Alain Simard dreamed of a festival. So he launched not one, but three, today inseparable from Montreal cultural life. The businessman formerly at the head of Équipe Spectra, who in the eyes of the public was the leading face of the FrancoFolies, the Montreal International Jazz Festival (FIJM) and Montréal en Lumière, testifies in an autobiography full of tasty anecdotes from the birth of a real entertainment industry in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s. And he recalls in passing that before doing business, he was first and foremost a music enthusiast.
The meeting with The duty was set for the opening day of the 35are Francos de Montréal, near the entrance to the Maisonneuve theater, in front of the Place des Arts Exhibition Hall, where, from June 27 to July 6, artifacts from the entrepreneur’s personal collection, posters, trophies will be exhibited , musical instruments, several of which will be auctioned for the benefit of the Place des Arts Foundation.
“Are you recording there?” » asks Alain Simard, pointing to the device placed on the table. “Good idea, because I go from cock to donkey all the time when I speak! »And when he also writes: I dreamed of a festival is a long and dense story in which a multitude of characters appear, disappear and reappear who will, alongside him, shape Quebec musical life for more than half a century.
After the first third of the book, devoted to his ancestors, his family and his childhood, Alain Simard takes us back to the 1960s, the psychedelic wave, his discovery of jazz music and the major musical gatherings that this travel enthusiast attended. (but not Woodstock!) and which he dreamed of recreating in Quebec. At college and university – years during which he met his first business partner, André Ménard, who would become artistic director of the FIJM – Simard already launched into concert production, becoming the first to bring to Quebec, with Productions Kosmos, Genesis and Gentle Giant, in 1973.
An industry to be invented
Under his pen, we relive the genesis of a modern entertainment industry: “I thought it was interesting to contextualize all of that and show how suddenly theOsstidcho [1968], Sisters-in-law [créée en 1968]the contribution of this generation which is mine” and which had within its reach a Quebec cultural universe and industry to invent.
I dreamed of a festival can be read in two stages – or, as the author illustrates, “the initial idea was to first write the story of Alain the hippie”, who will live in communes, surrounded by other lovers of music and free love, “and, secondly, that of Alain the businessman”.
However, throughout his story, Simard digresses, makes connections between the characters, events and places of his past, returns to the main line of his story interspersed with several “boxes”, or small chapters, devoted to notable figures (Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Genesis, Beau Dommage, BB King, Miles Davis, etc.).
Reading it, we immediately recognize the jovial character, who sows exclamation points throughout his text. “Ah yes, huh? Pierre Huet told me that, too! » Huet, an old friend from college, the Casgrain Family and the Quenouille bleue (the first a musical collective, the second a theater and humor troupe), embryos of Beau Dommage, had been asked to help Simard write this book that he had until then refused to write. “My diaries that I kept were very useful for the details, but there are 10,000 pages. When Pierre found out about this, he told me: “Oh no, I don’t have time!” »
Alain Simard worked for a year and a half on this book of more than 280 pages, richly illustrated with archive photos, but he didn’t even find the time to say everything – he ends his story with these two words : “To be continued…” After the creation of its companies, including Équipe Spectra (in 1977) and those of the FrancoFolies de Montréal and the FIJM, several chapters are still missing on the growth of these structures and on the mutation of “ the philosophy student who managed, in spite of me or by force of circumstances, to become a businessman.”
But his propensity to jump from cock to donkey still pushes him to set the table for the rest of his story when he offers a plea for the maintenance of public financing of festivals which, like the Francos and the FIJM, offer a program of free concerts.
This box, he specifies, was written after the debacle of the Just for Laughs festival. However, maintains Simard, “what happened to the Just for Laughs festival has nothing to do with the festival formula, because before being a festival, it was a television production company.” According to him, the public funding model for festivals “worked well until everyone started wanting to make money with it,” he said, recalling that the two summer events he put on together with its partners are always constituted as non-profit organizations, managed by an independent board of directors.