One of Us Cannot Be Wrong

“I wrote this in a peeling room in the Chelsea Hotel before I was rich and famous and they gave me well-painted rooms. I was coming off amphetamines. I was pursuing a blonde lady whom I’d met in a Nazi poster. And I was doing many things to attract her attention. I was lighting wax and cones of sandalwood… I lit a thin green candle…”

This is how Leonard Cohen introduces his song “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” the last track from his first album, during a legendary live set at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970. For my money, it's the best single-song performance of the best set of his career—one at the height of his popularity early in his time as a musician. The broke poet and the failed novelist was all of a sudden performing in front of an anarchic 600,000 crowd that had booed Kris Kristofferson and set fire to the stage’s piano Hendrix was playing earlier in the night. Cohen and his band were hours late to take the stage, refusing to go on until a replacement piano had been found, which the organizers had to scramble around the island to find in the middle of the night (it would be worth it, the force of the keys in “Sing Another Song, Boys” gives the recording enough vigor to live on for eternity). When he finally went on, he was like a drugged up sage, the Mandrax priest taming his hippie flock.

After some luded-out improvisations, he opens the set with the greatest song ever written, “Bird on the Wire,” which he does a verse-swap that’s a signature part of his live performances (following “If I have been untrue…” not with “I hope you know, it was never to you” with “It’s just I thought a lover had to be some kind of liar too…”). This is the mythic Cohen, him at a level of fame and cultural relevance he’ll never have again (his “Hallelujah” revival was something else entirely), and it’s easy to see his artistic genius from the brilliant words he ekes out. It’s not the most booming song of the night, that surely goes to the ripping performance of “Tonight Will Be Fine” (credit to Charlie Daniels’ fiddling). But it’s also not the song where Cohen leaves his soul most on the table.

“One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” is one of Cohen’s hardest songs, in no small part to its symbolic imagery. It’s a thematically complex work filtered through Cohen’s speed-brained opacity—it’s the work of a pained madman, the Flowers for Hitler Cohen over the gentler, romantic Cohen of Let Us Compare Mythologies. There’s a popular perception of Cohen, mostly created by his later-in-life rejuvenation, as a kindly, if not also flirtatious and secretly seductive old man. But the young Cohen was anything but: he was troubled from a young age, of high-class standing but Marxist politics, sexually frustrated and repressed, had a deep connection with his Jewish identity but sought agitation against institutions in favor of personal enlightenment. He was also on a lot of uppers, hallucinogens, and alcohol. Often, in his music especially, he hides behind humor (“I was pursuing a blonde lady whom I’d met in a Nazi poster…” [which, for the record, was Nico]), but right around the corner is the darkness he’s running from.

I lit a thin green candle

To make you jealous of me

But the room just filled up with mosquitoes

They heard that my body was free

Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night

And I put it in your little shoe

And then I confess that I tortured the dress

That you wore for the world to look through

Cohen was always insecure about how his voice sounded, and it breaks here, continuously. That physical pain is part of the magic.

I showed my heart to the doctor

He said I'd just have to quit

Then he wrote himself a prescription

And your name was mentioned in it

The mandolin cuts in, ripping across the notes. It builds Cohen’s cry past just the echoes of the backup singers, adding a desired violence to his words.

Then he locked himself in a library shelf

With the details of our honeymoon

And I hear from the nurse that he's gotten much worse

And his practice is all in a ruin

The music winds itself back down.

I heard of a saint who had loved you

So I studied all night in his school

He taught that the duty of lovers

Is to tarnish the golden rule

It picks up again.

And just when I was sure that his teachings were pure

He drowned himself in the pool

His body is gone but back here on the lawn

His spirit continues to drool

Cohen pauses, as if deciding the final verse:

An Eskimo showed me a movie

He'd recently taken of you

The poor man could hardly stop shivering

His lips and his fingers were blue

I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes

And I guess he just never got warm

But you stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice

Oh please, let me come into the storm

Although this isn’t the original. In typical Cohen fashion, he wrote many versions of the same song, this earlier draft is far more devastating and revealing:

I'm lost in a spell that I started

To turn myself into a stone

I thought you'd be lying beside me

I don't want to be one alone

I cannot see you, I cannot feel you

It's only your shadow that's warm

Oh keep me from harm in my negative form

One of us cannot be wrong

It’s not that different in the shift from the sardonic sweetness of the “Bird on the Wire” line change-up to the deep-seated regret and loneliness.

I like to think this final verse is still hidden in the walls of the song, where Cohen clasps his hands in a boyish fashion that he was taught at some socialist camp when he was a child, and he whistles. A soul-crushing whistle, where his notes break as much as his tired voice. Singing through his echoes, affirming that one of us cannot, in fact, be wrong. They have to be.