In early 1968, three primary enthusiasms emerged from the dizzyingly eclectic musical mash-up spun by John Peel on his Sunday afternoon Radio 1 show. One was the clattery, rattly Jive Tolkien of that elvish Presley, Marc Bolan, in what was then still called Tyrannosaurus Rex; the second was the Dadaist mutation of delta blues and free jazz created by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band; and the third was the debut album of an obscure and comparatively elderly Canadian singer-songwriter named Leonard Cohen.

Biographies of pop musicians of a certain age tend to launch their narratives from childhoods spent either dirt-poor in America’s Deep South or Midwest or lower-middle class in wartime Britain. Cohen was a scion of Montreal’s prosperous Jewish bourgeoisie, exposed to radical folk music via left-Zionist summer camp and inquisitive