The Surprising Pinball Life of Leonard Cohen
The year was 2016 and I was 5 years deep into a PhD program, just starting to write my dissertation on Leonard Cohen. It was also the first year of business for North Star Machines à Piastres, the Montreal pinball bar I helped co-found. You see Leonard Cohen is a Montrealer, and we opened the bar just a few blocks away from his house. From the day we opened, I dreamt about how I could get him to come play pinball at the bar.
If you could play pinball with anyone on earth - dead or alive, fictional, or real - who would it be? I have known my answer for nearly as long as I have been playing pinball. It’s Leonard Cohen. Here’s the thing: the more I researched, the more I saw it could be a real possibility. I started to uncover Leonard’s own love of pinball, and saw how it bled into his creative work.
“A weird guy who liked to go around the streets of Montreal and play pinball”
Pinball was a connector for Cohen. For example, the Columbia record executive who signed Leonard, John Hammond, described his first encounter with the young songwriter. It turns out he totally related to “Lenny” as, “a completely weird guy, who liked to go around the streets of Montreal and play pinball. And I liked to play pinball, too, so that was a great bond that we had.” \
While Leonard loved to play pinball in Montreal, that was in the 1960s. Today, Montreal hadn’t had anywhere to play pinball out in public for decades. Like so many other places, pinball had been illegal here for many years. We even had to overturn an old by-law to open North Star.
Of course my fantasy life was rich with what might happen when the bar opened. My thought was, hey, we brought pinball back to the people of Montreal. Of course Leonard would want to come play! I thought pinball could be part of our bond. Likeminded renegades blazing our own trail in Montreal, you know?
Our own Monster Bash of Beautiful Losers
In his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard paid homage to the “yellow pinball machines of ancient variety” of the Main Shooting and Game Alley, “an amusement arcade on St. Lawrence Boulevard.” It felt like my life was coming full circle when I rediscovered this passage.
We had just opened a pinball bar on the very same street. Cohen must come and play. I absolutely recommend reading, err, painfully stumbling, through this postmodern stream of consciousness written on acid in the hot sun just to get to the character’s hot take on flippers. “Flippers, of course, have destroyed the sport by legalizing the notion of the second chance.” Wild, and something that we have to take a little tongue in cheek, after seeing Leonard’s fondness for a certain 1990s Williams pinball machine.
A photo of Leonard playing a Monster Bash pinball while on tour in Copenhagen in 2008 circulates through fan circles and amongst pinball players. I like to think that pinball is actually Leonard’s favourite game.
One last plunge
Pictured: Evidently this is Leonard Cohen’s fave meat spot.
I was playing pinball when I found out. I was having one of my all-time greatest games on Old Chicago, an EM from 1976. I had played three of five balls, had a score of over 75,000, and had earned a replay when I was ushered into the back room of North Star. “Is everything okay?” I asked with trepidation, unsure of what was going on. “No,” my friend Justin answered, “Leonard Cohen died.” I later wrote in my public condolence message to Leonard at the Grande Bibliothèque, “I have been the one whispering ‘Come back home … we have pinball to play.’”
The next summer I watched as artist Kevin Ledo painted a 130-foot mural across the street from North Star during the annual Mural Festival. Slowly the giant image began to take shape and a familiar face emerged. Leonard was back home. While he never got to come and play pinball at North Star, today he looks over the bar from across the street.
We see the spirit of Leonard in the folks who come into North Star, who challenge the status quo and live life rich with multiballs. And who knows? I like to think that his spirit sneaks in after hours and plays a few games at the witching hour. I look out into the darkness and think, how’s the Medieval Madness, Leonard?
