Rolling Stone——Death Of A Ladies Man（附原文）顺便普及下专辑被他打入冷宫的奥秘～

我第一次碰见Leonard Cohen的时候，他和我那个不久前父亲去世的朋友谈起他母亲病重的事，她被Cohen如此温和的亲人关怀感动，忍不住悄声哭泣。于是Cohen起身，并且离开了房间，不过一会儿，他带着他那件著名的蓝色雨衣（同时也是他的一首歌famous blue raincoat）回到房间，对她说：“请在这上面哭泣，悲伤便会离去”。这便是为什么我喜欢Cohen

只不过，有关于Cohen第七张专辑的故事，《Death of a Ladies’ Man》是由曾经风头无两但现在臭名昭著的Phil Spector操刀的一张专辑，不算诗也不算好，大概真正买下这张专辑的人也不会喜欢它。Cohen总觉得不满意，想多改进些。而独来独往的怪才Phil任意的支配着Cohen认为还需改进的部分，束之高阁。然后在没有与Cohen商量的情况下就将它发行。不是所有人都喜欢惊喜,但Cohen虽然生气，倒也就那样让它过去（毕竟人家把枪顶在他头上，笑~小提一嘴八卦，Joni曾提醒CohenPhil不是啥好人，结果他没听，就出了这么一张专辑。而且披头士里的Lennon也被Phil用枪指过，Phil参与了let it be,和plastic ono band的制作）

有过这样的故事，这张专辑的评价也算恰如其分。它要么是有严重的缺陷，要么就是伟大有着不足的专辑，我打赌是后者。“这张由世界上最神气活现的外向者为这个世界上最听天由命的内向者制作的专辑”。对于我来说，这两个人看起来属于单干那一派（反正很多意见嘛），Cohen这时候还在受之前那张专辑《new skin and old ceremonies》的困扰，Phil Spector则仍然捣弄他自己的那套音墙。显然后者Phil Spector与当代世界的大多数背道而驰，Cohen则在他的女性粉丝里谋取了那些爱恨是非的主流感情经历，其实这两人都明白名誉与欲望为何物。

只不过，单对这张专辑抱有偏见实着有些愚蠢，因为它真的很不错，与主流看法相左，科恩有着毫无争议最棒的词，这就很容易辨认出Phil Spector有时那类似内衬墙所发出的幽闭的声音（即他自己特色的wall of sound）。坦白来说，除了比较无关紧要的的“Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On”（毫无意义的粗俗）和Fingerprints（虎头蛇尾的乡村音乐）Phil Spector倒是展示了他所谓对某种东西的特质有着很高的敏感性的拿手戏。——chansons，写不出更好的词。通常情况下，他的摇滚热单的旋律里常常矫揉造作的混合最简单和最浮夸的东西，而不是词，Cohen则相反。

作为自学成才的歌者，只要他想，Cohen可以仅用6个声调和自创的旋律谱成他想要的歌曲，而他的词句却如此丝滑与醇厚，令你神魂颠倒，心醉神迷。只不过Phil Spector的旋律，编排与制作总体来讲，是浮躁而非深入人心。这些旋律起了这种异乎寻常的迷雾音障——构筑Cohen的内心风暴同时（大约三十名音乐家和十七名后台歌手参与）大家都沉醉其中，因为大家突然眼前一黑~（谁知道呢，Death of a Ladies Man也许某天就会被评为Phil Spector的最好的一张专辑哩）当Phil Spector仍在设法灌输一些虽说并非死亡性的东西给这张专辑（Memories绝对算得上一张噩梦doo-wop），Cohen却努力将其修缮成一个吻，——如果你能在听完Iodine”and“Paper-Thin Hotel就入睡的话。而Paper-Thin Hotel是一首有着双重极端的歌，即爱情里的双方对对方的背叛都释然，毫无妒忌。

（A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I learned that love was out of my control”）

然后，正如声音开始危悬

（“I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing”)

你知道爱人并未诉诸实情，而他自己也一样，这就像回想起一段伟大而失败恋情的开端，或者是提前预想现在美好却无法逃避的残局：若时过境迁，你已倦怠，徒留光阴。

(“What happened to you, lover?” someone asks the singer on “I Left a Woman Waiting.” “What happened to my eyes/Happened to your beauty,” he answers. “What happened to your beauty/Happened to me.”)

《Death of a Ladies’ Man,》无疑是Cohen最好的歌曲之一，它囊括了一部神圣喜剧，并使其发生奇迹，让你期待或是怀疑自己是否有过这段美妙的经历。一个男人和一个女人坠入爱河，最终，更加现实主义的女人彻底抛弃了这个可怜的、浪漫的男人，夺走了他的一切，包括他的社会的性身份，这首歌的最后一段被设计的令人兴奋、颤栗、和敬畏。这是关于生命和爱，可以作为我们大多数人共享这个星球的墓志铭：

So the great affair is over But whoever would have guessed It would leave us all so vacant And so deeply unimpressed It’s like our visit to the moon Or to that other star I guess you go for nothing If you really want to go that far.

(另外Phil Spector随带一提是疯子也是天才，传说是拿枪顶着cohen写的这张专辑，难怪被本人打入冷宫)

原文：

WHEN I FIRST met Leonard Cohen, he was telling a good friend of mine that his mother was seriously ill. My friend, whose father had recently died, was so moved by Cohen’s mesmerizing familial compassion that she quietly began to cry. Seeing this, Cohen jumped up, left the room and quickly returned with his famous blue raincoat. “Please cry on this,” he said. “It soaks up the tears.” And you wonder why I like Leonard Cohen.

Unfortunately, the tales surrounding Cohen’s seventh album, Death of a Ladies’ Man, produced by the once-famous but lately infamous Phil Spector, are neither poetic nor kind, and the LP probably has fewer admirers than buyers. Cohen himself, though he feels the songs are unusually strong, has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the record. Spector, it seems, simply took what the singer felt were tapes still in progress, kept them under lock and key, mixed them like a solitary mad genius and released the album without bothering to consult with his artist. Not everyone likes a surprise, but Cohen has both dealt out and dealt with enough superromantic irony in his lifetime to walk through it as if it were a fine spring rain.

With such a history, it’s fitting that Death of a Ladies’ Man more than lives up to its notoriety. It’s either greatly flawed or great and flawed — and I’m betting on the latter. Though too much of the record sounds like the world’s most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world’s most fatalistic introvert, such assumptions can be deceiving. To me, both men would seem to belong to that select club of lone-wolf poets, Cohen haunted by new skin and old ceremonies and Spector by the reverse. While the latter apparently begs to differ with most of the contemporary world, the former has been known to defer to amatory begging to gain all the experience he possibly can from the sisterly sea around us. Both these guys know what fame and longing are.

But it’s silly to take sides about this LP because so much of it is first-rate. Contrary to popular opinion, Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, arguably the best in rock & roll, are easily decipherable through the calliopean claustrophobia of Phil Spector’s sometimes-padded wall of sound. Actually, except for the very minor “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-On” (a rather pointless wallow in raunch) and “Fingerprints” (wrongheaded country music), Spector displays a good deal of sensitivity toward a type of material (chansons, for want of a better word) with which he’s never worked. Though his rock & roll hits were often delicate and deliberate mixtures of the simple and the grandiose, it was usually the music that was grandiose, not the words. With Cohen, everything’s the other way around.

A self-taught singer, Leonard Cohen can get by with six strings and a homemade melody if he has to, but his words are so moody and complex you can’t tell up from down, implosion from explosion. Yet Spector’s melodies, arrangements and production generally swim rather than sink, and though he provides an unusually dense aural fog (some thirty musicians and seventeen backup singers) for Cohen’s inner storms, no one gets run over here because of lack of vision. (Who knows, “Death of a Ladies’ Man” might turn up someday on an album of Phil Spector’s greatest hits.)

While Spector’s contributions to Death of a Ladies’ Man are anything but lethal (“Memories” is an effective doo-wop nightmare), Cohen’s are still the kiss to build the dream on — if you can get to sleep at all after hearing “Iodine” and “Paper-Thin Hotel.” The latter is one of his double-edged, liberation-and-revenge songs about infidelity and a cheated lover’s claim of lack of jealousy (“A heavy burden lifted from my soul/I learned that love was out of my control”). Then, as the vocal begins to turn murderous (“I felt so good I couldn’t feel a thing”), you realize the lover hasn’t been telling the truth. Then you realize he has been. It’s like thinking back to the beginning of one’s great failed romance or thinking ahead toward the inevitable finish of what is now sublime: after a while, you don’t want to, but what else is there? (“What happened to you, lover?” someone asks the singer on “I Left a Woman Waiting.” “What happened to my eyes/Happened to your beauty,” he answers. “What happened to your beauty/Happened to me.”)

“Death of a Ladies’ Man,” one of Cohen’s finest songs, is a seriocomic marvel that leaves you either anticipating great adventure or wondering if you’ve just had it. A man and a woman fall in love, and eventually the more realistic woman completely trashes the poor, romantic man, taking everything, including his sexual identity. (“The last time that I saw him/He was trying hard to get/A woman’s education/But he’s not a woman yet.”) The song’s incredible last verse manages to be terrifying, funny and philosophically awesome, all at the same time. It’s about life and love and could serve as an epitaph for most of us sharing this planet:

So the great affair is over But whoever would have guessed It would leave us all so vacant And so deeply unimpressed It’s like our visit to the moon Or to that other star I guess you go for nothing If you really want to go that far.