Tony Russell     Leonard Cohen, Isle Of Wight Festival     1970

Tony Russell     Leonard Cohen, Isle of Wight Festival     1970

“It was a dismal evening in New York City… I had a cheeseburger; it didn’t help at all,… I went to the White Horse Tavern looking for Dylan Thomas, but Dylan Thomas was dead.”

It was enough to find Cohen in a dismal state when he crossed the famous lobby of The Chelsea Hotel. Bristling with talent and the electrifying buzz of fame, filled to the brim with rent-money paintings from its guests the Hotel’s lift was notoriously tricky. While Cohen did usual Fonzie impression on the troublesome controls, a wild-haired, fiercely confident woman entered the lift. The current resident of Room 411 – the singer for Big Brother and the Holding Company, and one of the voices of her generation – Janis Joplin.

Cohen gathered his courage and decided to use the slow pace of the lift to engage in some conversation with this shining light of womanhood. He remembered in 1988, “I said to her, ‘Are you looking for someone?’ She said ‘Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.’ I said, ‘Little lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.’ Those were generous times. Even though she knew that I was someone shorter than Kris Kristofferson, she never let on. Great generosity prevailed in those doom decades.”

Leonard Cohen, on his meeting Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, in 1968, in Jack Whatley, “The Story Behind The Song: Leonard Cohen’s ode to Janis Joplin, ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’” Far Out Magazine, 2019