“Old punks never die, they just go to bed earlier,” the painter Zilon once said, a phrase that guitarist and author Alan Lord chose to place at the very end of his incredible autobiography. High Friends in Low Placesthe story of his years when he went to bed really late.
Twenty years ago, Alan Lord wrote the first sentence of what would become his autobiography, fifteen words already containing a whole program: “I smoked a joint with [William] Burroughs at sunset and I had intense sex with Kathy Acker [écrivaine culte de la postmodernité américaine] at dawn. How can you not want to read the sequel?
But who is Alan Lord? Nothing less than the Zelig of the Montreal margin. Pioneer of punk, guitarist for Lucien Francœur, member of the iconoclastic formation Vent du Mont Schärr, organizer of literary events, journalist and all other thankless related tasks, the man rubbed shoulders with all that Montreal of the 1980s concealed in characters rejecting the narcotic hum of mass culture.
“I have always had the conviction that I had to put as much life as possible into my life,” confides the 68-year-old musician in an interview. The death in 2006 of his friend the poet Mario Campo, then two cancers, from which he is now recovered, will have the effect of electroshocks: if he wanted to tell this busy life, it was now or never.
Busy life? Alan Lord also made a significant contribution as a civil engineer – the job which allowed him to pay his bills and finance his noble projects that were not profitable – building the Biodôme and the Saint-Jacques bridge. “I have always been half freakhalf nerd. »
feel alive
In 1977, Alan Lord obtained the first albums of the builders of English punk, The Damned and Sex Pistols. A slap, certainly, but not as superbly violent as the one he received a few months later, in 1978, on his way to attend his first punk show featuring local groups, at 364, rue Saint-Paul, in Old Montreal.
One show punk in Montreal? I do not believe it ! But I went there and it was total chaos, ecstasy, delirium.
Alan Lord
“For the first time in my life, he wrote in his autobiography, I really felt alive. »
Two essential friendships will then lead him in the direction of literature: those of his friend Mario Campo, a brother, and Lucien Francœur, with whom he opened for the Ramones on May 23, 1980 at the Le Plateau auditorium.
Alan Lord, although born into a French-speaking family, attended an English school, which explains why his book was written in the language of Johnny Rotten. “For me, poetry was boring, it was Alfred Lord Tennyson or Rudyard Kipling. One of the first things Francoeur did was put me A season in Hell Between hands. I fell on my ass. »
Another Montreal
Alan Lord would become one of Montreal’s most important promoters, thanks to his Ultimatum festival, of a poetry that blossomed more easily in smelly places like the Foufounes Électriques than in the silence of libraries. After attending the premiere of the documentary Burroughs: The Moviehe accepts director Howard Brookner’s invitation to follow him to New York, to visit the bunker of the author of naked lunchon the Lower East Side.
He participated a few days later, in 1984, in the celebration marking the 70e birthday of William Burroughs, whom he rubbed shoulders with on several occasions, an anecdote testifying to the fascinating naturalness with which encounters occurred in the world of the least conformist of engineers.
The other tenor of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg, writer Chris Kraus (i love dick) and the pair of wicked sparrows formed by Denis Vanier and Josée Yvon are also among the major figures who emerge in High Friends in Low Placesa raw and hilarious story, generous in scathing phrases, explicit scenes and preposterous anecdotes.
Gerry Boulet also makes a brief appearance there, while Vent du Mont Schärr ends ex aequo with Les Taches in 1986 at the Rock Envol competition, on the jury of which the singer of Offenbach sat. “Gerry voted against us,” Lord recalls laughing. Him, he liked the sincere rock of guys who bawl in their tattoos. The rest of us were in extreme derision. »
Major text for the memory of the Quebec counter-culture, High Friends in Low Places depicts the bygone world before social media, where a festival was organized with phone calls and handshakes. Above all, it describes a Montreal other than the frozen one of postcards.
Alan Lord writes in conclusion that he hopes to have been able to show that the metropolis once hosted a scene underground of international caliber, that it was once synonymous with something other than “Cirque du Soleil, smoked meat and Leonard Fucking Cohen”.
High Friends in Low Places
Alan Lord
Guernica Editions
352 pages