The 1969 song Robert Plant and Roger Waters agree is the most poetic ever written
What is poetry? Ask William Wordsworth, and he would have said, “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
Ask Allen Ginsberg, and he would have said, “The one place where people can speak their original human mind”. Ask Robert Plant and Roger Waters, and they’ll say: Leonard Cohen.
Back in the late 1960s, Cohen did the Beatnik thing before it was cool, and moseyed on over to the rustic Greek island of Hydra. Upon his arrival, the town was quiet and serene, on account of the lack of electricty or telephone wires. To Cohen, who was so busy reaching for the stars, it seemed a reminder that some places were still untouched by the human desire for progress and for freedom through progress.
From there, his song ‘Bird on the Wire’ charts one man’s lonely internal battle between the overbearing weight of human flaws and the desire for liberation, from the soul, from society, from the self.
Plant’s Led Zeppelin mania is far from the introspective grace of Cohen’s poetic musings, but the language of poetry can span all walks of life. Plant reminisced about the first time he came across ‘Bird on the Wire’, saying, “I’m listening to Leonard Cohen going, ‘Fuck me, these lyrics!’ Where do you go from ‘Bird on the Wire’? How can I get anywhere near that? It’s certainly got nothing to do with squeezing any lemons anyway! You know what I mean?”
The same goes, in a way, for Waters’ international fame achieved through the epic counter-cultural psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd, evidenced in sprawling, successful projects like The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. We mightn’t hear the similarity between Cohen’s careful craft and Waters’ warbling instruments, but we sure can feel it.
Waters previously explained that, “Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were the two men who allowed us to believe that there was an open door between poetry and song lyrics. This song of his, ‘Bird on the Wire’, is so simple, so moving, so brilliant. I love it.”
Waters and Plant were both drawn to the song because it exposes their inner psyche through a landscape most of us are lucky enough to recognise in some way: Summer, liberation, the alleviation of responsibility, when the world slows down, and you slow down with it.
For the two rock stars, no matter how enviable their lifestyle to us, cheering and jeering in the crowd, finding the time to truly slow down was quite an impossible feat. And so Cohen did it for them, and took them on a journey to Greece, where nobody knew their name, but everybody knew what it was like to feel, and feel often.
And, beyond this, perhaps the pair of rockers were drawn to ‘Bird on the Wire’ because it was, at least in part, about the death of the 1960s. “Everything was being finished. The ’60s were being finished,” Cohen once mused, adding, “Maybe that’s what I meant”.
Perhaps, in what they both deemed an unreachable poetic feat, both Plant and Waters felt themselves drawn to the idea that the years of their obscurity had died, and that, for better or for worse, the 1970s were calling for new artists to step into the ring. We all know what happened from there.
