Does it matter if we Canadians don’t know the ‘other’ culture’s stars?
Boomers will be boomers. Give us a name-brand musician from the 1960s or 1970s, and we flock to the concert halls. Whether it’s vintage James Taylor or Pink Floyd or whoever (Who-ever?) at the Bell Centre, I’ve tried to see ’em all. Or at least, the most memorable ones.
Another music-nostalgia date came on Thanksgiving weekend at the U de Sherbrooke cultural centre. And what an evening it was!
Robert Charlebois has been a rockin’ dynamo since I was a teenager in the 1970s. He somehow found a place on our after-school turn-table rotation beside the Stones, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield and David Bowie.
A fun and inventive musician, Charlebois in his prime was as big in Quebec as Céline Dion ever was, but he never “crossed over” to the English market.
His show prompted me to muse about Quebec and Canada and the bicultural dream.
—Is that overdone, or even possible?
First, Charlebois live
The 80-something Charlebois retains his full voice and range and he pranced about the stage, Mick Jagger-like, in a trim black outfit.
A dynamic performer, his repertory varies between soft, heartfelt ballads and quick, witty rockers. As a songwriter, Charlebois often collaborated with poet and novelist Réjean Ducharme, whose colloquial lyrics sometimes slide into an impenetrable joual.
Always inventive, Charlebois used instruments and symbols in novel ways: at one point in his career, he played a nickel-plated guitar, and famously wore a Canadiens sweater under his full head of curls.
In October, he covered many trademark hits, from wistful air-travel fantasies Je Reviens à Montréal and Lindbergh! to the barroom comic-opera Cauchemar. But I missed other favourites like Entre Deux Joints and Demain l’Hiver, a rave about fleeing our winters to Florida.
Charlebois was at his peak in the 1970s, when his eclectic style fit urban Quebec like a glove. Sure enough, this large 2024 crowd was entirely francophone boomers. Was I the only anglo? Sure sounded like it.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, Quebec generated iconic stars in several fields. Somehow, they emerged in series of three. Sports heroes Rocket Richard, then Jean Béliveau and finally Guy Lafleur each embodied their era. In parallel, three top chansonniers sang out French Quebec’s dreams: Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, then Charlebois.
Lafleur and Charlebois personified the turbulent Quebec of the ‘70s, and each could bring a Montreal Forum crowd to its feet with electrifying performances.
Cultures interact
In the early 1970s, there was an authentic bicultural moment in Montreal. CHOM-FM was a magnet for Montreal teenagers and CEGEP students, and listeners there regularly heard Offenbach, Harmonium and Charlebois alongside Genesis, Gentle Giant and the Moody Blues.
But the CRTC put an end to that, ruling that FM music stations basically had to stick to their language and not infringe on other stations’ niches.
English Canadian interest was generally light. Does anyone listen dutifully to the stars of the “other” culture? Sometimes this did work, in Montreal at least, as in the cross-cultural fan bases for Leonard Cohen or Céline Dion.
More recent stars have appealed to all comers, notably 2024 Juno winner Charlotte Cardin. (On checking into a hotel in Baltimore this year, a clerk looked at my ID and chirped: “Oh, Canadian?! I love Charlotte Cardin!”)
But more frequently, bands that enthrall English Canada are unknown in Quebec, and vice versa. The 2017 death of Gord Downie of Toronto’s Tragically Hip prompted an outpouring similar to a state funeral; Justin Trudeau even gave an elegy. Quebec barely noticed. Then in 2023, Karl Tremblay, lead singer of folk-rock band Les Cowboys Fringants, passed away. It was a huge shock for Quebecers — not so much in Vancouver.
Brendan Kelly, a culture and sports critic at The Gazette, encourages anglos to try some French content: “The two communities still live in their own worlds for the most part”.
In Montreal, “the Mile End anglo hipster alt-music community has little connection to the franco music milieu. Go see an anglo artist and the audience will be likely evenly split French and English. Go see a hot franco band … and you’ll be lucky if you find one anglo in the hall. That’s just the way it goes”, he noted resignedly in 2016.
MacLennan’s legacy
For some time, I have thought the phrase “two solitudes” was stale and tiresome.
When I hear a Toronto-based pundit use it, it sounds like a substitute for first-hand knowledge about Quebec. A cliché. Or a headline writer’s last-minute patchwork.
The phrase’s origin is clear, in Hugh MacLennan’s 1945 novel Two Solitudes. The source is poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other”.
The book famously begins: “Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec […. ]”.
“But down in the angle at Montreal, on the island about which [the] two rivers join, there is little sense of this new and endless space. Two old races and religions meet here and live their separate legends, side by side”.
The novel’s 1920s French-English romance focuses on the values clash between rural religious folk and big-city anglo moneymakers. How compelling does this sound in our world today?
MacLennan commuted between his teaching job at McGill and his country home in the Townships. Today a large stele, an upright stone slab, stands in front of that property above Lake Massawippi, inscribed “Two Solitudes”.
Is this a division worth overcoming?
I worked for 15 years in Switzerland, where the Swiss live peaceably separate, each in their own language-based cantons. They are as blissfully unaware of pop culture on the “other side” of their Confederation as we are. Yet somehow, they’ve stayed together for over 700 years.
Maybe there’s a lesson in that. But I still love Charlebois.
