Ninety-three years after opening its doors at the corner of Berri and Sainte-Catherine streets, the boutique founded in 1896 by Edmond Archambault will close its doors permanently on 1er June. After Sam the Record Man, who disappeared in 2002, and HMV, which closed in 2017, the Archambault Berri was the last survivor of the great record stores on rue Sainte-Catherine. With him disappears a tremendous revealer of vocations that have allowed the Quebec musical community to flourish. Reflections on the profession and its outlets with a few former members of the “Berri” who today keep the industry running.
On May 19, some forty former employees of the Archambault Berri — and even a loyal customer! — had agreed to meet on the lawn of Émilie-Gamelin park, just opposite, to meet, exchange memories and say goodbye to the famous brand. The majority of them have made career choices away from the world of culture, but all have in common this insatiable passion for music.
“I met at the” Berri “a lot of people that I still meet all the time in the middle,” says Dorothée Parent-Roy, now creative director at House of Supercool and co-general manager of the young record distribution box independent Amplitude Distribution, which came to fill the void left by Distribution Select (1983-2021) that Rosaire Archambault son, Edmond’s great-nephew, had successfully relaunched in the offices above 500 Sainte-Catherine Street East.
Like many former record dealers, Dorothée landed this job during her studies – at UQAM, in political communication, in the mid-2000s. didn’t really know in what. “ Hired as a record store in the “urban music” section, she was introduced to the different electronic genres, listening to everything that could come to hand: “You could borrow the records to listen to them at home. I knew I knew music, but I realized that I didn’t know as much as I thought! ” Around her, other enthusiasts who would also have a career in the musical world, including the future members of Omnikrom and the group Le Couleur, among other musicians, “and the guys who worked in the instrument department, who studied to become sound technicians.
According to Claude Dauphin, record store then buyer between 1993 and 2007, the Berri address of the Archambault chain was a gateway, “a way to become familiar with the workings of the music industry” and its various professions, starting with that of representing record companies and independent distributors, who landed each week with their new releases and exchanged with record stores.
At the Berri, we met people from Distribution Select, whose offices were upstairs, those from the entertainment industry, music publishing, artists and their managers, who passed through the main entrance to take the elevator at the back (or, for the more adventurous, the narrow spiral staircase) and go to their meeting with the management people. “When I became a buyer, I entered a kind of magnetic field: I could no longer escape the middle of culture”, adds Claude Dauphin, today representative of the French-speaking repertoire at Universal Music (another former record store in the Berri also works in the Montreal office of Universal).
“This work was my first intrusion into the field of music,” says former Berri employee Michaël Bardier, founder of the OK LÀ festival and of Heavy Trip, one of the largest show management and programming companies in America. du Nord, which specializes in avant-garde and experimental music. He worked in the back room, in labeling: “I had tried to pass the test to work as a record store, on the floor. I sank it — it was tough ! It’s impressive how well the record stores knew their music, and not just the “flavor of the day”. Should have known everything! »
“It’s weird, continues Bardier, but at the time, the job of record store did not seem to me as important or romantic as one could imagine – it was not like in High Fidelity “, the dramatic comedy by Stephen Frears (2000, with John Cusack, Jack Black and Lisa Bonet), adaptation of the eponymous novel by Nick Hornby. “It wasn’t an independent boutique, Archambault, it was part of a big conglomerate. But since music jobs were quite rare, everyone wanted to work there, as well as at HMV downtown. It’s quite impressive to see how many people in the industry have gone through Archambault Berri”, he adds, naming the composers Renaud Bastien (Malajube, Coeur de pirate) and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux (Lesser Evil and Organ Mood ).
The closure of the Berri remains symbolic, however, recognize these former employees. The store was no longer the meeting place for music lovers that it had long been. “I left Archambault because I had nothing more to learn there,” says Dorothée Parent-Roy. The priorities of the bosses had also changed: they had decided that they would sell Ricardo pepper shakers and oven mitts…”
“Where are we going today to discover the professions of music? It’s a very good question, said Claude Dauphin thinking. Many young people want to join the community and ask themselves the question. We no longer have this kind of terroir that can nurture new talent — it’s a very defeatist rhetoric, but that’s my observation. The Quebec music industry is thus losing a nursery of future cultural workers. Precisely, notes Dorothée Parent-Roy, “we are currently facing recruitment problems in the industry”…
“I find it beautiful, these places where people meet around a common passion and grow up there,” says Michel-Olivier Gasse, ex-record and bookseller, first at the Archambault in Sherbrooke, then at the Berry. He is now a writer (his latest book, Analogous stories, was published last year by Éditions Station T), member of the duo Saratoga (with his girlfriend Chantal Archambault – no connection with the company) and bassist in Vincent Vallières’ orchestra. “At the time of the country comeback, around 2005, I was in Caloon Saloon, a group started with the boys who worked in the musical instruments department at Berri. This is where I took off. »