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Three Paris Venues and two discoveries, in one night

September 15, 2010
bradspurgeon

An amazing evening last night at three different Paris venues, in two of which I managed to play some songs, and the first of which I listened to some wonderful music. And the whole thing was crowned by a sudden answer to a question I had in my mind for a few months about a musician I had seen play – and played with. I will get to that…

The evening began with the most exceptional strawberry millefeuille I have ever had – I’ve never had one before – in a brasserie down the street from the Rex Club. I went to the Rex Club to see and hear Lou Rebecca sing with her band. The band includes Etienne Shades, of the very cool Paris group, Les Shades, and I was looking forward to hearing Lou Rebecca, whom I had seen at Earle’s open mic at some point in the past.

The Rex has been around for more than 20 years, and it has been called the temple of electro music in France, and has had bands like Daft Punk play there. But last night it was not electro, but classic guitar-based rock – at least with Lou Rebecca and her band. It is a spacious room underneath the Grand Rex theater most of the world’s biggest bands have played at one time or another – I think the last band I saw there was Lenny Kravitz.

I had primed myself by listening to Lou Rebecca on her myspace before going, but what I heard in the concert was even more dynamic and rock. Great stuff, she has a style, a presence and a sound. And Etienne on guitar flashes in with some very cool bits of lead and his presence too. I heard another couple of bands before this one, and this was the best. Check out the videos below before I get on to talking about the next two venues and the second discovery of the evening (Lou Rebecca being the first).

The second venue I went to was the Ptit Bonheur la Chance on the Rue Laplace in the 5th Arrondissement, so it required taking a cab from the Rex Club to it. But I was very keen on playing this open mic again, despite having lined up a bit of play at a third venue. It was already 10 PM, but I knew that it was often possible to get to Ollie’s open mic later and still get to play. And that is the way it worked out. I figured it would be nice to see Ollie, and another friend who was going, and to warm up for my third event of the night. So I got there before 10:30, sang three songs – “Borderline,” “Just Like a Woman,” and I cannot remember the first!

So I listened to a few bits of the other musicians and then rushed out of the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, took a cab back to the Place Pigalle and I went to the restaurant of the Bus Palladium, where I was to sing a little after the main act. I have written about the Bus Palladium before, both about the history of the place and also about my first time playing in the restaurant upstairs.

I have returned several times since then, and I was always intrigued by the main musician who plays guitar, piano and sings, doing mostly old rock standards. I had mentioned in the past how great his English accent was when he sang. But what intrigued me was that I always thought he had a fabulous voice and a real presence and a massive repertoire. He had played with me once or twice, a bit of piano, a bit of guitar, maybe some backing vocals. And then last night, he came up and started playing with me again. I arrived around 11:30 PM and started playing around 11:45. We played for 45 minutes or more, and this guy played lead guitar and did some harmonies with me on “Just Like a Woman” and “I Shall Be Released,” and he played along even on my song, “Since You Left Me,” and on “Father and Son” and a few others.

I enjoyed it immensely, and he finished out the evening singing “Purple Rain,” of Prince, while I hit a few bad notes on lead guitar. But I still this night thought to myself, who is this guy who looks like Ron Wood, and is French but sings fabulously well, gets across good emotion, and has a vast repertoire of songs? And I thought, does he only do covers? I suspect that one of the “covers” I heard him sing was that huge success from 2000 by a French band called Modjo, the song “Lady (Hear Me Tonight),” and I probably thought, “What good is it to sound EXACTLY like Modjo on that? Can’t he bring something new to it?”

Well, after we played and returned to the bar where I had a beer and tried to get my shirt to dry out of all the sweat it had developed all on its own over the previous 45 minutes, we got to talking. He asked me if I had some place with samples of my songs, and I handed him my CD of the four songs I had recorded in July at the Point Ephemere, as I had actually prepared it to give to the artistic director, but I decided I wanted this guy to have it. I told him a little of my story about quitting music for nearly 30 years before returning to it, etc. Then I suggested we exchange Facebook friendship. We both whipped out our iPhones and hooked up immediately.

Through all of this, although I asked him about the name of his band, he never said anything to me to make me think that he was anything other than some starving musician of no renown. Well, once I had his name and Facebook link, I returned home to learn that this was Yann Destagnol, now known as Yann Destal, who was one part of the duo of the aforementioned French band Modjo, which sold more than 2 million copies of its hit song “Lady (Hear Me Tonight),” in 2000. He went on to make a solo album in 2004, and is now working on another solo album. As has happened to me several times in the past, I have found that the people who really achieve something in the world are often the least flashy and full of themselves. Yann is a very simple, unassuming guy with an enormous talent – and that finally answered my question: “Who the hell is this great singer anyway?!?”

The video I took of him below singing last night at the Bus Palladium, is not very good, and it does not do justice to his voice. But it is the only one I took, and you can hear nevertheless that he can really wrap that voice around that Led Zeppelin song…. I suggest you drop by the Bus Palladium on a Tuesday night if you happen to be in Paris, to hear the real thing; there’s pretty good food too.

A Lucky Night Au Ptit Bonheur La Chance

June 2, 2010
bradspurgeon

On a day when I was feeling anything but lucky, I suddenly recalled that it being a Tuesday, I could go to one of my favorite open mics in Paris. I don’t know where to start in talking about Ollie’s open mic at the bar near the Panthéon in Paris called Au Ptit Bonjeur La Chance.

What was lucky about it last night was that I was not ready to go out very early, and this open mic starts at 9:30 PM and Ollie is very equitable and agreeable in the way he gets people up to play in good time. But the other thing that made it lucky last night was a sudden feeling of several different connections to this bar on Rue Laplace, which is also near one of my favorites streets in Paris, the Rue Mouffetard.

Ollie Fury has been running the open mic for several months, and it’s always nice to have a good guy like him running and open mic, and it was particularly cool that we met each other long before he started the open mic as performing musicians both of us. In other words, I met Ollie playing at other open mics as a musician himself, and we bumped into each other many times before he opened his own evening. (He starts each evening by playing himself, and he has a very cool voice, doing some amazing interpretations of classic folk rock and others, and many of his own compositions.)

But my introduction to this cool bar was not through Ollie, but rather it happened to be the first bar at which I played my own musical gig – as opposed to open mic. It was in December 2008, near Christmas, and Earle Holmes set up for me a set at the same bar, when it was called the Rhubarbe. This was only two months after I had returned to playing music in public, and I must say that my set was pretty bad. I didn’t know what to expect, or what to do – except sing and play, but I did it while reading the lyrics in a book and on papers in front of me, and with a little lamp over the words so I could see them. Needless to say, I was somewhat upstaged by the Mister Soap and the Smiling Tomatoes, who played after me – and for whom, in any case, I was only really acting as a warm-up act.

I knew this before. But last night I discovered something else that ties me to this little bar: I learned that the man who has for several months – the time I’ve been attending the open mics – been very kind and convivial with me behind the bar went to high school (lycée) and was very good friends with the son of one of my Formula One reporter colleagues. The reporter is one of the regular F1 reporters for a French radio station, and as if to add to the coincidence, it turns out that he is a guy who has followed my musical adventures on the F1 road for a while and has been trying to link up to see me perform at a race. But my F1 music playing patterns are very difficult to follow, and so we have not yet been able to jibe on that. (He was supposed to go to the Hard Rock Café night in Malaysia, but I called him up to say not to come.)

Anyway, the Ptit Bonheur de la Chance open mic is a beauty for many reasons, and the above mentioned owner and bartender, whose name is Pierre Gonnet, has done a great job renovating it. The bar is fabulous because upstairs you can get away from the music and talk if you want, while in the open mic area proper, in the basement, people listen. It is very cosy, with a very low ceiling and circular tables and stools spotted all around the room. The sound system could be improved on, however, as the mic and amps kill the voice – sounds like the mic is covered with tissue paper or something – and, yes, the amps are as basic as you can get.

But Ollie does such a great, low-key, friendly and cool job of giving people a spot to play, and the crowd is almost always a nice one, there for the music and nothing else. And I don’t know how it happens, probably it’s Ollie’s efforts to promote the evening, but it has almost every week at least one standout performer, and often several. I particularly liked both the first and the last performers last night, both Americans. I’ll put up the videos I did – but I must apologize first, since the videos are almost entirely black. But the sound is great on this Zoom Q3. So that’s what it’s there for. And both of these performers were authentic. Check them out. (Oh, me? I told the story of how in Istanbul you can be asked to play everywhere on the streets, in the bars, etc., with just the sight of the guitar on your back – but then I played in that apartment and was stopped by a neighbor after one song, as in my previous post. So I said I was there at Ollie’s to finish “Just Like A Woman,” which I did. I then sang “Mad World,” and without Vanessa with me on that one I was totally lost. And then I did my song, “Since You Left Me,” and I left out a verse, but I also felt like I had repeated another verse. Ah well, that’s live performance for you.)

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