A terrified Leonard Cohen walked offstage in the middle of his first ever show

“I have always been grateful,” wrote folk singer Judy Collins, “that I did not fall in love with Leonard Cohen.”

She easily could have, she admitted. “He had that charm, that glint in his eyes, that secretly knowing air… I adored Leonard, but thankfully it wasn’t the kind of passion that got me into trouble. Instead, his songs would let me fly.”

Collins met Cohen in May of 1966, in New York City. She’d heard about him from a mutual Canadian friend, who had said that the poet and novelist from Montreal “thinks he has written some songs.” The friend handed Collins copies of Cohen’s novels Beautiful Losers and The Favourite Game. Collins loved them and agreed to meet Cohen.

Cohen wasn’t young — at least, not as young as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell when they started out. He was 32, and had spent several years living monastically on the Greek island of Hydra before deciding to join the New York arts scene, where he sulked for a few years on the periphery of Andy Warhol’s factory crowd, searching for the ideal artistic medium. When he showed up on Judy Collins’ doorstep, she “found a good-looking, slightly stooped figure, his handsome face wreathed with a smile — a sweet smile, an engaging smile, a rare smile… I knew in an instant that he was special, and knew that I didn’t care if he couldn’t write songs.”

But it turned out that he could. Collins was stunned when he played “Suzanne”, and immediately asked if she could record it. For the rest of her career, Collins included one or two Leonard Cohen songs on each record she made.

At first, Cohen didn’t want to sing. Even after he had signed a record real with Columbia, he was afraid to open his mouth. He told his lawyer Marty Machat, who represented a whole host of Greenwich Village folk singers, that people had told him outright that he couldn’t sing. “None of you can sing,” Machat replied flatly. “When I want to hear singing, I go to the Metropolitan Opera.”

Collins, however, thought Leonard Cohen had a lovely, if untrained, voice. She invited him to play his first show, a benefit concert for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, at New York City’s Town Hall, in 1967. She insisted he perform “Suzanne.” “I wouldn’t know what to do out there,” he protested. “I’m not a performer.”

“He was nervous,” recalled Collins, “and as I introduced him and brought him onstage in front of the enthusiastic full house, I could feel his hands shaking. But when he began to sing, the shaking left his voice and he steadied, and people began to revel in the beauty of ‘Suzanne.’ About halfway through the song, blaming what he later said was a broken string, he stopped and walked offstage. I went back on with him and we finished the song together. People went wild.”

Leonard Cohen’s musical career lasted for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, encompassing fourteen studio albums, many of which were critically acclaimed. In 1984 he wrote the song “Hallelujah,” which The New York Times calls “one of the most haunting, mutable, and oft-performed songs in American musical history.”

His reclusive tendencies never fully disappeared. Cohen spent five years in a California monastery in the 1990s, and it seemed that maybe his musical career was over. Then came 2001’s “Ten New Songs,” his first album in almost a decade. More were to follow. “Old Ideas,” released in 2012, reached number three on the US charts, the highest position of any of his albums. Just as he had done during that first show in 1967, Cohen reemerged.