“I have ideas all the time. Very often, they are bad, so I don’t show them to you, but my head won’t stop,” declared Dan Bigras in an interview with The Sun.
When the desire to sing with her boyfriend Gerry Boulet came to her, “like a flash”, this idea eclipsed all her other projects.
But how do you sing with someone who died almost 35 years ago?
From different recordings – as many live that studio -, the director isolated the voice of Offenbach’s singer by using artificial intelligence.
“Gerry sings and the rest of us accompany him. We make vocal harmonies, we play with it, the audience sings along… exactly as if they were on the stagebut he is on a screen,” explains Dan Bigras who is accompanied by the members of his group in this new show.
Great coordination is required to be able to sing with this recorded voice and obtain a quality result.
“I am no longer able to see my painting studio. I spent too much time in there syncing stuff,” says the Montreal singer-songwriter.
This is not the first time that Dan Bigras has played with Gerry Boulet’s recordings without the latter’s presence. Some time after his death, it was to him that the rocker’s widow turned to produce Jezebel (1994).
“He had just recorded voice and piano”, specifies the director who was afraid of committing “the damned sacrilege of fucking one of his songs”. A little fear resurfaced while working on This voice : Dan and Gerry, our story.
Despite the technical aspect of the show which kept him busy for almost two years, he specifies that it is a “show rock” and not a “show of technique”.
We hear several songs by Gerry Boulet and Offenbach in addition to compositions by Dan Bigras which were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the rocker or which are directly linked to their history.
“I think I am recreating a little bit of this evening which changed my life forever…” reflects the artist, referring to his meeting with Gerry Boulet, in 1982, at the Brasserie du Roi in Longueuil.
“I don’t know where I would be without him.”
«Son esti a big smile… he does it to you once and you never forget it again,” says Dan Bigras, remembering that evening.
Gerry Boulet, who then lived in Longueuil, was looking for a pianist for the recording of his first solo album, Almost 40 years of blues (1984).
“He came to see me play and he loved it. He climbed onto the stage and we jammed together. We had to play all of Offenbach’s songs about five times each,” says the pianist who was already familiar with this repertoire.
“A few years before, I had heard The voice that I have and I was literally screaming in my tank. Poetry and rock… when I was young, that mix didn’t exist. It was Gerry who pushed this.”
— And Bigras
Seeing midnight approaching, Dan Bigras thought that this moment of euphoria was soon coming to an end. But no. The owner of the brewery himself continued to send beers to the musicians after his establishment’s closing time.
Later that night, his new friend invites him to come and present his compositions to him at 10:30 a.m., in just a few hours. It was just a matter of time for Dan Bigras to miss this meeting with destiny…
Upon learning of his creations, Gerry Boulet told him that his music was “sickening”, but that his lyrics were “rotten”.
“He was absolutely right,” admits Dan Bigras, who fell in love with the honesty and kindness of the Offenbach singer.
“I’m a guy who likes to be nice in life, but I’m not polite. I don’t like coded fake kindness. It’s feelings kindness. We shouldn’t learn that as politeness. And Gerry, he’s not polite, in the good sense of the word,” explains the artist.
Gerry Boulet died on July 18, 1990 at the age of 44. (La Presse Archives)
“He’s kind, he has a lot of heart, but he tells it like it is. All the time. So all the time that we would have wasted talking, well, we talked about real business,” he adds.
If the two rockers quickly became friends, Dan Bigras specifies that it was above all a musical friendship. In the eight years they dated before the rocker’s death, they only talked about music.
“If, at that time, he had voted for, I don’t know, George Bush, I would never have known. We didn’t talk about anything other than music. There were two of us esti mad about music,” insists Dan Bigras.
Gerry Boulet encouraged him not to be ashamed of his passion for rock and blues, and put together an elite team – with Michel Rivard as lyricist – to record his first songs.
“I don’t know where I would be without him,” concludes the artist who offers himself the pleasure of singing again with his mentor and friend.
This voice : Dan and Gerry, our story is presented on January 17 at the Palace Theater in Saguenay, January 18 at the Salle Albert-Rousseau in Quebec, February 22 at the Théâtre du Cégep de Trois-Rivière and March 21 at the Salle Odyssée in Gatineau.
