Music sucked in Pattaya. Old farangs sing HOTEL CALIFORNIA and bar girls dance to boy band love ballads, while Thai bands play dinosaur rock for drunken tourists.
Nothing was wrong with a bad reprise of SMOKE ON THE WATER, except I once hung out in nightclubs and bars in which music meant more than a tune you can sing while drinking beer with your mates, hoping the Viagra will work with your new missus. Pattaya certainly doesn’t have a bar close to Max’s Kansas City, where you could see the Jam, MC5, or Iggy.
Not even close and none of the geezers here care, because most Pattaya farangs’ mental playlist was determined by whatever was on their car radio i.e. muzak for 9-to-5 existences and none of them ever heard Serge Gainsbourg’s HISTOIRE DE MELODIE NELSEN.
And that’s too bad, because this twenty-six minute masterpiece set a high-water mark in 1971.
Forget the sexy French lyrics.
Forget Jane Birkin’s breathy interpretation, for her daughter, Charlotte, was sexier in LEMON INCEST.
Dig how the guitar and bass weaved a groove unattainable in this modern world on pre-packaged CDs, as Serge crooned his tale of a Lolita sans the fear of moral outrage. This concept album wiped the floor with the Beatles’ SERGEANT PEPPER.
But they were no longer a band in 1971, but they must have spun this record and said, “We fucked up.”
Horrible to know you will never write anything as good as HISTOIRE OF MELODIE NELSEN.
Worse is to copy the LP like Beck, a talented plagiarist, because he was no Jean-Claude Vannier, who arranged the 33 rpm disc for Serge, who was the ugliest man in Christendom, yet ended up with Jane Birkin as his sexual consort.
The two of them might have had Jimmie Page play lead guitar. That was the rumor, but the riff sounded nothing like his solos with Led Zeppelin or the Yardbirds.
Understated and raw leaving you asking for more of sixteen year-old girls on bicycles, Rolls-Royce crash, defloweration and a dirge about Melodie dying in a plane crash.
Not 9/11.
It was genius and I advised anyone with any musical taste to pick up this chef d?ouvres, for a song with the line ‘une poup?e qui perd l’quilibre, la jupe retrousse sur ses pantalons blancs’ (A doll who lost her balance, her skirt pushed up over her white leggings) wasn’t getting any radio play on the American Oldies station.
Not this year.
But I got it on right now
Midnight. Gin-tonic. Dark outside.
Melodie Nelson.
The LP should have been a big hit, except French music has failed to dent the US charts. The only excursion into the Top Ten was by the Singing Nun with her 1963 hit DOMINIQUE. The language was a problem. No teenager wants to dance to music whose lyrics need subtitles.
Tant pis or too bad, because French music has produced hundreds of great songs by Alain Bashung, Lizzie Mercier Descloux, Jane Birkin, Manu Chao, Julien Clerc, Etienne Daho, Jacno, Jacques Dutronc, France Gall, Francoise Hardy, Indochine, Marc Lavoine, Vanessa Paradis, Les Rita Mitsouko, Alain Souchon, Les t?tes raides, Tahiti 80, Telephone, Sylvie Vartan ad infinitum.
And of course Serge Gainsbourg.
Recently I searched to find their names of the musicians and someone added them to Wikpedia.
# Alan Parker – guitar
# Herbie Flowers – bass
# Douglas Wright – drums
# Alan Hawkshaw – piano
# Jean-Claude Vannier – arrangements, Orchestra Director
# Jane Birkin – vocal parts (and posed for front cover art)
A belated thanks to them for the hours of listening to a gem.
To hear Melodie Nelson go to the following URL