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Les Mystics
Je m'sens bien, je m'sens mal / Mon pere est millionnaire - 7"
Vedettes - 1967
Michael Panontin
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Les Mystics were a group of teenagers from Grand-Mere, just to the northeast of Shawinigan. The five - singer Marc Bouchard, guitarists Bertin Saint-Amand and Mario Gelinas, bassist Denis Lahaie and drummer Michel Vincent - got their start there in 1966 in a music shop where, as we are told in the February 1968 edition of La Patrie, the young Gelinas "languissait des semaines entieres, revant de gloire et de voitures, de musique et de rideaux de scene."
Les Mystics would spend the better part of 1966 and 1967 honing their craft and waiting for that gloire to arrive. It came in the fall of '67 when none other than Tony Roman caught one of their gigs while passing through the area and hooked them up with producer Pierre Noles. By late 1967, the lads had issued their only 45 on the Vedettes imprint, a relatively uncool label at the time that seemed more comfortable with the parental pleasures of Dany Aube, Nathalie and Cleo et Mo.
The a-side here is a serviceable rendition of the Lewis and Clark Expedition's bouncy 'I Feel Good, I Feel Bad', a relatively obscure record itself that only reached #64 on the Billboard charts. Unsurprisingly then, Je m'sens bien, je m'sens mal' never really got much traction on the Quebec charts - this despite a full-page spread on the band in that edition of La Patrie - and by the end of 1969 the boys from Shawinigan had decided to call it a day.
But fast forward a bit to these cratedigging times and it is the groovy 'Mon pere est millionnaire' over on the backside that has collectors' hearts all aflutter. That perfect melding of garage rock and freakbeat managed to find its way onto the first installment of the excellent Ils Sont Fous Ces Gaulois! series, wedged comfortably between Les Saphirs' demented 'Jivaros' and Les Chancelliers' tasty 'La generation d'aujourd'hui'.
(And for what it's worth, copies of 'Mon pere est millionnaire' come pretty cheap these days, with a near-mint copy fetching just over a hundred bucks in 2015. More interesting, though, is the lucky internet blogger claiming to have scored a copy from "an older French lady, who took very good care of her collection, [who] was unloading a ton of great 60s Quebecois garage rock"...for 10 cents. Cue the exclamation marks!)
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