"Memories memories, you will remain my friends": thus ends the song which must have been played hundreds of times on my record player. She has been with me ever since, a sesame opening wide the doors of my youth. Johnny's real death doesn't change that; For a long time, his memories, memories have rocked me with an incurable nostalgia. Yet this departure to God knows where in a cold December night saddens me, in unison with the people of France who since Wednesday have had their hearts at half mast. Everyone has their reason to mourn Johnny Hallyday. The reasons for the offspring of the baby boom are irrefutable: it has put words, sounds, rhythms and appropriate gestures on our cravings for syncopated and truant life.
Of course Elvis was the King. His photo on the front page of Hello friends, a switchblade in hand, will have been the generic snapshot of this fever which heckled our neurons. Elvis: disdainful lip, dark look signifying that if he wants the fight he will not be disappointed. Such was Trouble's message in the movie King Creole and, coincidentally, Johnny took it up: "If you're looking for a fight..." Of course the story began in Memphis, Tennessee, in a studio whose boss was looking in vain for a White skin miraculously inhabited by the soul of black bluesmen. The warm, caressing and poisonous voice of Elvis was intended to accomplish this cultural crossbreeding. Of which act, in the middle of the 1950s, in the dampness of the Deep South of Caldwell, Richard Wright and the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, a little white boy born in Tupelo, Mississippi, who sang and swung like a black man. Heartbreak Hotel, Don't Be Cruel, All Shook Up, Blue Suede Shoes, Jailhouse Rock. These classics are as timeless as La Route de Kerouac – the wonderful "66" of our imaginary rides to Chuck Berry's Promised Land.
Of course, we loved listening to Fats Domino (Blueberry Hill, etc.) Eddie Cochran (C'mon Everybody, etc.), Gene Vincent (Be-Bop-a-Lula, etc.) Ray Charles, (Georgia on My Mind, etc.) or the Beatles in their early days (I Want to Hold Your Hand, etc.).
Synthesis of Marlon Brando and James Dean
But the French version of this conflagration of planetary amplitude – the beat – had everything to thrill us. His fair-haired archangel face, his bad subject look that offended our mothers, his howls of a lively flayed cat then his tenderly velvety voice when he sang Far too shy. This song still awakens in my heart a springtime mixture of disarray and tenderness; she knotted my throat when my love affairs turned to debacle. It happened often. I convinced myself that, beneath his black jacket exterior, he was as shy as I was. Also stupidly sentimental. I remember leaning over a jukebox, listening to Johnny's lament. "Why, this love/Making me sing? Why is he having fun/Making me cry?" Yes why? A final complaint from the electric guitar, a recent innovation, and the LP ceased to sizzle. You had to put in another token to be entitled to another song, sometimes a slow (Douce violence), sometimes a rock (Since that'ma kid), and then a frenzy burned my blood, I rolled on the carpet.
I see myself in my teenage room, imitating his swaying in front of the mirror cabinet with a tennis racket as a guitar. Although I put into it the conviction of a recent convert, I lacked the presence of a French lover equipped with a loaf of dynamite. Johnny realized the approximate synthesis of Marlon Brando (less brutal) and James Dean (without the tragedy). My "Saturday evening" muses suffered from the comparison with his beautiful Sylvie; but finally, behind my Solex on a departmental road lined with plane trees, they gave me the illusion of escaping to the colorful America of Elvis. Always Elvis, and Johnny kept reminding us that he owed him his destiny. Mine will have been much less lavish, but the debt is the same.
At that time, France descended the national 7 to go rock twist in Saint-Trop' with a mixture of youthful joy and rebellion without determined enemy. The upstarts drove in Porsches, the bourgeois in DS 19s, the all-comers in 403 Peugeots. The sons of families flirted in MG, the less expensive in Vespa, the not expensive of my kind in Solex. Our exotic fantasies were content with language stays in England during the summer holidays and the cheap beaches of the Costa Brava. We weren't going any further. A romanticism shrouded our dissipations; we wanted to smash it all, drop it all, hug it all – but the wind that lifted the hoop skirts was light. Our classmates braided scoubidous, sipped grenadine diabolos and waved hula hoops around golden hips in the Cadaqués or Palavas-les-Flots sun.
We didn't talk about politics in the high school courtyards
Nothing detrimental to the virtues inculcated by their mothers, who moreover had desalinated themselves a long time ago: Bonjour triste by Sagan dated from the beginning of the 1950s; as well as And God Created Woman, where BB displayed her sumptuous nudity, in all ingenuity. My rare war prizes around the Teppaz were decked out in Sheila duvets, or else adopted Françoise Hardy's long hair. One was playing her score on the register of the little girl of average French people in a suburban house; the other rather in melancholy, like I read Sartre and Camus in high school, that makes me think that love is a decoy, alas.
It was a pleasantly hexagonal France, with very little or no unemployment – and the tramps under the bridges of Paname seemed to have chosen rather than suffered their irregularity. For a bit we would have envied them, especially on the eve of a math composition. De Gaulle reigned, a Hugolian ghost recluse behind the gates of the Elysée. Kopa dribbled, Anquetil put on his yellow jerseys, the Boniface brothers' cross passes lit up the sky over Colombes. The Algerian conflict was coming to an end; the parents no longer heard the whistle of Richard Anthony's train which took their son to trudge in a djebel. We did not talk about politics in the courtyards of the high schools or in the amphitheatres of the university, the French were for or against de Gaulle, for or against Anquetil or Poulidor and, in the surbooms, the debates opposed the partisans of the black socks of Eddy Mitchell to those of Dick Rivers Wild Cats.
Other French singers took their place in the jukeboxes: Lucky Blondo, Frank Alamo, Claude François. But the more the years passed, the more the supremacy of Johnny Hallyday imposed itself with the force of evidence. The companions gratified us with a well-balanced summer hit, several hits in the case of Richard Anthony, the first to have listened to American music and made it his own. Johnny was the Star, with an illuminated capital letter. The only one really. Because his charisma made the nerves of his fans overheated. It was physical, he offered his body to the public in sacrificial paroxysms, we were close to the trances of voodoo when he seized the microphone. "Come on buddies, we're going to dance the twist", said his beguiling voice, and the girls screamed like the possessed of Loudun. They were in love with him and no one else. He offered himself whole, body and soul - doomed unremittingly to become the "idol of the young people" of Ricky Nelson, who was too wise to be idolized. Like de Gaulle, captive to his role in the theater of history, Johnny Hallyday had somehow denied Jean-Philippe Smet, he identified himself fully with his public figure.
Azar admits he does not collect this crucial information. Top health official admits he has no clue how many Ameri… https://t.co/gi8n8ZiDPG
— Dr. Robert Fortuna Tue Mar 10 15:56:07 +0000 2020
The hits of others, we hummed them and we forgot them. Who remembers this charming herbal tea, drunk throughout the summer by everyone: "There is the sky, the sun and the sea"? Who remembers "I paid myself a nice hat" by Sacha Distel? From the "swarthy Mexican" (Marcel Amont)? Pretty little Sheila (Lucky Blondo)? A few sexas to pick up. While Retiens la nuit will survive our decay. Johnny interpreted it in the film Les Parisiennes, with accompaniment of a sax and violins as languorous as those of Verlaine. To my taste, it's her finest, she deserves to rub shoulders with the best titles by Edith Piaf in the pantheon of French popular music, in the noblest sense of the term. "Don't ask me where my sadness comes from / Don't ask me anything you wouldn't understand." I know her inside and out, sound and words, sound and light because she still makes stars sparkle in my sky, intermittently. The voice is wonderfully tender, with that slight touch of eroticism when he whispers like a more than intimate secret: "With you she seems so beautiful." Yes, with him, my nights were beautiful, even if I was alone under the duvet.
Johnny, the one we couldn't hate
All his songs from our tender years tell the brief story of a boy in love with a girl. Harmless texts, which a strictly obedient feminism would reject today. It's not fair after all, Broken doll, Shake hands with a madman, In a garden of love, A girl like you, Arms outstretched, where he walks us through the Oklahoma valley to settle his account with a false friend. I only thought of him when much later I discovered Oklahoma. Invariable punctuation of a guitar solo that recounts the happiness of being sad or the torment of loneliness, not without irony but without making your teeth cringe like the squeaks of the following decades. He was the Johnny of our initiations of all kinds, the unleashed Johnny of the famous Nation concert, capable of fighting to prove to himself that he was a man, a real one. Machismo of the time, not mean and which gave up quickly because, deep down, this fake thug was a real softie. A good, simple and generous guy – and the French felt this sauce instinctively, which is why those who didn't like his music or his style couldn't manage to hate him.
It was a France in freedom with hardly any supervision, almost the sweet France of a poet's dream, so fresh was our desire. “The wind is rising, we must try to live,” Valéry wrote in another, less pleasant era. The equivalent of this verse in Johnny's discography was Pour moi la vie va commence. Each time I listen to it, with the initial drum solo, I see myself coming out of the stupid age as our parents said, pursuing happiness at the wheel of my deudeuch dented everywhere with the panic fear of missing its marks. Picking it up, losing it on the way if I tried to capture it, finding it, losing it again. For me, for us, children of half a century who promised us the moon, life never ceased to begin, it was haunting in the long run.
Everything changed when Johnny thought he had to convert to San Francisco-style horse racing. It didn't last long but it was the symptom of a dry loss of youth and innocence. More precisely: of innocence free from ideological corsets. The air of time was losing its sweetness, it was becoming cloudy. Guy Boniface was killed in a car on a road in the Landes. The Beatles were going to break up. In the student bars they were no longer compared to the Stones, who, moreover, were becoming aggressive. The friends took themselves seriously by declaring themselves anars, trotskards, maos or situs. The fachos with shaved heads, few in number, were no funnier. From whatever chapel it claims to be, an ideological seclusion has never brought good humor. The "desired storms" of our fiery romanticism turned into a verbose contestation of the established order. The "bourgeois" order in this case, which I couldn't care less about, and Johnny, thank goodness, did not give in to the panel of a revolt deviated into "isms" after the adventures of May-68 which earned the final of the Lourdes-Toulon French rugby championship to be adjourned sine die – I had a hard time forgiving Cohn-Bendit but he didn't give a damn about Crauste and Herrero, he only likes football .
Revolted, we were all, except for a few followers of the American Challenge of Servan-Schreiber. Revolted against what? We didn't know how to tell; Johnny knew how to sing it. Our America was his, recycled by the bikers of Easy Rider, not that of the Yankee economy deemed more efficient than that of our enarques. We didn't give a damn about their economy, and Johnny more than anyone else: he spent his money on racing cars, on Harley-Davidsons, on nocturnal clearances with princely casualness. There was reason to suppose that quite a few hookers lived on his hooks. Still, he had become an adult. Well, he pretended. He had divorced, he procreated like everyone else: David with Sylvie, Laura with Nathalie. He was consumed in his destiny as a star, from one concert to another, still radiant even though he was plagued by blues. He had tried to kill himself, as it should be when you are a real star. Because all glory demands its ransom, it must be expiated.
Like Elvis, he was a sponge
The soundtrack of the history of France after May-68, bereaved by the death of de Gaulle, these were his songs. Curiously, I can date his music to Excuse Me Partner, Le Penitentiary and Que je t'aime. Afterwards, things get muddled, no doubt because I didn't like the last four decades of the twentieth century and that of the twenty-first century offends me even more. Titles come to mind in random order: Ma gueule, Something from Tennessee, Allumer le feu, All the music I love. Yes, all the music we loved, before hard, before rap, before techno. Johnny smoked a lot, he drank a lot. He was burning his wings but they were growing back. Over the years, it became a kind of national fetish. And when the yéyé generation took it into their heads to procreate, they were surprised to hear their youngsters shouting their new songs.
And when his own children in turn procreated, their children became fans, they "light their fire" of teenagers with his songs. Always love: Oh! My lovely Sarah, Gabrielle. Paternal love now with Laura. Always on stage, the postures of the rocker and always this charisma, this magic which lifted the most stale hearts, with a dose of tenderness and also a dose of nostalgia. While interpreting creations of Berger or Goldman in a debauchery of pyrotechnics, Johnny commemorated the "good old days of rock'n'roll". From then on, he was the idol of the French, of all ages and all social classes. Purists reproached him for slipping into a chameleon in any fashion, hippie leaving for Kathmandu then crooning à la Sinatra, then Mad Max, then rocking again. Bof! Purism rhymes with fundamentalism.
Like Elvis, he was a sponge. He instinctively picked up and mixed as he pleased. Like Elvis, his voice remained exceptional, the bass as much as the treble. More hoarse however, the abuse of tobacco pays off in the long run. Chroniclers intoxicated by politics would like to put him on the right of the chessboard, on the grounds that he had sympathy for Chirac, for Sarkozy too. In truth, he was not on any side, he performed indifferently in front of an audience of RPR militants or communist sympathizers at the Fête de l'Huma. Seen en bloc from the stage, they looked alike, it was an audience whose enthusiasm had to be aroused. It was his multi-card and blue, white, red audience like that of Zidane.
In this respect, the tributes of the politicians to whom we tend the microphone these days are sincere perhaps, but somewhat self-serving. In terms of the communicators who govern them, Johnny is essential. By appearing with him in the photos, they thought they were gleaning crumbs from his popularity. Perhaps they also hoped to pierce for their guidance a part of the mystery that has the halo of a legend from the Golf Drouot to the Stade de France, the Eiffel Tower and the Parc des Princes through our provincial towns. Because all in all, of his immense qualities as a singer and a stage beast, a mystery remains.
To assess the emotion that overwhelms us all, I think we have to turn the hands of time upside down and remember our sadness on a rainy day in November 1970. "De Gaulle is dead, France is widow," Pompidou told us that night on TV. Johnny is dead, France mourned on Saturday, on the Champs then at the Madeleine. He crossed the generations like a meteor, streaking his variable skies with songs like Rimbaud scattering pebbles on the roads of his daydreams. For people of my age, France is more or less confused with that of "Grand Charles". While one intoxicated us with boastful pride, the other brightened up our lives.
De Gaulle was not very rock'n'roll and Johnny had certainly read neither Chateaubriand nor Malraux; however the speech to the Republic (1958) and the concert to the Nation (1963) resurrect in me the same – how can I put it? – the same regrets of a bygone golden age. This means that since Wednesday my soul is in shreds. Johnny, I saw him several times in concert. Only once did I have the privilege of an evening in his company, with Sarkozy who had invited me there. His wife Laeticia was surprised that I knew songs she didn't know, and for good reason. You talk too much, A handful of earth, The Little Clown of your heart, You who regret. The songs from his debut, the words of which he had forgotten, which he nevertheless tried to sing to please me. We talked about Elvis of course, it always comes back to the King. We will always come back to Johnny when a memory, memory catches our eye, and this evening will not count for anything when it comes to sorting through my intimate flea market. On his emaciated face I read a weariness, and in his eyes a strange sweetness. Suddenly, I thought back to the end of The Idol of young people: "But if they knew sometimes in life / how much alone I am"...
Johnny is dead, France is a widow and here we are again orphans. Farewell big brother, and thank you for everything!
