LEONARD COHEN : A POET IN AMSTERDAM

 

Disc One (55:52)

  1. Dance Me To The End Of Love
  2. Who By Fire
  3. Ain't No Cure For Love
  4. The Law
  5. Heart With No Companion
  6. I'm Your Man
  7. Coming Back To You
  8. First We Take Manhattan
  9. Chelsea Hotel #2
  10. Tower Of Song

Disc Two (56:30)

  1. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong
  2. Everybody Knows
  3. There Is A War
  4. Take This Waltz
  5. Sisters Of Mercy
  6. Bird On The Wire
  7. Hallelujah
  8. Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye
  9. I Can't Forget
  10. Suzanne
  11. So Long, Marianne

Label : Freefall Records

Venue : Het Muziektheater (Stopera), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Recording Date : April 18, 1988

Quality : FM Recording (A+)

Review : Great FM broadcast recording. The order of the songs on this bootleg slightly differs from the real setlist like it was played that evening in Amsterdam, where "Bird On The Wire" opened the show and "Sisters Of Mercy" follows "Hallelujah". But this one's a nice live performance of Leonard Cohen live in Amsterdam in 1988.

Review (Amazon) : By the late 1980s Leonard Cohen was on the verge of giving up: broke, depressed and struggling with writer s block. Although his last studio album, Various Positions, had been a critical success in Europe, Columbia Records had refused to release it in the US, a decision that inflicted significant damage upon Cohen s career. Yet the album contained the seed of what would be a glorious comeback: Cohen had credited his long-time backing singer, Jennifer Warnes, as co-vocalist on Various Positions, and it was Warnes who eventually managed to lift him from his knees. Warners 1987 album Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen was a tribute to her mentor at a point where her own recording career was at an all-time high, and the record pitched Cohen back into the popular American consciousness, while new compositions he wrote for the album helped him overcome his writer s block. These songs reappeared a year later, sung this time by Cohen, on a brand-new studio album: I m Your Man. I m Your Man transformed the Leonard Cohen story. It presented him as a modern-sounding, contemporary artist with the most successful album that he had yet released, and in April 1988 he took I m Your Man out on the road. The tour began in Europe, where the album was surging in the charts, and after an initial two weeks playing the major German cities, Cohen made his way down to The Netherlands for two performances at Amsterdam's Music Theatre on the 18th and 19th of April. This recording comes from the opening night, when the entire event was broadcast on FM Radio. It is one of the finest Leonard Cohen concerts ever captured and demonstrates why it was so important that an artist seemingly discarded was so urgently resurrected.