Thank you for pointing out a source of possible confusion. Dave McGowan's book on Laurel Canyon is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the music business back in the hippie days. Leonard Cohen, who once told me "I never liked the Beatles," arrived as a Nixonian straight man if you equate the Beatles with JFK, long hair and liberalism.

Cohen's career was going nowhere by the end of 1980, and then John Lennon died just as Ronald Reagan (whom LC lavishly praised at the time) became President,ushering in the present era of mind-controlled assassins posing as "lone gunmen". You just had another one go off in Colorado. Reagan brought us the Iran Contra affair and the war in Nicaragia, which is interestingly tied into the CIA drug ops that Kristofferson allegedly had his hand in.

Cohen is often now portrayed as a saint rather than a gangster (times do change), and he runs his own spy network which, in Montreal, consists mainly of that "poet" C. Ham consulted, not one comma of whose story ever changes. Isn't it suspicious that he always repeats the same formulaic response, that I am a "very good writer" inexplicably obsessed with Leonard Cohen and "none of her stories are true." Fascinating. "None of them are true." Does that sound like a programmed response? And, seriously, could I make this stuff up?

I guess it's one of those tragic conundrums, that a woman can be obsessed and totally unreliable but also "a very good writer." When did "writing" becoming separate from thinking and observing and communicating what you observe and think in a coherent, readable manner.

I am venturing out onto thin ice because I'm getting tired of reading various attempts to make sense of Cohen's strange but all too decipherable career, penned by people who, needless to say, never lived next door to him. They do their best with what they have but none of them is aware of the MKULTRA program and its impact on Montreal, and certainly they did not live on Mount Baldy, or Hydra. I can think of only one person who does. And that's me. Let me reiterate: we met many times on the street before he got my phone number from a mutual acquaintance in 1977. He invited me to Hydra, gave me names and addresses of his friends. He strongly suggested I study with his Roshi.

None of the biographers can even guess what it would be like to be a young woman dealing with his erratic behaviour alternating between neediness, seduction and abuse -- which he began to refer to as "training." Plus the political dimension, whether we like to hear it or not, e.g. demanding that his girlfriends convert to Judaism ... those strange rants about Israel and "geopolitics" ... accusations of "mutiny" when I lost interest in the game... his intimations that there was a powerful cult behind him that was poised to take over the "scene"... and his slanted references to a coming holocaust that would punish the Gentiles for WW2...

Of course, his fans would be skeptical but just supposing my stories are true. I mean, what if? It's a crazy world out there and I don't blame singers for being caught in it, but I also think the audience has a right to peek behind the curtain, given that they pay for the music not to mention its subliminal content.