Le Chat Bleu | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | 1980 | |||
Recorded | L'Aquarium, Paris Music Farm, New York | |||
Genre | Rock, Cajun, soul, Latin, cabaret | |||
Length | 30:57 | |||
Label | Capitol | |||
Producer | Willy DeVille, Steve Douglas | |||
Mink DeVille chronology | ||||
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Le Chat Bleu is the third album by the rock band Mink DeVille, released in 1980. The album received critical acclaim and elevated lead singer and composer Willy DeVille to star status. The Rolling Stone critics' poll ranked Le Chat Bleu the fifth best album of 1980, [1] and music historian Glenn A. Baker declared it the tenth best rock album of all time. The album cover is a photo of Willy's first wife Toots Deville's tattoo on her shoulder. [2]
Le Chat Bleu was recorded in Paris. "I wanted that (French) sound," Willy DeVille told Rolling Stone. "French records are so much more vivid. I knew what I was going for—this record was my dream." [3]
For the album, bandleader Willy DeVille dismissed the original members of Mink DeVille except for guitarist Louis X. Erlanger in favor of new musicians, including rhythm section Jerry Scheff (bass) and Ron Tutt (drums), who had recently toured with Elvis Presley. Instead of Jack Nitzsche, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Steve Douglas, another associate of Phil Spector, served as producer. Le Chat Bleu was the last Mink DeVille album to feature any original members of the band besides Willy DeVille.
Willy DeVille wrote some songs with Doc Pomus. As well as classic rock ("Savoir Faire", "Lipstick Traces"), DeVille delved into Cajun music (the accordion-dominated dance music of French-speaking Louisiana) and the French cabaret tradition for the album. The album includes a cover of "Bad Boy", the 1957 hit by the Jive Bombers. Jean-Claude Petit supervised the string arrangements of some songs. Joel Dorn did the remixing.
In Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus, Alex Halberstadt wrote about Le Chat Bleu:
(Willy DeVille) created a record that sounded like nothing that had come before... It was clear that Willy had realized his fantasy of a new, completely contemporary Brill Building record. To the symphonic sweetness of the Drifters he added his own Gallic romance and, in his vocal, a measure of punk rock's Bowery grit. Doc was elated when he heard it. Thinking they'd signed a new wave band, Capitol didn't know what to do with Willy's rock and roll chanson and shelved it for a year. When it was finally released in 1980, Le Chat Bleu, remixed by Joel Dorn, made nearly every critic's list of the year's best records. [4]
In his 2012 autobiography, bassist Jerry Scheff wrote about the album, "In 1979 I was invited by my friend Steve Douglas, the saxophone player, to go to Paris to make an album with Mink DeVille. Steve was co-producing the album and had invited Ronnie Tutt to play drums. I don't know how Steve came to the impression that Ronnie and I would fit in this scenario, but I have to say that the end result, Le Chat Bleu, is one of my favorite rock albums of all time... Willy's songs had a heavy Hispanic influence as well as a hint of Cajun music. Put all of that together with street-corner doo-wop, accordion playing, and Willy's wonderful velvet voice and what you get, in my opinion, is great rock 'n 'roll." [5]
Capitol Records, Mink DeVille's record company, was not happy with Le Chat Bleu, believing that American audiences were incapable of listening to songs with accordions or lavish string arrangements; consequently Capitol in 1980 released the album only in Europe. "That really broke my heart," DeVille said, "That record was my Starry Night . Records are like children; it's like having a baby. Your blood is on those tracks, and you do the best you can. They threw dust in my face. To them the music was too avant-garde. They said, 'We really don't know what to do with this. We've never heard anything like this before.' They didn't even know what Cajun music was." [6]
Reported Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone:
Despite DeVille's indisputable chops, Capitol was less than elated when he elected to cut Le Chat Bleu in Paris... And when Willy DeVille returned—many thousands of dollars later—bearing a record sprinkled with Cajun-style accordions and washboards, an unseemly number of ballads and vivid string arrangements by Jean-Claude Petit (who once worked with celebrated French chanteuse Edith Piaf), the label was flabbergasted, refused to release the album and dropped the artist. Burgeoning import sales finally forced Capitol to change its mind, but with DeVille now signed to Atlantic, Le Chat Bleu is probably a dead issue. Which is a shame, because it's one of the year's most impressive discs. [7]
DeVille told Leap in the Dark:
On Le Chat Bleu we had all these great people involved, you know, and we thought we had something great. I came back to America, and my label at that time said, "Well, we think we should put it on the shelf for a while." This was right before Christmas for God's sake when you know people are going to be buying stuff, so I asked them what the problem was. They said they had never heard anything like it before and didn't know what to do with it. We had Charles Dumont, Elvis's goddamned rhythm section, and they say they've never heard anything like it. I was heartbroken and angry. Finally Maxine Schmidt from my distributor in France (EMI Paris) phones and he says, "Willy what's going on?" So I told him. He said don't worry we'll release it over here. We did, and then it became a matter of not what are we going to do with Willy Deville, but who the hell let him get away. As an import it was wracking up great sales here. Capitol finally went and released a copy of it, but never did too much work on it." [8]
For the American release of Le Chat Bleu, Capitol substituted "Turn You Every Way but Loose", a rocker, for "Mazurka", a zydeco song written by Queen Ida.
The shoulder and panther tattoo on the cover of Le Chat Bleu belong to Toots, DeVille's first wife. [3]
Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [9] |
Christgau's Record Guide | B− [10] |
Smash Hits | 7/10 [11] |
Writing for Smash Hits in 1980, David Hepworth said DeVille "still sings like an angel who's fallen on hard times". Hepworth described the album as "patchier than anything [DeVille's] done before but the delights are nothing if not delightful". [11] Critic Robert Christgau, who had previously called DeVille "the songpoet of greaser nostalgia," did not care for Le Chat Bleu. He wrote sarcastically about the album, "Goils — they break your heart, run off with your coke, mess up your drug deals, and take your count when you go to the blood bank. Rhythm and blues was never like this, so maybe he's a punk after all. But more likely he's one more struggling professional musician." [10]
Neil McCormick, a music critic for The Daily Telegraph , wrote about the album 29 years after its release, "Whenever I am taken with one of those bouts of nostalgia where I am compelled to sit and flick through my old vinyl, there's a very high chance that Le Chat Bleu will wind up on my stereo. It is a perfect album, from first track to last, and how many of those really exist?" [12]
All songs written by Willy DeVille, unless otherwise noted.
Jerome Solon Felder, known professionally as Doc Pomus, was an American blues singer and songwriter. He is best known as the co-writer of many rock and roll hits. Pomus was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer in 1992, the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1992), and the Blues Hall of Fame (2012).
Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He first came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, and went on to work with the Rolling Stones and Neil Young, among others. He also worked extensively in film scores, notably for the films Performance, The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In 1983, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for co-writing "Up Where We Belong" with Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Loup Garou is an album released in 1995 by Willy DeVille. First released in Europe in 1995 on the EastWest label, it was released the following year in the United States on the Discovery label. It was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by John Philip Shenale, who also produced DeVille’s Backstreets of Desire album.
Willy DeVille was an American singer and songwriter. During his thirty-five-year career, first with his band Mink DeVille (1974–1986) and later on his own, DeVille created original songs rooted in traditional American musical styles. He worked with collaborators from across the spectrum of contemporary music, including Jack Nitzsche, Doc Pomus, Dr. John, Mark Knopfler, Allen Toussaint, and Eddie Bo. Latin rhythms, blues riffs, doo-wop, Cajun music, strains of French cabaret, and echoes of early-1960s uptown soul can be heard in DeVille's work.
Steven Douglas Kreisman was an American saxophonist and flautist. He was a member of the famed Los Angeles session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. As a Los Angeles session musician, he worked with Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys and Ry Cooder.
Mink DeVille was a rock band founded in 1974, known for its association with early punk rock bands at New York's CBGB nightclub and for being a showcase for the music of Willy DeVille. The band recorded six albums in the years 1977 to 1985, after which it disbanded the next year. Except for frontman Willy DeVille, the original members of the band played only on the first two albums. For the remaining albums and for tours, Willy DeVille assembled musicians to play under the name "Mink Deville". After 1985, when Willy DeVille began recording and touring under his own name, his backup bands were sometimes called "The Mink DeVille Band", an allusion to the earlier Mink Deville name.
Coup de Grâce is the fourth album by the rock band Mink DeVille, released in 1981. The album represented a departure for the band, as frontman Willy DeVille dismissed the only other remaining original member of the band, guitarist Louis X. Erlanger, and hired Helen Schneider's backup band to record the album. Moreover, the album was recorded for Atlantic.
Cabretta, known as Mink DeVille in the United States, was the 1977 debut album by Mink DeVille. It peaked at number 186 on the Billboard 200 chart and was voted the 29th best album of 1977 in the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop critics' poll. A single from the album, "Spanish Stroll", was a top-20 hit in the UK.
Return to Magenta, issued in 1978, is the second album by the rock band Mink DeVille. The album was the last to feature all the original members of the band. For this album the band was joined by Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Steve Douglas on sax and Dr. John on piano, who would later collaborate with leadsinger Willy DeVille after his move to New Orleans.
Where Angels Fear to Tread is the fifth studio album by the rock band Mink DeVille. It was released in 1983, and was the second album Mink DeVille recorded for Atlantic Records, and Atlantic brought in two in-house producers, Howard Albert and Ron Albert, to produce the album.
Sportin’ Life is the sixth and final studio album by the rock band Mink DeVille, released in 1985. Since the band's third album, 1981's Le Chat Bleu, when the original members of the band departed, lead singer and composer Willy DeVille had been assembling musicians to record and tour under the name Mink DeVille. After Sportin’ Life, Willy DeVille began recording and touring under his own name.
Miracle is an album by Willy DeVille. Recorded in 1987, it was the first album that Willy DeVille recorded under his own name. Prior to Miracle, DeVille recorded six albums with the band Mink DeVille, the last four of which were really solo albums by Willy DeVille in that no members of the original band played on the four albums.
Victory Mixture is a 1990 album by Willy DeVille. The album consists of cover versions of New Orleans R&B and soul classics by DeVille’s musical idols. Trouser Press said about the album, “A rootsy covers collection, Victory Mixture provides a welcome antidote to Miracle's misguided modernity, making the most of the singer's relocation to New Orleans with backup from such local legends as Allen Toussaint, Eddie Bo and Dr. John.”
Backstreets of Desire is an album by Willy DeVille. It was recorded in various Los Angeles recording studios in 1992. To make the album, DeVille was joined by many prominent musicians, including Dr. John, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Zachary Richard, Jim Gilstrap, Freebo, Efrain Toro, and Jimmy Zavala.
Willy DeVille Live is a live recording of Willy DeVille and the Mink DeVille Band. It was recorded on June 16–17, 1993 at The Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, New York City, and in October 1993, at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. It was released in Europe on December 1, 1993 in Europe by the French label Fnac Music.
Crow Jane Alley is an album by Willy DeVille. It was recorded in 2004 in Los Angeles. For this album, DeVille was joined by members of the Chicano rock band Quetzal, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, and Peruvian Afro-Cuban jazz drummer Alex Acuña, among other prominent musicians. Crow Jane Alley was produced by John Philip Shenale, the third album Shenale produced for DeVille.
Pistola is the last album by Willy DeVille, released on Mardi Gras day 2008 as a nod to DeVille's musical roots in New Orleans. The album was recorded in Los Angeles with Brian Ray, Lon Price, The Valentine Brothers, and other musicians who had played with DeVille for years. For this album, DeVille borrowed bassist Davey Faragher and drummer Pete Thomas from Elvis Costello's backup band, the Imposters. John Philip Shenale produced the album, his fourth production effort for Willy DeVille.
The discography of American singer and songwriter Willy DeVille includes, as well as his solo recordings, recordings released by his band Mink DeVille in the period from 1977 to 1985. It consists of fourteen studio albums, three live albums, fifteen compilation albums, twenty-two singles, and one extended play (EP).
Paul James is a Juno Award-winning blues guitarist, vocalist and songwriter.
Toots Deville was known as the wife of musician Willy Deville, and for her work as his personal manager and association with the band Mink DeVille during the 1970s. She was also a model and appeared in rock magazines like Creem. Her outlandish behavior and appearance made her a controversial figure in the music world for most of her life.