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Marie Claude
Un Peu Beaucoup / La Lecon D'anglais - 7"
Canusa - 1969
Michael Panontin
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A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Or something like that.
Marie Claude's lone seven-inch, the deliciously dreamy 'Un peu beaucoup', is about as obscure as a record gets these days. Of course, the astute digger will have already noticed Jean-Pierre Massiera's name in the songwriting credits and likely given the record a listen for that reason alone. The revered producer did in fact spend a short time in Montreal in the late sixties, but alas his tenure in the Quebec metropolis appears to have escaped even the seemingly infinite arms of Google.
So who better to crack open this case than Quebecois record sleuth Sebastien Desrosiers, whose resume includes work for the Mucho Gusto reissue label as well as the fabulous Mondo PQ web page, which for the past decade or so has been unearthing little-known discs from la belle province's illustrious past? Desrosiers traces Massiera's Quebec connection to a failed association with local producer Tony Roman.
"Tony Roman dreamt of expanding his Canusa label operations overseas and for a while tried to establish an office in Paris," he explained to CM. "The project never really caught on, but I believe it was around that time he met with Massiera, circa 1968. He convinced him to move to Montreal to produce some acts for Canusa and its partner label Revolution."
Massiera, who was hardly a stranger to the New World having spent the bulk of his childhood in Argentina, hopped on a plane with the intention of making Montreal his new home. But as Desrosiers notes he was less than thrilled with what he saw. "Upon arriving late summer, Massiera was unimpressed with Tony Roman's rudimentary studio and equipment. He told Roman he had to retrieve some of his own equipment to work something out of this."
Massiera did in fact return to France for a spell, and when he returned he brought with him some additional tapes to be issued exclusively in Quebec (like former Les Loups Garous singer Richard's 'Adieu' b/w 'Armes et larmes') or to be distributed there (the self-titled freak-out extraordinaire by Maledictus Sound). But more importantly, he did manage to record and produce some records on his own, including of course the delightful 'Un peu beaucoup' by the totally unknown Marie Claude (who, Desrosiers cautions, is not to be confused with Marie-Claude Ravel). On the flip is Massiera's somewhat clumsy and thus less interesting 'La lecon d'anglais', which if nothing else conjures up images of the frustrated producer slouched in his desk at the back of an evening ESL class in the city's west end.
Massiera's Montreal chapter unfortunately ended quickly, Desrosiers notes, and in a fairly predictable manner. "Those two had quite unique tempers, and JPM only managed to record or produce a few 45s before being fed up with Tony's ego."
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