Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1084
A hangover, a dead friend, weekend chores and an in-depth investigation into whether or not Leonard Cohen sent Johnette Napolitano roses.
Good morning. Well hello there. Surprise! I’m alive. And writing on a holiday. An “atonement” entry, if you will, for skipping Friday. Sorry about that. I was indisposed. With a raging hangover. Pool guys had an evening meeting with our banker, and she likes whiskey, and we were in a bar with a lot of whiskey, so, you know, when in Rome. So much for dry January (though I am back on the wagon). I paid the price. Spent Friday in bed till 3 PM. Did the barest minimum of work from bed. Not cut out for this shit, as they say in action movies.
It was fun, though. Though the banker told me I had short legs and all of my partners were like “you do have short legs” and here I am, 51 years old, and I’ve never really thought about the fact that my legs are short but now it is all clicking into place for me like at the end of a Benoit Blanc mystery. Whenever I buy pants, they are too long. Whenever I buy shirts, they are too short. Even when I don’t have a gut. Oh my god, I have short legs. Why did no one tell me this before. Or did people tell me this, but my psyche just blocked it out because of the horrific consequences. Short legs. I am living with short legs. I am a short leg survivor.
I learned this weekend, through my high school ex Anne, that our very close high school friend Tina Jayaweera recently passed away after a long bout with freakin brain cancer, and that is… well that is really freakin sad. Tina and I were Facebook friends, but no one did one of those public announcements on there, so I had no idea. Tina was absolutely brilliant. I mean just a freakin genius. And one of the kindest people I knew. And a giant Depeche Mode fan back in the day, though she liked Violator more than Music for the Masses. But I will forgive her for that. God. Two kids, too. So sad.
We are up in the play room this morning because Jane, in her passive way, made it clear she would rather come up here this morning than go down to the basement. She deigned to allow me to go get my laptop. She is on her phone. She’s playing with the new OSX journaling app, imaginatively titled Journal, in that Apple way that makes Googling support questions nigh on impossible. I am somewhat concerned that Apple thinks its acceptable to insert new apps onto a phone mightily locked down with every parental control under the sun, but I suppose I will let it slide, since it is a journaling app, and I am addicted to journaling, and I probably have like the tenth longest journal in the world or something like that. Maybe she will take up journaling. Wouldn’t that be awesome. Imagine the money we could save on therapy bills.
It’s been a great weekend. I painted all the electrical conduit, support brackets and breaker box for the greenhouse, so the electrician can get all the conduit installed and I can finally, finally, only three months late, get the raised beds into the house. Fingers crossed I can pull this off in the next two weeks. I dismantled a large wooden box, maybe ten feet by 5 feet by three feet, that has been sitting in my driveway for months, having originally been the shipping container in which the greenhouse glass came. We had been using it as a workbench to assemble certain parts of the greenhouse, though that’s been done for ages. But it’s just been too cold to do anything about it. But now it’s gone and I can actually turn around in the driveway again without backing down to the tenant’s spaces, which is always fraught since she has an intern now and if it’s her, the intern, and a client, there’s nowhere to turn around. So I took care of that.
I also reorganized in the workshop garage a fair bit. I moved one of my rolling shelves into the greenhouse, and moved all of the gardening and greenhouse supplies in the garage onto the shelf now in the greenhouse. This freed up enough room that I could move all my wood in the garage to a single space, over by the miter saw and table saw, but not directly behind the table saw, which means I can now actually put an outfeed table behind the table saw, which means I can use it more easily. Also I have a ton of room on my shelves now, there is nothing on the floor of the garage anymore, and it is just great. Only one major new layout change left in the garage until I have it exactly the way I want it, for now. Hopefully I can get that done today, though it is unclear how much time I have over there because a) I need to make soup, b) Emma is going to meet our pregnant neighbor for a long walk presumably to talk about motherly things and, c) that means I’d have to cajole Jane to come to the other house with me which is always a crap shoot, and d) our home network has been giving us grief and I have been slowly accumulating the equipment to fix it, but I’m not quite there yet, but the entire wifi crapped out last night, and the main wifi router is also our DHCP server so the entire network crapped out, and I did a temporary fix and it’s a mess and I really should try and fix it today, but I don’t want to, I hate hate hate doing network work, but the entire house is only running on one wifi node and the ethernet is getting separate IP addresses from the AT&T DHCP server, which means our network is on two different submasks which is a giant mess and it really is unsustainable man this is really a run-on sentance and a run-on paragraph but I am okay with that.
Except where am I going to insert the cute picture of Jane’s artwork.
On Friday when I was driving to school, the original Leonard Cohen version of “Hallelujah” came on in the car and I realized that Jane is six and she’s barely been exposed to Leonard and that is an absolute travesty so I turned it up and we listened to Hallelujah in silence and then by the last chorus she was singing along and I think maybe we’ll listen to more Leonard in the car, but not his early hippie acoustic guitar stuff, only his Casiotone era stuff cuz that is really the best Leonard.
Speaking of which, I have had the Johnette Napolitano song “Leonard Cohen’s Roses” in my head a lot lately. The song is a story song, the “me” in the song is not Johnette, but ironically, it could be! Because Johnette, one could argue, really augured the Leonard Cohen renaissance. Sure, a lot of people would say it was Jeff Buckley and his 1994 cover of “Hallelujah,” but that was inspired by the John Cale version, which was released on the 1991 Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m your Fan, produced by Les Inrockuptibles. And we we know this, because Buckley sings the verses of Hallelujah that do not appear in the original Leonard version, but do appear in the John Cale version because John Cale had read in an interview somewhere that there were extra verses to “Hallelujah” and so he asked Leonard for them, because he could because he’s John Fucking Cale, and Leonard faxed all the extra verses to the song — there were bajillions of them — because back in the early 1990’s rock stars communicated via fax. Also I believe this was at the time that Leonard was holdup in that California buddhist monestary but it might have been before he went in I always forget what year that started. Hrm I pay for ChatGPT now (god don’t ask) so let’s ask it.
Well, thanks, buddy. I could have told you that. Can’t blame it, though. Leonard was a secretive bloke in those years and there still really isn’t a definitive biography, is there?
Anyway, Leonard sent John Cale the verses, he recorded his version of Hallelujah with some of the extra verses, and that’s the version that Jeff Buckley recorded and because I am not a plagiarist, I am telling you all this because I learned it in the book The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" by Alan Light.
(Oh my god Jane is making a video for her Journal showing people how to make “the border of your own picture” and it is the cutest thing ever.)
Anyway (great word), Light posits that Jeff Buckley, by way of John Cale, was responsible for the Leonard Cohen renaissance via “Hallelujah,” but I would posit the renaissance began earlier, thanks to Concrete Blonde’s hit cover of “Everybody Knows,” on the Pump up the Volume Soundtrack. Concrete Blonde arguably holds the title for “First cover of Leonard from his Casiotone era.” And it was fairly widely known, at least in alternative circles. I would certainly argue that the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack sold more than the I’m Your Fan album.
(Also John’s cover isn’t even the best thing on the I’m Your Fan album, clearly that belongs to Nick Cave’s bonkers cover of Tower of Song.. If I am ranking the covers on that album, I would put Cale’s behind Nick, REM, James and Bill Pritchard’s straight-Casiotone-flavored take of “I’m Your Man.” A Casiotone cover of a Casiotone-era Leonard song is bold. Bill Pritchard never got enough credit. Great songwriter, ignored because of “Goth.”)
This leads us to the biggest wrinkle in this whole theory, which is, of course, the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Rollercoaster EP, which includes as a B-Side their quite lovely, 13th Floor Elevators-esque cover of “Tower of Song.” Tower of Song most definitely qualifies as a Casiotone-era Leonard song, having come off of the same 1988 album as “Everybody Knows,” I’m your Man. Wikipedia tells me that the Pump up the Volume soundtrack came out August 17, 1990. Discogs tells me the Rollercoaster EP came out August 1990, but Wikipedia says it came out September of 1990.
So, I mean, do Concrete Blond really hold the “First cover of Leonard from his Casiotone era” title? It is a pickle. But, as a gentleman who purchased all of these records upon release, I can tell you that the Mary Chain’s “Tower of Song” did not make waves – it was the A-side, “Rollercoaster” that did that (and of course the tour, my god, what a tour). Whereas Concrete Blonde’s “Everybody Knows” absolutely did make waves. So I am modifying the title to “First mainstream cover of Leonard from his Casiotone era.”
Anyway (great word) all of this is to say that the idea of Leonard Cohen sending Johnette Napolitano Roses is entirely plausible, as a woman who had a hand in returning Leonard to mainstream success. Even if Buckley did it again, and moreso, three years later, Leonard wouldn’t have known that in 1990, so he still could have sent Johnette roses.
And indeed, when I first heard “Leonard Cohen’s Roses” that is what I assumed the song was about. I was not paying close attention to the lyrics. I thought it was a sort of “I Saved Latin” kind of song. Which would have been deserved! But it’s not. It’s a much more romantic and evocative song, with a character in a bar telling Johnette these things.
I met her in a bar way back in 1982
She was wearing a crooked wig
And had a lot of old tattoos
She says, "Why are you way over there?
Come on over and pull up a chair!
She says, "you've got nothing else to do!"
"You know, Leonard Cohen sent me roses, how about you?
That's right, Leonard Cohen sent me roses, how about you?"
Which is a much prettier song. But still! One cannot help but wonder:
Did Leonard Cohen ever really send Johnette Napolitano roses?
In my headcaon, they did.
Speaking of my headcanon, For all Mankind is a prequel to The Expanse. Chew on it.
After all that, I think you know what the Media of the Day is going to be. Give it a listen. In fact, give the whole album a listen. It is great. Released by the Triangle’s own Schoolkids records, to boot.
Miss you guys. Talk soon!
Thanks for this tribute to Tina. I forgot about her love for Depeche Mode. I can’t believe she’s gone. So unbelievably tragic.