Allen bro it's great to hear that there is another Cohen fan here - I absolutely love his music and have been a fan for decades. In fact I got to meet him and chat with him a bit about 15 years ago. I asked him a few questions about how he grew up in Montreal and the fact that his dad was an army officer. At some point he looked at me and said something like "with all due respect the kinds of questions that you are asking me are depressing me..."
Anyway being able to depress Leonard Cohen is not at all an easy task...
and quite a distinction to have...
I can play much of his music and one of my personal all time favorites is "The Chelsea Hotel" which by the way was written about a one night stand that he had with Janis Joplin.
I have always loved Neil Young too and I am not ashamed to admit that his politics were always not far off from mine either...
Bob Alvin Lee was 10 Years After right? When I was a kid playing lead in a band at some Catholic youth center (they didn't know that I was a Jew bastard...
) a rival lead guitar player in an effort to one up me with his list of songs that he could play asked me if I know "I'm going Home." I didn't know it was a 10 Years After song and said something like "great when are you going to leave...."
Ron buddy I'll admit that HH had some great tunes too and the girls loved them!
Nick bro your list is very cool too and Pink Floyd was always a fav (using 60-70's language here...) too.
Something that helped me a great deal to pick the tunes that I loved off the albums was the advent of the CD. Prior to the CD one had to use a turntable and even though I STILL believe that records have more sound than CD's turntables, at least mine, suffered from speed errors which changed the pitch of the music. Trying to tune my guitar to a turntable with speed problems absolutely sucked. With CDs it seemed like the speed/pitch issues went away and it was much easier to jam along and learn tunes and the random access capability of the CD heads that never touched the CD made one feel less guilty than when raising and lowering a turntable tonearm...
You know folks our friend Rick has probably met a number of the artists that we have mentioned - I hope that he weighs in here.
When the marriage, thankfully, came to an end I came back to guitar as a way of getting over the breakup and listened alot to Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughn (alot of blues orientated players for some reason 
