In Praise of an Older Man (Leonard Cohen @ Oakland's Paramount)

Leonard Cohen is 78 years old and still giving everything he's got.

I was learning how to ask a girl out for a date in high school when this unkempt Canadian with a gravelly voice was strumming a guitar and singing about Suzanne.

If you said Leonard Cohen wasn't the coolest man alive, I'd say you were wrong.

Cohen gave two shows this weekend before two sell-out crowds at Oakland's priceless art-deco Paramount Theatre, treating 3,000 fans each night to more than three hours of his gracious, intimate and inspiring poetry and music. He was here in 2010 for a series of concerts at the same venue.

By all accounts, he is even more energized and more gracious. In the intervening two years, of course, he had to testify against his former manager, Kelley Lynch, before she was jailed for stealing more than $5 million from his accounts while he was in a Zen monastery.

That's him there, on the left, I think.

So this is a singer, entertainer and cult icon who is back to work on a 19-city tour with nine musicians and a big back-up team, and he is gracious, tender and generous in giving himself to his audience in marathon performances such as the two he gave in Oakland this past weekend.

He opened Sunday night's concert with a tilt towards his mortality and an affirmation of his state of mind: "I don't know, friends, when we’ll ever meet again – no one can know that – but tonight we'll give you everything we've got."

If you have a chance, between now and April 21, Cohen will appear at 17 venues across North America.

We in Oakland have been so fortunate to be on his radar. Rolling Stone pretty much has got it right in its write-up of Leonard Cohen singing here in Oakland.