Répondez-moi

Francis Cabrel, looking like a chevalier cathare in the video, recorded this in 1981. Mais, c’est au courant, bien entendu.

Je vis dans une maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas la nature
C’est même pas une maison

J’ai laissé en passant quelques mots sur le mur
Du couloir qui descend au parking des voitures
Quelques mots pour les grands
Même pas des injures
Si quelqu’un les entend

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur d’être emmuré entre vos tours de glace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles, de colliers de jonquilles
Pour accrocher aux épaules des filles

Mais le matin vous entraîne en courant vers vos habitudes
Et le soir, votre forêt d’antennes est branchée sur la solitude
Et que brille la lune pleine
Que souffle le vent du sud
Vous, vous n’entendez pas

Et moi, je vois passer vos chiens superbes aux yeux de glace
Portés sur des coussins que les maîtres embrassent
Pour s’effleurer la main, il faut des mots de passe
Pour s’effleurer la main

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur de s’enliser dans aussi peu d’espace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles et de pluie de jonquilles
Pour s’abriter aux épaules des filles

Mais la dernière des fées cherche sa baguette magique
Mon ami, le ruisseau dort dans une bouteille en plastique
Les saisons se sont arrêtées aux pieds des arbres synthétiques
Il n’y a plus que moi

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas dans la nature
C’est même pas une maison.

But the last of the fairies seeks her magic wand
My friend, the stream sleeps in a plastic bottle
The seasons have stopped at the feet of synthetic trees
There’s no one but me

Francis Cabrel

Muskrat Love

With the Aussie koalas in the news, the wee animal theme continues for Valentine’s day. Here’s Muskrat Love, from the Captain and Tennille. Feel free to karaoke along.

“Captain” Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille were hot in the 1975 – 80 pop scene with their romantic and novelty keyboard stylings. Margo at the salon tells me that, back then, everyone was asking for a blonde, fluffy Toni do.

Some of us remember those heady days between Woodstock and the nasty 80s when Boomer chicks were getting into big hair, shoulder pads and voodoo makeup. That was long ago, though, before knee replacements and Celebrex.

Black Eyed Dog

With every passing year, it becomes a little less accurate to say that Nick Drake has a cult following. Cults, by their very nature, tend to exist on the margins, the subject of their admiration unknown or even unloved by the vast majority of people. Mention Nick Drake to a certain generation of music fan and chances are you won’t have to explain yourself. Latterly, Drake’s name has become a byword for a certain kind of acoustic music. Gentility, melancholia and a seemingly casual mastery of the fretboard.

Nick Drake’s Black Eyed Dog is as disturbing a piece of music as Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Hellhound On My Trail by the tormented blues guitarist Robert Johnson. From the depths of Sound Technique’s eerie echo room, Nick’s guitar rang like a funeral bell. From the depths of his own tortured soul, his fractured voice cried out “I wanna go home”.

Probably suggested by Winston Churchill’s famous description of depression as a black dog, this stark piece from the Time of No Reply album, played on just three strings, is a harrowing listen. Nick was psychologically fragile, and his desperation is tangible. His tormented voice is beyond pleading. As the song proceeds his formally faultless guitar playing is marred by scuffs and scrapes.

“He had no interest in living at all,” remembers a friend. “The fruits of life meant nothing…I don’t remember him ever laughing. Just before he died he looked like Howard Hughes. There was this beautiful boy with the milky white, almost see through skin, who always took great care of his hands and his fingernails, and now he was dirty and unkempt and his nails were too long to play the guitar”.

Source: Trevor Dann, Darker Than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake

Exiled from Heaven

Nick Drake

Sad Songs at Gentlebear

Heath Ledger connection

Yes We Can

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics…they will only grow louder and more dissonant ……….. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea –

Yes we can.

A week before Super Tuesday last February, a bunch of inspired Americans got together over two days to make a music video. Will.i.am had just written a brilliant song based on Barack Obama’s speech following the New Hampshire primary.

Will had grown up in school listening to Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, Kennedy’s “Ask Not” inaugural address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; his little brother and his friends were in school memorizing those same words today because there had been nothing as memorable or inspiring from our national leaders since. After listening to Senator Obama’s speech, Will felt it could be as important to future generations as those other speeches were to ours, and by putting it to music, people would be drawn in and would actually listen to Barack’s words.

More by Fred Goldring at Huffington Post.

Mama Roux

We at the Café  are avidly following the Revelations of Sarah Palin (of the Palin/McCain ticket, in that order), although at times we Canuckistani east of the oil sands must shake our heads in disbelief. After all, we were something like 70% in favour of Obama a few weeks back and are surely at par with the French by now.

The latest, from our favourite AK blogger, Mudflats, continues to amaze us this Friday evening. Get out your tin-foil hat!

“The witch hunter, Pastor Muthee, was the guest pastor from Kenya that appeared at Palin’s church, The Wasilla Assembly of God, and ‘prayed over’ Sarah to help her become governor.

Muthee began his life in ministry in Africa by hunting down a local woman named Mama Jane after proclaiming her a witch.

Her alleged involvement in fortune-telling and the fact that she lived near the site of a number of fatal car accidents led Pastor Muthee to publicly declare her a witch responsible for the town’s ills, and order her to offer up her soul for salvation or leave Kiambu.

After Pastor Muthee declared Mama Jane a witch, the townspeople began to turn on her, demanding that she be stoned. Public outrage eventually led the police to raid her home, where they fired gunshots, killing a pet python which they believed to be a demon.

While Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Muthee came to speak at her church. Here’s what Sarah Palin has to say about the experience,

As I was mayor and Pastor Muthee was here and he was praying over me, and you know how he speaks and he’s so bold. And he was praying ‘Lord make a way, Lord make a way.’

And I’m thinking, this guy’s really bold, he doesn’t even know what I’m going to do, he doesn’t know what my plans are. And he’s praying not ‘oh Lord if it be your will may she become governor,’ no, he just prayed for it. He said ‘Lord make a way and let her do this next step.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Complete story and scary video at Mudflats. Praises be!

Now, most pot-smoking bunny-hugging liberal folks are likely to remember The Night Tripper, an album of mind-bending N’Awlins music from Dr. John from the late ’60s. For some reason, we are reminded of a cut called Mama Roux. Could it be Palin’s failed marketing venture, Rouge Cou (or as we say en français, cou rouge)?

We are walking on gilded splinters, indeed.

Sadly, Dr. John’s version of Mama Roux has been removed from YouTube for copyright reasons. But here’s Laura Nyro’s offering.

Please feel free to sing along:

Mama Roux
She was the queen of the little red, white and blue
Mama Roux
She was the queen of the little red, white and blue

Ooo why, can’t cha spy boy
Prepare yourself to die boy
Medicine man got heap strong power
You know better than to mess with me

Mama Roux
(growl)
Mama Roux
(growl)

If you see a spy, boy, sittin’ in the bush
Mess ‘em on the head, give him a push
Get out the dishes, get out the pans
Oh he’s a pheasant for the medicine man

Mama Roux
(growl)
Mama Roux
(growl)

Queen is comin’, ooo, by me
Queen is comin’ (growly words)

Better not get in the way
Got the second line fever today

Singin’ wham bam hangin’ ham
Come on down boy and now follow me
Singin’ wham bam thank you mam
Come on boy and follow me

Mama Roux
She was the queen of the little red, white and blue
Mama Roux
She was the queen of the little red, white and blue

Chica chica chica chica
Chica chica chica chica
Chica chica chica chica
Chica chica chica chica
wham bam thank you mam
Come boy now follow me
Singin’ wham bam hangin’ ham
Come on boy now follow me
Wham bam scram sam

Like a Theremin, But More Sophisticated

Jean Laurendeau lives on an ordinary street in West Montreal. But tucked away in a small second-floor studio in his home is something quite out of the ordinary: a rare musical instrument called the ondes Martenot.

At first glance, it doesn’t look very remarkable. Consisting of a piano keyboard on legs with a few mysterious buttons and switches, it could easily be mistaken for an early prototype of a Moog synthesizer. But it’s much older than any synthesizer: It was invented in France by Maurice Martenot in 1928, and is now eight decades old.

“The right hand plays on the keyboard to determine the notes,” says Laurendeau, a soft-spoken, professorial man of 70 years. “The left hand controls the sensitivity – like the bow on a violin.”

In some ways the instrument is like a theremin – famously used to create weird, otherworldly sounds in old horror and sci-fi flicks. Both instruments work on the same principal: “heterodyning oscillators” control pitch and volume. But according to Laurendeau, the ondes Martenot is more sophisticated.
“When you play the theremin, you don’t touch anything. Everything is in the air, and it’s hard to be precisely in tune and to make a clean attack on a note. The keyboard allows a kind of virtuosity that the theremin does not permit.”

By adjusting the settings on his ondes Martenot, Laurendeau demonstrates how it can warble sweetly or penetrate like a knife. By altering pressure on the keys, he coaxes a gentle vibrato from it. When he puts a metal ring on his finger and slides it up and down the keyboard, a distinctive wail is produced.

“Maurice Martenot was a very simple man,” continues Laurendeau, who studied with the inventor in Paris in the 1960s, and later wrote a book about him. “He was not very good at marketing – it was non-existent for him. Once, some people from a bank came to him and said ‘What do you need?’ He said, ‘I want to be left in peace in my studio.’ “During his lifetime, Martenot built fewer than 300 instruments.

On the other hand, the Russian inventor Léon Theremin was an aggressive advocate for his instrument, performing concerts on his invention throughout Europe and America. As well, the theremin soon found its way to Hollywood – and was also popularized by the Beach Boys in the song Good Vibrations.

As a result, the theremin is much better known in North America. But in the Francophone world, the ondes Martenot holds a position of respect. In France, the instrument can be studied at music conservatories in Paris and other cities. And until the mid-1990s, Laurendeau taught it at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.

Yet despite its rarity, the ondes Martenot shows no sign of dying out. It also continues to crop up – sometimes in unlikely places. It can be heard in the soundtracks of the movies Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India. Jonny Greenwood of the band Radiohead plays one, and it was used in the 1970s by the Quebec rock groups Harmonium and Beau Dommage. As well, the instrument is the subject of Wavemakers, a documentary film currently being made by the Montreal-based Productions Artifact company.

Most significantly, the ondes Martenot is essential to a small but valued body of 20th-century classical repertoire. Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise requires three of them.

Laurendeau, one of the few professional “ondistes” in North America, is often called upon when his services are needed: He’s performed throughout Canada, and in the United States with the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and Houston, among others.

“Its past guarantees its future. There are great works that need the instrument to live, and new compositions are still being written for the ondes Martenot.”

Excerpted from Colin Eatock, Globe and Mail, April 9, 2008

Marion Cotillard is La Môme Piaf

Non, rien de rien.
Non, je ne regrette rien.
Car ma vie, car mes joies
Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi !

‘The first time I heard Edith Piaf sing, I cried,” says 31-year-old Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, who plays the legendary French singer in a heartbreaking new biopic, La Vie en Rose. “I was so moved – and so impressed that in only three or four minutes she could tell a whole story that would make me cry.”

Piaf certainly had a handle on misery. During the 47 years of her short life, she lost almost everyone who mattered to her: her parents ran off to the circus when she was a baby, leaving her to grow up in her grandmother’s brothel; her only child died of meningitis; and the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash only two years after they’d met.

Yet somehow, despite all this, she soared from the filthy Parisian streets of Belleville to the glitzy heights of stardom, touring the world with a clutch of show-stopping tunes delivered always in that miraculous, seismic voice: it shook her birdlike frame, held audiences spellbound, and transmuted the gloom that enshrouded her life into musical gold.

Cotillard, as Piaf, gives the most remarkable performance you’ll see on film this year.

Whether portraying the scruffy teenage ingénue – spotted singing on a street corner and ushered on to the stage of his nightclub by Louis Leplée (played by an avuncular Gérard Depardieu) – or the aging diva, crippled by arthritis and addicted to morphine, Cotillard’s extraordinary turn seduces the eye and assaults the heart.

Although Cotillard is a talented chanteuse, and already knew Piaf’s music back-to-front having long ago acquired the habit of listening to it in her trailer whenever preparing to act a particularly emotional scene, Piaf’s own recordings were used for the soundtrack.

Cotillard insists that she was undaunted by the prospect of taking on the mantle of a French national treasure, an iconic figure whose funeral, attended by 40,000 fans, brought central Paris to a standstill.

“I was inspired by a great uncle who used to live at home with us,” she says. “I still remember him perfectly, all the movements of the person he was just before he died: the way he walked, the way he behaved, and that horrible life you lead when you are ill inside. For the old Piaf, I took all of that.”

The result, a striking combination of physical frailty with emotional volatility, makes Cotillard’s Piaf a far from straightforwardly sympathetic character. The flip side of her contagious joie de vivre is a selfish capriciousness: she casts off lovers like dirty stockings and, as her fame grows, neglects her old friends, or humiliates them in front of her starrier new acquaintances.

“When I started reading about her life I discovered a bright side and a dark side,” says Cotillard. “Some aspects of that dark side I initially found very hard to accept – like the tyranny that she could use over people. But then I realised that her selfish behaviour was motivated by her desire to keep people around her. She was so scared to be alone. And once you understand that, you stop judging her.”

In preparing for the role, Cotillard read and heard many stories about Piaf – few figures in French popular culture have generated quite so much myth and rumour -but one source she grew to trust more than any other was the singer’s old friend, Ginou Richet, who offered her a surprising insight into Piaf’s character. “Ginou shared with me many things that she thought would help me to understand Piaf,” says Cotillard.

“But above all she described her as a happy person. Yes happy. Even though she lived such crazy tragedy, such huge tragedy, Piaf loved to have fun. She loved life.”

Telegraph UK review

La Vie en Rose is the English-given title for the Academy Award-winning film La Môme, a 2007 French movie directed by Olivier Dahan about singer Édith Piaf, starring Marion Cotillard in her Academy Award, BAFTA, César Award, Czech Lion, and Golden Globe winning performance as Piaf.

Lambs of God: Anniversary of the Pet Food Recall

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.
~~ Irving Townsend

The anniversary of the 2007 pet food recall is a particularly bittersweet time of remembrance for the thousands who lost their companions to contaminated food, corporate greed and inept oversight. The pet food industry is a sham, dressing up the shabby left-overs from human consumption as nourishment for animals. Its regulation is a gutless farce. Compound this with the cost-cutting efforts of income funds masquerading as pet food purveyors, and the unregulated corruption that allows plastic to pretend to be protein, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our pets were, sadly, the canaries in this coal mine.

At the end of a long, dark year, as the healing sun begins to melt away the ice from our hearts, here is some music from heaven for the small, much loved victims of the recall and those who love them. It is Samuel Barber’s hauntingly beautiful Adagio for Strings. This music is truly touched by God.

Adagio for Strings is a work for string orchestra, and it is Barber’s most popular piece. It originated as the second movement in his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936.

The recording of the 1938 world premiere, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Orchestra, was selected in 2005 for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the United States Library of Congress.

The piece was played at the funerals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and JFK. It was also performed in 2001 at a ceremony at the World Trade Center to commemorate the thousands lost there in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The composer also arranged the piece in 1967 for eight-part choir, as a setting of the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”).

The YouTube video features a stunning rendition by the BBC Orchestra, accompanied by images from 9/11.

Adagio for Strings mp3 download

Itchmo: In Memory Of

Pet Food Recall

A Dog’s Breakfast

Images: Pebbles the Yorkie, and from the Flickr Photo Gallery: Yeti (malamute) and Ashleigh (cat)

Canada’s Melancholy Bard

Poet, musician, novelist, ladies’ man, monk, actor… Leonard Norman Cohen, one of Canada’s most influential cultural icons was born on Sept. 21, 1934 in Montreal. Whether from a mountaintop at a Buddhist retreat in California, on the Greek island of Hydra or strolling along the streets of his beloved ville d’amour, the melancholy bard of popular music has delighted fans worldwide with his poetry, novels and music.

Leonard Cohen’s towering songbook fits no category save its own, but they finally found a house big enough to hold him. Cohen’s overdue induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came during Monday night’s ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Between the inductions of Madonna, John Mellencamp, the Ventures, Gamble & Huff and Little Walter, Lou Reed took the podium to offer a generous tribute to his fellow rock poet.

Reed mentioned William S. Burroughs and Cohen as contemporaries, citing Naked Lunch and Beautiful Losers, and saying “one of them got more attention. I was always surprised by that.” Reed then quoted lavishly from the Cohen oeuvre from typewritten remarks, from First We Take Manhattan, Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Anthem and Cohen’s latest work Book of Longing. It was, appropriately, a most writerly induction for Montreal’s greatest living artist.

Cohen pronounced the induction “such and unlikely event” and “not a distinction I coveted,” while joking that music critic Jon Landau once said “I have seen the future of rock ‘n’ roll, and he is not Leonard Cohen.” Then came the perfect recital of Tower of Song before Damien Rice serenaded the hall with Hallelujah.

The evening was doubly celebratory for Montrealers as it was accompanied by the announcement of Cohen’s first live dates in Montreal in 15 years, with three shows at Place des Arts – June 23, 24 and 25 – as part of this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival. There is also talk of an album.

Details at Montreal Gazette

CBC Digital Archives

Leonard Cohen website

Canada’s First Matinee Idol

“If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in autumn,” sang Robert Goulet, but in the end, that’s just what he did.

Robert Goulet, who marshalled his dark good looks and thundering baritone voice to play a dashing Lancelot in the original Camelot in 1960, then went on to a wide-ranging career as a singer and actor, winning a Tony, a Grammy and an Emmy, died today. He was 73.

After the Camelot triumph, Mr. Goulet was called the next great matinee idol. Judy Garland described him as a living 8-by-10 glossy. He was swamped with offers to do movies, television shows and nightclub engagements. Few articles failed to mention his bedroom blue eyes, and many female fans tossed him room keys during performances. His hit song from the show, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” remains a romantic standard.

“Something in his voice evokes old times and romance,” Alex Witchel wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1993. “He makes you remember corsages.”

His more than 60 albums, travels with touring theatrical revivals and many Las Vegas gigs were enough to ensure nearly a half-century of popularity.

Mr. Goulet’s rise after Camelot was swift. In 1962, he won a Grammy award as best new artist for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us,” and his hit single “What Kind of Fool Am I.” Two years later, his album “My Love Forgive Me” went gold; 17 of his albums between 1962 and 1970 made the charts.

He reached the peak of his popularity in the ’60s. In 1966, he starred in a television adaptation of Brigadoon, which won an Emmy as outstanding musical production. He won a Tony for his performance in the 1968 Broadway musical The Happy Time. And he appeared frequently on popular television programs like The Ed Sullivan Show.

A theatrical agent recommended him to Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist, and Frederick Loewe, the composer, for their new musical, Camelot which would also star Julie Andrews and Richard Burton.

His audition, in September 1960, went so well that everyone applauded, a rarity, Mr. Goulet recalled in an interview with Music Educators Journal in 1998.

Mr. Loewe asked him, “Parlez-vous francais?”

Mr. Goulet answered, “Oui, certainement.”

Variety called Mr. Goulet the “perfect Lancelot.” Richard Burton pronounced that Goulet had “the voice of an angel.”

The public loved Camelot. It ran for 873 performances, closing in January 1963. The cast album, featuring “If Ever I Would Leave You,” topped the charts.

“Robert Goulet was a monumental presence on the stage and had one of the great voices of all time, which often overshadowed his many other talents,” pianist Roger Williams said in a statement Tuesday. “He really could do it all — act, dance and was as funny as hell, especially when he was making fun of himself. Robert always took his craft seriously, but never took himself seriously.”

“Oh, how we will miss this great guy.”

Robert Goulet, 1933 – 2007