The Velvet Underground song that inspired Leonard Cohen to continue with his music
In 1966, the legendary singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen shadowed Bob Dylan’s migration east to the creatively fertile streets of New York City. As a published poet and author, he had confidence in his craft but saw more opportunities in the performing arts. Cohen soon set up residence at the city’s famed Chelsea Hotel and joined a passionate grind on the folk circuit.
Cohen immediately found himself in a nurturing environment, as had previous Chelsea Hotel residents Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C. Clarke and Jackson Pollock. As a 32-year-old, Cohen was already a little older than most creative minds driving New York’s bohemian underground, but he soon found his place.
Most memorably, Cohen entered a brief relationship with Janis Joplin and mixed with Andy Warhol’s art troupe, ‘The Factory’, including its progressive house band The Velvet Underground. Although his music differed from Lou Reed and John Cale’s avant-garde rock, Cohen greatly admired the Velvets’ creative energy.
When inducting Cohen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, Reed remembered the first time he met the ‘Suzanne’ singer. “I first met Mr. Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel, a place called Max’s,” he recalled.
Reed continued, remembering Cohen’s kind words. “Outside the Chelsea, we were talking, and he said – which I thought was really sweet – said, ‘You wrote a song called ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, and it made me want to continue being a songwriter.'”
“I was part of [Cohen’s] tour, ‘I’m Your Man’ or ‘I’m The Man’, that wasn’t filmed, so nobody got to see me except in Dublin unless you flew there. You get to really appreciate somebody’s songs when you sing them out loud – that’s when you can really hear it,” Reed added.
In return praise, the Velvet Underground bandleader explained that, early on, people didn’t recognise Cohen, but he would publicly venerate the aspiring musician as the author of the 1966 Beat novel Beautiful Losers.
“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!”
As far as Reed was concerned, Cohen’s Beautiful Losers deserved just as much praise and attention as William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel, Naked Lunch. “Beautiful Losers, Naked Lunch – I was thinking, ‘Burroughs, Leonard, Allen Ginsberg, those three… Hubert Selby [Jr.], maybe four.’ Naked Lunch and Beautiful Losers were out more or less kind of the same time, but one got a lot more attention. I was always very surprised by that.”
Reed then quoted lyrics from Cohen’s early song ‘One of Us Cannot Be Wrong’. Incidentally, the track was inspired by Nico, the early Velvet Underground collaborator and one of Cohen’s muses. Watch the full induction speech in the video below.
