Mystical Crooner: The Lives of Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen continues to exert a fascination for his fans even eight years after his death. The charismatic Jew from Montreal's French Quarter entered the music industry in the late sixties from a literary background, creating a sensation with his song "Suzanne," which had first been recorded by an early booster of his, Judy Collins. Bob Dylan and others had already paved the way for the phenomenon of the singer-songwriter to prosper. Cohen's first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, produced a new kind of sound for a generation shaking off the shibboleths of the past and ready to embrace the sentiments of the Thinking Man. The "darling of the bedsit" spent the next few decades alternating albums with concerts as his hypnotic airs penetrated the hearts and minds of audiences all around the world. In his private life the so-called Ladies Man juggled asceticism with indulgence. Aubrey Malone met him in 1988. At that time he was emerging from a period of relative obscurity to launch a renaissance with his album I'm Your Man. In 1990, burned out from touring, he entered the Zen retreat of Mount Baldy in San Francisco, spending four years there before reverting to "the day job." A few years later he discovered he'd been defrauded of the lions share of his fortune by his trusted friend and manager, Kelley Lynch. Bankruptcy forced him to go back touring in what proved to be a blessing in disguise. Audiences old and new flocked to his concerts. "Mystical Crooner" analyses the cerebral troubadour as he struggles with romance, perfectionism and a career that went from adulation to indifference before his celebrated Indian summer.