Kansas City Music Blog

​When Leonard Cohen's first-ever Kansas City concert was announced a few months ago, you'd have been forgiven for assuming it was the latest Folly Theater event booked by Bill Shapiro, host of KCUR 89.3's long-running music show (and pledge-drive workhorse) Cyprus Avenue. Shapiro had often named the Cohen tour as No. 1 on his wish list.

In fact, the tour is an AEG jam at the Midland, and if you're sitting anywhere close to the dapper Canadian, you've blown a big-city chunk of change. (As of this writing, it's mostly sold out, but some $250 seats remain.)

In lieu of the preshow talk he might have offered an audience at the more intimate Folly (which has about 1,080 seats to the Midland's 2,300), we asked Shapiro to name the songs most on his mind as the clock counts down to Leonard Hour. His exclusive list after the jump.

In an e-mail, he writes:

The five songs I hope to hear at the Leonard Cohen concert are: "Tower of Song," "I'm Your Man," "Everybody Knows," "Boogie Street" and "Chelsea Hotel #2."

All but the last one have been a part of his set list for this tour, so I'm optimistic that I won't be disappointed.

While I've been a huge fan since his first release and consider his early work ("Suzanne," "So Long, Marianne," "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye") to be truly classic, I now find that the lyrical perspective of much of his later stuff coalesces more comfortably with my current state of mind. I'm sure that much of that has to do with the fact that he and I are essentially the same age. "Chelsea Hotel" holds my affection because I lived nearby it in New York in 1961 and 1962, and the reference to Janis Joplin also for me clearly evokes that amazing era.

Unlike the early Dylan, whose high, nasal quality simply was an unpleasant sound to my ears (it wasn't until enough people whose musical taste I respected lauded his work that I really listened) and caused me to avoid his material until I focused on the words and understood, Cohen's early works, when his voice was higher, came across fine. Because, while his
sound didn't add anything, it didn't detract, and the pure poetry hooked me.

I tend to favor Cohen's later work because his vocals make little pretense toward musicality but are more like chants of wondrous words. In fact I really prefer both the over-60 Dylan and Cohen vocally, but that may just be because I'm accustomed to the timbre of my own voice.

Shapiro is set to devote a new hour to Cohen on his November 7 broadcast. We'll be listening. (Next up for Cyprus Avenue at the Folly: Allen Toussaint on January 8. Shapiro also hopes to book Rosanne Cash next winter.)

And if you can't make the Midland show? Well, it's been a good year for Cohen live albums. In the spring came the double-disc Live in London (DVD sold separately), a comprehensive document of the 75-year-old legend's recent return to the stage. And this month, Sony issued a 1970 performance (Cohen playing the Isle of Wight festival -- right after Jimi Hendrix) as a CD-DVD package.

For a video-intensive, argument-starting Cohen list, see this entry at the music blog of our sister paper in Broward-Palm Beach, Florida. And the singer's own site features plenty of recent video clips here.

Photo from Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, copyright Lions Gate Entertainment