After one marathon session, and wearing only his underpants, he ended up banging his head repeatedly on his hotel-room floor, wailing, ‘I can’t finish this song!’
Leonard Cohen took five years to write his masterpiece, ‘Hallelujah’.
He tinkered with it endlessly, chiselling at its intricate rhymes and phrases. He was a devout believer in painstaking craft and meticulous polish. But he was haunted by the fact that others could knock out their finest work in seconds.
When Bob Dylan wondered how long ‘Hallelujah’ had taken him, Cohen couldn’t bear to tell the truth and said, ‘Two years.’ He asked about one of Bob’s and got a mortifying response: ‘Fifteen minutes.’
You can only hope he never heard about Keith Richards and ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (see Chris Jagger’s piece on page 16). Composed 60 years ago this month, it set a high bar for lack of creative effort that’s never really been surpassed.
Keeping a tape recorder by his bed in case of spontaneous inspiration, he awoke on the night of 6th May 1965 in a hotel in Clearwater, Florida, with a riff running through his head, pressed ‘Record’, sang it twice wheezily and slumped back to sleep. In the morning, he found the three-note superstructure that would help immortalise him, followed by 40 minutes’ snoring.
Lady Gaga came close to this strength- saving work ethic when bashing out ‘Just Dance’ in five minutes through the fog of a hangover.
Stevie Nicks returned Fleetwood Mac to the top of the singles chart with ‘Dreams’, cobbled together in ten minutes.
Incensed by a red-headed bank clerk who’d flirted with her newly acquired husband, Carl Dean (who sadly has just died after 59 years of marriage), Dolly Parton raced home to bang out ‘Jolene’ in half an hour. And then wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ the same day.
Posh white rappers the Beastie Boys left Happy Hour in New York’s Palladium cocktail lounge with their anthem ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)’ scrawled on a paper napkin.
James Brown improvised the classic ‘What I’d Say’ live on-stage after running out of songs – and it was so warmly received that he recorded it.
And ‘Seven Nation Army’, by blues anarchists the White Stripes, was cooked up at a Melbourne pub soundcheck. Its now ubiquitous six-note signature was soon fashioned into football chants the world over. It was even pressed into service at Glastonbury in 2017, where a speech by the briefly beloved then Labour leader was met with 100,000 singing ‘Oh Jer-em-ee Coooor-byn!’
But my favourite is the deliberately slapdash and lumpy ‘Song 2’ by bumptious pop stadium-fillers Blur.
It was written and taped in 30 minutes as a joke to alarm a record
company desperate for a hit. Ironically, the label loved it. Rightly so. It’s just passed one billion streams on Spotify.
The fastidious, pencil-chewing Leonard Cohen could only
dream of such effortless
spontaneity. How it must have hurt. His
famous song ‘Anthem’ is even a celebration of the
value of flaws and
imperfection. ‘Forget
your perfect offering,’ it
advises. ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’
