“Complete support”: The bassist who made Leonard Cohen’s musical dream a reality
During his rise to popular acclaim in the late 1960s and thereafter, pundits have tried to put Leonard Cohen in a box. He has been invariably compared with the Minnesotan songwriting powerhouse Bob Dylan and his fellow Canadian and brief romantic interest Joni Mitchell. While such comparisons are by no means insulting, they are lazy, imposing limits on each artist’s unique footprint. Arguably, Cohen’s is the most unique and intriguing of the lot.
For starters, when Cohen decided to trade the scenic setting of Hydra for the urban decadence of the Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s, he was tackling his early 30s with a celebrated career as a published novelist and poet under his belt. Cohen had long dreamt of international success as a poet, and had been lauded in his 20s as one of Canada’s finest young wordsmiths, having collected several encouraging student awards and a pivotal scholarship from the Canada Council for the Arts, which helped finance his foray as a novelist in Europe.
In 1965, Cohen completed his second and most famous novel, Beautiful Losers – his first being the semi-autobiographical book of 1963, The Favourite Game. Beautiful Losers was somewhere between a pop novel and a postmodernist labyrinth, with its obscure, obscene and salacious investigation into the life of Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha. The quirky book received a mixed response, with some unsurprising criticism and anxiety expressed by publishers and readers on the more conservative end of the spectrum. Otherwise, the book was appreciated as a breath of fresh air, buoyed by its outrageous nuances and a subversive spirit in keeping with the decade’s zeitgeist. In a glowing review of the novel, the Boston Globe proclaimed, “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montreal under the name of Cohen.”
Despite positive reviews from several major publications worldwide, Beautiful Losers failed to reach the masses, especially in the US. For this reason, Cohen was taken aback when, one day, shortly after arriving in New York City to pursue a music career, Lou Reed revealed that he was a huge fan of the book and had been one of Cohen’s first disciples in the States. “We were sitting at Max’s Kansas City in the back room there,” Reed recalled. “You had to know somebody, so people weren’t paying attention to Leonard. I said, ‘This is Leonard Cohen. He wrote Beautiful Losers!”
Due partially to his age and somewhat unique literary background, Cohen never quite fit in with Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground’s clique. Nor did he align with the flower power wave spearheaded by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. A force unto himself, Cohen embarked on his first ardent musical foray with a consciousness of all contemporary styles yet without intention to adhere to any one in particular. He had dreams of making country music in Nashville, but even when he moved to the Tennessee capital to record his second album, Songs from a Room, with renowned producer Bob Johnston, he still operated in territory somewhere between folk and country.
Cohen’s first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, followed several years of graft, both on the road and in the studio. The Canadian poet had been a prolific orator and debate leader during his college years in Montreal and had long enjoyed entertaining his close friends with a guitar on his lap. Still, when it came to dazzling New York venues packed to the rafters with zany youth, the more reserved, sensitive side of Cohen seemed to prevail.
Famously, Cohen received his first plaudits in the musical field after giving Judy Collins permission to record his song ‘Suzanne’. After the song’s success, Collins played a crucial part in encouraging Cohen to embrace the stage as a performer in his own right. In her autobiography, Trust Your Heart, Collins remembered Cohen as “terribly shy” but full of potential.
“I knew once he got over his fear, he would be powerful on stage,” she wrote. A reluctant Cohen eventually faced his fear, joining Collins on stage to perform ‘Suzanne’ with her. The first time, his hands shook with fear, and he even left the stage at one point before returning to a warm reception. Little by little, the walls of diffidence fell, lighting the path to a feasible solo career.
If Collins inspired a crucial shade of vocal confidence in Cohen, the unsung hero of his early instrumental confidence and minimalistic approach was Willie Ruff. With his performative confidence still at a low watermark, Cohen preferred to play in a solitary setting, though, due to a bedroom guitarist habit, he liked to see himself while he played.
“I asked them for a full-length mirror. That was my only requirement,” Cohen recalled in an interview for Sylvie Simmons’ biography, I’m Your Man.
Besides his reflection, Cohen, of course, depended on several musicians, including members of the band Kaleidoscope. However, for the core and majority of his debut album, Cohen relied on a sparse studio setup of himself, his reflection and an astute, attentive Ruff. Producer John Hammond had heard the bassist’s prior work with jazz legends Duke Ellington and Count Basie and knew he’d be the perfect fit.
Speaking to Simmons, Cohen recalled that Hammond had found “a really fine bass player.” Continuing, “We laid down a lot of the songs, just the two of us together. And he was a very sensitive player. I think those were the core tracks of at least half the songs on that record, just the guitar and bass.”
The name Ruff may not ring the bells quite so violently as Entwistle or Thundercat, but the former forwent flamboyance in favour of a much rarer attribute: artistic altruism. “He supported the guitar playing so well,” Cohen recalled. “He could always anticipate my next move, he understood the song so thoroughly. He was one of those rare musicians that play selflessly and for pure and complete support. I couldn’t have laid down those tracks without him.”
Listen to ‘Sisters of Mercy’, one of the first songs for which Willie Ruff helped Cohen compose the core musical structure during the Songs of Leonard Cohen sessions.
