THE TROMBINOSCOPE
BRASSENS (Georges-Charles) poet, musician-performer born October 22, 1921 in This which was written as in the verse of La femme d'Hector: “What is this benevolent fairy? ". The demonstrative adjective being as widespread as malaïgue in the pond some summers, the town councilors decided in 1927 to change the spelling which became Sète. A metamorphosis that the poet deplored in Jeanne Martin and which gave birth to his “first sadness at Olympio” in reference to Victor Hugo's poem.
In a popular district of the city, Elvira Brassens née Dagrosa (1887-1962) gave birth to a little boy. Her husband, Jean-Louis (1881-1965), a mason, like her father was in Castelnaudary, and her daughter Simone (1912-1994) whom she had from a first marriage cut short by the war, were waiting in the dining room. to eat. The first gesture of the bambino would have been, according to the few witnesses present, to turn around, fearing to see a brown wave falling on the continent. A first libertarian reflex that will be followed by many others. At the same time, in the four corners of the globe, dashing nationalist and communist parties were springing up, sprightly and cheerful. Nothing seemed to prefigure the great hecatombs, fascists, Bolsheviks and Maoists that were to follow. "Let's die for ideas, okay, but a violent death" seemed to be the leitmotif of ideologues of all persuasions.
The young Brassens made his first weapons of rebellion without gnosis in chestnuts between Seto districts. His battalion of the Caraussane periodically carved croupier fiefs to that of the upper quarter which turned upside down. As a good guerrilla, he did not hesitate to resort to small thefts around him which were worth a suspended sentence and a family banishment.
A few rhyme books in his pocket, his head full of refrains and refrains, the young Brassens reached the capital without fear of losing his soul there. Bohemian life stretched out arms that were certainly stunted, but they warmed his body like a bonfire. And the young poet was not slow, from the top of his Tower of miracles, to deliver, At the wind, Sword strokes in the water. Subsequently, his anarchist blood was only half-turned when nazillons, reassembled like Aryan cuckoo clocks by their national-socialist party, decided to turn Europe upside down. Almost overnight, Paris was written in Gothic letters, while our poet only practiced cursive. This impropriety will make him join the sto to prevent his poetry from suffering from a fraktur.
The stupidest of all wars, that of 14-18, was then in the head who refused to throw themselves body and arms into the next one. Did the slaughter of the Der des Ders suggest to this generation to put off a salvo until tomorrow? Many were those who, like Brassens, rose up against all forms of widowmakers. Let's not blame them, he was behind the war widows. Elvira herself was one of them, before remarrying Jean-Louis Brassens, Georges' father. It's the only time you can sniff a Danke schön to the revengeful Teutons. Without them, the father of Les Deux oncles would not have been born...
Returning from Basdorf, Brassens decides to found the Prehistoric Party with a horn of Auroch as standard bearer and a plesiosaur for secretary. Advocating a return to primitive life and aiming to make fun of political parties, he didn't have time to throw the slightest flint at them. The barefoot party turned into Cri des gueux, a newspaper-manifesto which, for lack of 2 in the typo case, only published one number. Anti-militarist and anti-clerical, he takes the wrong and cause to cut the bourgeois weeds and for the libertarian spirit. The newspaper of the Anarchist Federation, Le Libertaire, hired him as a proofreader and opened its columns to him for virulent diatribes tinged with black humor, under the pseudonym (among others) of Géo Cédille. The proofreader that he was must have thought that this piercing trowel under the c looked like a tribute to his mason father. The bad boy, having once become a bit of a thief, suspected that he was being taught a chilling lesson. Although disappointed, the father gave him no menacing look, preferring instead to hand him his tobacco pouch. Taken aback, the child found that this way of doing things commanded respect.
From cedillas to syllables, the violence of his prose having been fatal to him, Geo finds all the time to complete his novel The Moon Listens to the Doors, stamped nrf, the acronym of the NATO Reaction Force and before that, that by Gallimard, more oriented towards fiction than friction. His law firm having advised him not to crumple the honorable cover, Geo split a missive - in fact an application form for amnesty in vogue at the time - to the publisher. Which, against all odds, was content to make a bookmark.
His talents as a poet and musician having reached maturity, Georges Brassens decided to share them with the fairer sex, with the great lady of Jeanne, his muse of the first verses. After stripping one or two pretty flowers, the repentant bad subject meets Joha Heiman (1911-1999), an Estonian whom he will call Pupchen. His appetite for nicknames had made him choose the German translation of little doll, püppchen, for an obvious reason: the two syllables are easy to harangue from one house to another, Brassens still not having resolved to the principle of cohabitation. Witnesses affirm that on days in a sly mood, he pushed the invective until a “Pupchen de toi! worthy of a foul-mouthed boor.
In a Florimont cul-de-sac that smacks of misery, the anarchist traces his days to the revolution of the Earth around the sun, which has risen since early morning, slept with darkness. Noah's Ark collects animals without company, stray dogs, scruffy cats, flying birds. The bridge was burned there during the war, but in this badly patched cul-de-sac, Georges Brassens found his way. The Jeanne illuminates this merciful city. Big candy — Brassens, avid of nicknames, nicknamed her so for his mania for filling his belly with the children of the universe — Big candy, I say, confesses a penchant for humanity. Marcel, her man, for the bottle.
Jeanne Planche (1891-1968) was born Jeanne Marie Le Bonniec in Lanvollon, in the Côtes-d'Armor. Daughter of a road mender and a housewife among nine brothers and sisters, she moved to Paris before the first attacks of 1914. Jeanne lived with her husband, Marcel Planche, at the bottom of a miserable trench without water or electricity, Impasse Florimont in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. Brassens was parachuted into the capital in 1940, at the same time as the German army. Hosted by his aunt Antoinette Dagrosa in her pension rue d'Alésia, he met Jeanne there for sewing work. She worked miracles with the holed pockets of Sétois, going so far as to hide it in her petticoats on her return from sto to escape informers. He curled up there for 22 years to lay his most beautiful songs including La Cane de Jeanne and Chanson pour l'Auvergnat dedicated to the couple who shared his life. On October 24, 1968, he reunited with his friend René Fallet (1927-1983) who was watching over Jeanne after a gallbladder operation. She asked him several times to kiss her and was prescribed champagne. Jeanne was 77 years old.
Jeanne has welcomed Jo since 1944, when he was trying to make the poet rhyme with hiding in the shadow of the Kommandantur. He will live more than twenty years in a household of three. Its charm operates on the one to whom one obeys. A bohemian life out of time to devour the great poets and thinkers failing to fill its belly. One morning, Brassens opens martyred shutters on a liberated Paris. Shortly before, Jeanne had lost her brother, a resistance fighter arrested by the Gestapo and beheaded with an axe. To die for ideas will be dedicated to him. Until 1952, Brassens is notoriously brooding. He wrote to Roger Toussenot (1926-1964), his anarchist philosopher friend, alias Huon de la Saône in reference to Nerval: “There is no sick person at a dead end, but a neurasthenic, me. This disease of the soul charms me. I don't believe in guns, though. Neither with the rope, nor with the poison…”. Poems and novels are being snubbed. As for the auditions, they are kindly praised… to scorn.
His guitar with quivering strings under his arm, he jolting petrified by stage fright, sweating from vaults to cabarets. The interpreter would have preferred to become a wholesaler of songs for star retailers, which he found much more authorized to sell his verses. A final audition, on January 24, 1952, won by his Sète friends from Paris Match, Roger Thérond* and Victor Laville*, brought him to meet a blonde siren with a hoarse and elegant voice, Patachou.
* Trombinoscopies in a future volume
The rookie launches into his audition under the intrigued gaze of Patachou. A few titles later, she is won over and offers him her audience. Brassens instead suggests that she interpret her songs herself. On the first evening, she rubbed shoulders with Brave Margot and Les Amoureux des bancs publics, then asked her audience to discover the author. A two-legged guitar comes out of the curtain tottering and sings Le Gorille et P. de toi, which the best-mouthed Patachou could not interpret. The last note soaring, the public, hitherto experienced in ditties, discovered a flowering cactus under an auroch's skin, striking out with a shortened tongue diatribes from another time. As intimidating as he is intimidated, Brassens has been arousing curiosity ever since. The director of the Théâtre des Trois baudets, Jacques Canetti, invited to come and listen to him, finds him amazing and will urge the phonographic firm Philips to have the pornographer sign a solid gold contract.
Patachou, born Henriette Ragon (1918-2015), owes her nickname, not to Brassens, but to a brief career as a pastry chef in the provinces and to her restaurant-pastry-cabaret in Montmartre. His cheeky Parisian register first made neighboring slums happy under the name of Lady Patachou before his became the unmissable cabaret of Parisian nightlife. She shamelessly cut the ties of celebrities or anonymous people there and hung the trophies from the ceiling, leaving the circumcised collars hanging from her lips.
Angry at not having been able to baptize her with a nickname of his own, did Brassens call her in private by her first name Henriette, or shorter, by a duly chirped Riette? The answer belongs to the esgourdes attached to the walls. One would be tempted to subscribe to the diminutive Manceau for two reasons. Before him, Rabelais (1483 or 1494-1553) praised riette which he called "brown pig jam". On the other hand, among the Brassens, charcuterie held off pastries. Which were not really current in the impasse.
Distressed to see a Brassens so uncomfortable on stage, the double bass player in the cabaret orchestra spontaneously offers to accompany him. The duo got off to a good start, Pierre Nicolas had no idea that he would have Brassens' back as his horizon for more than thirty years. Notorious coincidence, he was born in the very place where Brassens lives, impasse Florimont. He lived there until he was nine years old, then married the double bass a little later, after dressing up with the violin. Born September 11, 1921, Pierre Nicolas will push the accompaniment beyond the grave, with the celebration of the centenaries of two faithful musicians, a few days apart.
The recording of the Gorilla and the Bad Subject Repented at the Salle Pleyel studio thrilled the technicians who were more accustomed to the swing of Claude Luter and Sidney Bechet than to the waddling of a gorilla in front of a judge. Nine other songs will be released on 78 rpm discs, including The Umbrella which will be distinguished by the Charles-Cros Academy the following year by obtaining the Grand Prix du Disque 1954.
On April 6, 1952, Brassens made his first television set on the rtf, the national television channel born three years earlier. The approximately 40,000 cathode-ray tube monitors deployed in France that year—less than 1% of households—broadcast their first anarchist in terrorized bourgeois salons. He will then harangue his Bad Reputation in front of the public of the Alhambra. Then he made his first tour in France, Switzerland and Belgium, with Patachou and the Jacques Brothers.
On the eve of Christmas of that fateful year 1952, nine songs were recorded for the album Patachou chante Brassens: The prayer, The lovers of the public benches, Brave Margot, I have an appointment with you, Maman papa (interpreted in duet with Brassens), The Butterfly Hunt, The Handyman (exclusively), The Croquants and The Legend of the Nun by Victor Hugo. The stages see their ramps firing on all cylinders for the troubadour who now alternates cabarets with singing tours between Bobino, the Olympia and abroad.
Endowed with a certain grip, Brassens nevertheless had difficulty in managing an ascending popularity. His first big poster will be for L'Olympia, directed since 1954 by an avid Bruno Coquatrix. Its new director had great ambitions with, among others, Brassens in sight. After seeing him at Patachou, he granted him star status in March of that year. The prestige of the Olympia will arrive the following year with the triumph of Charles Trénet, avant-garde artist, envied and respected. Barbara will make her farewells on stage there, as well as Jacques Brel whose only version from Amsterdam will be recorded there during his concert on October 17, 1964, with the great orchestra of the hall.
Two years earlier, when he periodically suffered from renal colic, Brassens began one of his sober concerts at the Olympia with the sole backdrop of his chair and his double bass player Pierre Nicolas. Pressed by an intractable Coquatrix, he honors each of the dates until Christmas Eve, which all end, as soon as the curtain falls, with a stampede in an ambulance. Revanchists, his kidney stones made him remove the Olympia from his list of rooms that had the favor of his jigs. On December 31, he learns of the death of the Italian, a nickname he gave to his mother. He returns to Sète the same day before going to perform at the Alcazar in Marseille. "For the first time, tonight, she sees me sing", he will say.
Despite everything, he continued his singing tours in Paris and abroad: Switzerland and Rome in 1958, Belgium and North Africa in 1959, Quebec in 1961… At a frantic pace, only caught up in his calculations. At the impasse Florimont, Jeanne suffers from these long absences made inevitable by a growing celebrity. To cut short her loneliness, she remarried at 75 with a crisp 37-year-old. Brassens, bothered by this assortment, leaves the impasse.
In the fall of 1966, he appeared at the Théâtre national populaire with Juliette Gréco in the first part, the tnp that Jean Vilar* directed between 1951 and 1963. Every evening, he made a plea to be buried at the beach of Sète and puts forward a Health Bulletin in response to the rumors distilled by folliculars in search of headlines. With Le Pluriel, he put his uniqueness to music and distanced himself from the great revolts of 1968 which he anticipated, going against the current of the Germanopratine intelligentsia. Wardroom songs had more of his favor than revolutionary songs. Meanwhile, the French Academy awarded him the Grand Prize for poetry for all of his masonry.
* Read trombinoscopy
On March 20, 1977, the day of the last one in Bobino, his "factory", no one suspected that he would never tread the boards there again. Georges Brassens swallows his quid on October 29, 1981 in Saint-Gély-du-Fesc (Hérault). He is buried in Le Py de Sète cemetery, in the family vault which Joha Heiman, his pupchen, will join in 1999.
The trombine of Georges Brassens is like a straight Gallic rooster perched on its large spurs, mustache and bushy sideburns, between which the mocking eye has never hidden. See the portrait in foot (of nose) in the Blog note. A broad forehead that one would like plumed with a minstrel's feather hat, Brassens had no need to force the line to forge the attraction. But today's folliculars don't care about these subtleties. Our press cartoonists necessarily practice the big line. A Brassens on the cover with, escaping from its pipe, a fumarole in the shape of a middle finger, it must sell well. Asked shortly before the marathon celebrations of his centenary, Victor Laville had replied, anticipating the parrots perorations perched on their fanfare boat: “Brassens would have said why not, if it amuses them. It was all the same to him."
