Joe Cocker has a voice with enough strength to pry open an oyster let alone smash a glass. His brazen tones and gravel track timbre graced a great many covers with an air of rafter rattling bravura. However, he rarely sang a song written quite as well as Leonard Cohen’s ‘Bird on a Wire’. Hell, there are very few songs in existence that can rival it.
Cohen played ‘Bird on a Wire’ just about more than any other song in his back catalogue, frequently opening his concerts with the anthem. “It seems to return me to my duties,” he said of the song’s spiritual impact. “It was begun in Greece and finished in a motel in Hollywood around 1969 along with everything else. Some lines were changed in Oregon. I can’t seem to get it perfect.”
Nevertheless, despite Leonard’s humble demurring, many musicians – from Kristofferson to Father John Misty – would disagree with him. “Kris Kristofferson informed me that I had stolen part of the melody from another Nashville writer,” Cohen added. “He also said that he’s putting the first couple of lines on his tombstone—and I’ll be hurt if he doesn’t.”
Those fateful first lines in question read: “Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free.” The brilliance of much of Cohen’s lyricism is that it etches itself on the sensibilities of any attentive listener. As such the refrain of “I have tried in my way to be free” is one that flutters and then nestles into the psyche like a bird from the frenzy of flight into the cushion of the nest.
Cohen has described ‘Bird on the Wire’ as a simple country song, and indeed that is how the track first debuted via the Judy Collins version. In many respects, it does have the straightforward heart of a country song, but its wayfaring ways betray its creator’s folk stylings. It is a heartbreak song of transcendence, and it clearly struck a note with Kristofferson, God forbid the man so good they named him two-and-a-half times should ever die.
As for Cocker’s stirring version, well, he might have the sort of voice that could whip up a hurricane—the sort of voice that Bob Dylan christened one of the finest of his fruitful generation, but somehow there are strains in his refrain that sound meek. However, it’s a purposefully meek delivery, adding some lowdown temperance to the tune, so that the catharsis that it builds towards truly sounds like he’s suddenly soaring above the gutter from which he once resided.
