Leonard & Janis

I was thinking about that overrated wretch Leon Russell. 

One of his worst songs was "Elvis and Marilyn," yowled like a seasick Van Morrison. If he hadn't died, maybe he would've tried to get some attention doing "Leonard and Janis." What better way to cash in than on the death of Cohen, right? Remind everyone how his cock collided with juicy Janis. At least for one night. Wasn't that another fantastic romance, worth commemorating in song?

Actually, not.

What happened was that they were both staying in the obnoxiously "trendy" Chelsea Hotel. Oh, it was where ALL the cheap hipsters stayed in town. It was known as a cool place for boho writers and ho's like Joplin. Real "La Boheme" shit. So one night Leonard saunters into the elevator around 3 in the morning, and Janis does, too. She's in town with her shitty band to record a shitty record for Columbia. Leonard had also recorded a shitty record for Columbia (in terms of sales) and wasn't sure what to do, besides eat, drink, and maybe get lucky. 

The droll mythology is that slutty Janis yapped that she was lookin' for Kris Kristofferson. Leonard quipped, "I am Kris Kristofferson." And off they went to his room. Cohen's recollection is a bit hazy on whether she recognized him as Leonard Cohen, or more likely, whether she cared that much. 

Janis gave him a blowjob, and Leonard apparently figured that was good enough. He may have figured he was risking a disease with just a blowjob, but to fuck a bitch like this could've been fatal. 

He came, and she left. And a year or whatever later, she died.

Leonard brooded about this while sipping a drink in a bar (you know, the "Death and the Maiden" bit) and jotted down something sensitive:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so free
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street

A bit condescending, no? Here's an interesting part of what is basically just a hippie-dippie boho blowjob story. Cohen, who was able to come pretty well into a total stranger's mouth, found it hard to complete his song. Nothing new, there. While his pal Dylan could knock off a masterpiece in 15 minutes, Cohen would often agonize over fragments of lyrics and take years to glue the pieces together. 

He eventually pieced together more poetic lines: 

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception

And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty...
you said, "Well, never mind
We are ugly but we have the music" 

OK, now we're getting some humility, at least. Of some kind. 

During an eight hour flight, he and a band member (uncredited) worked on polishing the tune. The song, now called "Chelsea Hotel #2" (being the second draft) appeared in concert two years after Joplin's death, and was recorded two years later. And after that, Cohen smirked that the woman in the song was Joplin. See, everyone, your Leonard IS a rocker. He had sex with just about the wildest bitch in the rock world, so there! 

Eventually Cohen realized he'd used her to add to his own legend, and it brought a pang of grandiose conscience. The gloomy poet would later offer a guilty mumble that it was an "indiscretion" to name a name like that. It was also uncharacteristic of a grand wordsmith and intellectual to cross into pornographic slang with the phrase "giving me head." 

Being a religious and mystical guy, Cohen's mea culpa was punctuated with a final thought: Janis would understand and forgive him, wherever she was. 

Yes, yes, Janis was such a beauty, with a very spiritual soul. You just had this image of her in some exotic Nirvana cloud for eternity: 

An irony here is that Janis had already spilled the beans about the night Leonard spilled into her mouth: 

"Sometimes you're with someone and you're convinced that they have something to tell you. So maybe nothing's happening, but you keep telling yourself something's happening—innate communication. 'He's just not saying anything. He's moody or something.' So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping. And then, all of a sudden about four o'clock in the morning you realize that, flat ass, this motherfucker's just lying there. He's not balling me.

"I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened. Twice. Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen. And it's strange 'cause they were the only two that I can think of, like prominent people, that I tried to ... without really liking them up front, just because I knew who they were and wanted to know them. And then they both gave me nothing. I don't know what that means. Maybe it just means they were on a bummer."

Yes, Janis expected that blowing Leonard would just be foreplay, and he'd be up and ready for fucking her. Aw, a lack of cum-munication. 

No question Joplin's quote, which appeared after her death, is real. She was fond of coarse talk like that. She once offered a comparison between two other famous fuckers. She said, and here I paraphrase, "Dick Cavett has a bigger dick and is a better lover than (N.Y. Jets football quarterback) Joe Namath. Joe, what a disaster."

What have we learned from this? 

All I can add is that aside from "Piece of My Heart," which I haven't heard in years, I think Janis was a pretty shitty waste of time, and mostly she was screeching like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. And "Chelsea Hotel #2" is just another tuneless Cohen song, nowhere near as pretentiously fascinating as "Suzanne." Which means that maybe Joplin should not have blown him, but instead given him "tea and oranges all the way from China."