“This desperate, mad, humorous voice”: The murderous punk song Leonard Cohen fell in love with
Is Leonard Cohen an influence on punk?
It’s less of a stretch the more you immerse yourself in his work. A brooding poet penning raw lyrical confessionals and hailing from the folk world while owing nothing to Woodstock’s flowers-in-your-hair hippiedom, Cohen’s weathered lyrical view of love and romance behind the brittle acoustic arrangements would have marked a distinctly unique emotional pang at odds with the prog silliness the punks were keen to destroy.
Not that he ever sought to identify as a punk, on record for expressing his being far too grateful for the fans of his to start gobbing or flicking Vs to the crowd. But Cohen’s authenticity and darkly intense songbook saw the veteran poet coast through the new wave and into the affections of the alternative rock world by the early 1990s.
Frank Black loved him, Nick Cave covered ‘Avalanche’, Trent Reznor lifted some songs for the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, and The Sisters of Mercy named themselves after his namesake paean to human connection.
Cohen was an admirer, however. A guarded, remote fan admittedly, but he was paying attention to rock’s upend by the late 1970s. It’s easy to imagine the singer-songwriter possessing some affinity with punk’s insurrectionary fire at the time, going through his internal process of sharpening his acidic wit and mordant visions in tandem with the new wave’s reverberations across the 1980s, eventually wielding keyboards in his work and spitting prophecies like “Get ready for the future / it is murder.”
While Cohen held a lifelong love of the blues and country, he was no purist of the Americana standards. How could someone with such a complex view of life be enthralled with surface swing cool and ersatz depictions of nightlife hedonism? Cohen liked hedonism, as his many songs of sexual conquests testify, but even a 20th-century anthem like Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ stirred nothing inside him until a grubby icon of the punk explosion decided to offer his cover with irreverent snarl.
“I never liked this song except when Sid Vicious did it,” Cohen confessed in 2009’s Leonard Cohen’s Jukebox series. “Sung straight, it somehow deprives the appetite of a certain taste we’d like to have on our lips. When Sid Vicious did it, he provided that other side to the song; the certainty, the self-congratulation, the daily heroism of Sinatra’s version is completely exploded by this desperate, mad, humorous voice.”
It’s unlikely that Cohen or anybody else looks at Sinatra’s swanning around in a raincoat and fedora with any real resonance, but Vicious’ hand grenade ego swaggering into the American songbook with razor iconoclasm pushes ‘My Way’ to its rightful, blustering home, an authentic realm far more realistically knotty, daft, and dangerous than Sinatra’s swing croon dared touch. Cohen couldn’t ignore it even if he tried.
“Sid Vicious’ rendition takes in everybody,” Cohen concluded. “Everybody is messed up like that; everybody is the mad hero of his own drama. It explodes the whole culture this self-presentation can take place in, so it completes the song for me.”
