Leonard Cohen | Merriweather Post Pavillion

It's likely to arouse suspicion when, days before you are set to watch a 74-year-old poet/deity perform in concert on his first tour in fifteen years, ticketmaster sends you an e-mail explaining that there is no opening act and that Leonard Cohen will be taking the stage promptly at 7:30. Adjust your plans accordingly. It isn't unnatural to wonder if, as if in antithesis to the spirit of his body of work, everyone is going to be home and in bed by 10:00.

At the expense of whatever "credibility" I may have as a critic, I am just going to say from the outset that the Leonard Cohen spectacle to which I just bore witness was one of the greater privileges of my life. No hyperbole. Indeed, we were not in bed by 10:00, around then Mr. Cohen was just starting his third and final encore which he would finish with his 25th or so song of the night and then a very moving benediction to the crowd. Yes, I received a semi-personal blessing from Leonard Cohen himself and I have had more goodwill in my veins in the past few hours than I can reasonably recall.

Accounts of the spectacle: It was cold and raining for most of the night and those uncovered on the lawn of the venue standing for hours under umbrellas in the Maryland night. Listeners pulling partners up for Take This Waltz and making the space to dance.

Mr. Cohen introduced his nine person band to the crowd twice with full flourished descriptions like "our irrepressible shepherd" for the bassist, "our impeccable timekeeper" for the drummer, "maestro of the instruments of wind" for the sax player (he also introduced the technicians who handled the instruments, the lighting, and the sound and thanked the caterers, truckers, and again, all of us). He was backed most of the night by this sizable entourage of world class musicians (harp, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, banduria, harmonica, electric bass, keyboards, steel pedal guitar, upright bass, others) and three women who sang beside him.

But the real religion came when Mr. Cohen sang a stripped down and haunting Suzanne. While it was written 42 years ago, it was still sung with all resonant tinges of blind piety.

Suzanne takes your hand now
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters

And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbor
She shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers

There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

By the time these last stunning verses arrived in Cohen's whispering baritone, there was a woman in the row behind me who was sobbing aloud and amazingly, it didn't seem to strike anyone as strange in the moment or even after. Following the execution, probably the fourth of a dozen or so standing ovations of the night, this one early in the second set.

If it's a poet's charge to curate the topography of timely suffering then there seems no better arbiter for it than Mr. Cohen who (it was revealed a few years ago) had the vast majority of his retirement fund stolen by a longtime associate while he was living in a monastery. His solution: go back on tour.

Right before the end of his 65-minute first set, when Mr. Cohen doffed his fedora and finally said a formal hello to the crowd, I think it hit home that we were seeing this man in all his mythical corporeality and he received the kind of standing ovation that people normally reserve for the end of a performance that's really earned it. He gave the love right back.

We're so privileged to gather like this, with so much of the world plunged in chaos and suffering.

He then read a few lines of the poem Anthem before performing a moving rendition of the relevant and epic song:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

He recited lines from his poetry a number of times during the night, one (A Thousand Kisses Deep) that went on for at least two minutes to a doting audience. He could have stopped reading his poems years ago, but he read them expertly, like a poet should, with a delicate touch and the attentive press of syllables like water smoothing over a stone.

The crowd laughed at many of the sharp lyrics that typify his work ("I haven't been this happy since the end of World War II") as if it was the first time they had heard the joke. When he dramatically announced "democracy is coming to the USA," the crowd shouted as if the Cold War had just ended again. And when Mr. Cohen played up his dirty old man act for the gleefully perverse I'm Your Man , the women still swooned.

Each time he left the stage, he frolicked off of it in bounces. He kneeled like a supplicant and serenader during the appropriate songs. He never really seemed frail and had his caustic, self-effacing wit in full form ("you're very kind" he said to the cheering crowd after he finished playing the keyboard for the first time during the extremely simple arrangement that concludes Tower of Song). The only point in the show that stank of the Elvis-in-Vegas decay was his performance of Hallelujah where he subbed in a hammy "I didn't come all the way to Merriweather just to fool ya." But even this is excused because Mr. Cohen knows well that the song is no longer his.

What still is his: the command over a moment and the ken of an agile performer. In the first set, while singing the lyrical litany that makes up Who By Fire, a song about the vast and arbitrary number of ways a person can be lost ("who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate"), beyond him the sound of the rain on the pavilion tent ("who in the merry merry month of May") pattered down loudly and noticeably. The water had its own sonic effect, sliding off the side of the tent beneath where the revival was taking place and dripping audibly on the pavement. All the while as the water was trying to get in, Mr. Cohen kept going, convincing us of anything.