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''Death of a Ladies' Man'' is the fifth studio album by Leonard Cohen. Produced and co-written by Phil Spector, the voice of typically minimalist Cohen was surrounded by Spector's Wall of Sound, which included multiple tracks of instrument overdubs. The album was originally released by Warner Bros., but was later picked up by Cohen's longtime label, Columbia Records. ==Background== By the mid-1970s, both Cohen and Spector were on a downward-slide commercially. Although he remained quite popular in Europe, Cohen had never managed to achieve the success in the United States that Columbia had hoped for. Spector, who had created scores of hits like "Be My Baby" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with his Wall of Sound production technique in the 1960s, had experienced a rebirth of sorts in the early seventies by producing albums by John Lennon and George Harrison but, as the decade wore on, the always eccentric producer's behaviour became increasingly unhinged. The craziness would escalate when Spector reunited with Lennon to record a rock and roll oldies project called ''Roots'', which would eventually come out in 1975 under the title ''Rock 'n' Roll''. The sessions took place in a chaotic fog of drugs, booze, and hangers-on as the equally troubled Lennon drank his way through his infamous "lost weekend." In the 2003 book ''Phil Spector: Wall of Pain'', biographer Dave Thompson recounts one famous incident when Spector, a notorious gun nut, fired off a pistol in the studio. "Listen Phil, if you're goin' to kill me, kill me, " Leonard remarked dryly, "but don't fuck with me ears. I need 'em." Such behaviour did Spector's reputation no favors, and as the hits dried up he was viewed more and more by the rock press as an oldies act. As Ira Nadel notes in the 1996 Cohen memoir ''Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen'', stories differ as to how Cohen and Spector became collaborators: :The liner notes on the album state that Marty Machat, who was Spector's lawyer as well as Cohen's, introduced them. According to Cohen, this occurred backstage after one of his performances at the Troubador in L.A. Spector had uncharacteristically left his well-protected home to see Cohen, and at the show was strangely silent. Spector then invited Cohen back to his home, which, because of the air-conditioning, was very chilly, about "thirty-two degrees," Cohen recalled...Spector locked the door and Cohen reacted by saying, "As long as we are locked up, we might as well write some songs together." They went to the piano and started that night. For about a month they wrote (and drank) together and Cohen remembers it as a generous period, although he had to wear an overcoat almost constantly to work in Spector's freezing home." Biographer Allen Reynolds writes in the 2010 book ''Leonard Cohen: A Remarkable Life'' that friend and fellow Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell tried to warn Cohen about working with Spector, the songstress having witnessed some of the insanity between Spector and Lennon in L.A., but initially - at least at the songwriting stage - the pair worked well together. Songwriter John Prine, who had also witnessed the producer's bizarre antics when he had been invited to his house to compose a song together, later marveled to Paul Zollo of ''BluebirdRailroad'' magazine that as soon as Spector "sat down with an instrument, he was normal." Things would change once Cohen and Spector entered a studio, with the producer's paranoia taking over and Cohen becoming increasingly disengaged from the project. ==Recording== Spector would use three studios for the album, although his favorite remained the Gold Star Studios complex located at 6252 Santa Monica Boulevard near the corner of Vine Street in Hollywood. Spector recruited a plethora of top-shelf L.A. studio musicians to play on the songs, including guitarists Dan and David Kessel, drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Keltner, and pedal steel player Al Perkins, among many others. It was precisely in front of an audience, however, that Spector's megalomaniacal switch turned on, and soon Cohen felt overwhelmed. Speaking to ''Mojos Sylvie Simmons in 2001, Cohen described his feelings at the time: :It was one of those periods when my chops were impaired, and I wasn't in the right kind of condition to resist Phil's very strong influence on and eventual takeover of the record. There were lots of guns around in the studio and lots of liquor, a somewhat dangerous atmosphere. He had bodyguards who were heavily armed also. He liked guns - I liked guns too but I generally don't carry one, and it's hard to ignore a .45 lying on the console. When I was working with him alone, it was very agreeable, but the more people in the room, the wilder Phil would get. I couldn't help but admire the extravagance of his performance, but at the time couldn't really hold my own." During a cryptic exchange detailed in Ira Nadel's Cohen memoir ''Various Positions'', Spector pointed a loaded pistol at Cohen's throat, cocked it, and said, "I love you, Leonard." Quietly, Cohen responded, "I ''hope'' you love me, Phil." Nadel also writes that the recording of the nine-minute title track began at 7:30 in the evening and lasted until 2:30 in the morning with the session musicians working on quadruple time, typical of the sessions as a whole. Another night, poet Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan showed up and were ordered by Spector to sing background vocals on the raucously burlesque "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on." Most of the songs deal with themes of unbridled sexuality and brutal voyeurism, such as "Paper Thin Hotel" ("''The walls of this hotel are paper thin/Last night I heard you making love to him''..."), and are couched in Spector's bombastic sprawl of sonic grandeur. The buoyant "Fingerprints" is a fiddle-infused hootenanny that recalls Cohen's love of country music. Early versions of "Iodine" (then called "Guerrero") and "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-on" were performed in concert as early as 1975 (with music credited to John Lissauer) and is widely available on bootlegs. As Allen Reynolds reports in his 2010 Cohen biography, the sessions did not even "officially" end: :One day Phil just failed to return to the studio, keeping all the tapes (as he had done with Lennon's masters) and going on to mix them alone. Cohen was aghast. He did not consider his recorded vocals to be anywhere near definitive. As far as he was concerned they were merely "guide" vocals for the benefit of the musicians. He had expected to be able to take time on his singing but with Spector holding the tapes hostage at an unknown location this now seemed impossible, unless he brought his own bunch of heavies to take on Spector's. "I had the option of hiring my own private army and fighting it out with him on Sunset Boulevard or letting it go...I let it go." Marty Marchet's son Steven secured a deal with Warner Bros. to release the record, one that Cohen would always harbor mixed feelings about. "I’m too ashamed to tell the whole truth of what happened there," Cohen confessed to Adrian Deevoy of ''The Q Magazine'' in 1991. "People were skating around on bullets, guns were finding their way into hamburgers, guns were all over the place. It wasn’t safe. It was mayhem, but it was part of the times. It was rather drug-driven. But I like Phil, and the instinct was right. I'd do it again." Interviewed for the 2005 documentary ''I'm Your Man'', Cohen expressed disappointment in the record and felt that the songs "got away" from him; he also noted that it was a favorite among "punksters" as well as his daughter. At the time of the album's release, however, Cohen was much less generous in his public response to the album, calling Spector's production "a 'catastrophe.'"〔Nadel, Ira B. Various Position: A Life of Leonard Cohen. Pantheon Books: New York, 1996.〕 Of the album's eight selections, "Memories," is the only track Cohen regularly performed in concert (on tours in 1979, 1980 and 1985). Cohen apparently liked the song enough that he included it in his 1983 experimental art film, ''I Am a Hotel,'' as the sole non-acoustic piece alongside four other songs which have generally enjoyed more positive fan response, "Suzanne," "Chelsea Hotel #2," "The Guests," and "The Gypsy's Wife." A "de-Spectorized" version of "Memories" ended up being released when Cohen's album, ''Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979'' was issued in 2001. This version included a saxophone solo. In 1978, Cohen would release a book of poetry with the slightly altered title ''Death of a Lady's Man''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Death of a Ladies' Man (album)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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