Everyone knows about Leonard Cohen's visit to Israel in 1973 when he spontaneously parachuted into Israel to entertain IDF troops on the front during the Yom Kippur War. Especially since the publication of Matti Friedman's comprehensive
Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai – a celebrated book that recounts that visit of the Jewish Canadian high priest of poetry to the Holy Land, and the subsequent theater performance that has evolved from it – that moment in time has been captured and dissected from every angle.
But much less is known about another eventful convergence of the stars between Israel and Cohen, some 37 years before he returned to the Holy Land in 2009 for his monumental concert at Ramat Gan Stadium, complete with the Birkat Kohanim (Priestly Blessing) bestowed upon a stunned crowd of devotees.
In 1972, a year before his historic Yom Kippur visit, a not-so-famous and professionally struggling Cohen and his band arrived in Israel for two concerts, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Both shows are legend, not as much for the music as for the drama surrounding them.Â
In Jerusalem, Cohen suffered an onstage crisis, spurred by ingesting a tab of LSD before the show, went offstage at intermission and shaved, coming back to perform a stunning second half.
The show in Tel Aviv, at the Yad Eliyahu sports arena, was marred by clashes between the audience and members of the event's security detail, who were preventing them from getting close to the stage.
Snippets of film and audio from those shows have emerged over the years, along with a recounting in Friedman's book. It was also touched on visually in a somewhat sensational and inaccurate manner in a 1974 documentary, Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire by Tony Palmer, which was quickly taken out of circulation upon its release, at Cohen's request, and subsequently by Sony and the Cohen estate after an unauthorized DVD recut by Palmer was re-released in 2010.Â
The irony is that extensive audio and video footage of both the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv shows exists – along with hours of Cohen at various spots in Israel, including at the Western Wall – but has remained locked up since Cohen's death in 2016.
In March, however, the likelihood that those artifacts – along with a vast archive of Cohen's music, art, writings, and film – would become available to Cohen's fans increased slightly with the partial conclusion of a lawsuit brought on by his two children, Adam and Lorca, against his former manager and the trustee of the Cohen estate, Robert Kory.
For years, the children have been blocking Kory's plan to make the archive available through donation to preeminent Canadian universities and museums. Their tactic was to accuse Kory of misconduct in his role as trustee. But in a March 24 ruling, a court-appointed referee found, after a 10-day trial, that Kory had fully and competently carried out Cohen's wishes in his management of the estate and had committed no wrongdoing whatsoever. In fact, the referee went so far as to say that the claim of Kory's alleged fraud was a “flaming red herring of scarlet proportion.â€
The Magazine spoke with Kory about the lawsuit, Cohen's complicated relationship with Israel, and his final trip to the Jewish state in 2009. And Robert de Young – an Australian filmmaker, literary studies academic, and archivist – whom Kory tapped in 2017 to take charge of going through the reams and reams of notebooks and hours of music and film that Cohen had left behind – delves into the projects that are ready to roll, including the holy grail of the 1972 concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Robert Kory arrived in Israel in 2009 with his client and friend Cohen ahead of the singer's show at Ramat Gan Stadium.
The California-based attorney had stepped in to assist with Cohen's affairs in 2004 following a financial disaster resulting from a previous manager stealing the singer-songwriter's life savings. By 2008, Kory had been so successful in assisting Cohen that the bard tapped him to become his personal manager and support a late career renaissance in which Cohen rose to international stardom.
Cohen, who died in 2016 aged 82, was received like the upper-echelon artist he was over the course of 147 shows around the globe between 2008 and 2010 alone.
When Cohen was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, presenter Lou Reed said, “We are so lucky to be alive at the same time Leonard Cohen is.â€
The singer's return to the limelight was a mixed blessing, as he was not comfortable in the public eye.
“Leonard was very reluctant at first to go back on tour. From his view, touring had always been a disaster – he would say, ‘Performing is an opportunity for a thousand humiliations,'†Kory told Billboard magazine earlier this year.
When I met Kory in a big reception tent outside Ramat Gan Stadium before the 2009 show, he wore the same tailored suit and fedora as his boss, and he was on a high. He had staged a coup in arranging the Israel show because it was a low priority, given all of the lucrative opportunities that Cohen had to perform elsewhere at the height of his resurgence.
Although performing in Israel seemed to Kory like a no-brainer, given Cohen's history with the country, it was a hard sell.
‘Leonard didn't want to play in Israel’
“Leonard didn't want to play in Israel at first, but he allowed me to explore the possibility and I learned there was a huge demand,†Kory told the Magazine recently, a few weeks after the court ruling in his favor.
Cohen, upset over the continuing Israel-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing struggles surrounding the future of the Jewish state, “didn't want to play because of the politics and was troubled by making money in the middle of a conflict,†Kory said, having discussed the issue extensively with Cohen.
“So I said, ‘Well, what if we do it as a charity event?'â€
Together, they devised a plan that made sense to them: to not treat the show as just another stop on a global tour but to establish a fund that would benefit coexistence efforts between Israelis and Palestinians, and also set up a sister show in Ramallah, alongside Ramat Gan.
“Leonard immediately goes to the web and finds this organization called the Parents Circle, which was founded by one of the most noble human beings I've met, Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was killed by Hamas at a bus stop, and who had an epiphany, when at first he wanted revenge, he realized that hatred can only stop in one heart at a time, and he declared that it was going to stop with his. So he set up this organization of Israeli and Palestinian parents who've lost their children,†Kory said.
The Ramallah concert didn't materialize due to politics and pressure, despite the great interest in the concert among the Palestinians whom Kory met and, to his surprise, were familiar with Cohen's work. Instead, Kory arranged for 400 Palestinian bereaved parents to attend the Ramat Gan concert, which was a huge success, both artistically and financially, raising over $3 million for the Fund for Reconciliation, Tolerance and Peace.
Kory returned to the region many times over the next couple of years to be hands-on in administering the charitable funds, but he and Cohen began souring on the prospects of their efforts bearing fruit, amid increasing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I seemed to know more Palestinians than the typical Israeli whom I met, and I had closer relationships with many wonderful people,†Kory said. “But, by 2012, Leonard discouraged me from continuing to visit Israel and the West Bank in what appeared to be an increasingly conflicted environment. Leonard feared I would get hurt because I had no real understanding of the conflict.â€
“Leonard was a huge personal defender of Israel but recognized the reality of evil in the world, and he thought my views were naïve. Leonard told me, ‘You know, music doesn't really make a difference, but it does somehow make things better,'†he recalled.
“He definitely realized the impact of his performance on the Israeli people. But he also realized the limits of what he could do as an entertainer to have any major impact on peace between Israelis and Palestinians,†Kory added. At Cohen's request, Kory became executor of his estate.
In the last year of his life, Cohen talked more intimately with Kory about his archive and his legacy, and he asked Kory to serve not just as the trustee of his estate but to continue as a manager under a management agreement with his publishing and recording companies to continue expanding Cohen's audience.
“In 2016, based on the tremendous success that I'd had with Leonard, he asked me to continue managing his businesses and his intellectual property. We weren't expecting him to pass away so quickly, but he fell. He was a prophet in the classic Old Testament sense. Maybe he had intuitions about his death. I was surprised at the intensity of his request that I commit to continuing to manage his affairs, so I agreed to do that for five, a maximum of seven years,†Kory said.
With so much material in Cohen's archive, Kory saw an opportunity to permanently etch Cohen into the upper echelon of 20th-century artists.
Some of his efforts following Cohen's death produced fruits. He executive-produced the film Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song released by Sony Pictures Classics and screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2022, about the history of the timeless 1984 Cohen song that has achieved a life of its own.
In addition, The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) hosted Leonard Cohen: Everybody Knows, an exhibition and an accompanying catalogue that showcased items from the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, which includes personal notebooks, lyrics, photographs, and artwork.Â
“We also had a contract to publish five books. The first one came out in 2022 – A Ballet of Lepers – a novel that Leonard wrote when he was 21. And there are four to be drawn from unpublished work in the archive. We had his entire musical archive digitized, and we had a plan for 10 box sets with Sony, à la Bob Dylan bootleg series that has been so popular,†Kory said.
“And we had this completed film of the 1972 tour, with complete versions of concerts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that had never been seen before.â€
KORY ALSO set in motion avenues to generate revenue from the Cohen estate, benefiting Cohen's children and grandchildren, of which Kory earned a percentage. In the largest single transaction, he arranged the sale of Cohen's music catalogue to the Hipgnosis publishing company for $60 million in 2022.
“As I promised Leonard, I consulted with Adam and Lorca after he died. I kept them informed. I sent them financial statements every month. I met with them quarterly. They knew everything that was going on and then, because of the bubble in music publishing, I had an opportunity to sell Leonard's music publishing to some very good people at an extraordinary price, which I did successfully. That was in my sixth year as manager,†Kory said.
Adam, Lorca, and the Trust collected over $50 million, and Kory gained a 12.25% management fee.
“And at that point I thought, you know, I had the film coming out. I had a five-book contract with Penguin Random House. The archive was completely digitized, and we had Canadian patrons that were going to buy the archive and give it to universities for study. Adam and Lorca stood to make an additional $15 million each. I thought, ‘My job is done, I have some other projects that are very important to me. I can turn it all over to Adam Cohen.'â€
However, later that year, Adam and Lorca filed suit in probate court in California alleging that Kory had “fraudulently installed himself†as trustee in 2017, “pilfered the estate†for six years, and ran the estate like a “black box.â€
To counter these broad general claims, Kory filed a petition for Approval of Accounting and Ratification of Trustee Acts in December 2023. The Probate Court appointed retired judge Glen Reiser to conduct a trial on Kory's petition.
After a 10-day trial, presentation of witnesses, thousands of pages of documentary evidence, and cross-examination, Reiser rejected all of Adam and Lorca's claims in their entirety and recommended that the Probate Court approve Kory's petition in full.
As to the claim that Kory installed himself fraudulently, the referee found that Kory performed multiple roles as trustee, business manager, and personal manager as Cohen had intended, competently, and for compensation well within industry standards. Regarding the claim that Kory pilfered the estate, the referee rejected this allegation in full and confirmed that Kory generated tens of millions of dollars for Adam and Lorca and that Kory's fees and expenses were all reasonable, disclosed, and well within proper bounds for the services provided.
Notably, the referee also faulted Adam Cohen for blocking the sale of his father's archive, which includes over 240 notebooks, tens of thousands of manuscript pages, original drawings and paintings, which was appraised at one point at $48 million.
According to the Variety report on the trial, Kory testified in late January and early February, saying that Leonard Cohen had warned him while he was alive that his son might interfere in the management of the estate. Kory quoted Leonard Cohen as saying that his son might commit a metaphorical “patricide†in order to get out of his shadow.
“He said, ‘Look, my son is Hamlet,'†Kory testified. “‘He's a prince haunted by his father's ghost, who poisons everyone he touches… I want to make sure you're making the final decisions.'â€
Kory expressed puzzlement and sadness to the Magazine over Adam's continued refusal to allow his father's unpublished work to see the light of day.
“I cannot explain the dynamic exactly, but Adam started to turn on me in 2022, even though I had made him and Lorca quite a considerable amount of money.â€
Kory said that Cohen “would be heartbroken†to learn about the fight over his legacy and Adam's conscious suppression of his father's work that he had meticulously preserved for future generations to study.
When Robert De Young was approached by Kory in 2017 to work on the Cohen archives, he was as excited as a kid in a candy shop.
De Young, with a long track record in the media, was already well familiar with Cohen, having produced two radio documentaries on the singer for ABC in Australia in the late 1990s.
“I sent them over to his manager, Kelly Lynch, at the time, with the idea of developing a documentary film about him. When I was in Los Angeles in 1998, I met with her, and she said, ‘Oh, Leonard is just downstairs, I'll bring him up.' This was soon after he came out of the Zen monastery he had been living in.
“We had an hour or so together, and he was very comfortable with what I wanted to do. He started pulling artwork out of the cupboards and said, ‘Hey, Robert, if the camera crew is downstairs, bring them up.' And I had to say, ‘Leonard, look, I didn't even know I was going to meet you today. There's no camera crew.'â€
That documentary got snagged up in corporate difficulties, but de Young kept in touch with Cohen and his team, now helmed by Kory. After Cohen's death, de Young was invited to the private memorial service, and shortly after, he got a call from Kory.
“He said, ‘Look, I know you're a very experienced documentary filmmaker and an academic, and that you knew Leonard and he was very happy to work with you, so I'd like to employ you.' And I suppose because of my media experience in audio and as a documentary filmmaker, I was particularly interested in the audio-video archive material. But because of my literary background as well, I was also interested in the notebooks.â€
Only after a year and a half or so, de Young began to get a sense of the depth of the archives in terms of all the photos, artwork, notebooks, manuscripts, film, and music. So he asked Kory to hire a library science master to help rake through material and digitize as much as they could.
In parallel mode, de Young also took on the vast amounts of music in the storehouse. A big fan of the Bob Dylan bootleg series of albums that have been curated over recent decades for Sony by music archivist Steve Berkowitz, de Young went to Kory with a proposal.
“These are really interesting ways of preserving and archiving the material, but also getting really rare and unreleased material out to the public,†de Young told Kory.
“And so we sat and had a look at them, and he was obviously impressed with the packaging that Sony had done, and of course, with Steve's production. And I said, ‘Look, we should start doing this with Leonard.'â€
Kory okayed the project, and de Young brought in Berkowitz, and together they started mapping out a series of box sets. After extensively listening to hundreds of hours of music, they decided to focus on the 1972 period first.
The 21-concert date tour, which took place over the course of a month in March and April and resulted in the 1973 live album Live Songs, took place less than a year after Cohen released his album Songs of Love and Hate.
He brought a small band, which included backup singer and future star Jennifer Warnes. The tour was well received, with the only controversy taking place, of course, at the Israel stops.
“We had 11 complete unheard concerts, and about 22 hours of unseen film footage of his 1972 tour, including his shows in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Cohen's first time visiting in Israel,†de Young said.
Calling it “an extraordinary concert,†de Young explained that the plan was to release the Jerusalem show in its entirety on two bonus discs, together with two curated discs drawing on the best performances of the 1972 tour.
They were documented in Tony Palmer's 1974 film Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, which was removed from distribution as quickly as it was released. Cohen sacked Palmer and re-edited the film with Humphrey Dixon, but the film was only ever screened on television by ZDF in Germany. Sony and the estate shut down the unauthorized DVD release by Palmer in 2010.
The film portrays the audience in Jerusalem at Binyanei Hauma being disgruntled at Cohen's performance, and a German audience demanding money back due to a bad sound system.
The Tel Aviv show was marred by physical altercations between concert-goers and the security team at the Yad Eliahu sports arena.
However, the complete footage, according to de Young, told a different story.
“If you're one of the few who saw Bird on a Wire, you get the impression that the '72 tour was pretty shambolic, that the audio was terrible, that Leonard was drug-addled, and that crowds were unhappy and restless. Yet, when we went back and listened to the 11 complete concerts, there was hardly any feedback or static. And then when we started looking at the film footage, we realized that Palmer's film was a completely unrepresentative and very tabloid take on the 1972 tour,†he said.
“So I think part of our ambitions for getting the '72 box set out first was to correct that impression. Given that, I suppose the Jerusalem show had a bad reputation partially because of the Tony Palmer film. Leonard took some acid [LSD], and he wasn't in great shape. But what's really interesting is that he and the band went backstage, Leonard had a break and shaved, the audience sang “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem†to bring him back to the stage, and when he came back out, he did absolute killer versions of 10 songs, including the finale “So Long, Marianne,†which sees Cohen weeping as he's singing, accompanied by the devoted Jerusalem crowd,†said de Young.
“And in Tel Aviv, the whole thing was based on a misunderstanding and confusion. Leonard didn't know that the floor surface of the arena had just been redone, so the audience was all sitting in the bleachers. So he called on people to come down onto the floor, not as some sort of revolutionary act. And when they started coming down, the security guards pushed them back. So again, Palmer's representation of that was very sensational.â€
In addition to the audio boxed set, de Young digitized and restored the archive footage of the tour into a documentary titled Leonard Cohen 1972, with the last section devoted to the Jerusalem and Tel Aviv shows.
In an excerpt he made available to the Magazine, which was produced for the ANU Museum of the Jewish People, there is footage of Cohen mingling with shopkeepers in the Old City and overlooking the Kotel, making music backstage and in hotel rooms with his band, and the concerts themselves, interspersed with footage of Cohen's 2009 Ramat Gan show.
“I tracked down two of the musicians – bass player David O'Connor and guitarist Peter Marshall. I wanted to retain the film very much as a 1972 time capsule, so I just wanted to use their audio. So I recorded interviews with both David and Peter,†he said.
“Jennifer Warnes did a voice-over and told me, ‘You've absolutely captured what that tour was like.'â€
According to de Young, who has devoured and internalized everything about the 1972 tour and Cohen's time in Israel, the bard's experience on his first visit to the birthplace of his faith left a huge impression on him.
“I think that Leonard's time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and the absolute love and devotion the audiences had for him was a big factor in his decision to return so suddenly when the Yom Kippur War broke out,†de Young said.
Will the film, the music, and the rest of the archives finally be made available to the general public?
Adam Cohen's attorney, Alex Weingarten, told AP that the “proceeding is far from over†and that objections to the ruling would be lodged.
Kory is no longer the trustee of the Cohen estate, but he said that a contract exists between him and the estate for the rights to complete the archive sale.
“There's a promise by the estate to let me complete the process and, you know, make Adam another $40 million. But Adam has said publicly he doesn't want to let that happen.
“I have this victory, but my promise to Leonard about his archive, and where he stands historically, remains unfulfilled.
“He said to me that he had some faint hope of being recognized on the lower rungs of the pantheon of great poets. And I said, ‘Leonard, you know I'm not an academic. I certainly don't know how to make judgments in these matters, but I have my own views, and I think you should be recognized, not on the lower rungs, right? You should be recognized much higher than that.' And so, in part, I accepted the mandate to be, to manage, to try to achieve that goal.
“Since the Variety article appeared about the court case, I have been approached by scholars and Cohen fans from all over the world who are hopeful that the archive might finally be made available. I remain hopeful this may prove true,†Kory said.
“I pray for some kind of insight from somewhere that Leonard's archives will be allowed to see the light of day. It's a rich source of inspiration, and it's a tragedy that it's not available. My goal is to let people know that this archive exists. And hopefully, out of that will arise some kind of demand for it to be seen and heard.â€
As the revered songwriter sang on “If It Be Your Will,†a song from his 1984 album Various Positions that also gave us “Hallelujahâ€:Â
If it be your will that I speak no more
And my voice be still as it was before
I will speak no more; I shall abide until
I am spoken for, if it be your will.â–
