Recently (2018) reissue by Wah Wah Records
Like most of record collector I’ve started listening and collecting music from the USA or United Kingdom.
Except for a few of the most famous figure (Gainsbourg, Polnareff, Dutronc, Hardy etc..) I’ve always avoided to listen and collect French music.
A few years ago thanks to Magic Time Guide, a French book like all the Pokora’s volumes, I’ve dwelled deeper inside the French well of music, starting with folk based music.
In this same book there was a fascinating picture of a record cover with a strange name : Long Orme.
Who is this couple ? They look like some sixties “Beautiful people” and also are very modern and can be some 21st century hipster.
I was intrigued.
As usual I needed then to find who they were and what was their music like.
A couple of years ago after finding the name of the label on which the disc was published (SonArt) I’ve quickly found a telephone number for Yves Chauvet (sound engineer, creator of the label, see interview sidebar) and after some discussion and exchange of emails I was surprised a couple of months later to receive an email from YF !
After finding that we both live near each other we’ve decided to see each other.
My first surprise was that YF looks way younger than his age, and my second surprise was that he is very friendly, warm and funny. And he rides a motorcycle !
Yves Fajnberg was born in the early fifties in Grenoble (near Lyon and the Alps) from polish jewish parents.
“When I was 16 I found out about Dylan. I saw some people playing his songs and saw that they always attracted a lot of people, who were listening religiously to them. I wanted to be like them, wanted to learn the guitar !”
“I found a teacher, his methods were laborious but at least I started to play fast. “
He then played all the usual suspects played by all young aspirant French guitarists in mid-sixties : Dylan, Donovan, and French singers like Hugues Aufray or the French-based Graeme Allright (the later two famous in France for translating respectively Dylan’s and Cohen’s songs in French).
“I was a pain to my friends then, because I needed someone to translate me all those American songs!”.
“Then I fell in love with Joan Baez with her long monotonous songs with just verses and refrain in a repetitive way. Hypnotic”.
“While getting older I’ve went from Baez to Dylan, because – and it was just before May 1968 – I felt apolitical coming from provincial bourgeois family. I didn’t need to be a rebel. That’s why I preferred Dylan then, because he started to write more poetic songs than protest songs.”
Then came the big moment : May 1968. Students and workers almost hand in hand against De Gaulle and the French politic class who represented the old world for a lot of people.
“It is difficult to image that today but in 1968 people, mostly our parents, found the Beatles’ hair way too long ! So for most of us in provincial Grenoble having long hair was like doing a real revolution. But personally I was more attracted to the artistic side of 1968, I was what we called in France a “Baba Cool” ! For me to see my bourgeois’ friends going for striked in the street with red flag et al. was always very strange and sometimes inappropriate.”
“I’ve always been more attracted to the manual work, being more of an ecologist, loving the country and living there with people etc.. We didn’t want to work in an office with our ass screw to a chair all day long ! “
“I was more attracted to the life in the country then, but as I have just obtained my baccalauréat in 1968 in went into University more to pleased my parents than myself. I’ve tried first philosophy and sociology then psychology, but I was bored.”
“In the same time I started to develop skills in sculpture, woodcraft but mainly photography and the guitar of course ! And I still love to do all those manual works today.”
“I was then attracted to a group of people who dabbled then with poetry, theatre etc… It’s there that I met Dominique Droin. It was 1969, I’ve stopped going to the university and then progress – thanks to Dominique, a great guitar player, and still is – in folk guitar sounds mainly by playing picking. With Dominique we then listen and loved some great british players like Cat Stevens and more specially John Renbourn (Dominique played a tribute to Renbourn on his solo album).”
“It was through this community, where I met also Dominique, that I finally found Marie. She was breathtaking. She was at the time with an older guy (maybe only 24 years old, but we were something like 19 !), an intense person, a philosopher. But soon we were together !”
“It’s through Yves Chauvet, a genial sound engineer, that we’ve started to record some of our songs. First was the Dominique’s album (“Wave On” on the Kiosque d’Orphée probably in 1972) and then our album a couple of years later.
I only played acoustic guitar because I couldn’t then master the electric guitar. In early seventies I’ve loved to listen to those british folk extraordinaires and also some French chanson, specially the first recordings by Veronique Sanson that we all loved deeply.”
“Since I’ve started playing the guitar I always wrote songs, more like ballads, and then in early seventies I started to compose some new songs with the voice of Marie. That’s what led us to Long Orme (which is a “clin d’oeil” to my love of working the wood from a tree (an orne) and my love of America (the animal Longhorn).”
“In 1976 we’ve parted ways with Marie and I went to live with another woman for 6 years. We lived from 1976 to maybe 1982 deep in the countryside near Grenoble. We lived in a house where there was no electricity, no telephone. Extreme conditions for young people from the French bourgeoisie ! We lived “d’amour et d’eau fraiche”.
“But then in early eighties life was getting more and more difficult in the country and I decided to go to Paris and change my life working in marketing, commercials and films – which I still do. I’ve founded a new family and never left Paris and its suburb since 1982”.
Yves Chauvet interview :
“ I was born in the suburb of Grenoble, a town called La Tronche. In my family nobody was a musician, there was just my grandad who created radios !
Musically like most of people my life changed in 1965 when I discovered “Satisfaction”. I’ve always loved to fabricate things, transistor, amps etc.. more sometimes by necessity. I think that I am a better technician and engineer than a musician.
I’ve first met Dominique Droin in 1964 or 1965 in our High School Lycée Champollion in Grenoble. He was then studying to play “As Tears Go By”. With Dominique and Patrick Chezaud, Jean-Jacques Carrichon and Joel Chinal we’ve then formed our first band The White Spirit.”
“The Dominique Droin’s album “Wave On” was recorded in 1971-1972 with Michel Vignon in a chalet in Meylan. There was 2 Revox a 8-track mixing table.”
“As for the SonArt label, it has been created for the first time with the Long Orme recordings. Long Orme was recorded in 1974-1975 and pretty quickly on 2-track Revox and a 24 input mixing table that I built myself.“
“All the SonArt record covers were print in Bernin, the etching done by a Parisian studio, and finally the pressing of the discs were done by Areacem.”
Marie Butel :
“I was born a couple of years after Yves in Argenteuil (near Paris) but spent my childhood in Grenoble. When I was a kid I loved listening to some operettas but as everyone in the early sixties I started to love the usual suspects (Dylan, Baez, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Moody Blues, The Who and also some French artists like Brel, Brassens, Ferré and later Manset or Veronique Sanson).
Early and in my family we all played guitar but our tastes were sometimes really different.
I discovered music mostly through my friends and when i started to go, at 13 years old, to some parties called " des Boums”.
In 1969 while I was studying psychology at the university I met YF at a bar or maybe through the leader of an artistico-theatral troup named Gerard Navas.
Then I was already friends with Dominique Droin and Yves Chauvet. We were friends then and we are still friends today – we even recently did a party together in 2017 !
Then with YF our friendship leaded to a great love story that lasted at least 5 years. I loved all he did then : his music, his photos, his singing.
I also remembered him mostly writing his songs during the night – while we lived with some friends in huge apartment in Grenoble, and later in a house in a country but always with friends : une vraie communauté.
We were then 24/7 with each other, singing and also going to class at the university (we were both studying psychology then).
As I was singing also with him, he started to write songs that we could then sing together (when my voice could follow his). This were the songs that made the Long Orme album.
Because our friend Dominique Droin just did his “Wave On” album (on which YF helped a bit), we thought that we could do the same. That’s how the Long Orme project started, and thanks to Yves Chauvet it became a reality.
I remembered it recorded in huge friends’ house (the same house we did a party this year !), with a beautiful park, where we also used to do some theatre playing. There was also an orangery where in the basement we built a recording studio for the Long Orme project.
The recording lasted a few months maybe 4 or 5. It was that long because it also became a rehearsal space for friends and we used to do some parties there too. And during the night when I wasn’t singing and needed some rest I used to take 3 chairs and lie and them to sleep a little bit!
I love that album, YF’s voice is beautiful, beautiful lyrics too. My brother Jean-Pierre did the drawing on the back cover (representing some famous jewish figures like Marx, Freud, Einstein and YF !). In the beginning my brother wanted to do a drawing in colors but it was technically not possible (see pictures). He was not happy ! He mostly took the inspiration from two songs of the album for the black & white version (“Le hibou” and “Les Enfants”).
I’m so happy and surprised to hear that some people are intrigued by that album, and continue to hear it in this 21st century.
Late I did continue to do some background voices for Yves Chauvet, mostly for commercials or documentary. I never really continued in this artistic route, I in fact became a psychologist.”