Smokey 0913 hr (Saturday 21st September 2019)

Smokey on sentry duty.

L.
22.9.2019 (1938 hr)

Blip #3044 (#2794 + 250 archived blips taken 27.8.1960-18.3.2010)
Consecutive Blip #013
Blips/Extras In 2019 #221/265 + #086/100 Extras
Smokey #486
Day #3466 (771 gaps from 26.3.2010)
LOTD #2173 (#2014 + 159 in archived blips)

Old Forge series
Smokey series

Taken with Panasonic/Leica DMC-LX100 M4/3 compact

Lozarhythm Of The Day:
Leonard Cohen - Suzanne (recorded July-November 1967, Columbia Studio E, New York NY)
Leonard Cohen (vcl, ac gtr) with Chester Crill and David Lindley (vlns), John Simon (pno), ensemble and Nancy Priddy (vcl)
(arr. John Simon and John Hammond)
Leonard Cohen would have been 85 on this day. He was a writer before he was a singer and other people released his earlier songs before he did, including Judy Collins, who first recorded Suzanne in 1966. "(Cohen's manager) Mary Martin was an old Canadian friend of mine who was always mentioning Leonard and his books. And one day in 1966 she said, 'What if I sent Leonard over to see you? Because he's written some songs.'" "The first night came to my apartment, he was charming, shy. I don't think he knew what he was doing, and he never sang a note. He said, 'oh, I'm embarrassed to...'" "He came back the next afternoon and sang me Suzanne, Dress Rehearsal Rag and The Stranger Song and the next day he came back and sang Suzanne again and I recorded it shortly thereafter. There was no question immediately that it was a classic. There's a spiritual center to it that's authentic. The authenticity is what really grabbed me."
Of the song in 1975 Leonard Cohen said, ""I wrote this in 1966, Suzanne had a room on a waterfront sheet in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later, I sang it to Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights pilfered in New York City but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea."
In 1994 he spoke about it at length: ""The song was begun, and the chord pattern was developed, before a woman's name entered the song. And I knew it was a song about Montreal, it seemed to come out of that landscape that I loved very much in Montreal, which was the harbour, and the waterfront, and the sailors' church there, called Notre Dame de Bon Secour, which stood out over the river, and I knew that there're ships going by, I knew that there was a harbour, I knew that there was Our Lady of the Harbour, which was the virgin on the church which stretched out her arms towards the seamen, and you can climb up to the tower and look out over the river, so the song came from that vision, from that view of the river. At a certain point, I bumped into Suzanne Vaillancourt, who was the wife of a friend of mine, they were a stunning couple around Montreal at the time, physically stunning, both of them, a handsome man and woman, everyone was in love with Suzanne Vaillancourt, and every woman was in love with Armand Vaillancourt. But there was no... well, there was thought, but there was no possibility, one would not allow oneself to think of toiling at the seduction of Armand Vaillancourt's wife. First of all he was a friend, and second of all as a couple they were inviolate, you just didn't intrude into that kind of shared glory that they manifested. I bumped into her one evening, and she invited me down to her place near the river. She had a loft, at a time when lofts were... the word wasn't used. She had a space in a warehouse down there, and she invited me down, and I went with her, and she served me Constant Comment tea, which has little bits of oranges in it. And the boats were going by, and I touched her perfect body with my mind, because there was no other opportunity. There was no other way that you could touch her perfect body under those circumstances. So she provided the name in the song."
Suzanne herself said in 2008, remembering it slightly differently, "By 1965 I had separated from Armand and was living with our little girl. Leonard would come over and I would serve him jasmine tea with mandarin oranges, and light a candle. It sounds like a seance, but obviously Leonard retained those images, too. I was living in a crooked house, so old with mahogany and stained glass. I loved the smell of the river and the freight trains and boats. Out of my window was total romance. Leonard was a mentor to me. We would walk together and we didn't even have to talk. The sound of his boots and my heels was weird, like synchronicity in our footsteps. He felt it, I felt it and we got such a rush just grinning at each other."
Leonard Cohen wasn't overly fond of his first album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, from which this comes. I think he found the production too cluttered as his other albums are more stripped back, but it has all the songs that we most remember, including of course this one, which was also the first and only single taken from the album.

One Year Ago:
Smokey 1259 hr (#437)