Tales of an Electric Adolescence
By John Sobol

I grew up with Les Foufounes Electriques, a legendary nightclub at 97 rue Ste.Catherine Est, in the very heart, the very ventricle of Montreal's racy red-light district. Les Foufounes was a prophetic school teaching love, sex, imagination, energy, freedom, danger and music. It was always more than just a club -- it was a home away from home. And I grew up in it too. Les Foufounes and I go back a long ways. Back to 1980, when I was 16, playing music there night after night until 3 in the morning to lushes and pimps, hookers and junkies. Back even further too, to a hot summer day in 1979 when somebody rolled up a metal grill, unlocked a solid metal door, and led me up through three decades of dust into a long-abandoned strip club from the 1950s -- walls plastered with the peeling silhouettes of showgirls, martini glasses still stacked behind the bar, and on an empty office floor beside a squat menacing safe, a fading photo of Vic Cotroni, mob boss and gangland killer. That ghostly attic was to become my spiritual home -- Les Foufounes Electriques.

What was I doing in that part of town anyway? Why hadn't my parents forbidden me to hang out under the heels of pimps and pushers? I don't know. Ask them. Maybe after moving to Montreal from Brooklyn, where I'd been strangled nearly to death in the boy's bathroom in grade 2 in P.S.29, and had a friend who'd been brain-damaged in front of his mom by a stranger wielding a 2x4 on a busy street, they probably figured I could handle whatever Montreal had to offer.

And in the end they were right. I saw some weird shit go down but never felt in serious physical danger. Which was part of the city's great civic affluence -- you had to be a real asshole to get hurt in Montreal in those days. Even being stupid or naive or unlucky generally led to a whole lot less drastic consequences in Montreal than in any other big city. So I hung out. Under the armpits of pimps and pushers. And smoked their roaches and played their music. I ate it up. What red-blooded teenage phreak wouldn't?

I played saxophone, an old tarnished silver Conn, a tenor, stamped at the base of the bell -- 1923. But it played. And so did I. Pretty badly by professional standards, but with wild enthusiasm and delight. I could read reasonably well, and loved to blow, so I fit right in with the house big band that played Thursday through Sunday at Les Foufounes. It was a dynamite band and the bandleader, Michel Bruyere, was the fuse. When he lit up, we exploded.

Michel was a gaunt, chain-smoking wildman. And I hope to god he still is. The last time I saw him he was wired, bleary and hollow-chested. I thought he'd die of stress and starvation before my very eyes. But Michel was always an obsessive character. What I loved about him, and what attracted such stellar musicians to his band despite the fact that he could barely read the music he conducted, was his maniacal devotion to swinging as hard as possible at all times. Every piece we played was a matter of life and death for Michel. He gave everything he could to his bands, often depriving himself of sleep and food if that's what it took to keep the band going. All so we could share the ecstatic rush of a 16 piece band in furious flight. Once, many years later, he admitted to me he'd been three days without food, working graveyard shifts sewing ball caps in a sweatshop, just so he could pay his current bandmembers $20 each to rehearse!

Back in 1979 I was the second-youngest player in that relatively young band. The youngest was my best friend Mike Donovan, also a sax player and at 14 a year younger than I. (Unless you count my sister, who sang with us occasionally. She was 13, but looked 18 and sounded 25.) But as young as we were the band featured many players who would go on to become leading club and studio musicians in Montreal in the years to come. And as we got better our lineup included more and more top players, including the likes of Roger Walls, who was Vic Vogel’s lead trumpet player at the time. Of course, my favourite people in the band were the ones who went on to form some of Montreal’s weirder ensembles, like oddball trombonist Jean Billette, who was in the wonderfully wacky Montreal Transit. We played an assortment of tattered old charts – lots of classic Basie, a few of Dizzy’s Cuban bigband tunes, arrangements of Anthropology and Ornithology… all fine stuff – that Michel carried around in an old leather satchel. We were a motley crew compared to – well, compared to almost anyone – but we put out. Oh yeah, we left it all onstage, every night.

Although I spent years with what would eventually became a terrific group, I don't even remember how I happened to get invited to rehearse with what was at first a 6 or 7 piece ensemble. I do remember showing up with Mike at somebody's apartment one Saturday afternoon, horns in hand. As soon as I walked in some pony-tailed Quebecois guy leapt up warmly and said "toi!" I had no idea who he was or how we knew each other until he reminded me that we had once jammed together outside in Old Montreal, during the St.Jean Baptiste celebrations of 1978.

That was back when weekends in Old Montreal were still enormous and utterly unregulated outdoor drinking parties, long before mayor-for-life Jean Drapeau decided the area should be cleaned up and turned into a tourist destination. Place Jacques Cartier itself, the heart of Le Vieux Montreal, was accessed by mounting a wide stone staircase of a dozen or so steps. But many people never got any further than that staircase. God knows I often didn't. For that staircase, which sat equidistant between -- and in full view of -- Montreal police headquarters on one side and the provinical law courts on the other, was the single largest open air dope market in town. It was like going to a Turkish bazaar, or Freak Street in Nepal. Upon approaching the stairs you were immediately welcomed by a host of rockers chanting, "hash, pot, acide, d'l'acoke, la mesc, de l'huile, TH". It was almost more than a teenage head knew what to do with. Of course, these were not the most sophisticated of dealers, and as soon as we grew up a bit we shifted our trade elsewhere, largely due to these merchants' habit of storing their hash in their mouths, wrapped in tinfoil pressed against their gums. But we usually purchased acid anyway, so it wasn't that big a deal.

Hanging out in Le Vieux was magical. And on Quebec's national holiday, la fete de la St Jean — how can I hope to describe the revels of hundreds of thousands of delirious Montrealers? Amazing. So it was with a smile that I vaguely recognized this pony-tailed stranger beaming at me as the other sax player from a memorable outdoor St.Jean Baptiste jam session in le Vieux Montreal. He turned out to be a real sweet guy and also one of the most successful drug dealers I ever met. He parlayed a summer's worth of psilocybin picking in B.C. into college tuition, a beautiful black-laquered tenor horn, and living expenses for about 18 months. After that he went straight. Cool.

A band was formed and began rehearsing, gradually growing to a full complement of saxes, bones, trumpets and a rhythm section. Then we landed our first regular gig. It was on Rue de Bullion, an awfully seedy sidestreet just east of St.Laurent featuring a dark gravel parking lot that was a favourite worksite of hookers, dealers, pimps and anyone else who liked to do their business in private. It was in this gravel parking lot, perhaps the single scuzziest public location in the city at the time, that we landed our original house gig.

How? It remains a mystery to me to this day. But somehow, some guy I remember as Michel (I'll call him -- the second of several Michel's in this story -- Michel 2) had managed to fool the city's cultural department into freeing up some cash for inner city culture. The city built a plywood stage in the parking lot, covered it with a striped awning, set up a beer stand, and paid our big band to play. And so, to the assembled denizens of skid row, only mildly miffed at the intrusion, we did.

Our first shows were in the early evening, attracting a smattering of protuberant bellies, scarred forearms, thigh boots, frothing geezers and runaways. As the night -- and the summer -- wore on, our audiences grew in size, though not in sophistication or ruliness. Between sets the bandmembers huddled together nervously, wondering what the hell we were doing there. But the city paid adequately and the music was good and these were jazz musicians, after all. Slowly it began to feel like home. Soon we were playing there three and four nights a week, usually until the bar closed down around 3 am. It was the summer I was to turn 16. I swung between being scared shitless, thrilled beyond belief, and being way too stoned.

Towards the end of that summer, I remember the two Michels talking about possibilities for the future. I was curious. They told me to come along. Together we crossed rue Ste.Catherine and walked up to a rusting metal grill blocking the entrance to a filthy doorway. Michel 2 produced a key and fumbled with the old padlock, eventually opening the sliding grill. Before us was a door that seemed not to have been opened in years. I was soon to discover that it hadn't. Again Michel 2 produced the key and we entered -- slipping back into time as the sounds of the city disappeared behind us and we were surrounded by the dust-covered glamour of days gone by. This had been a high class strip club. One of the 600 nightclubs operating in gangster-run Montreal in the 50s and 60s. But it had been closed for what was certainly two or three decades. It was a scene out of a David Lynch film. Dennis Hopper singing blue velvet would have been perfectly at home here. It was dusky and rich with faded passions, shadowy encounters tumbling in the moted air. Somehow Michel 2 had been turned on to its existence and had wrangled the keys from a half-dead landlord. Within days he and his buddies began renovating the interior. And within weeks the old stripclub opened as Les Clochards Celestes -- The Heavenly Hobos -- the first incarnation of les Foufounes Electriques. If memory serves me, this was 1979. And to further cement my relationship with the club, I played at its opening night. Only, due to a stunning fluke, the band I played with in that hot and sweaty nightclub, swarming with 3 or 400 street hustlers and club cognoscenti , wasn't Michel Bruyere's big band but my other band, Nom Provisoire, as loopy a collection of fusionoid Quebecois freaks as Montreal had to offer.

Nom Provisoire was five long-haired (and in the case of the three senior members, Michel, Pierre and Yves, all of whom were over 20, long-bearded too) musical madmen determined to make as lovely and as contorted music as we possibly could. My friend Mike was in this band with me, too. We had the two horns (Mike and myself), electric bass, drums and guitar. We were fucking fantastic, I can honestly say, but utterly out of whack with the musical zeitgeist and equally bereft of showbizz savvy. Our informal leader was Yves, a ferociously driven, fiendishly good bass player who played his electric bass with a huge pick and ran his sound through a box called a Mutron-BiPhase. His guiding philosophy was that we should always make our music as difficult to play as possible, and we did, too, which is why it took us two and a half years of constant practice to learn 6 of our own songs. And Pierre, well, Pierre was a beautiful cat, a tawny lion really, who could play extreme guitar with tremendous style. His sense of time was unlike that of any other musician I’ve played with in that although he couldn’t keep regular time to save his life, he nonetheless was entirely consistent with in own utterly idiosyncratic chronometre, allowing him to fit in marvelously with our weird music. Years later Pierre went though a terrible period in which several people close to him died in succession. Too young – or to scared – to understand what he was going through I retreated, unable to offer him the support he needed. I’ve always regretted that.

That night at Les Clochards Celestes was probably the highlight of Nom Provisoire's career, which I deeply regret, because we deserved better. But who cares now? Not even me. Shortly after that our drummer, Michel, quit due to imminent deafness and we never quite got things together after that. Our next drummer, Claude, was a curious fellow. I ran into him many years later at Cafe Campus, where I was amazed to discover he had become a professional prophet – a Futurologist – as his business card read. Our third drummer - a lifelong friend - committed suicide. As I said, it was a helluva band. We only played that opening night because the clubowner, Michel, hadn’t time to audition us when we came down that morning and set up. After sitting around all day waiting to play for the man the crowds swarmed in at 8 pm and we just played. All 6 of our songs. Twice.

But for the rest of that opening week at Les Clochards Celestes, and for four of every seven nights for several months thereafter, Michel Bruyere's hard-swinging ensemble was the house band. We were a huge hit, and the place was packed on weekends. The rest of the week we played for our regulars -- winos, wackos and whores. It was an education for a boy, and boy did I get educated.

Slowly the club began to morph, opening a balcony upstairs, losing the catwalk. But it always retained its unerring sense of the weird. Of all the wild cats who hung out there, none was as bizarre as a tall lanky junky named Renaissance. He danced to our jazz in his own world, wearing transparent vinyl pants over a g-string – bare chested, Bowie-esque, possessed, accompanied by his slinky, athletic and vaguely supernatural acolyte, who was usually fully made up and poured into a tight bodysuit. In a sense, those two set the tone. Renaissance carting a potted palm onto the lava-lamp lit linoleum floor and dancing frond to cheek for hours on end. Renaissance feeling up our bandleader Michel as he tries to conduct the band (us looking on, horns in hand, stumped). It was terrifying and beautiful. And it was only fitting that when Les Clochards Celestes succumbed to an unknown ailment, (and after a brief yet memorable interlude as the Zoobar) the club should reopen in Renaissance's capable yet insatiably twisted hands, under the banner, Les Foufounes Electriques -- The Electric Buttocks.

It was different from anywhere else I'd been, or have been since. The club was animated by an unruly generosity of spirit which cut everyone who came in completely loose from all conventions. One of Renaissance's early moves was to rent a 16mm projector from the municipal library for 12 bucks a week, then to flash whatever films he could dredge up all night long across a wall. These weren't screenings, in the normal sense. If the films had soundtracks they went unheard beneath the din of the music. Someone would change the reels desultorily now and again, as if the films were an afterthought, but they added a perfectly surreal texture to the room. One might see Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd, a bit of Maya Deren or Murnau, or maybe Bugs Bunny or an animated NFB film. It didn't matter. The point was to saturate one's senses with as much inspired discordance as possible. And it worked.

The later history of the Foufounes is known to many. Every hip band on the planet played there at one time or another. The list reads like a who's who. Black Flag, Cowboy Junies, LLCoolJ, Pil, Nirvana, etc.etc. etc. Meanwhile Les Foufounes grew and grew and grew and grew, adding an enormous elevated outdoor drinking terrace. For years underneath this vast patio (which, apart from becoming a site of endless debauchery, was also the site of yet another debut for me, when my poetry band played it's first gig there during the 1990 jazzfest) lay an extraordinarily psychadelic mini-golf course. Each hole was designed by a different local artist, and the results were suitably blasphemous. The trademark exterior 3D mural (featuring the Foufounes' psychic emblem -- a rocketship blasting off from the top of a gable towards uncharted realms of night) had also mutated, until it covered most of the block. And inside, the club gradually took over an adjacent building, added more rooms upstairs and a massive sound system, but still sold cheap beer. It attracted the weirdest looking people in the city, but nobody cared what you looked like. I once saw a bride and groom in full regalia -- train and tux -- rush in and out for a quick drink. Nobody blinked an eye.

And I never did see a fight there, although no doubt there were plenty. But the presence of Le Gros Michel, who was for many years the jolly bouncer, ensured that there was a minimum of trouble. Le Gros Michel weighed in somewhere around 350 pounds, most of which was in his enormous belly, which he carted about on a huge Harley. Le Gros Michel was one of the founders and regular participants in the ever-popular soirée peinture de fesses, roughly translated as 'ass painting nights', and whichever lucky artist ldrew his name had an epic canvas upon which to work. Like Renaissance, Le Gros Michel eventually died, and with him a big part of the club disappeared. Renaissance himself had begun to appear less and less as time went by. He was the first person I knew of whom it was whispered that he had died of AIDS. In all those years I don't think I ever said a word to him, but I missed him.

more recently Les Foufounes has had setbacks, including being repeatedly shut down by the cops, who have always hated the place. First they tried busting customers. Then they tried busting customer's heads. They finally revolted against the raw anarchy that the club embodied and enacted night after night by yanking Les Foufounes' liquor license. The club has more than once been bankrupted under this relentless pressure, and yet, someone has always stepped into the void and kept the flame flickering. Last I heard it was still alive, though I really can't say whether it's thriving.

But during its long heyday it was a haven and a sanctuary and a school. I was just one of countless Montrealers whose tastes, values and lives were shaped by the passion, freedom and imagination which reigned there. Les Foufounes ruled because it embraced the rawness which surrounded it. It was never an escape from real life, as outsider clubs elsewhere seem to be. Instead it sucked the living sweat from the wild streets and drank up their grimy excitement. People died there. Lived there. Danced there. Became famous there. Fucked there. Failed there. Burned there. Anything went. There were absolutely no rules. It was a revolution in progress. And for the many thousands of citizens who were lucky enough to have been a part of Les Foufounes, it still is.

In the end, Les Foufounes Electriques stands out for me as a shining example of a truly open, creative and revolutionary environment. Throughout its history the club continued its support of all forms of visual art, from live models provided for free to the drawing public many afternoons, to in house painters spending the evening painting in a corner, to the aforementioned ass-painting sessions. And the dancers, christ, the dancing that would go on in that room! Limber bodies jacking and spiking, flinging and crawling and jerking to Nina Hagen, The Cure, Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy, The Specials. . . maudit k'ça shake-ait la-dedans!