Leonard Cohen isn't quite as old as the Academy of Music, he just sounds like he is.
On Tuesday, the 74-year-old Canadian song-poet put on a magnificent three-hour-show at the 142-year-old opera house that was filled with prayer-like intensity and easygoing grace, not to mention sartorial splendor, meticulous musicianship and as perfectly crisp a sound mix as I can ever recall hearing at a rock show.
And the white-haired guy - who can look like an elderly gentleman begging for alms or a remarkably nimble and debonair cock of the walk, depending on whether he's holding his fedora over his heart or wearing it on his head - cracked a bunch of old guy jokes, too.
"I haven't been this happy since the end of World War II," he dryly croaked in "Waiting for the Miracle," the elegantly stately song in which he sang, "the maestro says its Mozart, but it sounds like bubblegum," before gesturing toward the bust of the Austrian composer atop the Academy's proscenium arch.
And Cohen altered a lyric in the sashaying "I'm Your Man," to volunteer to "wear an old man mask for you," as part of his septuagenarian seduction technique.
