Song of an Old Skin for a New Bird on the Wire
by Leonardo da Cohen
I took Suza-a-a-anne walking beside the ri-iver.
I hoped she’d le-e-e-et me gi-i-i-ive her — one.
Her breast was soft and ge-entle, her skin was smooth as feathers, white and sleek.
I said she looked just like a dove and she turned round and pecked me on the cheek.
Suzanne is like the w-i-ind, she blows my mind like no one I have seen.
And like the wind you don’t know where she’s going, but you know just where she’s been.
We always took our kicks together, even though she’d never let me score.
We once dropped acid in her bedroom — burnt a hole right through the floor.
Oh-oh Suza-a-a-a-anne.
Oh-oh Suzanne.
We stood and watched a bi-i-i-ird sitting on a wire in the sky.
It mouthed a melancholy melody and then it crapped right in my eye.
Suzanne said she liked Monteverdi, I said that I knew his brother well.
But she’d not heard of Monty Python, I thought Jesus, she’s as thick as hell.
Oh-oh Suzanne.
Oh-oh Suzanne.
1975
PS
You can rarely tell how funny a thing is going to be before you put it out there, but believe it or not, this one always went down a bomb. It first saw the light of day as part of the ‘The Samuel Pepyshow’ sketch in the revue Allswellthatendsrock! at Corpus Christi, Oxford in late 1975. Richard Curtis (yes, that Richard Curtis), as the eponymous presenter, would introduce me as Leonardo da Cohen: “Come on, Leo! Let’s hear you rock!” and I would wander on and deliver myself of this dreary dirge.
When writing a parody, I have found, it helps not to know too much about the thing you’re making fun of. If you like something well enough to have respect for it, you find it harder to recognise its flaws. I knew next to nothing about Leonard Cohen, other than that he sang in a monotone, seemed to know even fewer chords than I did, and was always maundering on about some girl called Suzanne and oranges. It was enough.
I accept the characterisation is probably unfair – I used to eke it out by using my right hand to position my left-hand fingers on the opening chord, and pretend to fall asleep halfway through the chorus – but I also know the iconoclast can risk robust resistance. My parody of one particular worldwide hit was once openly heckled in a full theatre for showing insufficient reverence to its subject, and even ‘Song of an Old Skin…’ was loudly booed by a Leonard Cohen fan one night in the Café de Paris during an office Christmas party.
But as a piece of entertainment, it seems to work, and I think that probably has something to do with the construction, which itself was probably more a fluke than anything I consciously did. It’s certainly very short, so it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and it’s also not that specific; the thing is silly enough even if you don’t know anything about Leonard Cohen (as I didn’t). The long drawn-out opening lines are in themselves ridiculous and the first punchline – “give her – one” immediately sets the tone of cheek and vulgarity which have been my standard go-tos throughout so much of my writing life.
So while there may not be much to the piece, it was the second verse that started giving me the reaction any comedy performer prizes above all others: the double laugh. When I started doing this song in After Eights at the Oxford Playhouse the following summer, I even occasionally got a round of applause halfway through, which was stratospherically satisfying. It was the ‘dropping acid’ line that did it. The contextually expected hippy idea of dropping acid followed by the prosaic reversal of burning a hole through the floor is nothing more than standard misdirection, and it usually got an immediate laugh, like an involuntary reaction. But then, more often than not, there would be a second laugh, bigger than the first, as the audience played the line back in their heads and realised how they’d been fooled. After that, the wailingly banal chorus added to the momentum and by the time the third verse started, everyone was happily onside and looking forward to seeing how I was going to top that.
Of course I couldn’t – I didn’t know the acid joke would go down so well, how could I? – but luckily the third verse was always received more warmly than it deserved to be simply because people were by then having a good time. It was a lesson well learned – get in early. Once they’ve laughed once, they’ll be more likely to laugh again.
So I got lucky with this one and in fact it was so long ago now and so complacent have I become about it that it was only while I was preparing the lyrics for publication on this website that I noticed for the very first time that there is a mistake in the tenses. It starts off in the past, like a reminiscence, but then the second verse is in the (?historic) present – “she blows my mind”, not “she blew”. It has to be that way – the first line could conceivably work in the past tense, but the second would be hopelessly awkward and overripe: “And like the wind you didn’t know where she was going…” But no one cared. Like I said, lucky.
PPS
This is the final form the song took though there was an earlier draft where I had been fiddling around with an orange peel idea for the final verse (someone told me Leonard Cohen went on about oranges for some reason):
Suzanne said she liked oranges, I said ‘Well, that explains the puckered hips.’
She laughed, but I came round next morning bleeding at the bottom of a skip.
On balance I feel this might be slightly stronger than the version I finally went with, even though there is a slight mis-rhyme in the plural hips and singular skip… but on the other hand the gerundive bleeding (or do I mean present participle?) lands perfectly, punched up by the minuscule pause, or comma, imposed by the melody immediately after morning. Then again, I would be reluctant now to mess with a formula that seems to have proved its worth over the years, so maybe it’s best left alone.
PPPS
And if I were writing it today I might well end it rather more imaginatively than with a simple repeat of the original chorus – though I did use to liven that up by asking everyone to join in, and then, hypocritically, accuse them of singing flat. Today I might write:
Ha-a-llelu-u-jah.
A-a-amen.
But I couldn’t have done that back in 1975 because the song ‘Hallelujah’ didn’t come out until 1984.