed it… And yet, he's funny, he always was, and daring, and his tunes are so very pretty, and he can write like an angel on occasion — sometimes all the hype is true, how annoying - God is Alive, Magic is Afoot, A Kite is a Victim, Stranger Song, Democracy is Coming to the USA, and the entirety of Beautiful Losers, all pure gold, I'd take them to my desert island. At the moment I'd also have Dance me to the End of Love as one of my desert island discs. The thing is, he gets you on his wavelength. You know what? He was my man. Like he said. I bet you flinched when you first heard him. But it's okay, there's plenty of room for the both of you, your awkward clawing and expert plagiarising has a place prepared for it at my banquet of song. I'm sitting Hank Williams between you and Leonard. His whole life is a bit galling, you know, he droops and sags through all this desolation free razorblade with every album whilst having to shoo naked 24 year olds out of the way so he can get to his front door. He's so solitary but his concerts are sellouts and he loves working those crowds. He's Tom Jones for the book groups, they throw moist first editions at him. Audiences immediately loved him and never stopped; they love him even more now he's old. What's he got to be doleful about? He always has these dead-on cool situations going — he lives with a gorgeous young woman on Hydra, he eats a bucketful of drugs and he writes Beautiful Losers — he tosses off quotes like "I'd thought of myself as a loser. I didn't like my life" — then later with the second Suzanne, another gorgeous young woman, he doesn't like that situation either; there's no pleasing this guy. He loathes himself because there's no pleasing him. He's a monster of appetite and he's a Zen monk. He's fixated on sex but he's universal and spiritual. At Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen same time. He has everything, he has nothing. He's self obsessed, yet always comes across as generous. In he has his most successful album ever The Futurea successful world tour, he's engaged to blonde bombshell Rebecca de Mornay 20 years his junior, of course, you think guys like him go out with women of his own age? For five years. But even that doesn't work, he falls into another dreadful depression. He comes Im Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen from the mountain and gets back into his thing again. Then someone sidles up and says sotto voce "Hey Leonard — did you check your bank account recently? So back on the road he goes, and makes all his money back, and then some. That's one to tell at the next dinner party. She gets the complicated detailed story told, it motors right along, there are no longeurs. And she's funny too. Other than finding themselves the last two left at a key party, it is hard to picture Leonard Cohen and Phil Spector ever ending up as musical bedfellows p I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal ininto an upper-middle-class Jewish family.