“There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues.”

Cohen and Dylan seem to be stitched together in the fabric of the universe. They both moved to New York from the North: Dylan from Minnesota, Cohen from Montreal. Dylan as a crazy kid, and Cohen as an already successful poet and novelist. The are both Jewish. Like Cervantes and Shakespeare–who died on the same day–they are contemporaries, although Cohen is several years older.

To my knowledge, their paths have crossed several times. Dylan sang background vocals on a song on Cohen’s failed collaboration with Phil Spector (who was recently tried and sentenced for murder) Death of a Ladies’ Man. There is also a fabled meeting where they “traded lyrics.”

Which is Shakespeare and which is Cervantes? This is where the comparison needs to stop.

***

My introduction to Cohen was just as random as my introduction to Doug Knaphus, a few years earlier. We were brought together by a mutual acquaintance whom I knew from school and church, and who been Doug’s neighbor when they were younger. Why did he decide to introduce us? Because we were the only people he know who have home computers.

It was 1983. Such a meeting would never happen today.

***

I almost saw Leonard Cohen in concert in 2009, because 26 years earlier, my father owned an Atari 800 computer. Almost. The Rain God had other plans.

***

Doug and I eventually lost interest in the magical machines, but nonetheless became close friends, and turned out attention to music. Our mutual acquaintance, I’ll call him Joey–was a nice–but dull kid with no real curiosity about the world. He quickly fell to the wayside. What is curious, is that Doug and I started out liking different kinds of music: I liked metal and progressive rock, and he liked punk and new wave. Eventually our interests converged when we both started listening to 60’s folk rock and psychedelia: Hendrix, the Byrds, and especially The Beatles and Dylan. I don’t remember us ever listening to Cohen together, although we most likely did hear Judy Collins’ “Suzanne.”

I must give credit where credit is Due: Doug led the way on this. He was Don Quixote, and I was Sancho Panza. He led on our adventures to the used dusty record stores that smelled like moldy cardboard and the community radio station (where I first heard “Suzanne.”) He got me buying records that I had never heard of with weird album covers, and reading books. It was with Doug that I suffered through two horrible opening acts to hear and meet Don McLean.

As Dylan and Cohen seem to be metaphysically connected somehow, so are Doug and I. During our last year of high school (we were in the same grade, but attended different schools) we began moving apart. We eventually went to different colleges. He dropped out to run a movie theater in Idaho, and I dropped out to serve a religious mission in Venezuela (where I remember reading a lengthy magazine article about Cohen while sitting in a barber shop) for a church to which I no longer belong.

I thought that I would never see Doug again. I looked for his name in the phone book, tried searching the Internet, and all to no avail. Within a week of reluctantly signing up for Facebook, he contacted me. Over twenty years had passed since we had last seen each other.

The Rain God had plans.