Marjo lives her life as she dreamed it

On stage, Marjo, sovereignly free, never thinks about what she might look like. ” Well no ! she exclaims. I wouldn’t live if I had to be conscious of behaving well. When we sing, we evacuate things taken within. That’s what singing is: it’s giving, giving, giving, to the fullest. Until exhaustion. » Story of the passage of the iconic rocker at the microphone of the podcast of our journalist Dominic Tardif, Are you becoming what you wanted?.

Marjo kicks off her cleats and slips into her chic gala-worthy high-heeled booties. Do you know that this interview will not be filmed? that I ask him. “Yes, but did you think I was going to do the interview in stockings?” “, she replies tit for tat, with her big, taunting smile.

Marjo, always performing, even when there is no camera? The paradox that shapes the explosive 69-year-old woman, with an exuberance that the years do not diminish, is largely due to her inability to behave other than as if life were a stage. Insofar as the stage is for her the place of a quest for truth. Performing does not mean putting on a mask, on the contrary.

Marjolaine Morin will therefore answer all my questions with the intensity of someone who refuses to pretend and who prefers learning about others to talking about her past. One of the first things she’ll do when she arrives at the studio: check on my family. “Do you have pictures of your daughter?” »

On the set of The voice, between takes, so don’t look for her in her dressing room. You’re more likely to find her in the makeup room, or somewhere else, chatting with a member of the tech team. He had already been offered on two occasions to play this role of coach that she has been wearing for a few weeks.

And if she accepted this time, it’s less to provide singing advice than to convey her conception of the stage. “During a show, I reach out my hand to the audience, I look them in the eye. If I’m not all there, I have no business there. And I have something to accomplish: I’m here to give you a little confidence, a little hope, a little juice to go on living. »

The music lived in it

There is a parallel world in which, rather than becoming the greatest rocker in Quebec, Marjolaine Morin would have led the orderly life of a secretary, a profession for which she had studied. She was born in Rosemont, grew up in Montreal North and yet, in her heart, the decor of her childhood is not made of concrete, but of mountains, those of the family chalet, built by her father, somewhere between Rawdon and Chertsey.

“And next to us, there was the Lang family, she recalls. Everyone was playing guitar. And the oldest, June, sang so well. Where do you think I was going when I heard guitar? I was going there. ” Fascinated. Never, however, will she confide to anyone her desire to take up music herself.

His big sister Carole, who frequents the photographer Daniel Poulin, offers him one day to pose for him. “Of course it was more the fun to go in front of a kodak than to stay behind a typist. Wasn’t she intimidated by the device? But what a question! Marjo, intimidated? “Ha? she exclaims. “Well no, well no. No way. »

Her first modeling contracts will soon lead her to another photographer, Pierre Dury, who will become her boyfriend (“He courted me for two years!”) and who remains one of his best friends. His house, at 1620, avenue des Pins, was then the second salon of cultural All-Montreal. Passing by, one fine evening, the songwriter François Guy tells Dury that he is working on a musical and that he is looking for new talent.

“Pierre said to her: ‘Go see Jojo, she’s upstairs, in our room.’ François came up with his guitar, he played me two tunes and I boarded. ” In All hot, all show (1975) then The island in town (1978), she tastes for the first time, late (she was in her early twenties), the intoxication of singing in front of people, and not just in her dreams. “My body was moving well, I was fine. The music lived in me, it seems. »

To stop falling

La Marjo de Corbeau, Pierre Harel’s group which she joined in 1978, was at first a little more shy, she recalls, than the jovial risk-all into which she would metamorphose. Risk it all? In 2016, Marjo had her left knee replaced, battered by countless shocks, including a legendary fall at the Jonquière en musique festival in 2007, immortalized on the internet.

She participated, shortly before Christmas, in a show at the Casino de Montréal with Guylaine Tanguay and Maxime Landry. “I watched them go and I was like, ‘My God, they’re way off the edge of the stage. They were singing four, five feet from the edge.” And I understood: “Ah, that must be why I fall all the time. Me, I sing on the edge, edge, edge.” »

The veteran now has the wisdom to ask for fluorescent tape to be affixed to the floor, so that she knows where the void begins. “Because otherwise, I will fall in the hole again. »

Up to 100 years

When Marjo is no longer happy, Marjo leaves. This is what happens after the release of the album Visionary in 1983. Tired of the booze in abundance and the life of touring, she sent her boyfriend of the time, the guitarist Jean Millaire, announce to the other guys from Corbeau that she is ending the group.

Music was over for her at the time, she swears it 30 years later, which nevertheless seems inconceivable. A world without wild cats ? Without provocative ? Impossible ! But the music will inevitably catch up with her, because it is at the heart of her relationship with Jean Millaire, her creative partner – Marjo signs the lyrics and co-signs the music for the majority of her hits.

The booze and drugs, above all, will catch up with her too. “That’s why I lost my boyfriend “, she confides about Millaire. “He was gentleman quiet, I was madam tanning. She took refuge in Charlevoix at the end of the 1990s, her own rehab. “I had to go breathe and become Marjolaine Morin again, stay away from my bad habits. »

If she never left the stage again, her most recent album, Turquoisedates back to a very, very long time ago: 2005. His reunion with Jean Millaire, filmed by the superb Télé-Québec program in love, will have led to an unsuccessful working session. “Me, it takes love from me. If I don’t have love, it doesn’t work. What it would take is for me to fall in love with a musician. »

But it would be sad if there were never any new Marjo songs, do we get along? ” I know it ! But I have hope. Hope is part of my life. »

The good news ? Marjo has plenty of time ahead of her. At 95, her mother “still has all her mind”. “She’s someone to watch go. I look at her and I’m like, ‘This is where you’re going, Jojo. You too will live to be 100 years old.” »