Deux légendes (Two Legends)
PodcastsAug 9, 2020
In 1969, I was in a group. There were four of us, and in an attempt at wit, we decided to call ourselves ABCD. We had also managed to arrange two songs that represented my whole songwriting catalogue. Our manager felt we were ripe enough and booked us for a recording session to produce a 45 single with the two tunes. Pour l'amour, y a du temps, a hippy-inspired peace anthem would be on side A and Demain, nous revenons à Tijuana. a little nod at the counter culture of the late sixties, on side B.
So, bright and early, one Saturday morning, we showed up at a little studio in a basement bungalow in Ville-Brossard. Unbeknownst to us, we had just walked into André Perry's first recording studio. André was a well-known drummer on the Montréal jazz scene and he had decided to get into recording which was in its infancy in Québec. André would later go on to open Son-Québec, a premier multi-track facility in Montréal before moving on to build and operate the legendary facility in Morin Heights known world-wide as Le Studio.
It's at Le Studio, that we would later cross paths again with André when he gave our band, Lougarou a major break, and produced our debut album.
But on that morning, what really caught our eye was the huge framed photograph at the foot of the stairs. It was that iconic picture of John and Yoko with their hair intertwined known as Hair Peace. The photo was signed by John Lennon: "To our good friend André, thanks for everything."
It was then that we connected the dots. André had just recorded Give Peace a Chance a few weeks earlier at the now-famous Queen Elizabeth Hotel Bed-in for Peace. We pinched ourselves because we knew we has stepped into rock history when we walked down those stairs and rubbed shoulders with two legends!