Avalanches, Leonard Cohen Live in Switzerland, 1993 [vinyl]

Swiss FM Broadcast from The Kongresshaus, Zurich, Switzerland. 10 Tracks. Running Time 46.32. Featured tracks: Chelsea Hotel, First We Take Manhattan.

Promoted on Amazon UK

Note: While the Amazon blurb dates the performance in 1983, it actually took place May 21, 1993. There have been more than 10 bootleg albums copied from this broadcast.

Leonard Cohen – A Poet In Amsterdam (Live 1988) ( 2CD set)

Promoted on Amazon UK

By the late 1980s Leonard Cohen was on the verge of giving up: broke, depressed and struggling with writer’s block. Although his last studio album, Various Positions, had been a critical success in Europe, Columbia Records had refused to release it in the US, a decision that inflicted significant damage upon Cohen s career. Yet the album contained the seed of what would be a glorious comeback: Cohen had credited his long-time backing singer, Jennifer Warnes, as co-vocalist on Various Positions, and it was Warnes who eventually managed to lift him from his knees. Warner’s 1987 album Famous Blue Raincoat: The Songs of Leonard Cohen was a tribute to her mentor at a point where her own recording career was at an all-time high, and the record pitched Cohen back into the popular American consciousness, while new compositions he wrote for the album helped him overcome his writer s block. These songs reappeared a year later, sung this time by Cohen, on a brand-new studio album: I m Your Man. I m Your Man transformed the Leonard Cohen story. It presented him as a modern-sounding, contemporary artist with the most successful album that he had yet released, and in April 1988 he took I m Your Man out on the road. The tour began in Europe, where the album was surging in the charts, and after an initial two weeks playing the major German cities, Cohen made his way down to The Netherlands for two performances at Amsterdam s Music Theatre on the 18th and 19th of April. This recording comes from the opening night, when the entire event was broadcast on FM Radio. It is one of the finest Leonard Cohen concerts ever captured and demonstrates why it was so important that an artist seemingly discarded was so urgently resurrected.

TRACK LISTING CD1 01. Dance Me To The End Of Love 02. Who By Fire 03. Ain’t No Cure For Love 04. The Law 05. Heart With No Companion 06. I’m Your Man 07. Coming Back To You 08. First We Take Manhattan 09. Chelsea Hotel #2 10. Tower Of Song CD2 01. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong 02. Everybody Knows 03. There Is A War 04. Take This Waltz 05. Sisters Of Mercy 06. Bird On The Wire 07. Hallelujah 08. Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye 09. I Can’t Forget 10. Suzanne 11. So Long, Marianne

Credit Due Department: Thanks to Dominique BOILE, who alerted me to these releases.