at the time couldn't really hold my own." During a cryptic exchange detailed in Ira Nadel's Cohen biography, Various Positions, Spector pointed a loaded pistol at Cohen's throat, cocked it, and said, "I love you, Leonard." Quietly, Cohen responded, "I hope you love me, Phil." Nadel also writes that the recording of the nine-minute title track began at 7:30 in the evening and lasted until 2:30 in the morning with the session musicians working on quadruple time, typical of the sessions as a whole. Another night, poet Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan showed up and were ordered by Spector to sing background vocals on the raucously burlesque "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on". Most of the songs deal with themes of unbridled sexuality and brutal voyeurism, such as "Paper Thin Hotel" ("The walls of this hotel are paper thin/Last night I heard you making love to him..."), and are couched in Spector's bombastic sprawl of sonic grandeur. The buoyant "Fingerprints" is a fiddle-infused hootenanny that recalls Cohen's love of country music. Early versions of "Iodine" (then called "Guerrero") and "Don't Go Home with Your Hard-on" were performed in concert as early as 1975 (with music credited to John Lissauer) and are widely available on bootlegs. As Anthony Reynolds reports in his 2010 Cohen biography, the sessions did not even "officially" end: One day Phil just failed to return to the studio, keeping all the tapes (as he had done with Lennon's masters) and going on to mix them alone. Cohen was aghast. He did not consider his recorded vocals to be anywhere near definitive. As far as he was concerned they were merely "guide" vocals for the benefit of the musicians. He had expected to be able to take time on his singing but with Spector holding the tapes hostage at an unknown location this now seemed impossible, unless he brought his own bunch of heavies to take on Spector's. "I had the option of hiring my own private army and fighting it out with him on Sunset Boulevard or letting it go...I let it go." Marty Marchet's son Steven secured a deal with Warner Bros. to release the record, one that Cohen would always harbor mixed feelings about. "I'm too ashamed to tell the whole truth of what happened there", Cohen confessed to Adrian Deevoy of Q magazine in 1991. "People were skating around on bullets, guns were finding