A lady journalist from Winnepeg once said he had the stoop of an aged crop picker and the face of a little boy.

Pitchfork has a pre-Songs of Leonard Cohen documentary about Leonard Cohen, the renowned poet. He does some stand-up comedy, smokes some cigarettes, reads aloud much of his poetry, plays with the I Ching, speaks French (naturally), and bits of Greek. He’s a vegetarian. He plays a guitar and sings, then plays a harmonic, poorly. He talks about sex. This is Leonard Cohen before he was a musician, a star, a ladies’ man, a spiritual seeker. The surprise, if it is a surprise, is that he already was all of those things in 1964 when this film was made. He’d sold more than 400,000 copies of his novel Beautiful Losers, far more than his recording debut sold, at least initially.

As an addendum, the end of the film has a bit of self-referencing as Cohen watches footage of himself sleeping and bathing. It’s an interesting moment because it presages what became something of a trend by the late 60′s. The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter ends in an editing room. In 1969 the art film Medium Cool took self consciousness to new heights.

These songs are still pretty great. Surely the best Leonard Cohen record. And his best album title too.

I’ve had most of these songs for, uh, decades, but never the complete collection. I grabbed it when Emusic added it and a bunch of other Sony back catalog stuff (and raised their prices).