As long as we have love

At the demonstration / It’s true that we haven’t changed anything / We caused a traffic jam / It still feels like a win

The first day without Karl Tremblay began with a demonstration which changed nothing, as in the song. A bridge blocked during rush hour on Thursday to demand a ceasefire on the other side of the planet. Online, a slew of angry comments. Bunch of clowns! Terrorists! Let them block streets in Gaza!

I wanted to go back to bed right away. Let’s move on to another day or, better, another month. Out November! You’ve already given us enough hatred, blood and fury. Now you are imposing an additional penalty on us, the death of a Quebec icon? This is too much. Go along your path.

And then the radio came on On my shoulder. At 8 a.m. sharp, several competing stations played it simultaneously, in homage to the gentle giant of the Cowboys Fringants.

Put your head on my shoulder
So that my love brushes against you
You who need it so much

It was both sad and beautiful. The beginning of an immense wave of love for Karl Tremblay, for the Cowboys, for everything they represented in our lives. Our joys and our sorrows. Our aspirations and our disenchantments. All these years with their songs as a soundtrack.

In the end, we had to live it, this first day without Karl Tremblay. Even if our hearts held on with spit. We had to begin this collective mourning together, a handkerchief of tears in our pocket.

The wave swept all day, from Montreal city hall to Quebec city hall, where the flags were lowered to half-mast. She was stranded in Europe, which cried, like America.

I heard a minister singing a cappella, saw the photo of a businessman who had put on the t-shirt Union break of the group over his shirt, listened to a prime minister announce a national funeral but without pressure, only if the bereaved family wants it…

There was some discomfort, in relation to the not always tender songs of the Cowboys towards our elites. But the emotion was sincere. The intention was good: to salute a singer whose voice touched Quebecers from all walks of life.

PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon summed it up well in May, when presenting the National Assembly medal to the Cowboys: “There are people in circles that you would not suspect,” he said. – he says to the members of the group, people who have a very corporate profile, who could have had the title of “full of shit in a tuxedo”, but who, in fact, listen to you on repeat, because it joins their soul… ”

It’s exactly that. By singing the intimate, Karl Tremblay touched the universal.

For a quarter of a century, with his companions Marie-Annick Lépine, Jérôme Dupras and Jean-François Pauzé (who wrote most of the songs), he told the story of love, death and the time that slips through our fingers.

But at the end of the road, tell me what will remain
Of our little passage in this frenetic world
After existing to save time
We will say to ourselves that we were finally
Only shooting stars

Karl Tremblay didn’t just tell the story of life moving too fast. He was also “the voice of a generation, of a disenchanted moment in this post-referendum Quebec, depressed, stunted, turned towards the Public-Private Partnership”, very rightly underlined the historian Éric Bédard on Facebook.

The dreams of ti-culs
Faint or repress
In this raw reality
Who takes us into the mold

This generation is mine. I felt this disenchantment all too well. Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote a report entitled “The Parti Québécois at the time of the Cowboys Fringants”, in which I explored the independence malaise of young people, 10 years after the referendum defeat, through a song of the group, Letter to Lévesque.

If we look at that, René
The issues have changed
And young people are becoming aware
Should listen to what they say

I went to reread the report, in the archives of The Press. It was published on February 6, 2005. On the next page, my colleague Agnès Gruda reported that Israeli settler families had agreed to leave the Gaza Strip. “Then we will withdraw from the West Bank,” one Israeli analyst confidently predicted. For the first time in years, we could finally hope for a major unblocking in the Middle East…

The November depression hit me suddenly.

At the end of this extraordinary day, however, ordinary Quebecers gathered with their musical instruments in Montreal, Quebec and elsewhere, to “honor the memory of a modern poet, a storyteller of our lives.” And to celebrate, quite simply, the happiness of being together. So, I regained hope.

As long as we have love…

Since we let go
We see color in gray areas
There is good in the cold of November