What would summer holidays be without tubes? of summer, these songs that turn on a loop at the radio, which we sing at the top of our lungs and which make us dance until the end of the night? Over the next few weeks, The duty takes you on a musical and temporal journey to (re)discover these “hits” that have marked our holidays.
A quarter of a century after rising to the top of the radio charts, Scotch nights always enchant Luce Dufault, who cannot imagine going on stage without offering his timeless hit to the public. This song, her greatest career success, she owes to her friend Dan Bigras for the music, but also to the sulphurous Christian Mistral, who put into words in this piece the premise of her stampede.
Died into oblivion in November 2020, plagued by addiction and ostracized for multiple stories of domestic violence, Christian Mistral is still at the dawn of the 1990s this adored writer, who knew how to translate into his best-selling novel Vamp all the nihilism that then inhabited Generation X, eaten away by unemployment and the fall of the ideals carried by the baby-boomers in the past. This evil of living, the successful writer used to drown it at the Beaux Esprits, on rue Saint-Denis, where almost all the young blues enthusiasts hang out: Bob Walsh, Lulu Hughes, Terez Montcalm , but also Dan Bigras and a certain Luce Dufault, who is barely in her twenties.
“I played in a rhythm and blues band called Stable Mates on the weekends, and I worked in a health food store in Westmount during the week. I sang until 3 a.m., but I sold tofu. That was how I found my balance. Because at Les Beaux Esprits, it was a great party! But it wasn’t scotch, it was more like beer. I was far too poor to drink scotch,” recalls Luce Dufault with humor, her hoarse laugh, recognizable among all.
It is undoubtedly this deep voice, so singular in the Quebec musical landscape, which convinced Christian Mistral that Luce Dufault was the ideal artist for Scotch nights. Dan Bigras, then in his camisole and long hair phase, would not have imagined anyone other than the one he describes “as one of the great voices in the world” to interpret him.
Many years before it became the radio hit we know, Scotch nights will live on stage, without even having been recorded. Luce Dufault, who was a backing vocalist for Dan Bigras in the early 1990s, used to perform it with her faithful sidekick on stage. Each time, the magic operates among the public, “as if people already knew the song”, is still surprised Luce Dufault today.
Double meaning
However, neither she nor Dan perceived there the sign of an immense radiophonic potential. “I’m bad at predicting that. There are people who have that gift, like Marc Dupré and Pagliaro. But I never knew how. Apart Kill me and The Three Little Pigs, I had no radio hits. But hey, the important thing is that people come to see the shows. It is not with the radio that we live. Richard Desjardins has never played on the radio either, and that hasn’t stopped him from having an immense career,” added Dan Bigras with his usual outspokenness.
The conductor of the Show du refuge has never seen either in Scotch nights any hidden meaning, content to read the lyrics in the first degree: the story of two lovers who sink into alcohol and partying. Ditto for Luce Dufault.
But then, during one of his last media appearances, in 2007, on the set of Everybody talks about itChristian Mistral confided that the Scotch nights were actually a “metaphor” for the “coke nights” he was used to when he was hanging out with Dan Bigras. ” But [soirs de coke], it did not rhyme “, had dropped the cursed writer. “He never told me it was about that, but it makes a lot of sense. Especially that [la coke]it’s something that was part of the decor at the time, ”recognizes Luce Dufault.
In the early 90s, she finally recorded the piece for the first time with a view to a first album, which ultimately never saw the light of day. Quebec’s best-known chorister failed at her record company and preferred to go into exile in France to starmania, seized with insurmountable stage fright at the idea of now taking center stage. This first draft of the song, which no one has heard, is probably sleeping somewhere in one of his drawers. Privileged are therefore the few who hold a copy…
Timeless
Scotch nights, whatever meaning we give it, were already far behind Luce Dufault and Dan Bigras when the song we know today was finally put on record in the fall of 1995, several years after the two artists had started doing it in concert. Luce Dufault is then pregnant with her first daughter, Lunou, finalist of Star Académie 2021 who today follows in her footsteps. As for Dan Bigras, he had turned his back for good on his vices a few months earlier. When Scotch nights playing on the radio in the summer of 1996, Christian Mistral is no longer in their lives, dismissed by everyone for his increasingly erratic behavior.
We can still hear Scotch nights occasionally on the air 25 years later. The piece has also become a classic at karaoke nights across Quebec. “I have no choice but to do it live. I still love it and never got tired of doing it. On the other hand, I always try to do it differently on each of my tours so that it does not become redundant”, says Luce Dufault, who will subsequently experience an enviable number of radio successes: With the left hand, You make Me Feel good or beautiful columbine, just to name a few.
Nevertheless Scotch nights is in a class of its own. “I think a great song is always an encounter between an author, a composer and a performer. And Scotch nights, It’s exactly that. It’s a very beautiful text, written by a tortured but brilliant writer, and sung by an extraordinary performer”, summarizes Dan Bigras to explain the longevity of this summer hit.