On several occasions we sat for an hour or two listening to the track and he'd say, »This is going to be so great! We'll just chant, 'morning glory' and maybe sing a few lines about how beautiful the morning glories are.« Meanwhile, he hadn't written or recorded his speaking part yet, so all I knew about the song was that a 7-foot high wall of morning glory vines in his backyard inspired it. He never knew this, but the more he played the tune the more bewildered I became. It was so slinky and quirky that I had no clue what to do on it. I avoided that session for months until it was one of the last things on the record to complete. By then I thought I'd just give it a shot and it wouldn't be useable, but at least I did some other good work on the record. So we rolled the tape and a minute of his monologue went by and nothing came to mind. Another two minutes passed and I was starting to sweat because I just didn't hear anything to sing. Leonard was sitting in a chair four feet away from me with his eyes closed and he didn't seem perturbed; but I felt like I was really blowing it. As his monologue ended I thought, 'oh, whatever' and I started singing, oh, the morning glory. When it was over I gave him a look like, how horrible was that? He nodded and said it was just what he had in mind. So I tripled that line, added the harmonies, threw in some 'glorias' and by then it really was rather beautiful.

Morning Glory: any of various usually twining plants (genus Ipomoea of the family Convolvulaceae, the morning-glory family) with showy trumpet-shaped flowers; broadly : a plant of the morning-glory family including herbs, shrubs, or trees with alternate leaves and regular pentamerous flowers.

»Julian returned home one day proudly carrying a drawing he'd made at Heath House Infant's School. He recalls: 'I trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And dad said: 'What's this?' I said: 'It's Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds!'«
In »infant's school«!!!
(Kids were into drugs awfully early in those days!)
However, for their own safety, due to their great popularity, all of the Beatles were totally insulated from the popular culture of their times.
So of course everyone believed Lennon when he sworn that he just didn't know that the line was common kid's code for LSD. »Boy, was I ever hoodwinked about that!«, I think he said:
»If only I'd known in time, then of course I would have had all the circulating Sgt Peppers albums recalled, and changed the line to: 'Lucy in the Sky with a Jack Daniels' or something.
But it was too late. While the Beatles may or may not be bigger than Jesus (there seems to be some question about that) even with Him on our side, there's just no screwing with the record company like that. At least I did right by Jillian. He won't be pulling a stunt like that again!«
And now we have Leonard Cohen's very own »Lucy In The Sky« incident. Cohen however is not insulated from the people. He's hip. He hears their pain. In fact his entire art is based on rubbing their pain in as hard as he can. And there's just no way Cohen can claim that he simply didn't know – what every hippie and Aztec high priest has always known – about Morning Glory seeds!
Morning Glory Seed Basics by Erowid

So there's the flower, and there's the LSD. But I think every listener who is not the native English speaker has only one thing on his mind: the dawn, the moment of morning. This song pictures the transcendental moment of enlightenment without any doubt (well, we can connect that to LSD!). I don't see a connection between that transcendental moment and flower, as I see it between transcendental moment and the dawn. I have Leonard's backyard in mind (mentioned in Ten New Songs reviews – Cohen was sitting there with journalists?), and there's his garage studio where he recorded Ten New Songs and this album, mostly in very early moments of the day, those moments between the night and day. Also, I cannot stop thinking about backyard back there in Montreal, where he buried the note he wrote after his father's funeral (considered as his first poetry work). So he goes into the garden, into the backyard, it's early day, the last minutes of night, heading to his home studio, and there's that flower (which name provides the verbal game which cannot be translated), and it dawns. Maybe it was a trancendental moment many times for him. Maybe that's just »another mile of silence«. What's interesting, he argues with himself alone. That track depicts perfectly the old poet's life, who goes every morning to write and record poetry in his garage in the backyard.

song index