Pag in the bag

>> One man’s quest to see a Montreal rock
legend, Michel Pagliaro, get his due

HE’LL SING, HE’LL DANCE: Michel Pagliaro

COMMENTARY
by DAN BURKE

Editor’s note: Former Montrealer Burke is a journalist turned concert promoter now based in Toronto.

Michel Pagliaro is at the wheel of his car somewhere in Outremont, trying to calm down a screaming Québécois woman in the passenger seat while speaking to me on his cell phone about his upcoming concert at Pop Montreal.

“Two minutes and we’ll be okay, I’m dropping her off,” he says, relaxed and reassuring in English while being verbally assaulted in French.

On my end in Toronto, I’m instantly sold, and not just on the fate of the interview. The real reason I’m speaking with Pagliaro, you see, is to make sure he’s geared up to deliver a performance of tape-measure home-run proportions at Club Soda on Friday. Reputations are on the line, that of festival director Dan Seligman and, more importantly, my own. We want more than just a great show. We want a whole new generation of Canadians—or two or three, perhaps—to embrace the greatness of this uniquely Montreal artist, affectionately called Pag by many.

Not much from Much

Let me explain. I’m an indie-rock show promoter in Toronto, and for the past six years, I’ve been unofficially lobbying for Pag to be recognized as the greatest singer-songwriter-arranger-composer in Canadian history, a peerless musical genius who crafted three of the most polished English pop gems you’ll ever hear on radio—“Loving You Ain’t Easy,” “Rainshowers” and “Some Sing Some Dance,” which, with its flamenco-style trimming (complete with castanets) and unimaginable chorus change, is a high work of art. At the same time, Pag has such a powerfully soulful voice that he dared to cover Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” while also belting out a whole sheaf of francophone Quebec rock ’n’ roll classics like “J’entends frapper.”

The problem is that the songs burst onto the radio the summer I spent loafing at Terrebonne Park in NDG, pitching horseshoes and smoking Export A’s. I was 14 years old. I think. Now, I’m 49. It’s so far back that Pag has trouble remembering how old he was when he made them.

“Jeez, uh...” He has to calculate. “Twenty-three. Maybe.”

He continues, “I did those songs in about a two-year period. ‘Lovin’ You Ain’t Easy’ was just a single in the beginning, but they all ended up on the same album. The label was called Much, which was owned by CHUM, the radio station. And they didn’t want to play it on their radio station because it would look bad because they put it out. Other stations started playing it, so they did, but then they went bankrupt.”

Next came CBS Records, his version of “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” and, as Pag recalls, “all the stuff that was supposed to happen didn’t happen and…”

And that was the end of Pag’s genius as an English-language pop artist.

Angles and anglos

Early this year, I pitched Toronto’s NXNE festival on Pag. DJ Davy Love and his Brit-rock crowd at Blow Up had been turned onto Pag’s music; the Constantines played the songs in their tour van. But, in a city as unadventurous as Toronto, it probably would have been a disaster.

So in June, I went to Seligman. “Pag did two of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life,” I told him. The first was in 1977 on a freezing cold weeknight in Edmonton at a bar called Grand Central Station. The second was at le Spectrum in the mid-’80s.

Seligman leapt on the idea. To fit the show with Pop’s reputation as a feast of cutting-edge indie rock, current Montreal bands le Nombre and Mongrels open the night. Pag admits he’s unacquainted with either band. In fact, prior to being booked to play it, he’d never heard of Pop Montreal. “At the café where I go in my neighbourhood, some of the young people there knew about it, but they said it was more of an anglo music thing.”

Though he hasn’t released any English songs of note since that promising binge in the early 1970s, Pagliaro, an Italian-Canadian from the St-Michel district, hasn’t lost his grip on the language. “I went to French school but I always had anglo friends growing up,” he says.

The shows he now performs, however, rarely stray off the Quebec tour circuit. And the recordings he’s recruited to produce are almost always in France, including three albums for Jacques Higelin—“a real crazy kind of guy,” Pag notes.

One current project on his plate is a heap of recordings he made with a band he’d put together, enough material for a full-length. “Me and that band, we no longer play together. But I should have the recording done in about six months. People think I’m crazy because all the songs resulted from these jam sessions we had over a period of five or six years.”

The jams ended, but Pag carries on. “I like to sing. I’ve always liked to sing. And I can still create,” he says. “Pop Montreal is gonna be fun.”

With le Nombre and Mongrels
at Club Soda on Friday,
Oct. 5, 9 p.m., $22