KEY POINTS:
Thank you, said Leonard Cohen, "for keeping my songs alive all these years". Did we?
I went home from the concert to look for something that might just still be there. Deep in the piano stool, beneath long forgotten songbooks with broken binding, I found it.
The leaves of newsprint were still mostly stapled together. A few that had come adrift were folded inside. The paper had turned a dirty brown and felt so crisp it might crumble at a touch.
And scrawled on the pages were notes I'd made nearly 40 years ago: "Stranger Song. D/C/D/A/E/F#m/E/ ... Master Song ... " Practically every song from his first two albums.
Darkly beautiful songs. Anyone who loved them could sing them. The words were the music, guitar chords just fell into their rhythm. Their composer was a poet first and always.
He savoured every word and phrase, singing them slow and low in a voice so clipped and clear it could crack the air, in cadences I'm copying here.
He could easily slip into self-parody and his third album crossed the line, but his first two were pure.
They were for listening with the light out or singing to good friends late on a weekday night when the study was done, the conversation had lulled, the coffee was cold and nobody wanted to go home.
I wonder if those old friends were at Vector Arena the other night. Probably not. I think I forced him on them.
I might not have been there myself if a constantly surprising son hadn't provided tickets at Christmas. I thought the songs had died before he was born.
It was an ageing crowd at the concert. I doubt that many of them had listened to Leonard Cohen for years. Wonderful as he was - and it turns out, still is - it was student music and, to quote George Carlin, you know, you grow.
We went, I think, out of curiosity for the man. We'd never actually seen him and it was a chance to put a personality at last on that entrancing voice of long ago.
Actually I had seen him briefly once, on a late-60s television show when he sat on a stool and sang Suzanne in a suit and tie. His eyes had a sardonic glint that redeemed the sadness of the song.
Many found him depressing, I never did. The bleakest sentiments can be uplifting in poetry that is true.
He walked on to the stage to a standing ovation. It was gratitude, I imagine, for the fact that he could come so far at age 74.
He had come some distance from the early songs too. He sang only a few of them and not so well. The bulk of the concert was built on a later style: big, bouncy musical productions with less poetry but still lyrically exquisite.
And the man himself was a revelation. Not all self-absorbed, respectful of the musicians around him, he could laugh at the seriousness of his art without diminishing it.
Small, grey and strangely dapper in an op-shop suit and a fedora that he doffed during applause, he was as riveting as a rock star on stage. He had the touch, timing and presence of a natural performer though he said hardly a word between songs.
With a ritual nod to our nuclear pacifism, he seemed to share the shallow political pessimism you hear from musicians who are not really interested. No reference was made, even obliquely, to the inauguration of Barack Obama the day before.
But then, his songs never did descend to political comment.
He was much more interested in religion and sex, which were not poles apart in his theology. No songwriter has done masculine sexual awe more accurately.
I knelt there at the delta,
At the Alpha and the Omega,
At the cradle of the river and the sea.
And like a blessing come from Heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease.
I had always thought he was a male cult but the crowd at the concert said otherwise. Nor can he have been a minority taste as tiny as I'd imagined.
Maybe back then and ever since, many liked his music more than they cared to admit. Whole verses of songs he didn't sing in the concert have come back to me often in the week since. They live in that way but no other. I'm not playing the recordings again, the chords aren't coming as easily as on my rusty strings and I don't think I will persevere.
Nostalgia is not revival. I have never seen an audience my age more responsive, or a performer more appreciative, but he said he probably wouldn't see us again and we understood. It was nice for a night.
