Leonard Cohen’s strange relationship with LSD
When you think of Leonard Cohen, you don’t tend to think of the drugs he was taking. Cohen was such a poet and a wordsmith that when images of the musician come into your mind, they’re followed by the most profound and beautiful prose that has ever been committed to paper. His words and music feel like the most accessible and raw pieces of art ever created. Drugs often obscure art, turning it into something surreal and absurd, so it makes sense for people to think they didn’t play much of a role in his creative process; however, he did have a strange relationship with LSD.
He wasn’t somebody who relied on the drug in a bid to engage further with his creativity; he looked in the deepest recesses of himself for that. When it came to writing, he brought his emotions to the surface and, as a result, created poems and songs that were raw and vulnerable, which fans loved because of their lustrous transparency.
What was interesting about his relationship with LSD is how often he saw it as some form of lifeline. He believed that his art needed to move him, to help him meditate and make sense of the world around him. Drugs brought some of those ideas to life, and as a result, it allowed him to study them in real time and allow himself to be moved by his own work.
This use of LSD once saved a gig he was playing in Israel and wanted to cancel. During the show, reflecting on previous shows he had done and how they had come close to being meditative processes, Cohen wasn’t satisfied with how this particular gig was going. He left the stage and told his manager, band, and promoters that he wouldn’t be returning to the stage as the show wasn’t meeting his expectations and wasn’t as meditative as it had been on previous nights.
“It was the end of the tour. I thought I was doing very poorly,” he said, “I went back to the dressing room, and I found some acid in my guitar case […] I go out on the stage with the band and I started singing ‘So Long, Marianne’. And I see Marianne straight in front of me and I started crying. I turned around and the band was crying, too.”
His hallucination then went even further, and he began to see something else entirely, which took his show and, subsequently, his art and music to a whole new level. “The entire audience turned into one Jew! And this Jew was saying, ‘What else can you show me, kid? I’ve seen a lot of things, and this don’t move the dial!’” Recalled Cohen, “And this was the entire sceptical side of our tradition, not just writ large but manifested as an actual gigantic being! Judging me hardly begins to describe the operation.”
The result of taking LSD and performing the gig left a lasting impression on Cohen, which never seemed to shift. “It was a sense of invalidation and irrelevance that I felt was authentic because those feelings have always circulated around my psyche,” he recalled, “Where do you get to stand up and speak? For what and whom? And how deep is your experience? How significant is anything you have to say? I think it really invited me to deepen my practice. Dig in deeper, whatever it was, take it more seriously.”
While drugs, in this sense, elevated his art at times, there were some instances when they became a real detrimental factor to his health. For instance, when he moved to the Greek Island of Hydra, he was taking copious amounts of LSD and other drugs in a bid to get his work finished. Writer Sylvie Simmons recalls how Cohen spent his days on the Greek Island, “Leonard sat in his room in his house on the hill in Hydra, writing furiously,” she said, “He was driven by an overpowering sense of urgency. He had the feeling, he said, of time running out.”
During this period of drifting in and out of various trips, he finished his work on Beautiful Losers, one of his more famous pieces of work. When he finished, he fasted for 10 days and ended up in hospital. Cohen had a strange history with LSD that brought out the best and the worst in his creative process; it led to some of his greatest triumphs and almost killed him.
