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The Association:
Leonard Cohen's Greatest Hits at the Mental Institution
By Andrew Morgan
I purchased Leonard Cohen's The Best of in early summer of 1992right after returning home to Jackson, Mississippi, after my freshman year in college. Bought it on cassette for $1 from the cassette bin (cassette bins, we miss you!) at BeBop Records. Bought it on a whim, never having heard anything by him. (Well, to say I bought it on a whim isn't quite accurate. REM, to me, at that time, was the shit. I was a true “Distiple.” If REM appeared on a Leonard Cohen tribute album, I had to know who he was.)
The tape dominated my car stereo that summer, which was spent working at the Mississippi State Hospital as a painter. The hospital, popularly known to Mississippi grade-schoolers as Whitfield (“You're crazy; they should put you in Whitfield!” they'd say), is the state's repository for the mentally insane. It's located at Whitfield, a tiny place just outside of Jackson. Many of the patients there have grounds privileges, which meant I had to deal with them daily since it wasmy job to paint windows, walls, benches, rails, and other outdoor things. I encountered lots of schizophrenic rambling. People walking around laughing for no reason. People getting naked and being yelled at to get their clothes back on.
 Some of the patients have more bizarre ailments. Like the Water Drinkers. The Water Drinkers drink water. Lots of water. More than you can imagine. Gallons when given a chance. They are addicts. They drink so much that it makes them “drunk” by extremely altering their electrolyte balance. Water Drinkers that have grounds privileges must weigh in upon leaving and returning to their building. If they weigh the same when they return, they receive cookies and juice as a reward. If they weigh more because they went out and scored water, they are punished. I don't know how.
The more experienced painters on the hospital's paint crew took care of most of the indoor work, and on days when it rained, those of us who did the outdoor stuff had little to do. So we'd hide in the paint shop and go to the back, where the giant canvas drop cloth nailed to the ceiling hid the ping-pong table.
You wouldn't believe the way these backwoods Mississippi rednecks could play ping-pong! I'd grown up playing in fellowship halls and whatnot and knew what I was doing. But these crusty painters put me down hard. There were rivalries among a few of them in the paint shop, but the fiercest was among the two men, both of whom sort of grudgingly shared the title of Paint Shop Head. So the rivalry was even more appropriately heated. One of them, Ron was a short, shit-talking, red-bearded white dude. An okay guy, but man was he annoying. And his style of play totally reflected his personality—ugly but somehow effective strokes, bold and brash, lots of the obligatory shit talking, moments of undeniable yet unfortunate greatness. The other one, Sam, was The Master. He was a thin, 50-something black dude, who always woreworn-out Converse All-Stars and played with a lit Kool in his lips. He never tapped it off. A chunk of ash would just break off when it was ready and hit the table mid-match. He rarely said a word. He never talked shit. He was smooth and powerful and relaxed on every shot. He could reach back and curl a shot behind him and below table level cross-court and fuck you up. He was my hero and I learned much from him that summer. I never did beat him. But I did beat that asshole Ron one day and everyone cheered and harassed him about it. That was a good day.
At lunch I'd escape the shop and go sit in my car to eat my two pimento and cheese sandwiches, a Big Grab of something or other, and drink a Mountain Dew in peace. The Best of Leonard Cohen tape was a part of this routine.
The Best Of is a collection of Cohen's pre-1975 tracks. It was released in 1988, around the same time as the release of his then new album I'm Your Man. Cohen had released new music sporadically from the late '70s through the early '80s, and even at his most popular has remained an artist on the fringes of the mainstream's consciousness. So it was probably a pretty good marketing strategy for CBS Records to remind listeners of Cohen's early greatness while promoting his new, dark, weird, synth-heavy record.
It's kind of hard to listen to The Best Of much any more. Maybe two, three times a year and I've had my fill. The whole thing is the sound of pure loss. It's stark and icy, despite some bizarre production choices like the chirpy, almost laughable chorus of female back-up singers that make appearances throughout. It even maintains its chill when portraying peace and warmth in tunes like “Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye.” But as the title suggests, that warmth is fleeting. The lover has to get out of bed and leave. Always. And it only gets harsher from there. How I managed to listen to “Famous Blue Raincoat” so often back then is a mystery. It's a letter in song to a friend, a betrayer who has possibly been betrayed as well. In the song, Cohen claims he has, after all this time, found a way forgive both the friend and the woman between them. The sound of it all suggests otherwise. What at 19 seemed poetic and intense now seems stark and painful. Listening too closely to “Famous Blue Raincoat” might qualify as a masochistic act. “Sincerely, L. Cohen”? No shit!
Leonard has a new-ish album out, Dear Heather, though I've not heard it. I'll probably get around to it someday. Skimmed a few reviews and they seemed positive. I don't know what to make of him nowadays. I'm sure he's still reppin' the religio-mytho-sexo stuff pretty hard. He is, after all, some sort of mystical Jew for Jesus with Buddhist leanings and a passion for Scientology. Something like that. But whatever's going on with him, I can't see it bothering me too much. As long as I can, on two, three times a year, hear “Take This Longing” and the lines “I love to see you naked over there/especially from the back,” it doesn't really matter.
Andrew Morgan is a musician and writer living in Little Rock. He is an
advocate of DJ Koze's "Don't Feed The Cat," George Herriman's Krazy
Kat, and the cabbage casserole at Your Mama's Good Food Diner (it
sounds disgusting, but trust him).
Talk to him at westernish@hotmail.com
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