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Telling It on the Mountain : Although Leonard Cohen has retreated to a Zen center to write music and poetry, a tribute album being released this week could bring new fans.

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Like a bird on a wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free.

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--Lyrics by Leonard Cohen

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It’s hard to imagine being startled in a setting as peaceful as the Zen Center on the edge of the tiny resort village of Mount Baldy, but that’s the likely reaction when you discover that one of the most respected songwriters of the modern pop era lives on the center grounds in a cabin no larger than a budget motel room.

Leonard Cohen has spoken for years about his interest in Zen. But who ever figured that this pop icon, whose classic tales of restless longing include “Bird on a Wire” and “Suzanne,” would make such a spartan spot his permanent home and would trade in his finely tailored suits for modest robes?

“They have been very kind to me here,” Cohen says matter-of-factly about his change of lifestyle as he sits on a narrow cot that would look at home in an Army barracks. “This was originally two cabins, but they broke through [the wall] and made it one cabin to give me a bit more room.

“I stay here and do my work and help look after Roshi, who is the old teacher. He’s 88, and three or four of us are charged with doing that. Cooking is my contribution.”

The 61-year-old songwriter and poet hasn’t turned his back on the world. He frequently heads down the mountain to Los Angeles in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, either to visit an affiliated Zen center, to visit his daughter in the Mid-Wilshire area or meet with Kelley Lynch, his manager.

But this two-room cabin has been home for two years for Cohen, who hasn’t toured since 1993 or recorded a studio album since 1992. The cabin is where he rises at 3 each morning to begin preparing the day’s first meal.

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“Please stay for lunch,” he says warmly. “I’ve made some lovely vegetable soup for today.”

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Cohen’s graceful, confessional songs--described as “elegant, bittersweet mood music for the dark nights of the soul” in the latest edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide--have had a major impact on a wide range of rock, country and pop musicians.

The reason he is accepting a visitor today is to talk about the tribute album that will be released Tuesday by A&M; Records ( see review, Page 90 ). The collection, titled “Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen,” features versions of his works by such artists as Bono of U2, Peter Gabriel, Elton John, Willie Nelson, Sting, Billy Joel, Aaron Neville, Tori Amos and Trisha Yearwood.

The gracious, soft-spoken songwriter is delighted with the collection.

“I have had a good following in Europe and Canada, but I felt my position on the pop landscape in America was getting smaller and smaller until I kind of disappeared from view on the pop scene for about 10 years--say, 1975 to 1985,” he says.

“But things started to change. My daughter [in her teens at the time] pointed out a few years ago that her friends were listening to my music, and that pleased me. People used to say my music was too difficult or too obscure, and I never set out to be difficult or obscure. I just set out to write what I felt as honestly as I could, and I am delighted when other people feel a part of themselves in the music.”

Cohen was a late starter in the pop world. Born to a well-to-do couple in Montreal, he grew up in a house that was filled with music. As he got older, he enjoyed a wide range of musical styles, from commercial country and folk to synagogue music.

Inspired by the songwriting of Hank Williams and other Nashville heroes, Cohen was in a country group, the Buckskin Boys, briefly during his teens.

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While a student at McGill University in Montreal, he gravitated toward poetry and prose, eventually gaining acclaim in Canada for his poems and two novels. But the books didn’t sell well, and he turned to his first love--songwriting--in hopes of making some money.

He was quickly rewarded when Judy Collins recorded one of his songs, “Suzanne,” for her “In My Life” album in 1966. The song became a staple of her live show and is still strongly identified with her.

Although Cohen had planned to simply write songs, John Hammond, the legendary Columbia Records executive who signed artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Billie Holiday, was so impressed by Cohen’s own versions of his songs that he signed him to a record contract.

Cohen’s debut album, 1968’s “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” contained some of his most memorable compositions, including “Suzanne,’ “Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Sales were modest, but critics and other songwriters hailed the collection. One fan, Robert Altman, even used it as the background score to his film “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”

While Cohen was frequently written about in the context of the New York folk movement, he stood apart in several ways. Cohen was in his 30s by the time his first album came out, and he favored expensive suits rather than blue jeans and work shirts. He also didn’t share the movement’s interest in left-wing or radical politics. He preferred to concentrate on themes of loneliness and desire.

“I grew up wearing suits,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to make a statement or set myself apart. I was never into blue jeans. I was older. I wasn’t ashamed of my education. I didn’t pretend that I came out of the country. I wasn’t trying to be Paul Bunyan. My name was Leonard Cohen. My father was a clothing manufacturer. I wrote books. I went to college.”

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Cohen doesn’t answer so quickly when asked why his music seemed so relentlessly stark and revealing--characterized by such lines as these from “Sisters of Mercy”:

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You who must leave everything

That you cannot control

It begins with your family

But soon it comes round to your soul.

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“It was all I could write about,” he says finally, rubbing his shaved head as if trying to stimulate thought. “You have to dig down for that true voice, which you’ve heard in others--a Billie Holiday or a Hank Williams--and you try to find it in your music. It’s a way of proving you deserve to be here. . . . You deserve to get a girl or deserve to walk out on the street.

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“I know this is a very poverty-stricken view of things, but that’s the way it was. I never had the luxury of standing in front of a buffet table saying, ‘I’ll write this kind of song today and that kind tomorrow.’ It was like: ‘Can I scrape some words together and write anything? . . . Can I dig deep enough inside to say something that matters?’ ”

So how did Cohen get to the Zen Center?

“I was never interested in Buddhism,” he says later, leaving his cabin and heading to a larger building where he does most of his cooking. “I was never looking for a new religion. The religion I had was fine as far as I was concerned, but this particular kind of training interested me. I have been studying with this old teacher, who happens to be a Zen master.”

At the main cabin, he takes off his sandals and steps into the kitchen to test the soup that’s heating on the stove.

Cohen began his embrace with Zen in the early ‘70s, during a period of deep depression.

“It’s the same thing that happens to lots of people,” he says after sampling the soup. “You don’t do anything [to help yourself] unless you are in trouble. I got into a bit of trouble myself, and I noticed a friend from Greece seemed to have a much calmer life than mine. I had done a couple of records by then and done a tour of Europe. I had made a little money, but I was very lonely and dissatisfied. So, I phoned up my friend and he introduced me to this old teacher.

“There was something very intriguing about the Zen training. It was very rigorous. We were like the Marines of the spiritual world, and I enjoyed that. But after a while, I thought, ‘This is crazy,’ and I went over the wall.

“Yet something had touched me, and I started coming back here from time to time. It became integrated into the rest of my life, my songwriting, my touring, my duties to my family. As events in my life allowed it, I began spending more and more time until I just moved in.”

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Cohen gazes across the room, at the trees through the window, when asked about the fulfillment he receives at the center.

“I think finally it is the freedom from questions like ‘What is life? Why are we here?’ This is the study of the self--your relationship to this entity that we call the self. One of the things that appealed to me about this particular [discipline] is that they don’t demand an answer.”

On this afternoon, Cohen is making plans to accompany Roshi on a tour of Zen locales on the East Coast. “You might say I’m the road manager of the tour,” he says, smiling at his joke.

“I have done this type of trip before. Sometimes people recognize me at airports, but the people at the centers are used to me taking Roshi around for many, many years, and it’s no big deal. Besides, there are other people at the centers who have distinguished careers.”

An outsider might interpret Cohen’s decision to live in a Zen center as akin to dropping out of society, but Cohen objects.

“This is the very contrary of dropping out,” he says. “Most people can’t wait to get home to their house or apartment and shut that door and turn on the TV. To me, that’s dropping out. There is a saying: ‘Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish each other.’ You are continually involved with people here in a way you are never involved [on the outside]. You wake up with it and you go to sleep with it. There is this community. Any tendency toward dropping out is immediately spotted in a community like this.”

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Cohen has plenty of time here to devote to his writing. At present, he’s working on an illustrated book of poems and songs for a future album. His workroom contains a primitive Macintosh computer and a synthesizer, tools for his music and his graphic art. There is also a radio in the room but no CD or cassette player. He has to go out to his vehicle to play a CD.

Though he has a daughter, Lorca, 21, and a son, Adam, 23, Cohen has never been married. He was engaged for a while to actress Rebecca De Mornay, but that relationship has ended.

“I’ve never felt myself as a civilian,” he says when asked about relationships. “This kind of life suits me. I tried domestic life. I did my best. I had a good relationship with the mother of my children and my children, but I never felt I was any good at it.”

Cohen finishes eating his soup and carries the bowl over to the sink. He puts on his sandals and then leads his guest back across the dirt trail to the parking lot.

He pauses at the car to answer a final question--whether he plans to tour if the response to the tribute album suggests there is a big U.S. audience to hear his songs again.

“Well, you know, the devil laughs when we make plans,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to say never, but I’m not waiting for the phone to ring.”

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