Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man and I have a past. As a skeptical kid, my loyalty to bombastic classical pieces and Alvin and the Chipmunks impenetrably strong, my mother would try and get me excited about “First We Take Manhattan,” which she chose because it had spaceships in it and I was six. Actually, as I would later discover, there are no spaceships in “First We Take Manhattan,” and Cohen’s chuckling, sinister lyrics have less to do with vengeful aliens than with the hidden violence and fascism of fame; a poll of six-year-olds as to which is a better topic for a song would be a mere formality. So Leonard Cohen’s 1988 back-to-the-big-time record lay forgotten in some cupboard or other until my junior year in high school, when I was making a very bad movie called Zigzag whose principal players were, as a matter of convenience, installed at my house indefinitely.

There were three of us, and if I can’t remember much at all of the filming and editing in which we ostensibly engaged in the daytime, I remember vividly every heavy object hurled across the 3 AM bedroom at someone who wouldn’t stop talking. I also remember the music we played each night: at the beginning it was a tasteful mix of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and “MacArthur Park”; within a week, the hysterical laughter with which we greeted the latter had become our sole reaction, as the only album we were listening to was I’m Your Man.

I’m not sure what was so hilarious about it, and I wasn’t at the time, but something about its back-up-singer-drenched bombasticism engaged our acute teenage senses of derision and provided us hours of entertainment. It wasn’t the whole album we reacted to like this—we recognized the coolness of “First We Take Manhattan,” and the reams of vaguely sardonic poetry comprising “Everybody Knows” appealed to the tiresomely rabid Dylan fan I was at the time, but the swirling second half of the album was nothing but a target to us. It wasn’t until another week later, when the CD spun to a stop for the ninetieth time, that what was now half-hearted laughter trickled into a long pause broken by one of us saying bashfully, from the darkness:

“I kinda like this album.”

And I do kinda like this album; in fact, I really like this album, particularly those hilarious second-side songs—tracks five through seven, all of which AllMusic.com tellingly denies “Track Pick” checkmarks. But AllMusic.com’s playing it safe. Anybody can respond to the thrilling crypto-fascism of “Manhattan,” or the ultra-dry sarcasm of “Everybody Knows”; everybody has moments sappy enough for “I’m Your Man” or “Ain’t No Cure for Love.” It takes work to appreciate a song like “Jazz Police,” which muddily describes what may or may not be two classes of beings—”jazz police” and “jazzers”—and explains, ominously, that while the former are paid by J. Paul Getty, the latter receive compensation from J. Paul Getty II. Add love-struck female backup singers—”Jazz Police, I think I’m falling for you”—and a final-verse exhortation to “stick another turtle on the fire / Guys like me are mad for turtle meat,” and you’ve got one of the most inexplicable songs ever released by a mainstream artist. Sure, if you work hard enough you can uncover a wobbly culture-police metaphor, and you can make lines like “wild as any freedom-loving racist” square up satisfyingly with your interpretation, but the greatness of the song isn’t in some hidden meaning—it’s in its sheer giddy creepiness, the sinister portentiousness it steals from the more disciplined “First We Take Manhattan” turned to eleven.

In its excess “Jazz Police” resembles its second-side album-mate, “Take This Waltz,” a six-minute poem so deliberate in its literariness it was easy to make fun of even for someone like me, who pretended to find merit in Dylan’s “Disease of Conceit.” Between verses bubbling over with sepia-toned imagery and Cohen’s formal crooning, it tests the limits of the listener’s gravity with a stabbing chorus—”This waltz / This waltz / This waltz / This waltz / With its very own breath of brandy and death”—that suffered more of our derisive imitation than any other moment on the album. But as I now adore “Jazz Police,” I adore “Take This Waltz,” a much better song, and one whose syrupy, mystical romanticism is only easily mocked inasmuch as all earnestness is easily mocked. No other song on the album has as little guile, and Cohen’s better lines—”Take its broken waist in your hand,” “In a cry filled with footsteps and sand”—create an atmosphere able to sustain his less successful ones—most notably “My mouth on the dew of your thighs,” which I regret to report I laugh at as much now as I did then.

“Take This Waltz”’s grandiose eloquence is inverted by the last of the unchecked trio, “I Can’t Forget,” the middle-aged story of a lost romance, in which Cohen pokes gentle, continuous fun at himself, and achieves one quietly masterful moment of delivery: listen to how audible is his sad half-smile on “It was high and fine and free, oh, you should have seen us.” The instrumentation, gentle, amiable, and understated, is a perfect match for the ironic, half-nonsense chorus that gets sadder with each repetition—”I can’t forget / I can’t forget / I can’t forget but I don’t remember what”—and even if the song lacks the theatrical music or lyrical pyrotechnics that make “First We Take Manhattan” and “Everybody Knows” such obvious winners, its weary, wisecracking melancholy and total lack of bathos might just make it the highlight of the album. Much was made of the sardonic humor I’m Your Man brought to Cohen’s usual lamentation, and it was never better used than here, where the singer’s calm, slightly sad shrug leaves one unable to imagine a better way to think about things. “Jazz Police” is a wickedly impenetrable bad trip; “Take This Waltz” a tender, rose-encrusted serenade; but “I Can’t Forget” is a masterpiece, and the stars of Zigzag and I have a lot to atone for. And I may have written too much here, but I kinda like this album.

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