It’s 4:30 p.m. Seated at the P’tit bar, rue Saint-Denis, Stephen Faulkner is finishing his first Bloody Caesar of the day, then goes out to grill one. “I just got up, I’m dizzy,” he grumbles. A big teasing smile, which has probably already coaxed many, emerges from his white beard. “It’s funny, because when I was in school, the teachers said I was crazy. »
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Faulkner searches his memory, a question of situating his story. “We’re probably in 1974.” Back from a weekend of shows with Plume – a weekend that we guess is generous in pleasures – a young Cassonade shows up late for work. The most cowboy of our rockers then toiled away at the Empire Crockery, packing dishes.
The foreman comes to see me and he starts giving me shit. I took off my apron and said, “My pay, shove it up your ass.” I pissed him off and never had a job again in my life.
Stephen Faulkner
PHOTO ARMAND TROTTIER, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Stephen Faulkner in 2004
Nearly 50 years later, good old Steve, 67, still refuses to submit to any authority, even that of time. He may resume the tour this summer on the occasion of a trip of ten dates called 45 years on the road – an anniversary marking the start of his solo career – the author of My little merry way is more the type to celebrate every day, “without worrying about the next day”, than to celebrate such a milestone.
“It was not me who wanted to put forward such a thing. Forty-five, I never thought about that. It’s him,” he says, pointing to his manager Jean, who watches over the poet with the tenderness of a nanny.
If this anniversary moves him little, Steve Faulkner is inexhaustible on almost all the other subjects, whether he tells the james on cardboard guitars that he invented with his brother Brian to the sound of So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star of the Byrds, or that he remembers the passion for music of his pharmacist father, who faced in 1948 Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson in a piano competition.
In summary: the body of the man is worn, but the engine of the one who has not had a tank since 1981 does not lack gas. “Other than my dizziness, I’m fine. I am struggling a little, I am getting old, I am taking a hit. When I do two shows in the same weekend, it takes me a week to recover. But otherwise, I’m on fire. He also now offers private concerts at home. “The last time, in Sainte-Scholastique, there were children sitting on the ground, I found that magnificent. That’s the real job. »
a bit of a dictator
“Fragile is the flame / And so easy to sell your soul”, sings Stephen Faulkner in Troubadour (2000). Selling one’s soul has never watched this intransigent chronicle. In interview with The Press in 2011 on the occasion of the release of the documentary I’m going to come back by Sarah Fortin, it promised the imminent release of a new album, Detoxwhich is still awaited.
Photo Philippe Boivin, THE PRESS
Singer-songwriter Stephen Faulkner
There have since been several other projects that would have allowed him to pull out of his guitar case the fifty unreleased songs that are waiting to be captured alive, including one with Carl Prévost, of the Mountain Daisies, and Éric Goulet. But Faulkner struggles to allow himself to be organized by others. “I’m a bit of a dictator when it comes time to go into the studio. »
It is better to do nothing than to do something bad. Should I die tomorrow, if there are just seven albums that bear witness to my work, that will be it. Why make it a bad one?
Stephen Faulkner
In any case, its repertoire has enough unforgettable choruses for no one to dispute its place in the history of Quebec music. Didn’t Faulkner write one of the most simple and moving songs about parenthood, The meteor (1992), for his son William, who is now 36?
Grandpa Brown Sugar
The father fascinated by his stellar offspring is today a grandfather who, like all grandfathers, lights up when he describes the 2-year-old grandson given to him by his daughter Alice. “The little one is in the strongest percentile! He is built. And he already has two blondes in daycare. »
the bum does he like this new role? “Yes, because when you’re a father, everything goes too fast for you to notice. You will see it yourself one day, you will be a grandfather, and I will no longer be of this world, but you will remember what I tell you. When you have kids, you’re too busy making dinner and changing diapers. You don’t see them growing. When you’re a grandfather, you’re free from all that. You can take advantage of it. »
One of his first and most beautiful songs, Dust door (1978), speaks with great light of this death that awaits us all: “People come and people go/do their pirouettes and then turn back/somewhere in the horizon”.
The tender inconvenient turns into a philosopher. “Every human being should remember that there is a limited time to live. I often think about death, but it’s not morbid: it’s to remind myself that I have to try to get as much pleasure out of this life as possible before leaving, without hurting anyone. Stephen Faulkner orders another drink and continues on his merry way.
Stephen Faulkner will be at the Festival de la chanson de Tadoussac on June 18, at the FestiVoix de Trois-Rivières on July 6 and at the Festival en chanson de Petite-Vallée on July 9.