«I'm nostalgic for an era I never knew, and I want to live it through music», declared the unbearable Serge Gainsbourg. Today, a number of us miss his heyday, the period 1966-1971. A time when the Anglo-Saxon conversion of the yéyés was taking place under the promise of the seventies; The era of Hardy's variété and Polnareff's folk rock; the era of the early Doors, the last Beatles albums and Sergio Leone's Dollar Trilogy. Magneto, Serge.
There are official half-centuries, beginning with a 0 or a 5. And there are unofficial half-centuries, particularly in the arts, which begin where they mean to begin and end where they mean to end. In the world of music and film, something was happening in Europe and the USA as early as 1966. Like a turning point. That of a decade hippie into the seriousness of the seventies, against a backdrop of artistic sophistication and spleen.
Music: the end of the yéyés, rock'n'roll made in France and the arrival of concept albums
In France, it was the yéyé movement that took a beating. Thanks to the sensitivity and flair of a handful of artists (Françoise Hardy, Michel Polnareff, Serge Gainsbourg, Jacques Dutronc), French chanson gained an Anglo-Saxon flavor, while remaining based on French lyrics - and careful ones at that. Polnareff imported folk rock on his first album Love Me Please Love Me in 1966, at the same time as the release of the band's equally folk-rock debut album America in the USA. Except for the Polnareff touch.
Read also | Polnarevolutions
Then came the only French instance of baroque pop in 1968 with the very London opus Le Bal des Laze. Two concept albums of absolute coherence and innovation, preceding the masterpiece Polnareff's (1971). This grandiloquent album presented a genre invented by the artist, a kind of experimental pop that found its emblematic purity in Who killed Grandma?.
1971 was also the year of Serge Gainsbourg's masterpiece, Melody Nelson story. The album-concept dimension is even more obvious than with the singer with the now-white glasses: with Gainsbourg, it's also present in the lyrics. Everything revolves around the story of this Melody, a young girl at the end of her fourties, and the melodies, for their part, revolve around pure Anglo-Saxon rock, but perhaps even more accomplished than in its original land. The arrangements are co-written by the two composers of Gainsbourg's first concept album: Gainsbourg himself and Jean-Claude Vannier. It's the start of the seventies, ladies and gentlemen, and we may never make anything this good again.
Read also | Melody Nelson storya musical and literary masterpiece
Across the Channel, 1971 was the last Doors album to be recorded with singer Jim Morrison. Also considered by many to be the band's best work, it contains what made that year the pinnacle of the golden decade: melancholy rock. blues, The disillusionment of a carefree world that no longer believes in its ideals of peace and freedom, a lucid and tragic crisis in short. But it's all set to music, to our great delight.
Cinema: the spaghetti western and the beautiful Claudia Cardinale
Coincidence of calendars or not, what has gone down as the finest moment in Italian western cinema also concerns this famous quinquennium. Is it still necessary to recall the great art of Sergio Leone's Dollar Trilogy, a series of films whose last one - "The Dollar Trilogy" - was the first of its kind? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the most famous - was released in 1966, with a legendary soundtrack by Ennio Morricone? It's like a meeting of several beauties: that of instrumental music as classical as it is popular and even wild; that of mysterious actor-characters like Clint Eastwood; that of a landscape, the American West.
In 1968, the genius resurfaced with Once upon a time in the West, whose soundtrack was analyzed here, by Ennio Morricone. In this new Sergio Leone film, the only female character is played by Claudia Cardinale, a woman who will have many people fantasizing. Starting with Polnareff, who spends a night of love with her. A stroke of luck. Meanwhile, Hollywood was rethinking itself. Cinema is no longer American, it's Italian. And French.
In the overwhelming splendor of these works, there is an omnipresent drone. An awareness of the artificial nature of a totally created world, because it is artistic, where the melancholy can take refuge. Artificial, but not ephemeral. Proof of this is the immortality of this collection of albums and films, linked by the same season, the golden season of Western cinema and music in the second half of the 20th century.th century. In reality, no one has ever really lived through this period. Because it only existed in the world of music and cinema! And what better form of existence could there be?
Write to the author: jonas.follonier@leregardlibre.com
Read the rest of «The Golden Age 1966-1971» in Le Regard Libre N° 59.
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