Jan. 18, 2010

Over the years, I’ve often stumbled across the name Serge Gainsbourg while reading about 1960s cult musicians, only to shrug and keep on moving because Gainsbourg was French, and, in the only photos I had ever seen of him, seemed far too committed to posing sensually with his open collar and Gitanes cigarettes. Frankly, his sensibility was a little too French for my taste, and I was busy enough absorbing the music I could understand immediately. In the pre-Internet days of yore, I wasn’t about to spend my precious time digging up English translations of possibly disposable foreign language lyrics.

Gainsbourg, then, would have to remain a vaguely familiar presence to me, that big-eared, heavy-lidded guy who’d occasionally be seen hitting the town with some incongruously super-hot French chick, or maybe sharing a drink with Paul McCartney. I assumed, from all outward appearances, that I had better things to do.

That, it turns out, was a mistake. A couple months ago, I was skimming the reviews at Pitchfork.com when I saw a reference to Gainsbourg’s reported masterpiece, a 1971 concept album called “Histoire De Melody Nelson.” For whatever reason, the album had never received a proper U.S. release. But a Seattle company called Light in the Attic finally gave it a fancy remastering and presented it to the American public in March of last year, and a new generation of music critics were agog. My interest was also piqued by a quote from no less a current-day luminary than Beck, who referred to “Melody Nelson” as “one of the greatest marriages of rock band and orchestra” that he had ever heard.

That sounded pretty cool.

So I picked up a copy of “Histoire De Melody Nelson,” complete with translated lyrics, and promptly had my mind blown. This is a stunning album, a landmark recording that unfolds like a Baudelaire novel crossed with “Theme from Shaft”— “Walk on the Wild Side”-era Lou Reed, to name just one of Gainsbourg’s many children, is utterly inconceivable without the funky-droll map provided by several “Melody Nelson” tracks.

The record repeatedly rises to the string-laden pop stratosphere, then rumbles with dark sexual obsession and an even darker streak of black humor. And that orchestra that floored Beck - heavy on the timpani, backed by a full choir - finally reaches a crescendo that stands as a brooding forerunner to Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” Goosebumps are to be expected.

But to truly mine the depths of the record, you have to have a working knowledge of Gainsbourg’s personal history as France’s most oddly embraceable, and massively talented, wasted scoundrel. This guy, in case you’re one of the millions of music fans on this side of the Atlantic who have no idea about him, was practically France’s poon-hound laureate, and his creative journey is as unique as any in pop music history. I’ve grown fascinated with him.

A button pushing visionary of gussied-up skank and lechery, Gainsbourg spent a good 30 years pissing off the European hoi polloi, but served up his outrages via an astounding gift for both sweeping lyricism and down-and-dirty funk...and, as an entertaining side-light, he was an in-demand character actor in an assortment of French quickie movies.

An artist without borders, he applied his songwriting gifts, and knowing intellectualism, to everything from cocktail jazz to New Wave movie scores, from 70s radio-rock and Frenched-up reggae to an hysterical collection of 50s-style rock & roll songs about the Nazi occupation (Gainsbourg, unlike Mel Brooks, fooled the Gestapo with fake documents, then escaped with his parents to the concentration camp-free countryside when he was a kid.)

There were many candidates for the crown, but Gainsbourg’s most spectacularly infamous poke at bourgeois sensibilities would have to be a mid-Sixties sojourn in which he sarcastically deflowered an entire pop movement for his own financial gain. Then again, there was the release of a Number One record that centered around his ridiculously fuckable girlfriend audibly approaching orgasm. I'll let you decide for yourself which one wins.

Gainsbourg was a legitimate poet and an unrepentant scatologist, a charming romantic and a dirty old man, a fame-hungry pop star and a closet deconstructionist. But he was never anything other than Serge Gainsbourg, and the good people of France, not to mention France’s slightly behind-the-curve musical landscape, would just have to accept that.

                                                ***

At the beginning of his career, Gainsbourg quickly acquired a sizeable critical following, coupled, much to his dismay, with near-nonexistent public acceptance. This wasn’t particularly surprising. Although he was hardly cranking out punk tunes before there was such a thing, his closest musical relative over the years is surely early Elvis Costello. Both men loved twisted wordplay, and their songs’ dark subject matter is so aggressively un-endearing it’s enough to generate belly laughs.

For instance, two of my favorite early Gainsbourg numbers are “En Relisant Ta Lettre,” in which a man reads his lover’s suicide note but can’t help making snide remarks about the grammatical errors, and “Requiem Pour Un Twisteur,” about a guy who compulsively does the Twist until it kills him. Gainsbourg also saw fit to pose for on an album cover holding a gun and a bouquet of flowers, which just about sums it up.

That bit about the doomed Twist enthusiast was actually a matter of wish-fulfillment on Serge’s part, since post-Beatles pop, and the late-arriving Twist craze that followed, had all but cancelled out his hope of truly hitting the big time. So Serge started writing (and, more importantly, selling) lovely confections that, when sung by such marketable entities as Francoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot, and Nana Mouskouri, became major hits in France.

However, when a 17 year-old chanteuse named France Gall, a steadfast practitioner of a lucrative form of music loosely known as “baby-pop,” fell into Gainsbourg’s gravitational pull, he supplied her with a tune that turned the movement’s so-called innocence on its unblemished ear.

“Les Sucettes,” which Gall supposedly believed was nothing more than a pleasant observation about a girl who loves anise-flavored lollipops, was actually a lecherous ditty about…well…about the joy of giving blow-jobs. Sample lyric:

Annie likes suckers
The anise flavored suckers
The anise flavored suckers
Of Annie
Give her kisses
An aniseed taste
While the creamy sugar
Flavored with anise
Sinks in Annie’s throat
She’s in heaven

Whoops.

It’s been debated for years whether Gall, or her management, could have really had no clue what Gainsbourg was up to, that they weren’t aware of the song’s double meaning until its very existence became a French newspaper editorial page staple. But Serge certainly knew what he was up to, and what would become a lifelong career as a famous pop provocateur was officially launched with “Les Sucettes.”

Here’s a clip of Gall and Gainsbourg performing a duet of the tune for a French TV show. It’s difficult to decide if this is hilarious or horrifying. To be honest, though, I’m leaning pretty hard toward hilarious.

From there, Gainsbourg was on his way, both musically and, to an even more amped-up degree than he had been before, sexually. From “Les Sucettes” onward, the pull of female connection became an almost obsessive element of his public and artistic persona.

Although he was long self-conscious about his hangdog looks, Gainsbourg tired of endless magazine articles centered on the “beauty and the beast” aspect of his personal relationships. It’s somewhat uncharitable to call him “ugly,” but he wasn’t within shouting distance of being a matinee idol. This, however, didn’t stop him from getting it on with Bardot, while she was still married, and tons of other slinky-style mademoiselles. In fact, he recorded a duet with Bardot, “Je t’aime…moi non plus,” that, right on cue, shocked the nation when word spread that the sex kitten’s orgasmic moaning was generated by the exact sorts of things that normally encourage orgasmic moaning amongst the sex kittens.

Mortified after the fact, Bardot (and, it should be noted, her husband) urged Gainsbourg to withdraw the record, which he did. Then he promptly went into the studio and re-recorded it with his newest lover, the English actress, Jane Birkin, who was over 20 years Gainsbourg’s junior. Here’s a picture of Serge and Jane.

Or, far more to the point, here’s a picture of Serge and Jane.

Um…yeah.

“Je t’aime…moi non” (translation: “I love you…me neither”) became a big, fat, officially banned Number One hit, both because of it’s catchy production, and because Jane was no less shy about the moaning than Bardot was…and she didn’t have a husband who was threatening to, as Bob Dylan would put it, punch Gainsbourg’s cigarette.

If this initially doesn’t seem like your sort of thing, take my word for it, you still have to stick around for the third act. Gainsbourg’s rule of thumb, after all, was if you bring a woman like Birkin onstage, you eventually have to fire her.

“Je t’aime…moi non”

                                                ***

Which leads us - rather logically, as we'll see - to “Histoire De Melody Nelson.” The album's cover features Birkin holding a stuffed monkey, the better to cover the three-month baby bump that would eventually yield the couple’s daughter, the actress-singer, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Serge's connection with Jane, then, focused a great deal on skin, but went a lot deeper than that.

“Histoire De Melody Nelson” is, without a doubt, the high point of Gainsbourg’s career as a recording artist. A succinct 28-minute song cycle that traces a self-absorbed Frenchman’s sexual obsession with a 15 year-old English girl, it passes through the various phases of a doomed, one-sided love affair while visiting the stylistic stations of the singer-songwriter’s own career-long passion play.

Gainsbourg often said he never could have written "Melody Nelson" had he not met Birkin, who wasn't jail bait when they initially hit it off, but was pretty damn near it. The album, for all its thematic ugliness, stands as a sort of hyper-sexualized valentine to the woman he loves. No one ever said these two were your average married couple.

For the most part a funk record, "Melody Nelson" also contains a handful of ballads, and a waltz, that are as breathtaking as anything Gainsbourg ever committed to tape. This is the sound of romance growing overwhelmed by the inexorable pull of sweat-slickened flesh. Audacious from the get-go, there are moments on "Histoire De Melody Nelson" that can leave you breathless.

A spartan, astonishingly tight band comprised of Brian Odgers on bass, Vick Flick on lead guitar, and Dougie Wright on drums, jams through the funk-based tunes via a dark synergy that often verges on jazz improvisation, but stays grounded in the complex interplay of the rhythm section. Skittering musical patterns weave in, out, and around Gainsbourg’s weary, mostly spoken vocals like a spring that’s slowly tightening in the narrator’s heart…or maybe it’s a noose tightening around his neck.

The lyrics describe how the narrator meets poor Melody one night after accidentally bumping her off her bicycle with his Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, only to fall for her when he notes, to the accompaniment of a celestial choir, that her red hair is "her natural color” (one guess how he determined such a thing when he was picking the skirt-wearing girl up off the street.) From there, he romanticizes their attachment beyond anything resembling reason, and takes the girl to a gauche hooker hotel, where he relieves her of her virginity.

Then, just to keep things nice and tidy - and properly fatalistic - Gainsbourg allows Melody to perish in a tragic plane crash, leaving the narrator with an idealized vision of sexual healing that he'll never duplicate. As Sylvie Simmons points out in her entertaining Gainsbourg biography, "A Fistful of Gitanes," he's now the Ancient Mariner of sex, cursed to recount his story to anyone who will listen, while, in reality, telling it only to himself.

                                                ***

“Histoire De Melody Nelson” is a record that demands to be heard in its entirety, in sequence. But I’ve selected three choice cuts to convey the depth and range of Gainsbourg’s accomplishment.

Very special credit must go to the arranger, Jean Claude Varnier, who also collaborated on armfuls of movie soundtracks with Gainsbourg. Each of “Melody Nelson”’s songs, regardless of their musical setting, spring to wild, vivid life in Varnier’s hands, and Gainsbourg’s variously wistful and brooding vocals seat you securely in the narrator’s reckless psyche.

As despicable as what he’s doing may be, you get caught up in his exhilaration at finding his Lolita - years earlier, Gainsbourg was rejected by Nabokov when he approached the author about turning his controversial book into a musical - and, finally, you sink into the warped depths of his despair. The sheer craft of what you’re listening to, and the ballsy, bold extravagance of Gainsbourg’s vision, fully pulls you in.

First, there’s “Ballad De Melody Nelson,” a too-brief exercise that, quite revealingly, alternates between describing Melody as a “little animal” and a “delightful vagabond,” all while floating on an intoxicating string arrangement.

"Ballad De Melody Nelson"

Next up is “En Melody,” an instrumental that accompanies an illegal frolic with the “delightful vagabond,” only to culminate with the somber news that Melody has perished in the plane crash. Note the intricacy of the arrangement, how each member of the band has to be listening at all times to exactly what the others are doing. This isn’t the kind of thing you can lay down in overdubs— surely these guys were sitting in the same room together, bouncing vibrations back and forth. It’s a masterful performance that gains a little extra kick when Jean-Luc Ponty, who Gainsbourg temporarily poached from Frank Zappa’s band, enters on electric violin (the snorting laughter you hear at one point is, yes, Birkin being tickled by her brother for the benefit of Serge’s microphone.)

"En Melody"

Then, immediately following “En Melody,” comes the album’s ominous closer, the genuinely twisted lament, “Cargo Culte.” In it, the narrator, who’s now clearly reached a psychological abyss of his own making, recounts the story of a religious cult he’s heard of that prays for airplanes to fall out of the sky in New Guinea. The members of the cult, you see, are among the poorest people in the world, and can remember when passing bombers would tumble to the earth during the War, allowing them to scavenge for the shattered riches contained within. He wonders if Melody stayed with her plane when it went into the ocean, or if she, like him, is still traveling on some uncontrollable current.

"Cargo Culte"

I know of the magicians who summon the jets
In the jungle of New Guinea
They scrutinize the zenith, coveting the guineas (money)
that the pillage of freight could bring them

On the sea of coral in the wake of the machine
Those creatures, for very good reason
Wait for vapor from the wreck of the Viscont and the Comet

And because their totem has never been able to bring
To their feet the Boeing or DC 4
They can only dream of hijackings and bird accidents

Where are you, Melody, and your wrecked body?
Is it haunting the archipelagos where the sirens live?
Or is it attached to the cargo plane whose siren of alarm
Has become silent?
Did you stay with the plane?

Adrift on the currents, have you already touched
Those bright corals of the Guinean Coast
Where indigenous magicians act in vain?
Who still hope for smashed up planes

Having nothing more to lose, nor a God in whom to believe
They give me the meaningless desire
To pray, like them, to the night cargo planes

And I hold onto the hope of an air disaster
That would bring Melody back to me
A young girl turned away from the attraction of the stars

Then, after a pause, we return to a moment from the album’s opening track, when the narrator picks the girl up off the street and she first tells him her name. From there, the angels rise once again, the spirit of sexual conquest filling the air through a surge of organ, strings, and timpani, for a man who will never again experience such dark, forbidden fulfillment. It may not be the listener’s idea of a good time, but it worked for him at a time when he was all but lost. And now it’s gone forever.

No one but Serge Gainsbourg, an artist of outrageous contradictions, could have managed such a disquieting revelation. No one but Gainsbourg could have even imagined it, let alone pulled it off so magnificently. To me, that’s the mark of genius, and “Histoire De Melody Nelson” is one of the greatest album of all time.

Download: "Histoire De Melody Nelson" (1971) by Serge Gainsbourg, in its entirety. It’s well worth it, however, to pick up Light in the Attic’s deluxe package, the booklet for which includes translated lyrics, a couple of lengthy essays, and an interview with the man himself. And it sounds terrific.

Paul Tatara