The Tale Behind The Tune … First We Take Manhattan

First We Take Manhattan is a song by Leonard Cohen. It is another instance where we have taken a demo made by Graham Young and I that was intended to help us get some work as a duo … we didn’t get any gigs but we had lots of fun … and have turned it into a full band recording thereafter, as we have done with some other songs like Hold On I’m Comin’ and Long Black Veil. That involves deleting the keyboard “drummer” and bass on the original demo and replacing them with our drummer Al Cross, our bass player Dennis Pendrith and in this case, we added in David Chester playing organ … a Hammond B3. The main reason I wanted to do that was I was so taken with Graham’s guitar.

You might think that is a simple process … that we get the musicians in the studio, just turn on the recording equipment, count in the track and record them playing. But in fact, there is far more to it than that … on the part of the musicians. They listen to the demo many times to get ready before they come in, and in many cases, they chart out what they are hearing beforehand. On this tune, if you listen carefully, you will notice that Al Cross embellishes every move I make on the piano and many of Graham’s guitar riffs in a wonderful way after charting all that. At the end of this Tale I have posted a player of the original demo and then our final recording side by side so you can listen to what a huge difference it makes to have a world class master drummer and bass player playing on a track instead of some computer generated drum loop and keyboard bass … a far too common way of doing things in the music of today … not too mention how Dave’s organ playing lifts the whole recording to another level … it is indeed truly magical.

Patrick Fockler and I were working on the mix together when he asked me …  What’s this song about anyway? … good question! Reminds me of another song we recorded a while back … Tears Of Rage. Apparently Bob Dylan came downstairs one night at Big Pink, the house where The Band lived and rehearsed, handed Richard Manuel the lyrics for that song and said … Do you have anything for this? … meaning a melody, chords, the music. Then Dylan left and after Richard read the lyrics over he had the same question. But as he said later … You don’t go upstairs and ask Bob Dylan what his song is all about … you just get to work and come up with something … which he did! Sometimes poets use words like abstract artists use paints to create an image. An image that the viewer finds appealing regardless of what the artist meant. There may be a parallel in this situation in some respects and indeed we can’t ask Leonard Cohen about that anymore even if we wanted to because he has passed on.

Our drummer Al Cross had the good fortune to hang out with Leonard one afternoon at The Silver Dollar in Toronto … they were both from Montreal so they had a lot of stuff to talk about together … Al probably brought up Montreal bagels! Al has raved on about those to me and I eventually got one from Burke Carroll. They are really chewy and delicious I must say … can see why Al cherishes them. Al told me that everything Leonard said to him all afternoon sounded like poetry. Makes a lot of sense … Cohen was a well established poet before he wrote songs.

When considering the lyrics in First We Take Manhattan it seems to me that there are several threads here that have something in common underpinning them all. The whole thing seems to be a fantasy of some kind in Cohen’s mind about how some things and assumptions in our civilization and society are inappropriate, unjust, oppressive, unfair and that as a result he intends to meet out some kind of retribution for having them imposed upon him and us … ergo take Manhattan and Berlin by military force … to set things straight and in an effort to change things.

In the first verse he seems to be talking about the fact that we all spend a great deal of our lives working in a system, most often for others, on tasks we don’t have any personal investment in … sometimes in little cubicles staring at computers or typewriters under neon lights … like human worker ants … in order to receive a whole bunch of pieces of paper with pictures of the Queen or Prime Ministers on them … south of here that’s George Washington … in order to “make a living”! In this regard I am reminded of a story about a Blackfoot chief named Crowfoot who was approached by government officials at a meeting around a council fire in his village to discuss purchasing their land and moving the tribe to a reservation. In order to impress the chief they had brought a chest full of the paper money they were offering the Blackfoot for the purchase and they spread it out on the ground. Crowfoot apparently got up silently, walked to the riverbank nearby, picked up a handful of clay, rolled it into a ball as he walked back and sat down again.  Then he rolled the ball of clay into the fire and invited them to do the same with their money … an invitation they obviously declined … but a wonderful metaphor that was for what was really going on at that moment between the parties. After all, as Yuval Noah Harari points out in his wonderful book Sapiens, money only has value because it is a collective myth that we all share and agree to. Otherwise it is only pieces of paper … the apparent perspective of the Blackfoot.

As they say, life is short and maybe we all spend far too much of it “working”. While we tend to think of our world at present as having made “progress” in the human condition, perhaps in some ways that is not the case at all. Our hunter gatherer ancestors did not spend one minute of their precious lives doing anything like that … every moment of their time was spent doing things that directly related to their own situation … solving problems, foraging for food, escaping predators, working with other members of their tribe or clan for the benefit of them all, confronting and dealing with enemies and relating with allies. Furthermore, since they had no such thing as money … which we invented and then almost immediately became addicted to … they didn’t suffer from one of the most obvious side effects of that addiction … greed and avarice … lust for money. As a result, they thought about each other in an entirely different way than we do. When one of them took down an animal they thanked it for giving up its life so they could eat and survive, then they shared it with everyone else in the clan. We would likely take that animal home, guard it with whatever means we had at our disposal as our “property”, then tell everyone else to go out and find their own! Is that “progress”?

In some important ways our ancestors had a much richer quality of life than we do. While it is obviously more convenient to go and turn up the thermostat than rub two pieces of wood together to stay warm, we might be giving up a lot to do that. Our forebears had a much better, far more respectful understanding of their place on this planet and in the universe than we do … saw themselves of part of all other living things and nonliving things rather than being “in dominion” over anything. And if we are indeed in dominion over this world we certainly have screwed up! In her book The Sixth Extinction, after consulting with some of the most preeminent environmental scientists on Earth … who all told her the same thing … Elizabeth Kolbert shared their unavoidable conclusion that we humans are in the midst of our own extinction … that we are consuming and destroying this planet! In the process we have driven more forms of life into extinction over just the last 100 years on Earth than at any other time since its creation 4.5 billion years ago! And that process is being driven, for the most part by one thing … lust for money. Is that progress?

And, back to the song, our self destruction is not only driven by wealthy and greedy corporations but also by people like us “making a living”, “working”. We are simply “cogs in the wheel” … in a “system” that perpetuates this reality. In a “system” that Cohen feels he was sentenced to twenty years of boredom. And that, for which he fantasizes he is coming “reward them” … to get even.

The images Cohen creates painting with words in the second verse are wonderful. Among them, the statement that he is “guided by the beauty of our weapons” says that he is not alone in his fantasy of a campaign of retribution, we are there too! For some reason or other, I noticed after listening to this track a great many times that my vocals sound a bit like Neil Young in this particular verse. I have no idea why that is the case, nor did I intend to do that on purpose. But I have always loved Neil’s vocals whether David Foster does or not, so I’ll take that anytime … and having Neil Young sing any Leonard Cohen song would be a real Canadian moment!

The lyric in the bridge, aside from celebrating Cohen’s fascination with the woman he is singing the song to, also reinforces the reality that we all, in some ways seem like grey anonymous persons in our world with … You see that line that’s moving through the station, I told you, I told you, I told you … I was one of those.

The meaning of the third verse is rather self evident so I will let it speak for itself. It is worthy of note that both Manhattan are Berlin are not only centres of the business world, they are also places where the world of fashion is very prominent.


The Ending …

When we recorded the original demo we knew we were going to fade the track out. So Graham and I played on for a while in the ending because we didn’t know exactly when that would happen until later … and we had fun doing that. I have actually heard a band do fade outs live and it sounds and looks ridiculous. But that strategy works very well on recorded music and is used very often. As a result, on our original demo below you will hear the recording fade out. But when I gave the other musicians the demo to get ready to play on it I gave them the whole original demo with no fade out so they all played to the very end. The more I listened to it the more I liked the way that the recording didn’t really come to an end at all, the wheels just came off and it fell apart … much like what the rather noble but futile fantasy to take Manhattan and Berlin would have done. Especially when Al plays that drum roll … he seems to be putting on the brakes.  That led to the idea of embellishing that impression or idea with sound effects. Sometimes in the recording studio things happen that you would never have thought of beforehand or planned … this was certainly one of those moments.

In the War Of 1812 Symphony there are cannons firing in the score … so in that context cannon fire is music … and cannons are in fact musical instruments. That symphony has been performed many times in outdoor settings with cannons. Something similar is going on here … as it was when we used an air raid siren at the beginning of More Of The Same … and then The Peace Bell to end that song. And we have not just thrown a few sound effects into the track here and there. Patrick did a great job of making sure each one was in time with the music. And he placed them carefully across the soundscape from left to right. So as to create the impression that the listener is gradually entering a battlefield. The glass shattering at the end says it all, that this fantasy has come crashing down. It was a lot of fun working on this concept … felt it embellished the music well.


On this recording Burrows And Company are …

Drums … Al Cross
Bass … Dennis Pendrith
Hammond B3 … David Chester
Guitar … Graham Young
Piano … Bob Burrows
Vocals … Bob Burrows

Recording Engineer … Justin Meli
Mixing Engineer … Patrick Fockler
Recorded at Chalet Studio … Claremont ON
Produced by … Bob Burrows

Graphic Art … Tamara Green
Photography ... SilBaBum

Now here’s the original demo by Bob Burrows And Graham Young

And here’s the full band version again for comparison

Thank you for taking the time to read this Tale Behind The Tune. And for your interest in and your support for our music … much appreciated.


Bob Burrows