In 1968, Leonard Cohen stepped into an elevator at the Chelsea Hotel in New York and found Janice Joplain standing there. She told him she was looking for Chris Kristofferson. Cohen said he was Kristofferson. They both knew it was a lie, and they spent the night together. Anyway, Cohen turned that night into one of the most famous songs of his career, and almost nobody knows the full story of what happened before he wrote it.

 The Chelsea Hotel in 1968 was not a hotel in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a building on West 23rd Street in Manhattan that had been absorbing artists and writers and musicians since the 1880s. Mark Twain had stayed there. Oh, Henry had written there. Dylan Thomas had drunk himself toward death in a room on the third floor in 1953.

By 1968, the Chelsea had become something different, something more alive and more dangerous. the kind of place where you could be anyone and nobody asked questions because everyone there was also being someone the rest of the world had not yet decided what to make of. Leonard Cohen had a room on the fourth floor. He was 34 years old.

 He had been a poet and a novelist before he became a songwriter. He had the specific quality of a man who had spent a long time observing other people and had developed from all that observation a very precise understanding of what people were actually saying underneath what they appeared to be saying. Janice Joplain was not a Chelsea resident.

She was passing through New York in that restless way she passed through places in 1968, fully and loudly with the specific energy of a woman who had been famous for approximately one year and was still working out what that meant and what it cost. Cheap Thrills had gone to number one. The Monterey performance had traveled through the culture like a current.

Janice Joplain’s face was on magazine covers. She was 25 years old. She was the most famous female rock singer in America. And she was lonely in the specific way that very famous people are lonely. Not the absence of company, the presence of company that cannot reach you where you actually are. She was at the Chelsea because Chris Kristofferson was at the Chelsea or she thought he was.

 Cohen asked her who she was looking for. She said Chris Kristofferson. Cohen said he was Chris Kristofferson. This was not true in any verifiable sense, but Janice Joplain did not inspect it. She may have known immediately that it was not true. She had a very good radar for what was true and what wasn’t. She had grown up in a town that had made her feel like she was too much of everything, and surviving that experience tends to sharpen a person’s ability to read a room.

She went with Cohen anyway because it was 1968 and they were both at the Chelsea Hotel and the night was available and Cohen was interesting. And the lie was the kind of lie that is also an invitation. Or because she understood something about Leonard Cohen that she recognized from the inside.

 Someone who had learned to be larger in public than they sometimes felt in private. They spent that night together at the Chelsea Hotel. What was said and what was not said belongs to the private record. What Cohen took from it belongs to the public one. 6 years later in 1974, he recorded Chelsea Hotel number two for his album New Skin for the Old Ceremony.

The song is two verses and a chorus and a bridge. It runs 3 minutes and 30 seconds. It is written in the first person. It is addressed to a woman. It is about a specific night in a specific place with a specific person. The woman in the song is giving something to the narrator. The narrator understands the value of what he is being given.

He also understands with the specific clarity of a poet who has been paying attention his whole life that the woman giving it does not entirely believe she deserves to receive the same thing in return. Cohen understood this because she had told him in the way that people tell things to strangers they will probably never see again more than she might have told someone she would have to face the next morning.

 The song became part of Cohen’s repertoire. He performed it through the mid 1970s, through the late 1970s into the 1980s. Audiences loved it in the way audiences love songs that feel like they are about something true, something that happened, not a composition, but a confession. Nobody asked who the woman was.

 For six years, the woman in Chelsea Hotel number two had no name outside of Cohen’s own knowledge. Then in 1980, during a concert, Leonard Cohen told an audience that the song was about Janice Joplain. He said it directly without preamble. The audience went quiet. Then he sang the song. He later said that naming her was an indiscretion, that she deserved her privacy, that he had broken something by saying the name out loud.

He apologized for it, not to an audience in interviews as a matter of private conscience that had become public record. He said he should not have said her name. He said it because he regretted it. Janice Joplain was dead by the time Cohen named her. She had died on October 4th, 1970, 2 years before Chelsea Hotel number two was recorded, 6 years before Cohen said her name in a concert.

She never heard the song. She never knew that the night at the Chelsea Hotel had become part of Cohen’s art. She never knew that he had been paying the kind of attention that produces songs. She never knew that the things she had told a man in an elevator on a night in 1968 had traveled through him and come out the other side as something that would outlast both of them.

This is the thing about art made from real experience. The people who provided the experience do not always know they did. They live their lives. They move through their nights. They tell strangers things they would not tell people they know. They look for Chris Kristofferson in elevators.

 They find Leonard Cohen instead. And they go with it because it is 1968 and the night is available. And the lie is the kind of lie that is also an invitation. Chris Kristofferson, for his part, did not know any of this was happening. He was in Nashville in 1968 working as a janitor at Columbia Records, sliding demos under the doors of producers who did not yet know his name.

 He had written Me and Bobby McGee. He had written Help Me Make It Through the Night. He was carrying songs that would reshape American music in the years to come. He was not at the Chelsea Hotel the night Janice looked for him. He and Janice would meet later in California in 1970 through Bob Newworth. By then, Janice was recording Pearl.

 By then, there were only a few months left. He heard me and Bobby McGee and Janice’s voice for the first time in a producers’s office in Los Angeles the morning after she died. He had to leave the room. He did not know in that producers’s office about the elevator about Cohen about the night at the Chelsea Hotel when Janice had asked for him by name and gotten someone else instead and made something of it anyway.

He found out later. He said it sounded like her. Chelsea Hotel number two contains a line that has stayed with people for 50 years. Cohen sings that he remembers the woman well. He remembers her body and her beauty and the conversation. He also sings that she never brought out the best in him or even the very best.

It is an honest line, an uncomfortable one, the kind of line that a lesser writer would have cut because it does not make the narrator look good. Cohen kept it because honesty was the only currency he trusted and because the point of the song was not to make himself look good. The point was to honor the specific reality of what had happened.

The line after it is the one that people remember longest. He says he does not think of her that often. Except when he hears himself say that he does not think of her that often. It is the most honest thing in the song which means it is also the saddest. Janice Joplain spent 1968 becoming famous in the way that consumes people.

Not famous gradually, famous suddenly, famous completely. Famous in the way that arrives before you have had time to build a self large enough to contain it. She was 25 years old. She was from Port Arthur, Texas. She had been told for years that she was too much, too loud, too strange, too everything. And she had taken all of that too muchness and put it into the music.

 And the music had made her famous. And now the world wanted the too muchness. And she gave it the too muchness every night. And then she walked off stage and the quiet was very quiet. The Chelsea Hotel was full of people who understood this kind of quiet. Leonard Cohen understood it from the inside. He was a different kind of too much, quieter, more interior, but the underneath of it was the same.

Two people who had given everything to their work and were working out what was left for everything else. They found each other in an elevator. One of them lied about who he was. The other one let the lie stand. Leonard Cohen performed Chelsea Hotel number two for the rest of his life. He died in November 2016 at the age of 82.

He performed his final concert 3 months before he died. He had been performing the song for 42 years. Every time he sang it, he was in an elevator at the Chelsea Hotel in 1968. Every time he sang the line about not thinking of her often, he was telling the truth and lying simultaneously, the way the best songs do.

The Chelsea Hotel still stands on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. The elevator still runs. Somewhere in that building on a night in 1968, a woman who was looking for someone she did not find got into an elevator and found someone she was not looking for instead. And that man paid attention and wrote it down and carried it with him for the rest of his life.

 That is what happened at the Chelsea Hotel in 1968. One elevator, one lie, one night, and a song that has outlasted both of them by a long way with a lot left to Oh.