Leave it to his spiritual brother, Leonard Cohen, to prove the point. During his carefully staged but spirited three-and-a-half-hour performance Friday at Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live, the 74-year-old poet and chanteur represented for the wintery side of manhood, but his beatific smile revealed the little boy within.
Within the pop world, Cohen has always been an elder statesman; he released his first album in 1967, at age 33, already a published poet and novelist. The fact that he's always projected a certain maturity has helped him as he's become actually old; the transformation doesn't seem as drastic.
Cohen's foggy voice, formed over decades of time spent at what he once called “the little Parthenon of an unopened pack of cigarettes," still has power -- kicking the habit was obviously wise. It's the instrument he's had since the mid-1980s, an epic groan whose deepest rumble he deployed in “My Secret Life," singing about “the wisdom of old," and whose pinched high range he heroically attempted in “So Long, Marianne."
Mostly he used his gift for conversational chant to clearly put forth the lyrics his elated fans knew so well. He also did a little agile dancing and often knelt in the pose of a gospel preacher, though he left the cartwheels (only one, actually) to his young back-up singers, the sisters Charley and Hattie Webb.
