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Les Miserables
Les Miserables
Jupiter - 1967
Michael Panontin
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If the Ugly Ducklings were Canada's Rolling Stones, then Les Miserables were Quebec's.
Like the Stones in the mid-sixties, Les Miserables were a five-piece. They were also known as the bad boys of Quebecois pop. "Both musically and sartorially," guitarist Gerry Bribosia would tell the Vente de Garage blog (translated from French), "our approach was very, very aggressive. We moved a lot on stage, whereas other groups were frozen behind their microphones."
The group trace their origins back a few years to the early sixties, where they performed Shadows and Ventures instrumentals at Montreal high schools as Les Coronets. But things changed in 1965 when the guys - guitarists Gerry Bribosia and Michel Cavuoto, bassist Gregoire Buisson, drummer Aldo Marandola and saxophonist Jean-Marc Vanesse - inked a deal with Yvan Dufresne's Jupiter label. Les Miserables hit pay dirt on their second single, 'Elle me dit', a rather faithful rendering in French of the early Stones classic 'Tell Me'.
But deejays who flipped the record over got quite the surprise.
The acerbic 'Vivre avec toi' was a garageland classic to rival anything put out that year in anglo Canada. And unlike many of the discs coming out of francophone Quebec, it was not a French version of a current US/UK top-40 hit. The Buisson/Bribosia original would have been an eye-popper at a time when Tony Roman's 'Do wha d'iddy diddy' battled it out with Joel Denis' 'Ya ya' for top spot on the Quebec pop charts. And it was no accident either.
"The a-side was a version that was forced on us by the record company, it was in our contract," Bribosia explained. "On the b-side, we had required that each single we released have at least one of our songs."
More hits followed, like the scorching corker 'Chemises a pois, cravates a fleur', issued just as the summer of love and Expo '67 were getting underway, and the witty 'Miserablement votre'. Both were penned by Bribosia. At some point Jupiter got the memo. "The company said, 'Wait a minute...we're going to release an album with your compositions because it's always your tunes that get played on the radio.'"
The eclectic Les Miserables was more a mix of previous singles and newer material than a proper album. Still, in a market awash in second-rate cover versions, it managed to break solid ground up in la belle province. Apart from the aforementioned 'Elle me dit', the twelve tracks on Les Mis... all flowed from the pen of the talented Bribosia, making it one of the first French-Canadian rock records - along with Les Sinners' Sinerisme and Les Differents that year - to consist of mainly original songs. Of course, the aforementioned garage nuggets no doubt added a bit of street cred to the album. But other tracks, like Bribosia's organ-driven 'Ecoute-moi', which cops a riff or two from Steve and Muff Winwood, 'Toi qui es jeune''s unflappable Euro-cool and the languid psych-pop of 'Le chameau' definitely upped the hip quotient a notch or two.
Les Miserables just sort of dropped off the radar screen not long after this LP, and by 1969 the band was essentially finished. However, like many a Quebecker, the irrepressible Bribosia would emerge in the seventies firmly entrenched in Montreal's vibrant disco scene, producing a number of singles, including the international dance floor hit 'Dracula Disco'.
(Mintish copies of Les Miserables will set you back a couple of hundred bills these days. But the entire LP can be found on the mighty fine 23-track Disques Merite comp L'integrale, released back in 2001 and definitely well worth digging for.)
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