Elder statesman troubadour Leonard Cohen proved a point made earlier in the day by Matt Schultz of Cage the Elephant. He got a roar from his large crowd of disciples when he interjected the lyric “I’m not trying to fool you, Coachella,” into his song “Halelujah.”
Cohen performed an hour-plus set for a deep sea of humanity. He started 10 minutes late, which surprised his hardcore fans and caused others to make barnyard noises and chant to draw him out.
He was wearing a dark suit with a baby blue ribbon tied around one arm and a fedora, which he frequently doffed after his numbers, five-minute anthems about blighted love and the decline of civilization and the impact one has on the other. Many audience members knew the lyrics and mouthed them or sang along.
Titles included “First We Take Manhattan,” “I’m Your Man” and his closer, “Democracy.”
Favorite image: A upright piano mounted on a bicycle sitting at the edge of the crowd with a burning candle while Cohen finished his set. The instrument is operated by an English performance artist called Rimski and his part of the Coachella installation.
Cohen’s set overlapped a little with Morrissey’s opening on the main stage, blasted by loud speakers over a large swath of the polo grounds.
Morrissey, however, seemed to be having his own sound problems. He asked the audience how he sounded and said, “It’s rough up here.
—Fielding Buck
–fbuck@PE.com