Tuesday, 9 November 2010
It's close to forty years since Hughesy's circle of high school acquaintances was rocked by the reappearance of one of our peers who had spent much of the intervening two years in Sydney.
The girl we remembered as a pigtailed pony-lover (that girlie horse fixation personified) was now, we learned, circulating on the edges of the Sydney underground, au fait with a countercultural iconography we could mostly only dream of.
Most of the details of conversations that took place, as far as I can recall, around Christmas 1970 have long since faded, but one comment has well and truly stuck.
This Leonard Cohen they're all raving about down there, she sked. Have you heard him? My God! How depressing! And so boring! But they all love him.
That assessment would have been based on Songs of Leonard Cohen and Songs From A Room, which were hardly the most dynamic of performances, being largely in bard of the bedsit mode. That's not to knock the albums, but they were hardly the sort of thing suited to a close to three hour concert setting.
But that was four decades ago, when you couldn't have expected anything much over forty-five minutes in a concert set and prices were well below the current level.
If you're paying over $200, you want something more than a bare forty-five to sixty minutes.