Kansas City Music Blog

The ticket admonished: "8 p.m. sharp." And at 7:58 last night, the lights inside the Midland dimmed, and a low-voltage current of recorded flamenco music swept six musicians and three singers onto the stage. Then Leonard Cohen bounded out -- bounded, like someone on his way to high-five Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan. The first song: "Dance Me to the End of Love." Mission accomplished.

Scott Spychalski

Leonard Cohen, opening with "Dance Me to the End of Love"

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The 75-year-old poet and songwriter spent three and a half hours (less an intermission) dancing an enraptured crowd to the farthest reaches of ... well, if not love, then whatever it is that animates his graceful ballads of devotion and dissipation. All night he prowled the stage with feline grace -- crouching fast in supplication to his own lyrics, twisting upward on his toes when the beat kicked in, doffing his narrow-brimmed fedora in courtly deference to his backing singers, locking his knees together in mock-Jagger sexual panic. To call him merely spry would do a disservice to senior water-aerobics classes everywhere. What should have looked like Abe Vigoda auditioning for the Backstreet Boys was closer to seeing Michael Jackson moonwalk for the first time. No one who was there will forget it.

Scott Spychalski

Cohen serenades Javier Mas

​Not that it takes steady kinetic demonstration to sell Cohen's songs, which dance easily from wry biblical allusions to naked propositions and back again, with waltzing pit stops for drinks and blood-in-the-eyes jealousy and thwarted obsession. To long for the spirit is to crave the flesh is to beg forgiveness is to be denied healing. The stillest moment of the night came late, when verses from an early, unrecorded version of his 2001 song "A Thousand Kisses Deep" rumbled from his chest with no accompaniment besides his faded Canadian accent, and no movement in the house except the holding of breath. He earned a laugh at the start with the lines You came to me this morning/And you handled me like meat/You´d have to be a man to know/How good that feels, how sweet.

It would be crude and incorrect to say that a barb like that (axiomatic as it may be) sums up Cohen's late-period worldview, but the set gave more than fair voice to the most poetic -- and most jaundiced -- of these newer songs. There and with "In My Secret Life" and "Boogie Street" (frequent Cohen songwriting partner Sharon Robinson sang the latter last night), the simmering carnal regret (and fresh longing) of his early songs settled into the dusty landscape of 1992's apocalyptic The Future, represented at the Midland by the title song, "Anthem," a sprint-paced "Closing Time" and the heartbreaking epic of romantic entropy "Waiting for the Miracle." Taken together, the post-1992 material adds up to a kind of sex manual for the end of days.

The only problem last night wasn't onstage -- and it was less a problem than a sometimes aggravating curiosity. Especially in the show's first half, a few people on the floor at the Midland greeted a surprising assortment of lines in Cohen's songs with arena-style cheers, little viral ululations signaling approval without much attention to, you know, context.

Well, sure -- you wait a lifetime for the man's first-ever appearance in Kansas City, and you might blow up a little when he finally, finally, finally sings ... I know what is wrong and what is right (from "In My Secret Life")? Really? Old black Joe still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows ("Everybody Knows")? Hmm. Even the scream for We are ugly but we have the music from "Chelsea Hotel #2" rang a little false; what, Leonard Cohen is emo now?

Things calmed down some during the second half, when the downstairs bar closed and the first balcony ran out of red wine (I'm told). In the interest of participation, however belated, here are a couple of lines I would totally have gunned it for if I were into letting the people sitting around me at concerts know that my ticket is more important than their ticket: I tuned the old banjo ("Boogie Street") -- OWWW! YEAH! She sends her regards ("Famous Blue Raincoat") -- WOO! REGARDS! Let your mercy spill ("If It Be Your Will") -- DAMN, LEN! SPILL!

At the core of the note-perfect band were guitarist Bob Metzger and bass player (and bandleader) Roscoe Beck. Both have worked with Cohen for decades on and off the road. (Our sister paper in Dallas interviewed Beck not long ago.) No less crucial was Javier Mas, who deployed a caravan of exotic stringed instruments to deepen the textures of every song he played on. (Cohen discovered Mas after the Spaniard contributed to a Cohen tribute album in his home country.) Dino Soldo blew a variety of wind instruments but might have made his most lasting impression with a couple of unexpected virtuoso turns on chromatic harmonica. Appropriately for much of the set, keyboard player Neil Larsen found nagging martial chords and David Lynchian hums for songs like "Everybody Knows" and "First We Take Manhattan." He shone whenever he drove his Hammond B3 to the dark end of the street, as during the startling "Hallelujah."

When Cohen emerged for the night's second half, standing at a small keyboard ("I don't want to alarm you, but I'm going to fire this up," he said before starting "Tower of Song." "This thing plays by itself"), he told the audience, "Thank you so much for not going home." No, Leonard Cohen. Thank you for not staying home.

Setlist​
"Dance Me to the End of Love"
"The Future"
"Ain't No Cure for Love"
"Bird on the Wire"
"Everybody Knows"
"In My Secret Life"
"Who By Fire"
"Chelsea Hotel #2"
"Waiting for the Miracle"
"Anthem"

Intermission

"Tower of Song"
"Suzanne"
"Sisters of Mercy"
"The Gypsy's Wife"
"That Other Blues Song"
"The Partisan"
"Boogie Street"
"Hallelujah"
"I'm Your Man"
"A Thousand Kisses Deep" (recited)
"Take This Waltz"

Encores:
"So Long, Marianne"
"First We Take Manhattan"
"Famous Blue Raincoat"
"If It Be Your Will"
"Closing Time"
"I Tried to Leave You"