Leonard Cohen - Closing Time: youtube.com/watch?v=vVt6vhRAu3k
There are some songs that will always remind me of my Dad. “Closing Time” is one of them, strongly.
My father worked (and still does, at 58 years) every day but Sunday, 8am - 5pm then back in to do paperwork for about an hour after supper. Saturdays he would be done earlier, at around noon. He worked (works) hard, owns his own business and helps provide not just for his wife and 3 boys but also his mother and 9 brothers and sisters. The only rest the man had all week was Sunday mornings, when he’d sleep in until 9am, go to the basement and listen to music on the speakers that he built. And he’d listen to it loud. Loud enough that it would shake the floor and wake me up. I hated Sunday mornings.
But this is where I developed my base taste in music. I found out, years after moving away from my hometown, that there are a lot of songs to which I know every word by Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, The Band, Roy Orbison. Songs I otherwise could have sworn I didn’t know, but they come on and every word is familiar. Of course I have other influences who guided my musical tastes but this one was the strongest, and earliest. My father’s music developed in me a sense that musicians are songwriters, and songwriters are poets. This brought me from Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg. From Van Morrison to William Blake. I grew thinking there was a higher ideal to music.
I think this is why I’ve pursued music the way I have.
My friend Jane told me that she was at work one day and a song came on the radio and she stopped and started crying uncontrollably. She didn’t know why then, but it came to her later that the song had been one her late father had listened to often when she was young. I get the impression this will someday happen to me. I know the songs that remind me most of my father, so it probably won’t be them. But it’s coming and it frightens me a little.
My mother told me that when my father was a child he used to play air guitar to Elvis songs. Apparently he wanted to be Elvis. I wonder if he had been given the opportunity, would he have pursued this? He grew up in a large family, not much money, in a small town, ended up taking over his fathers business because his father was growing ill and someone had to do it. He stepped in, proudly. But what if someone bought him a guitar when he was young enough to really excite him? I got mine at 11 years old. What if no one had bought me a guitar then? Would I be a novelist? Or would I have taken over my father’s business?
I recorded an album in Halifax a few years back. It was a financial mistake, in retrospect, as I didn’t know what I was doing in that area. But I’m still proud of the songs. My mother liked it because it was something her son did but she didn’t get it. I remember talking to my Dad a couple weeks after giving him a copy, asking him what he thought. He said, “There’s a heavy Leonard Cohen influence.” And I made it that far.
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