There was the beginning of the 70’s of the last century, I went to university and it was the time when the music from foreign countries started to be a real taboo in Czechoslovakia. A few of my friends and I regularly met and listened to vinyl records which were sometimes smuggled from the Western Europe to this country. Once there appeared an LP in a pink sleeve and there was written The Greatest Hits of Leonard Cohen. Interesting, a little bit different sort of music which was not known when we listened to local „cheap“ cover versions but especially remarkable lyrics which we, who used the colonial English, tried to decode from the booklet of the LP. I copied the LP to a tape and I listened to it daily for years. That is to say, I liked listening to it.

When I went to the west from our borders for the first time ten years later, the tape was not in the best condition, so I bought all the Cohen’s vinyl records in Amsterdam which I was able to buy. They attracted the attention of a customs officer and he told me. “I should confiscate all of them because you are not allowed to import so many LPs but if you give me one, you can have the others. That is to say, I like listening to Cohen.”

I am more than sixty these days. I am getting older with Leonard and I still listen to the statements of the riper and still wise songs in the way as he ripens as an author and me as a listener. And when he said “See you again” at the end of his last concert in Prague (2013) which was full of energy and immense humility towards listener, I told myself, he will “come” and be played all the time, even we are not among alive people any more. No wonder I still fancy listening to him.
Stanislav Konecny
Prague, Czech Republic