Leonard Cohen on The Rolling Stones: “They are the bread and wine of the pop groups”
If you’re ever running out of conversation on a date or on a hangout with those same friends you see like every day, try launching this question: If you were Jesus, what would be your body and blood? If the church were all about you, what food and drink would be passed around as communion? I can’t tell you Leonard Cohen’s answer for that, but I can tell you his rock band equivalent.
In the Book of John in the Bible, Jesus says, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst”. In Christianity, bread and wine are far more than a luxurious snack. Wine is blood, it’s all the power and passion, it’s the thing that keeps the heart pumping and life going. Bread represents sustenance and fulfilment, it feeds people on a fully spiritual level and keeps them going.
So for Cohen, a man certainly well accustomed to religion and spirituality, who packed his work with the same sort of imagery that would be found in these sacred texts, calling someone the bread and wine of rock and roll is no light comment. He’s not just saying they’re good, but he’s saying they’re completely and utterly foundational, that they’re essential for the survival of the genre or the existence of any other acts too.
“There’s some of their songs I like very much,” he said, which seems like a light comment until he added, “I think it’s wonderful the phenomenon of The Rolling Stones, the figure of Mick Jagger. They are the bread and wine of the pop groups.”
Painting Mick Jagger as a kind of messianic figure, Cohen seemed to consider the Stones as the originals. To him, they were the body and blood of music.
“I met Mick Jagger once in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, and he said, ‘Are you in New York for a poetry reading?’” Cohen recalled of one chance meeting as if he’d met Jesus himself. Sure, all of it is an over-exaggeration, but the baritone musician’s opinion does ring true.
There is a sense that out of any rock and roll band, it would be the Stones who would represent the bread and wine, or the bodily foundation to it all. It’s tough to find another act out there that isn’t or hasn’t been inspired by them. Even if a band doesn’t want to admit to it, there is surely no escaping the impact and influence of the colourful group and its members, as even today, decades on from their breakout, people still look towards Keith Richards’ guitar playing or Jagger’s energy as a frontman.
They’re a place from which so much springs. So much music had started right there as part of their lineage, and more and more acts take inspiration from the band and run with it into the future. Still feasting on the sustenance of them and still taking from their passion, bread and wine is perhaps the perfect poetic description for their impact.
