I did not know Karl Tremblay personally. But Karl Tremblay was my friend.
Before Motel Capri (2000) and Break syndical (2002), Quebec music was just this laughable thing that didn’t belong to us and that our parents imposed on us in the car, tuning into Rock Détente. It is thanks to the madness of the Cowboys Fringants, their childish humor, their revolt, their refusal to conform, that Quebec music entered our lives – in mine, anyway.
Karl Tremblay has become, over the years and albums, an immense performer, his friend Jean-François Pauzé highlighted this in an interview a few weeks ago. But Karl Tremblay’s greatest strength as a singer was that we were all able to project ourselves into him.
It will be tempting over the next few weeks to portray him as a giant, and I understand that, because that’s what he has been over the past few months.
We could all see ourselves, see our own friends, in each of them, in Dom the braggart, JF the rebellious one, Jérôme the handsome fool and Marie-Annick the fiery true musician, with whom we were obviously all in love.
And there was always at the front of the stage, clinging to his microphone stand like a rudder, the great Karl. Karl and his reckless courage, sometimes downright stupid, to stand in the audience or climb on a monumental stack of chairs during one of his legendary Awikatchikaën monologues.
But above all, Karl embodied the courage necessary to continue smiling, despite all the reasons not to do so, intimate or social, listed in several of the songs written by his friend JF. “Tie your tuque with a brooch / Honey, winter is going to be tough this year,” he said every evening at the beginning of Winter is Approaching, but in his company, life was always a party.
Thanks to Karl Tremblay, we quickly felt that we could go through all the seasons of our lives without having to play the game. The Cowboys had become, after all, the flagship group of an entire generation by preferring to participate in Quilles à TQS than in La fureur.
I spent my adolescence in a town called Asbestos. With my friend Lallier, I organized bus trips to the Vieux Clocher in Sherbrooke, in front of which 20 or 30 of us got off, all dressed in our t-shirts decorated with the yellow cars from the cover of Break syndical. I borrowed words from the song Un p’tit tour in one of the first love letters I wrote in my life (without success). In secondary school, during the end-of-year talent show, I played drums on a cover of En maste, with a trumpet instead of the mandolin.
And on Wednesday evening, several of these old companions appeared in my mailboxes, including trumpeter friend JP Pinard, to whom I had not spoken for almost 15 years, and who wrote me the only five essential words : you have to enjoy life.
On Wednesday evening, it was of Marie-Annick and her children that I was thinking, but it was also of all these old companions, of these guys and girls with whom I once sang The Plumber. I cried for Karl on Wednesday evening as if I were mourning one of them, one of them.
The Cowboys had this community spirit: their shows were also ours. It had never been more true than on December 30, 2003, at the Bell Centre. That a group born half as a joke in a bar in Repentigny filled the Canadian’s home, without the support of any big machine, it was their victory, but it was very much our victory.
Back at the Bell Center at the end of 2021, in the company of the same three friends who accompanied me in 2003, we made the teenage girls sitting in front of us wince, while we screamed The Shack at Hector with the intemperance of young dads who don’t go out often enough. But it was in silence that we watched them embrace during On My Shoulder. Our group had become their group.
I would have had the chance to express all my gratitude to Karl Tremblay, during the few occasions when I interviewed him, moments where each time it quickly became very clear that if this group has lasted for all these years, it is because that each of its members still cherished the presence of the others as much.
There was always a moment, in an interview with Les Cowboys Fringants, where Karl and JF persisted over an incidental detail of a not really relevant anecdote, while Marie-Annick tried to camouflage her tender exasperation and Jérôme smiled discreetly. .
Many of us on Wednesday evening noticed that, like on the hood of the car in Impala Blues, we had all accumulated a little layer of rust, that our adolescence, although already distant, had irremediably ended. It’s up to us now, we owe it to Karl, to use the rest of the road to love ourselves as much as possible.
And at the end of the road, tell me what will be left? All these moments when Karl Tremblay, in small bars as in arenas, made one of the greatest gestures of love, that of singing.
