Leonard Cohen interviews Glenn Gould

From Daniel Poulin:

Cohen gave an account of interviewing Gould for Holiday magazine in the “late 1950s or early 1960s.” The pianist, having “apparently heard of a little book I [Cohen] had written, … accepted the interview.”

Cautioned not to shake his hand,Cohen met Gould in the lobby of Gould’s apartment building in Toronto.

This was before the days of tape recorders. ‘[I became] so engrossed by what [Gould] was saying, I stopped taking notes.’

The interview, scheduled for only a few minutes, lasted for a “couple of hours.” Cohen thanked Gould and returned to his Montreal home to write the article, at which time those words he thought “were burned into my soul” dissipated. As Leonard Cohen put it,

‘I couldn’t remember a word that he said.’

After stalling his editors over the phone for some time, Cohen ‘finally stopped answering the phone.’

After admonitory telegrams from the editor began to arrive, ‘I finally joined the witness protection program.’

Cohen & Gould meet again
Cohen segued into the second time he met Gould, years after the first encounter, at a Columbia Records studio in New York.

‘He was recording something sublime, I was recording something otherwise.’ Cohen, noting that he was, at the time, ‘infected with the new hip language,’ animatedly informs the audience that he hailed Gould with’ Hey man, what’s shaking?’

To which Gould replied ‘I didn’t know you were from Memphis, Tennessee.’

Image courtesy Allan Showalter