Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin & Me 'She wasn’t looking for me, she was looking for Kris Kristofferson; I wasn’t looking for her, I was looking for Brigitte Bardot.'

This is a story about two songs, both written by men about women they met in New York, inside and outside the Chelsea Hotel.

(Before you switch off, I’ve also included one of the women’s side of the story. It’s hilarious.)

The Chelsea is famous for its residents and the work they created there: Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Edith Piaf, Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsburg, Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix — and, of course, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin.

Leonard Cohen Meets Janis Joplin

In the late night spring of 1968, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin met in the Chelsea Hotel lift, going up to the fourth floor.

Cohen gathered his courage and asked if she was looking for someone:

She said ‘Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.’

I said, ‘Little lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.’ Even though she knew that I was someone shorter than Kris Kristofferson, she never let on.

By the time the lift reached the fourth floor, the love affair was on, a tribute to courage — if only for a couple of hours.

The next day, Joplin tracked down that handsome devil Kris Kristofferson, who sweetly sang to her the song that would become her biggest hit.

It took a couple of years for Janis Joplin to record her bootshaking version of Kristofferson’s Me And Bobby McGee (Spotify | YouTube), on 1 October 1970.

Three days later, she was dead.

Shortly after, Leonard Cohen started writing a new song, which he eventually released in 1974 as Chelsea Hotel #2 (Spotify | Youtube).

Here’s how it opens:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

Now, to be fair to Leonard Cohen, the story he tells is more complex than these first lines would suggest, but it’s not Cohen’s song that I want to write about.

Jeffrey Lewis Meets A Woman In Glasses

In 2001, New York antifolk songwriter Jeffrey Lewis released his first single, an extended riff on Leonard Cohen’s song, which he called The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song (Spotify | Youtube).

Before you get too excited, this is not a song about oral sex. As Jeff Lewis explains:

Life doesn’t work out the way it does in old songs
That’s why we sing new ones to say what really goes on

So what really went on?

Well, if Jeff Lewis will allow me to summarise his seven minute masterpiece:

  1. Late one night, ‘tired and alone’, Jeff is walking past the Chelsea Hotel
  2. He overhears a conversation about Leonard Cohen between a woman in glasses and her two, possibly gay, friends
  3. Jeff gets ‘uncharacteristically courageous’ and interrupts the strangers
  4. Jeff and the woman in glasses chat for ‘a minute or two’ about Leonard Cohen’s song, Chelsea Hotel #2
  5. The three strangers stop to look in through a pub window
  6. Jeff says good night (though he hadn’t quite meant to)
  7. The woman in glasses mysteriously says, ‘see you later’

That’s it. That’s the entirety of the narrative action: they never saw each other again; they didn’t even swap names.

The song is three times as long as the encounter it describes.

What About The Oral Sex?

In that two minute conversation, the woman in glasses told Jeff Lewis that Leonard Cohen’s line about getting a blowjob ‘made her want to do naughty things’ and Jeff heard the ‘faint knocking of opportunity’:

Right about then I should have asked if she knew
What the Chelsea charged if we got a room for two

But he didn’t. He got shy, waved goodbye, went home and wrote this song instead.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he did write this song — for two reasons, actually.

The first reason is, quite simply, this, the greatest rhyming couplet known to science:

If I was Leonard Cohen or some other song writing master
I’d know to first get the oral sex and then write the song after

The second reason I’m glad he wrote this song is because the narrative action of Jeff Lewis’s street encounter ends only five minutes into the song: what happens in the last two minutes transcends the self-deprecating story into a moment of connective awe for us all.

‘For The Love Of Other Folks That They Barely Knew’

In those last two minutes, Jeff Lewis turns his gaze onto the audience, as if to say, ‘Hold on, nothing happened with this woman outside the Chelsea and yet this song did happen, is happening, and, what’s more, you’re all still listening — what does that mean?’

In Jeff’s words, it means something wonderful:

That all around the world there may be folks singing tunes
For the love of other folks that they barely knew

This bit of the song usually gets a laugh because it’s so ridiculous. No one writes songs like that.

Except they do. The woman in glasses would laugh at this bit too — the laughter of giddy recognition.

And we can enjoy that same note of giddy recognition for ourselves right now, even without a gawky folksinger writing a love song for us.

Remember You Remember Me Well Too

Think of all the people you’ve ever interacted with. Go on: all of them.

Okay, okay — too much. How about just the ones who made you ‘sing’?

If you’re like me (and Jeff), they’ll fall into two camps:

  1. There’ll be people still in your life who already know that you remember them well. Your best friend who taught you self-esteem as a teenager or the mentor who modelled how to change career late in life.
  2. But there’ll also be people in your past who will never know that you remember them well. The Albanian plumber-mechanic who showed you the true meaning of hospitality, or that lost classmate in college who didn’t realise he was teaching you how to be funny.

Firstly: make a note to go and tell everyone in Camp 1 exactly what they mean to you. You can never do this too many times.

Now turn your attention to the people in Camp 2. This is where the magic happens.

Look at your list and ponder: there must be hundreds of fleeting moments in your life where a complete stranger made you sing and you will never be able to let them know.

Take a moment to acknowledge the ripples in the water, stones skipped by strangers.

Now flip it around in Jeff’s next lines:

[…] the next time you’re feeling kinda lonesome and blue
Just think that someone somewhere might be singing about you

A laugh again: fantastically unlikely. But it isn’t.

If you remember a hundreds strangers well, remember that a hundred more strangers remember you well too — they just never got the chance to tell you.

When you realise how even a brief interaction can connect and change us, that’s pure wonder. Never forget it.

The Other Side

Okay — reality check!

Songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Jeffrey Lewis are really good at turning their lives into stories: pinning the emotion that helps them process the encounter.

It’s a beautiful defence mechanism — transmuting their personal vulnerability into universal meaning.

As Jeff Lewis says, it’s much easier to write a song than it is to risk rejection.

You might think that vulnerability to rejection doesn’t apply to Leonard Cohen, but I’m not so sure.

We’ll probably never know what story Jeff Lewis’s woman in glasses would tell of their encounter, but Janis Joplin wasn’t one to stay in the shade.

This is what she made of that same one night stand with Leonard Cohen:

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. […]

So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realise that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me.

🤣

Be Both

Leonard Cohen and Jeffrey Lewis would seem to offer two different approaches to a fleeting connection between strangers:

  • either we are courageous enough to stop and feel out the depths of the exchange
  • or we are sensitive enough to walk away and still find meaning in the moment

But it’s not a choice: we can be both.

As Jeff says:

Life doesn’t work out the way it does in old songs
That’s why we sing new ones to say what really goes on

So let’s sing a new song: a song where we enjoy both Leonard Cohen’s earthy physicality and Jeffrey Lewis’s abstract transcendence.

Let’s recognise that any connection with a stranger, in the lift, on the street, can go both ways.

We might flex our courage and take things further, but, when we don’t — and most often we won’t because we’d never get anything else done — let’s remain sensitive that the moment was meaningful.

And occasionally, occasionally, a connection that we didn’t explore, years before, can, in the most unlikeliest of plot twists, come back around a second time.

Then we are both.

I’ll leave the last word to Jeff Lewis:

So who knows if I’ll ever see her again? Maybe we’ll see
This whole time she could have been singing about me
Probably not — but it could be

~

ps: Just as I was finishing the final read-through on this piece, a woman snuck up behind me on the train and said in a loud voice, ‘Ahh, I LOVE that song.’

I turned around with a thump and realised she was talking on the phone, to someone else. But I hope that one day, by some serpentine logic of the universe, she gets to read this story, listen to the music, and say again, ‘Ahh, I LOVE that song.’

Thanks to Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jeffrey Lewis and CW for showing me how it’s done.

Published by

David

David Charles is co-writer of BBC radio sitcom Foiled. He also writes for The Bike Project, Thighs of Steel, and the Elevate Festival. He blogs at davidcharles.info.

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