This is a guest post by Sean O’Neill - thanks Sean!
If John Lennon and George Harrison came back from the dead, teamed up with Paul and Ringo and played a concert in a stadium with Elvis opening for them, it couldn’t, for me have held a candle to the Friday 13th gig in the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainam in Dublin.
When I first listened to ‘The Rock Machine Turns You On’ and heard Cohen sing, ‘All the Sisters of Mercy they are not departed or gone…..’, I was hooked. I was sixteen and wanted to sing like that or even just sing. I knew nothing about Cohen – information was much harder to come by when there was no Internet.
A couple of years later I’d bought a couple of his albums, a songbook and could play Suzanne, even the in between verses guitar bits, I could figure out. The chord boxes in the songbook would help me figure out fsharp minor and other chords I needed to add to my usual 3 chord trick songs and – while not actually sounding like Leonard, I was happy enough with my own solitary sound, when playing his songs – more so than when trying to create a reasonable rendition of say, Satisfaction or any of the groups’ song from around that time. I was singing songs I didn’t understand the meaning of but I did know they meant something more than ‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah etc.’
Many years later, I turned to these songs in times of confusion and found a lot of answers in his writing – sometimes to questions I wasn’t even asking. I met him in a dream – sitting in his car waiting for ‘Mrs. Cohen’ to finish the supermarket shop and as we were both killing time, even felt free to ask him the burning question about ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’*
He did play in Ireland, at least once before – it passed me by as a was a full-time student running my business in my spare time to support my three children and pay the rent so concerts were out of the question and I didn’t even want to know what gigs I was missing, never mind getting to go to them.
When I heard he was playing in Dublin this year, I didn’t do anything about booking as somewhere in my mind, the guy meant so much to me that he could only disappoint - something about meeting your heroes. I’d buy some records instead.
In the most unlikely circumstance, I was told, on Thursday that there was a possibility of a spare ticket being available for the Friday concert and was asked if I would go. On Friday it was confirmed and so I did.
Stadium gigs usually leave me feeling a bit unfulfilled – the crowd who want to be there so they can say they were at the gig of the year, can make it almost impossible to enjoy the music. This was different. From the minute Leonard Cohen walked on to the stage, this was a special night. While the stage itself was a speck in the distance, the large screen brought an intimacy I’ve never experienced – compliments to the camera crew on an excellent job. On stage, nothing was rushed or even, music aside, seemed rehearsed. It was as if Leonard Cohen had come to see us. His happiness radiated form every fibre of him. His appreciation of the audience, of his musicians, singers, the beautiful location and even the moon was just about matched by the ‘band’s’ obvious love and respect for this man – a legend but also very much just a man. It was as if everything was awe-inspiring and everyone was beautifully in awe. Respect abounded. Cohen took his hat off – literally – to the individual members of the band and gave the stage to each for their solo contributions and then just came right back in as ‘one of the guys’ when it was his turn.
I realize I’m doing a poor job at saying what I wanted to say and if, as I planned to, I’d written this right after the gig I might have been able to express much better all that I felt but, as usual, life got in the way and so ‘rapture light’ is the best I can do.
When I began songwriting, asked about my influences, the four people I always mentioned were Leonard Cohen, John Prine, John Irving and Guy Clark. As of last Friday I’ve seen them all - live.
*I just had to know if it was about the singer Johnny Ray. I don’t know what part of my sub consciousness that came from but the dream features in track 8 on my ‘Losers & Sinners’ album. I’ll put it on my Myspace page soon.
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