Today I skipped into disc three of The Power of Negative Thinking by the Jesus and Mary Chain to check out the covers, some of which I knew (“Guitarman,” “Reverberation”) and one – “Tower of Song” – that I didn’t. By that time, the band had clearly evolved into a sleek, textured rock ‘n’ roll band, and no song was in danger of being overwhelmed by the cloud of racket, and their performance of the Leonard Cohen classic highlights a crucial difference. Musically, they don’t do much more than fuzz up the changes and give the song a tom-tom beat, but the vocal is so deadpan that the song struck me as remarkably funny. You’d have to be a toad to miss the humor of Cohen singing, “I was born with the gift of a golden voice,” but I never caught the hilariously bleak vision of “Twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond / They tied me to this table right here / in the Tower of Song,” or “I said to Hank Williams, “How lonely does it get?” / Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet / but I hear him coughing all night long.” The band that made Psychocandy emptied everything of meaning including the words, letting the sound and changes carry the day.

To check myself, I went back to YouTube for Leonard Cohen’s performance of “Tower of Song” from Night Music. I wasn’t sure if I missed the humor in his performance, but nope – Leonard might be low-key, but there’s a suave gravity to his performance that mutes the humor in his vision.