Halleluijah in a Northern Wisconsin Bar

Various renditions of every song are worth listening to. Some renditions move beyond our recognition, yet if we appreciate music and musicians, we can find something to enjoy. And some songs are nearly sacramental with ineffable or opaque elements that strongly affect the listener.

Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluijah” is one of those songs; it’s not just a poem set to notes, but a sacrament set to song. The “minor fall” and “major lift” in the lyrics go deep and high, and in Cohen’s razor-sharp verse, the movement begins with two lines and eight big beats:

“I heard there was a secret chord
That David played and pleased the Lord.”

By the sixth and seventh words, I’m all in.

What?

There’s “a secret chord”?

Where can I find it?

Why didn’t anyone ever teach it to me?

This summer, on what I’m calling my northern notes tour, I’m listening to lots of bands with music repertoires as diverse as Haydn and Brahams, to Willie, to Tracy Chapman, The Black Crows, Jazz, and Leonard Cohen.

I’ve listened at street concerts, art galleries, patios, and the bars. In the bars, it’s mostly party songs, and Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is rarely on the set list. The other evening, though, the singer decided to do it.

She has a big personality and sings with the bawdiness of the devil itself; she’s bold enough to take on Cohen. She laughed through a few verses, then leaned into the refrain with a big-throated conviction under the blue and red lights of a Monday night bar gig.

Halleluijah in a Northern Wisconsin Bar

During her version, I saw a laughing God; it was something like the Psalmist who widened stiff definitions of deity by directing worshipers to praise YAHWEH with drums and dance.

Then I thought of Leonard Cohen’s video version, his long, pale face beneath the black hat and his dark, gravelly voice sounding like a chanter during a somnambulistic walk-about where every word is tested against the darkness.

But it’s another performance of “Halleluijah” that has stayed with me for over eleven years. A gifted Hawaiian slack-key guitarist and singer-songwriter named L.T. Smooth performed it on Easter morning in 2015 for the brunch crowd at Huggo’s Restaurant in Kona, just forty-five feet from the Pacific.

L.T.’s rendition of “Hallelujah” was consistent with his perspective. He is a man of deep faith, and before he sang the song, he said that he’d been up late the previous night counseling a friend who had addiction problems.

That Easter morning, he seemed to channel Cohen himself. It was his Magnificat, a song of thanksgiving from a musician who has few peers and has played and sang with luminaries like Sting, Alicia Keys, U2, Lenny Kravitz, Lukas Nelson, and others.

Like the Wisconsin bar rendition, L.T. Smooth was accompanied only by his acoustic guitar, with the cresting and crashing ocean waves as the backbeat.

The Wisconsin bar performance was very different, punctuated by people yelling during the song. In Hawaii, listeners ate brunch with their feet in the sand; in the bar, patrons were drinking beers while a dog walked in and out of the open door.

This is what people do in bars: they meet others and talk even if there is music going on. That happened when I saw an old bandmate and we enjoyed a pop-up reunion, talking and reminiscing about our days together in our three-piece band.

I laughed so hard that I cried when he reminded me of a prank we pulled one night after a concert, when one of our members was overstepping boundaries and getting on us for the mistakes that he was making during the performance.

I don’t really believe there are such things as mistakes anymore. I see every event as a way of teaching and learning, and mistakes” as important forms of invention.

It was Billy Joel who spoke of creativity this way too when he described the art of music invention as hitting the wrong note at exactly the right time.

We called our other band member “Laser” because of his hyper-focused personality. That’s a good trait to have as a lead musician, but it can also make a person hard to get along with. Such people can be very critical of themselves and others.

At our concert, Laser was in a bad mood, and he took it out by leveling criticism at me and my bandmate. We rode past it, as always, but it didn’t feel good.

When our concert ended, we were all staying in the same place. Laser had trailered his boat to the gig because he wanted to go fishing early the next morning. The lake was known to hold large walleye and offer good panfish fishing.

Laser went to bed early, but my friend and I had no interest in doing so, so we stayed up to talk about the night and drink some beers. Late that night, we found ourselves walking past Laser’s boat.

Then it came to us, like a laughing rendition of “Halleliujah”:

“Let’s piss on Laser’s boat.”

We did.

The wrong note at exactly the right time.

He never knew.

And then there it was: the secret chord, the minor fall, and the beer sopped lift, bending all strings into “a cold and very broken Halleluijah.”

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image: my former bandmate, Nick Hoen and I in a Northern Wisconsin Bar. halleluijah

and here is a brief portion of Russ Thorburn’s poem, “The Night Leonard Cohen Died.”

Leonard Cohen was singing from the shore;

you might have sung back to him, his raven hair

still black and combed straight back.

He was holding the golden gun of Phil Spector,

as if he were going to shoot you full of song.

He drank the darkness, and offered a cup

to you, in the morning he would be dead.

Maybe the reason for me swimming with you,

as your body fought the darkness, and my hand

reached around your neck for a final kiss.