On the other side of the Viau bridge, it’s wonderful. You can’t see it from Montreal, but it’s still worth a look. We enter on one level into an imaginary paradise, a sort of Atlantis saved from marshy waters by the concrete foundations, an Eldorado in the bungalow, a Shangri-La in the shopping center, an enchanted country in the appellation so beautiful that it can be read in both directions: Laval. An enchanted world to sing, which goes without saying since there is “sung” in the word “enchanted”. Imagine when you are a singer and come from this enchanting place, you are predestined. We were “born on the right side / From the edge of America / From North America / The apathetic kingdom”, as Luc De Larochellière, the singer in question, has sung for more than thirty years.
A place so inspiring that he emerged from it, the great Luke, to the most cursed. As soon as he could, he became a Montrealer by adoption, a Montrealer to the point of lying about his origin. “When I was asked where I came from, I said I came from Montreal”, he dares to admit thirty years later, in an interview with the To have to. “It took a while for me to assume where I came from. The gaze of others was already extremely pejorative, it was a little inadmissible in the curriculum vitae of a songwriter. “That’s why he baptized his album and illustrated book project with a somewhat pompous name, bordering on grandiloquent: Laval Rhapsody. A little a lot to forgive himself.
Recognize nothing, except yourself
Before the project took shape, tapped by his old denial, this refusal of the origin which turned to the evil occultation, he decided to return there. In his own Laval. The old parental home. At least a day. In a pandemic, it turns out that he had time to find himself. He therefore rented a car, an essential vehicle in Laval-des-Rapides, the name says, it’s not Laval-des-Lents, and it’s really practical to go “around [son] navel ”, as he writes in the record book.
After leaving Rosemont, the journey took him to Ahuntsic, then he crossed the Viau bridge. To realize something unexpected: he hardly recognized anything. And whole areas had cruelly disappeared. Including the “last house of my grandfather De Larochellière”, a house that was demolished during the construction of the Cartier metro.
Like what it was urgent to remember. Thus was born, with the rapidity of the flood of rediscovered memories, his Laval Rhapsody, “Book / record / art object”, according to Pierre Huet’s description in his introductory note. A not at all bohemian rhapsody, where Luc De Larochellière, at the height of his 55 years, pays more than due tribute to the exhilarating and asphalt world of his ten years. “I therefore offer you this ratatouille of true stories, fantasies, urban legends and existential reflections (my specialty!) In connection with my childhood as a small Quebec suburb,” he writes in the long chapter in which he explains his approach. .
“I thought for a long time that it was nowhere, Laval”, he adds, comment above the explanation. Rich subject, finally. “Today, there is a cultural life in Laval, it has evolved, but when I was young, it was really a dormitory town, which was used to raise children in good conditions, with all that it was necessary: the land, the swimming pool, the finished basement or not, the quiet streets. You weren’t in Laval, you were in a kind of daycare the size of an island, safe to grow upright. “
Desire grows better in the suburbs
From the desire for Montreal to the rediscovery of its Laval, the observation was striking: something fundamental happened during those years. Something like an empty set to fill. “Laval built me, projected me into the rest of my life. Looking back, writing the songs that make up my Rhapsody, I could finally see clearly all that my childhood in Laval had given me. Unlike the Beau Dommage gang who, in their early twenties, just wanted to sing about their Montreal, to describe it on a daily basis. For me, going to Montreal was the big adventure. It was exotic. “
This gaze on elsewhere was exacerbated by this Laval life where it was necessary to compensate in imagination, in the basement, in the courtyard, in the street, for what was not there: necessity, Laval mother of invention. .
There were certainly banana seat bikes in Montreal, but it was in the suburbs that they took the entire street. “Our bikes became motorcycles, horses, and we became bikers, pilots or knights. What inventiveness! he writes. It was probably sitting on a banana seat that I felt in me, for the first time, this feeling of going out of my body, this desire for transcendence and perhaps for eternity. “
Laval built me, projected me into the rest of my life. Looking back, writing the songs that make up my Rhapsody, I could finally see clearly all that my childhood in Laval had given me.
Three ways to communicate
Each chapter of the illustrated book (“painting and drawing on collage”, he specifies) corresponds to a song. Same subject, but condensed, rhymed, tied to a suitable music. “On all the streets the avenues / The wheels clack clack clack clack clack clack clack / On all the streets the avenues / While shouting: Come on! Go on ! Everyone on the attack, ”he sings at a hectic pace, with a chorus that flies away.
So he saves from drowning The child in the swimming pool ; the illustration is reminiscent of Ben (Dustin Hoffman) on his blown mattress in The winner, celebrated 1968 film, directed by Mike Nichols. You can almost hear the music of Simon and Garfunkel. Luc’s melody is not that different, picking electric. Vincent Réhel’s synth tells us that we are more in the 1970s.
All Big Jims and GI Joe’s, alike, are post-Vietnam War figures: soldiers were added hair and beards to make them explorers, facing off against alligators and rattlesnakes. “These plastic figures will become, in my childhood, the main actors of what I could call ‘my universe of entrenchment'”, he writes. “All my Tonkas are at their yard / And in my world the weather is nice / All the Big Jims and the GI Joe’s / Stay there to protect me,” he sings. Text, illustration, song speak to each other.
The opportunity seized
Already, for his first illustrated book, Man of words and images, published in 2020, the doodles adorning thirty years of notebooks of the lyricist with the hyperactive fingers had fulfilled their destiny. Luc quite naturally had “the desire to continue”. This time, they are childhood photos, objects cut out from catalogs, photos of himself looking today at the child that he was, whom he manipulated very artistically, perfecting his technique well beyond. beyond what he considered at the first attempt to be a naive tinkering. Luc De Larochellière paints and draws as he composes, we understand. Control and sensitivity.
“I don’t have the nostalgic reflex. Me, it is rather the reverse. When it’s over, it’s over, I move on. But with the pandemic dragging on, I found the present so depressing that I thought it was an opportunity to look back a bit. The social observer, the champion of transposition into a song about the situation, above all did not want to write songs about the pandemic in the world.
“At the same time, I had never felt the need to pour out my youth, he nuances. There are those who make careers out of their childhood memories. Me no. I seized the opportunity, it made me feel good, that’s enough. He crossed the Viau bridge again and rejoined Rosemont. “There, with the green alleys, the children once again have a playground, which is not the screen for video games. There are a lot of young families. A community has been created. We’re good there. And the child Luc, him? “If my childhood remained in Laval, the child followed me,” he wrote. And will never leave him.