True Love Leaves No Traces

On Death of a Ladies' Man: Side One

Mar 01, 2023

trigger warning: love, sex, violence, death

By 1977, Leonard Cohen wasn't sure if he still believed in love. He wasn’t sure if he could risk such a dangerous pastime. He wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it.

Leonard Cohen, or at least the lyrical persona of L. Cohen, had been, for four albums, fascinated by the examination of love and its process, from every angle and distance. From the sublime to the perverse. Cohen presented himself as a balladeer in the most traditional sense, a weary knight errant in the grand hall of courtly love.

Yet his fifth studio album Death of a Ladies’ Man is a tragedy set to music. Echoes of violence, addled by drug-induced paranoia and terror, frame an unrequited yearning to return to innocence. It sounds like a wounded man mocking the ideals of love he cannot, or can no longer, obtain. Freely bleeding from paper cuts along the sharp edges of red paper hearts. A man riddled with scars of kisses, nauseous from the sweetness. Woozy from the heights, left for dead by the roadside of desire.

Death of a Ladies’ Man is a cry and a sob, repulsed and compelled by the rituals of love. If Death of a Ladies’ Man is the most cynical album Leonard Cohen was ever a part of, it is also the most self-aware album Phil Spector was ever a part of.

Spector - indeed, a spectral presence on the outskirts of the 1960s ideals he set to music. He was guilty, responsible for creating a seemingly obtainable reality where a boy and girl meet and fall in love forever and ever. Without any complication. Without any separation. Ever.

It could be said that as a music producer and as a creative, Phil Spector fetishized innocence, and particularly the innocence of young love. If he ever knew what it was. Nevertheless (chillingly), he created the sound and emotion of love for generations of young listeners. So if he could not write the book on love, Phil Spector produced it.

But what is love to these men, so dissimilar in their musical styles and yet so similar in their mutual obsession of desire? This is the mystery at the corroded heart of Death of a Ladies’ Man, and perhaps the only point of entry into a musical experience that is intentionally too disturbing to be enjoyed in any traditional sense. Death of a Ladies’ Man is a brutal work of art that examines love as transgression, with high school dances and hotel rooms as its crime scenes. In its cross-examination of intimacy, its beauty and its terror, the album interrogates its creators as much as its listeners.

TRUE LOVE LEAVES NO TRACES

The track begins with a ringing crystalline chime, like a champagne glass being struck. As Cohen sings with a background vocalist (Ronee Blakley, graduate of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue as well as star of Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville), their voices are juxtaposed in deranged harmony, as though they are singing under duress. The combination of voices has the effect of a dialogue, a checkmate across a table, a sleepless whisper across a pillow, between two lovers:

As the mist / leaves no scar / on the dark green hill
So my body / leaves no scar on you / and never will
Through the window in the dark / the children come, the children go
Like arrows with no target / like shackles made of snow

It is unclear from the lyric which stage of the relationship we are entering into, at the very top of the album. Is this a prelude, an intermission, or a finale? Like two deranged by lovemaking, the singers seem to have lost track of the time. Or perhaps they have been circling in the vertigo of their own delusion, and don’t for themselves know if their love is beginning or ending.

The grand bombast of the production, with its cruise-ship horns and whirling flutes, echoes like a promise, a Wagnerian duet sung from the mountain top. Like Brunhilde and Siegfried, but recast in the neon glow at the end of a bar, last call at the end of the world.

The lyric’s metaphors and similes are familiar, clichéd even, in their invocation of stars, sun, and moon, hollow depictions of eternal love. Arrows with no target…shackles made of snow. Classic Cohen poetry. Yet the cumulative feeling is one of terror. For there is something frightening in the song’s passionate, insistent conviction in its own reality. When they chant the chorus like a fervent oath, it sounds like an operatic statement of intention, pounded against the heart:

True love leaves no traces / if you and I are one
Its lost in our embraces / like stars against the sun

A promise that this will be a grand love, without any residue. No one will be hurt. No scars. I promise, there will be no scars. Yet in the way the song is sung, in the pain in the woman’s voice, in the traces of weary resignation and disgust in Leonard’s low somber growl, we know this cannot be true. In so many ways, it is already too late.

The promise, the lofty ideal of true love, is already ringing hollow, from the beginning - like two champagne flutes struck, not for the first time, the gesture has lost its purity. Lost its meaning. True love leaves no traces.

IODINE

The track begins with rolling echoes and thumps, like waking up from a bad dream and finding oneself in a carnival hall of fun mirrors. Debauched and glittering, Iodine sounds like a burlesque performed in a shooting gallery.

I needed you / I knew I was in danger
Of losing / what I used to think was mine

The expression of vulnerability (“I needed you”) in needing another is juxtaposed with the fear of reality, the danger inherent in the possibility of loss - the paranoid possibility that the beloved was never really his.

You let me love you / til I was a failure
Your beauty on my bruise / like iodine

Cohen, as the narrator of the song, is experiencing ego-death by what he considers his failure as lover. The logic of the lyric is that if one gives too much, too much love, existential oblivion is the result. He identifies the failure himself, his abject humiliation at failing to accomplish whatever the love requires.

In the story of this song, the beloved holds all the cards. She didn’t make him do it - she let him do it. Her consent is complicit in the narrator’s mortification. Accordingly, she alone can administer the salve…with her beauty. Your beauty on my bruise like iodine. As though her physical beauty is an entity somehow separate from herself.

I asked you if a man could be forgiven
And though I failed at love, was this a crime?
You said, "Don't worry, don't worry, darling,"
You said, "Don't worry, don't you worry, darling
There are many ways a man can serve his time"

Is love a crime? Is failing at love a crime? These are two of the central questions of Death of a Ladies’ Man. Like a crime, there is the implication of violence, even only in the emotional sense. And like a crime, there is a sentence decreed.

The woman is quoted like a Sphinx, ignoring his question as she looks down at him, unmoved, unaffected. There is ominous foreshadowing in her response: while she tells him “don’t worry,” inevitably justice will be administered for his perceived failure. Perhaps it is because she disdains to give either the forgiveness or the consequential punishment that the narrator desires. This cycle of desire and degradation requires iodine - in the extended metaphor, requires her beauty to disinfect the narrator’s “love wound”.

You covered up that place I could not master
It wasn't dark enough to shut my eyes
So I was with you, oh sweet compassion
Yes I was with you, oh sweet compassion
Compassion with the sting of iodine

Your saintly kisses reeked of iodine
Your fragrance with a fume of iodine
And pity in the room like iodine

PAPER THIN HOTEL

Spector and Cohen, through their art and obsessions, are both in turns the solitary man with his eye pressed against the key-hole, observing from a distance the act of love that does not involve him. Perhaps it is the inevitable voyeurism of the songwriter, the particular curse of the one who writes the love song alone.

The walls of this hotel are paper-thin
Last night I heard you making love to him
The struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb
The grunt of unity when he came in

This is a lyric without any adornment. For all of the high-octane majesty of Spector’s Wall of Sound production, when juxtaposed with this lyric it seems not only false but mocking. For the narrator of this song is disassociating; without love, without romance, there is only the crude observation of a struggle and a grunt. It plays out like a disordered series of freeze-frames: mouth to mouth, limb to limb. This is not Camelot. This is a science experiment.

The hotel he finds himself in may not be a physical location; as a songwriter and a documenter of love and its working, Cohen finds himself in a paper-thin hotel of the mind, haunted by the sound of a betrayal. Haunted by the physical reality of this mystical union laid bare.

I stood there with my ear against the wall
I was not seized by jealousy at all
In fact a burden lifted from my soul
I heard that love was out of my control

“I heard that love was out of my control .” This may be the most mature lyric regarding romance either Cohen or Spector was involved with in their respective careers. The acceptance, with a deep exhale, that love is out of one’s control. Love happens. Or it doesn’t.

MEMORIES

Like a repressed memory coming into focus, Memories launches with a drowsy, drunk doo-wop shuffle. The soundscape of a last dance in a high school gym: gaudy in its ecclesiastical fervor, the choir of heavenly voices soaring as cheap streamers float down, sequins trampled underfoot. Sweat and blind hunger in the air, clumsy and desperate on the edge of eternity. Frenetic making out under the bleachers, forbidden first experiences of the carnal. In this memory, noir is first experienced in high school. Leonard Cohen sings:

Frankie Laine, he was singing "Jezebel"
I pinned an Iron Cross to my lapel
I walked up to the tallest and the blondest girl
I said, "Look, you don't know me now but very soon you will
So, won't you let me see?"
I said, "Won't you let me see?"
I said, "Won't you let me see your naked body?"

Frankie Laine’s hit song Jezebel was released in 1951. Leonard Cohen would have been around 15 or 16 years old. In a live performance from 1979 in Munich, Cohen explained before singing Memories: “This is a song I wrote a couple of years ago with the great genius of darkest Hollywood, Phil Spector. It’s a song based on my extremely boring and pathetic life at Westmount High School in Montreal.”

The song operates as a denatured exercise in time-travel, imagining the young Leonard on that gym floor, seized with the power of Frankie Lane and the thrill of looming adulthood. On the threshold, “the dark side of the gym,” maturity promising an untold world of danger and seduction.

Cohen acknowledged the confessional nature of Memories, saying: “Everybody will know now, that under this serene Buddha-like exterior, beats an adolescent heart.” The sacred and the profane, together just as they had been at that high school dance in 1951.

To be 16 in 1951 and listening to a slick-haired crooner cautioning the Biblical cruelty of romance was to have a near-religious experience. The sock hop was as close as some teenagers ever got to that kind of exaltation. Hellfire might be real, might be as real as the secret life of the girl across the gym.

If ever the devil was born without a pair of horns
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
If ever an angel fell, Jezebel, it was you
Jezebel, it was you

If ever a pair of eyes promised paradise
Deceiving me, grieving me, leavin' me blue
Jezebel, it was you

The singer of Jezebel hates the woman to whom he sings simply because she does not give him what he wants. He hates her because he desires her without reality, without release. But rather than ask if Jezebel is truly evil, it would be better to ask if the narrator is reliable.

Like a demon, love possessed me, you obsessed me constantly
What evil star is mine, that my fate's design should be Jezebel?

An Iron Cross is a medal awarded for “bravery of service in wartime” (beginning in Germany in 1813), its original meaning troubled by a disturbing history of being appropriated as symbol. By pinning the medal to his lapel, Cohen as narrator is cynically, morbidly, lauding his own courage in approaching the “tallest, blondest girl” in school. As if to say approaching a young woman across a gym floor is itself an act of war, a battle waged. In this scene from Memories, the girl is the adversary faced in a slow-motion showdown, the young man’s honor and life seemingly at stake in his advancing toward her.

Just dance me to the dark side of the gym
Chances are I'll let you do almost anything
I know you're hungry, I can hear it in your voice
And there are many parts of me to touch, you have your choice

Ah, but no you cannot see
She said, "No you cannot see"
She said, "No you cannot see my naked body"

There is cruelty of her rejection, the implied teasing of her resistance. I know you're hungry, I can hear it in your voice. She knows his need and refuses. Which from her point of view, could merely be the setting of a personal boundary. Yet her response comes down like the blade of a sword. In the world of this song, there is no cruelty like love - whether it happens, or whether it is refused.

So we're dancing close, the band is playing Stardust
Balloons and paper streamers floating down on us
She says, You've got a minute left to fall in love
In solemn moments such as this I have put my trust
And all my faith to see
I said all my faith to see
I said all my faith to see
Her naked body

Now Frankie Laine and his Jezebel are gone, replaced by a band playing that sleepy ode to lost love, Stardust (…“always reminding me that we’re apart”).Yet when the woman in the song is quoted as saying, “You got a minute left to fall in love,” the dream is fractured; it sounds like a threat, like a line muttered in the dark shadows of a 1940s Warner Brothers’ B picture climax. And like a man in danger presented with a decision, the narrator will give all he has - his trust, all his faith - for the moment of relief and revelation.

Beyond desire, beyond love, there is the sweet beckoning of oblivion. After the whirling euphoric sugar-high of sweaty palms and stolen kisses, the final consolation would be a release so detonating it could only result in oblivion.

Ultimately Death of a Ladies’ Man is an album that uses romance as a weapon. There is a French expression for orgasm, “le petit mort.” The little death. Maybe that’s what Spector was in search of all along. In a notorious anecdote from the recording sessions of Death of a Ladies’ Man, Spector “pointed a pistol at Cohen’s throat, cocked it and said, ‘I love you, Leonard.” Cohen paused, then quietly replied, “I hope you love me, Phil. I hope you do.”

Considering the creative union of these two men resulted in Death of a Ladies’ Man, I think it is understood that neither one of them considered love aspirational during the making of the album - but rather a human need that paradoxically both ensures and threatens the survival of the species.