Leonard Cohen Plays a Spellbinding Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

Jimi Hen­drix was a tough act to fol­low under the best of cir­cum­stances. But to fol­low him onstage after mid­night in front of a crowd of more than half a mil­lion peo­ple that had been set­ting fires and throw­ing bot­tles at the stage seemed like an impos­si­ble task for a poet with an acoustic gui­tar and a gen­tle band of back­ing musi­cians. Yet Leonard Cohen turned the volatile sit­u­a­tion at the 1970 Isle of Wight Fes­ti­val into one of the most mag­i­cal per­for­mances of his career.

A lit­tle piece of land four miles off the south­ern coast of Eng­land, the Isle of Wight was host to three great music fes­ti­vals from 1968 to 1970. The last of these was some­thing of a cross between Wood­stock and Alta­mont: flower pow­er with an under­cur­rent of men­ace. Like the Wood­stock fes­ti­val the year before, the 1970 Isle of Wight fes­ti­val was crashed by thou­sands of unpay­ing fans.

Head­lin­ers for the five-day fes­ti­val includ­ed Hen­drix, Miles Davis, the Who and the Doors. By the time Cohen appeared–near the very end of the rainy final night–the atmos­phere had become dan­ger­ous. Dur­ing the Hen­dix per­for­mance, some­one threw a flare onto the top of the stage and set it on fire. Jour­nal­ist Sylvie Sim­mons describes the scene in her new book, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

Ten­sion had been ris­ing at the fes­ti­val for days. The pro­mot­ers had expect­ed a hun­dred and fifty thou­sand peo­ple but half a mil­lion more turned up, many with no inten­tion of pay­ing. Even after the pro­mot­ers were forced to declare it a free fes­ti­val, ill will remained. Dur­ing a set by Kris Kristof­fer­son, bot­tles were thrown and he was booed off­stage. “They were boo­ing every­body,” says Kristof­fer­son. “Except Leonard Cohen.”

As Cohen and his pro­duc­er and key­board play­er Bob John­ston stood watch­ing the may­hem dur­ing Hen­drix’s per­for­mance, Cohen stayed calm. “Leonard was­n’t wor­ried,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “Hen­drix did­n’t care and nei­ther did we. Leonard was always com­plete­ly obliv­i­ous to any­thing like that. The only thing that upset him was when they told him that they did­n’t have a piano or an organ–I don’t know, some­one had set them on fire and pushed them off the stage–so I could­n’t play with him. Leonard said, ‘I’ll be in the trail­er tak­ing a nap; come and get me when you’ve found a piano and an organ.’ ”

Accord­ing to most accounts it was a lit­tle after two o’clock in the morn­ing when Cohen took the stage. His back­up band, or “Army,” includ­ed John­ston on key­boards, Char­lie Daniels on fid­dle and bass, Ron Cor­nelius on lead gui­tar and Elkin “Bub­ba” Fowler on ban­jo and bass, along with back­up singers Cor­lynn Han­ney, Susan Mus­man­no and Don­na Wash­burn. Cohen had a glazed-over look in his eyes through­out the per­for­mance, the result of his tak­ing the seda­tive Man­drax. “He was calm because of the Man­drax,” John­ston told Sim­mons. “That’s what saved the show and saved the fes­ti­val. It was the mid­dle of the night, all those peo­ple had been sit­ting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hen­drix’s stage, and nobody had slept for days.”

The his­toric per­for­mance was cap­tured on film by Mur­ray Lern­er, who released it in 2009 as Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970. The film (above) includes the fol­low­ing songs from the show:

1. Dia­monds in the Mine
2. Famous Blue Rain­coat
3. Bird on the Wire
4. One of us Can­not be Wrong
5. The Stranger Song
6. Tonight Will be Fine
7. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Good­bye
8. Sing Anoth­er Song Boys
9. Suzanne
10. The Par­ti­san
11. Seems So Long Ago, Nan­cy
12. So Long, Mar­i­anne (dur­ing clos­ing cred­its)

Per­haps the most mov­ing moment in the film comes at the begin­ning, when Cohen brings the mas­sive crowd togeth­er by ask­ing a favor: “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” Cohen says, “so I can see where you all are?” As Sim­mons puts it, “Leonard talked to the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple he could not see as if they were sit­ting togeth­er in a small dark room.” Or as film­mak­er Lern­er lat­er said, “He mes­mer­ized them. And I got mes­mer­ized also.” Sum­ming up the con­cert and the film, Sim­mons writes: “It was a bril­liant per­for­mance. Lern­er’s cam­eras cap­tured Cohen’s com­mand­ing pres­ence, hyp­no­tist’s charm, and an inti­ma­cy that would seem unfea­si­ble in such a vast, inhos­pitable space.”