December 21, 2009 | music

In the latter half of the 20th century, three Montrealers – Leonard Cohen, Pierre Trudeau and Mordecai Richler – redefined the spheres of popular music, politics and writing within Canada.

With Trudeau, the day of the Canadian politician who looked like the miserable principal of a monochromatic highschool was gone in favor of a man so flashy and cool that John Lennon sought him out for a meeting, while Mick Jagger bedded his wife (not usually a marker of cool if not for the fact that Trudeau was busy bedding ladies who were not his wife in kind). Likewise, Mordecai Richler gave young Canadian writers hope – false though it may have been – that there existed within the Canadian literary scene possibilities beyond the interminable stories about the incest, dementia, and abominable weather conditions faced by frontier families and the godforsaken generations after them also raised alongside a hellacious mosquito-infested bogwater. He brought Canadian literature into the city, wrote brilliant satire and did so with none of the pastoral pretense of a novelist writing as if he’s practicing his Giller acceptance speech or grovelling for a grant.

Leonard Cohen is the sole survivor of these three Montreal maestros, a Canadian singer-songwriter with an air of European cool, who luckily does not croon in Danish. In Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah: A New Biography, honorary Shark Guy and blogger, Tim Footman nimbly dissects the complicated appeal of the “Bard of the Bedsit”. This is not a book meant solely to solely be a one-sided celebration of a man who could be bronzed and put in a park at any moment. What separates Hallelujah from much of what else has been written about Cohen is that it is not afraid to wipe off some of the gloss on the Cohen image. How a man who gives off such an air of assured self-confidence can spend years anxiously fretting over getting a song just right. How the man who apparently has an all-seasons pass to the bedrooms of every woman with a pulse once was left broken-hearted and spurned by the Velvet Underground’s Nico, who may have had Neo-Nazi sentiments to boot.

While most biographers are Cohen fans to the point of blinding themselves to any tears in his “famous blue raincoat”, Footman approaches his subject squarely — celebrating the achievements, while noting the utter failures. (The Cohen song “Fingerprints“, he writes, is “…possibly one of the most horrid and pointless things Cohen has ever recorded, as if he’d resurrected the Buckskin Boys [Cohen's high school band, a country outfit] to sing about divorce at a square dance.”) And unlike some of the Cohen hagiographies that have preceded it, and much in the spirit the great man has shown himself on his recent tour, the book approaches its subject with a welcome sense of humor. Cohen, one presumes, would have wanted it that way. How could he write about being “blessed with a golden voice” if he wasn’t a comedian at heart?

In that spirit, we pick up on a theme in Tim’s book, the consistently terrible cover art that has  accompanied Leonard Cohen’s albums for almost his entire career. The 10 albums pictured below account for a sizable chunk of his oeuvre, and Cohen was not printing these in his basement — much of the work you see done here (with the exception, as noted, of No. 1) was done by top industry professionals.

Here, accompanied by excerpts in italics from Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah are the 10 Ugliest Leonard Cohen Album Covers!

10. More Best Of Leonard Cohen

This is certainly the best looking of the album covers on this list. The main complaint here from a visual standpoint is the use of the Cohen symbols at the bottom, which also litter the sleeves of other Cohen albums and books and here have the effect of someone compounding the youthful folly of getting one ugly tattoo by getting five more to distract from the first. The photo is fine and the font choice makes a valid, though failed attempt to downplay the utterly terrible name of the album — “More Best Of”. It is, as Tim notes, “a stylistic and grammatical abomination of a title if ever there was one.”

9. Songs from a Room

The front image is an improvement on its predecessor [see The Songs of Leonard Cohen, below] , but still no classic: a monochrome shot of the artist looking decidedly stern, on a white background.

8. Various Positions

“… The cover photograph – a stubbly, suddenly old-looking Cohen scowling into the lens of a Polaroid camera – was the depiction of a man who just wanted to get it all over and done with.”

7. Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The album cover for Leonard Cohen’s debut album, an auspicious occasion marred by an image of him conjuring up the image of Michael Corleone, “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Just my enemies”… Well, whoever green-lighted this font would be high on the hit list.

“The cover design appears to have received little thought: a sepia head shot of the performer, taken in a photo booth in Montreal, with the album’s title in lettering that may have appeared cutting-edge at the time, but now looks dated to the point of self-parody… Half-assed as it was, this would by no means turn out to be the worst packaging to adorn Cohen’s work.”

6. Death of a Ladies’ Man

Not a fine moment in album photography and with a font and use of bars that date it more than Cohen’s youthful looks. Also unappealing, the look on Cohen’s ex-wife’s Suzanne Elrod’s face, one more commonly seen as weekend visitation rights for the family dog are worked out in divorce court.

5. Songs of Love and Hate

“Much of the album is pretty bleak, comprising the sort of songs that Cohen-haters and Cohen-mockers point to when they suggest that he just makes music to accompany whimpering and wrist-slashing. … The cover isn’t so great, either: white lettering on black, with an inexpertly cut head shot of an unshaven Cohen, grinning like a beatific hobo.”

4. The Future

“The cover is rather mediocre as well, resembling the sort of tattoo an accountant might get to celebrate a divorce.”

3. Recent Songs

The cover (an amateurish portrait of Cohen, based on a photograph taken by Hazel Field) was pretty ropey, but diehard fans had by now become used to that sort of thing.

2. Cohen Live (1994)

“What do you think of when you think Leonard Cohen?” “Uggh, the moon… castles…” “Perfect, put that on there, and add some other crap on the side. Limit yourself to the colors available on a 1984 Commodore 64 computer.”

1. Dear Heather

Dear Heather: “… The album sleeve is an absolute shocker, resembling nothing so much as the packaging for a range of feminine hygiene products from about 1986, decorated with the Chinese symbol for his monastic name, ‘Jikan’. Cohen has nobody to blame for this, as it’s based on one of his own drawings.”

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Of course, we kid Leonard and these covers do not reflect the content of the albums… mostly.  Tim Footman closes out his book with a list of his 10 favorite Leonard Cohen songs, and Noel, the more die-hard Leonard Cohen fan of the two SharkGuys, thought he’d do the same so here is:

Noel’s Top 10 Favorite Leonard Songs:
1) Sisters of Mercy
2) Ballad Of The Absent Mare
3) Everybody Knows
4) Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye
5) Famous Blue Raincoat
6) Bird on The Wire
7) Closing Time
8) Waiting for The Miracle
9) Chelsea Hotel # 2
10) I Can’t Forget