THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
2,103) Robert Charlebois — “Engagement”
Robert Charlebois (see #44, 1,185) “wrote Quebec’s first psychedelic song, he was the first chansonnier to use an electric guitar, he brought humor into rock — [he] is the musician who pushed the Québécois popular song into the contemporary world.” (Sophie Beaulé, An Anthology of French and Francophone Singers from A to Z: “Singin’ in French”) And this “seven-minute stone jam[] established Charlebois as a screamer, a mad performer” (François Couture, https://www.allmusic.com/album/robert-charlebois-louise-forestier-mw0000335102) and “to folks accustomed to Charlebois the folk singer, acid-jazz tinged material like . . . ‘Engagement’ must have come as a complete shock.” (Bad Cat Records, http://badcatrecords.com/CHARLEBOIS.htm) Bad Cat Records adds:
[It] was the album’s longest and most surprising track. After opening up with a brief Charlebois-in-chanteur segment, the song exploded into a surprisingly funky jam session with Charlebois channeling his best James Brown moves over an increasingly frantic and frenetic performance. Who would have thought a French-Canadian could pull of a James Brown impersonation.
François Couture writes that:
Charlebois . . . started his career in folk clubs in the early ’60s, while he also explored acting. His first LP won a prize for Best Folk Album in 1965. The young Charlebois was clean-cut, well-spoken, poetic . . . . [and his songs] appealed to the upper-class students and the intellectual elite. . . .
Never before and never after in the history of Québec rock music has an artist undergone such a profound transformation in such little time. Robert Charlebois’ previous album was a collection of acoustic folk songs in the French tradition of singer/songwriters Georges Brassens and Félix Leclerc: intelligent but clean and well-spoken. In 1967, Charlebois went to California. He came back a rock & roll dynamo, a stage beast.
Screaming, swearing, wearing outrageous costumes, and presenting his own brand of experimental psychedelic rock, he staged L’Osstidcho, a scandalous anti-show. . . .
Ditching his three LPs of guitar strumming, he started anew and recorded Robert Charlebois/Louise Forestier with a rock band and the Quatuor du Jazz Libre du Québec, Quebec’s first free jazz quartet. He worked with poets Claude Péloquin and Marcel Sabourin to write psychedelic lyrics closer to the spoken dialect of Québecers, while including plenty of trippy plays on words . . . . “Lindberg” can be considered the first Québec psychedelic rock song. Released as a single, it had a tremendous impact on the flower power generation, if only because it included swearing — something never heard before on the prude province’s airwaves. “California,” “La Marche du Président[]” [see #44,] “Lindberg,” “CPR Blues” also feature singer Louise Forestier [see #149, 1,438] and are all mind-expanding rock songs, each one revolutionary at the time. . . . Everywhere on this [LP] his sense of melody persists, but the arrangements, the freedom, the license were unheard of. A Québec artist, used to the severeness of Québec culture, had seen San Francisco and simply couldn’t do things the right way anymore. This album had a similar impact on young Québecers as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — and, honestly, it’s almost as good. Anyone, French speaker or not, interested in psychedelic rock will enjoy this wild album.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/robert-charlebois-mn0000047962#biography, https://www.allmusic.com/album/robert-charlebois-louise-forestier-mw0000335102
Bad Cat Records adds:
Three months in California gave him a front seat to the love generation and the counter-culture movement and Charlebois apparently came back to Quebec a changed man. His initial projects were a pair of musical reviews . . . which brought him into contact with singer/actress Louise Forestier. With Forestier having recorded a solo album of folk material . . . the pair apparently clicked artistically continuing their creative relationship with the release of 1968’s Robert Charlebois avec Louise Forestier. Completely abandoning his earlier acoustic-folk moves, Charlebois reinvented himself as a psych-tinged, cabaret-rocker. Charlebois also sang the French lyrics in Joual which was apparently a local French-Canadian dialect (and went a long way to explaining why it was difficult to understand some of the French lyrics). Working with Quebec poets Claude Péloquin and Marcel Sabourin, he came up with some truly bizarre lyrics and adding to the sense of weirdness, about half the album included support from Quebec’s only free form jazz ensemble – Quatuor du Jazz Libre du Québec. Musically Charlebois didn’t have the best voice I’ve ever come across. To my ears he actually sounded a bit like David Byrne having spent too much time with Jacques Brel, but most of the songs were either propulsive enough or strange enough (“CPR Blues”) where it didn’t matter. Unique, but by today’s standards most of the album sounds relatively placid, but upon its release in 1968, to folks accustomed to Charlebois the folk singer, acid-jazz tinged material like “California”, “Lindberg”, and “Engagement” must have come as a complete shock.
Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame:
1967 was the beginning of a new era. Charlebois, who already had two “chansonnier” albums behind him, released his third album Demain l’hiver, which featured more electric sounds. The cover photo . . . presented Charlebois pouting and dressed only with a soldier’s helmet filled with flowers. . . . With Mouffe and his friend Jean-Guy Moreau, Robert Charlebois presented a new satire review called “Terre des Bums” during Expo 67 (a pun on “Terre des Hommes”, ie “Man and His World”). That same year, Charlebois spent three months in California. The trip ended up being very influential, Charlebois recalling that “instead of taking music or music arrangement classes at university, I took this trip. It was like my very own Berkeley.” His music and his lyrics started reflecting this new influence, one that involved anti-establishment, counter-culture, the use of joual (Quebec slang), rock and roll and drugs. At the time, Quebec was going through its Quiet Revolution, fighting against the powers of the Catholic Church and the economic oppression many French Canadians had suffered until then. His anthem “Lindberg”, sung with Louise Forestier, was directly influenced by his trip to California. It shocked the province with its poetic use of joual and Catholic-based swear words. In September 1968, Robert Charlebois pushed the boundaries even further and triumphed with his “Osstid’show,” a refreshing, charming review, with its creativity, its audacity, its humour and its hope for change. The show starred not only Charlebois, but also eccentric singer Louise Forestier, as well as Mouffe, le Quatuor de Jazz libre du Québec and satirist Yvon Deschamps. Mouffe recalls that “it was a time when everything became a revolution, everything was changing; it felt like a constant boiling point”.
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