“We didn’t write songs with the record in mind. We wrote songs to get the shows going,” explains Jean Millaire, who will be inducted this Wednesday into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. Meeting with the man who, for more than 25 years, provided a presence as impassive as he was solid alongside the greatest Quebec rocker, the one who goes and whom he never stopped calling Marjolène.
“It’s a lot of fun, yeah,” concludes Jean Millaire as we leave in front of Bistro à Jojo, the blues bar on rue Saint-Denis which has long been the second salon of Offenbach and Corbeau and on whose small stage he still sometimes appears with his partner Andrée Dupré.
Well, fun, what? To be inducted, with Marjo, into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, an institution he didn’t know existed before receiving an email that he initially took for a scam. “It’s great fun, even if I’ve never done it for the honors and the prizes. All I wanted to do was play guitar. »
After seizing every opportunity to practice on his friends’ instruments, Jean turned at age 17 to someone he rarely spoke to: his father. A character worthy of Don Draper in the series Mad Men, had left his wife and six children stranded in a four and a half Saint-Michel, in order to start a new life in Santa Monica, California, where he worked in large hotels.
Guilt no doubt helping, his wish will be granted.
From 1968 to 1974, Millaire played in the blues rock group Expedition, whose only album (1970), recorded in the gymnasium of the Cégep du Vieux Montréal, is today a collector’s item. “It sounds terrible, but all of a sudden we had a record, we existed, and that’s everything I ever hoped for. »
With his friend Jim Zeller, Jean Millaire then accompanied the Detroit guitarist Shakey Al, then joined the ranks of Offenbach for eight months, in 1978, while the group eked out a living and defended in the brown bars of the province next door the tracks from his first English album, Never Too Tender. “I had pitched song ideas to Gerry, but he was reluctant to try new stuff. »
It was during the recording sessions for Stephen Faulkner’s  horse given we don’t look at the bridle that bassist Michel Lamothe suggested that he come and take a listen to what his new group, Corbeau, was preparing in the studio. Millaire quickly replaced the guitarist, Rick Haworth, whose schedule was overflowing.
The Raven singer? A certain Marjolène, with whom Millaire had already worked on the creation of a musical revue by François Guy. “The first time I saw her, she looked like a secretary,” he recalls, with the same discreet smile that sometimes beamed across his face during a solo.
“It was normal, she was a secretary in Bois-de-Boulogne. Then when I saw her again later, she was wearing a leopard suit, she had her big curly hair. It was love at first sight. »
Wild Cats, À bout de ciel, Provocante: listening again to Marjo’s catalog is to see to what extent several of the melodic hooks of her greatest hits are six-string hooks. A child of the blues, Jean Millaire is a guitarist capable of impressing, but who first and foremost pays allegiance to the song he plays and which must be served.
In a guitar solo, “there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end, it’s not right [he mimes a cascade of sterile notes] and then you stop. You have to start attacking, then leave space, so that it breathes, and so that it ends in an apotheosis.” “I have always constructed my solos as if I were singing, as if I were telling a story. »
Millaire usually provided Marjo with a sequence of chords or a riff, to which she combined lyrics and a melody. His partner also sometimes gave him orders. “In love, it was Marjolène who said to me: “Make me music in the Flashdance style. » I know I know, it was from Slave to Love [by Bryan Ferry]. Provocative, it was a bit like our Hot Legs [Rod Stewart]. »
After more than 25 years of collaboration, Jean Millaire and Marjo each went their separate ways following the release of Turquoise (2005), the iconic rocker’s latest album. The guitarist does not exclude that a musical reunion will happen one day, but in doubt, Marjo being tormented by a ton of anxiety at the idea of coming up with new choruses. This is because there is a sensitive, worried Marjo, the polar opposite of the intrepid and electric woman who appears when the spotlights come on.
“There is Marjo and there is Marjolène,” observes Jean. Marjo is her character. She takes the energy of the audience and transforms it into something bigger, more beautiful. With Marjo, you never know what will happen. »
“But I never called her Marjo. I always called her Marjolène. »
