Deceased Artiste: Fred Chichin of Les Rita Mitsouko

I’m pretty sure the American music press is gonna fuck up and completely ignore the passing of the wonderfully talented Fred Chichin, half of the great French pop-rock duo Les Rita Mitsouko (the other half being the lovely and talented Catherine Ringer). Fred died at 53 of cancer, a sad death, since his duo was a kick-ass musical act whose first few albums were golden, and who continued to create memorable, hook-laden tunes until earlier this year.

As is always the case with musical acts, most of their best work is available on YouTube, but I’ll just note that they hit it big with the super-memorable and goddamn bouncy song “Marcia Baila” in 1985, and went on to become major French music stars, she for her great vocals and sexy style, he for his musicianship… and sleazy moustache. They attempted crossover performances, but wisely never did a complete sell-out LP: two albums were produced by “Main Man” Tony Visconti, they performed songs with Sparks on their third album, their newest album has Catherine dueting with the lead singer of System of a Down, and the pair continued to perform tunes sung in English as well as Français. I thought it interesting that they received the same treatment in Godard’s Soigne Ta Droite (Keep up your right) that the Stones had gotten in One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil. They certainly deserved the dissection, as their music was wonderfully crafted by Fred and the albums are imminently relistenable.

Get hooked into “Marcia Baila”:

Pure pop for now people from Les Rita:

I get addicted with a few notes:

Dance music with a brain:

And I would be remarkably remiss if I didn’t close out with the best last line Les Rita ever came up with
“Les histoires d’amour finissent mal… en general”
(Love stories end badly… in general)

Hot Link: Vintage concerts online, all for free

The Wolfgang's Vault site is a collection of free vintage concerts from the 1960s through the 1980s, with some stray recent items. The collection began as the archive of recordings (soundboard recordings, the stuff of pure bootleg wet dreams) from the collection of legendary concert promoter Bill Graham. The site has now made a deal with the folks who produced the classic radio concert series "The King Biscuit Flower Hour" and some other group that was holding performances by some major country artists. So what you end up having, for the time being (I'm wondering how long this can continue at its current diluted strength) is a site that offers free concerts from psychedelia to punk. I have partaken of several of the recordings in the vault (all available for free — i.d. and password required, but they're gratis — as steaming audio; downloads are available, I don't know how that was worked out...). Immediate faves are of course Martin Mull (from his "Fabulous Furniture" period), the Ramones at the Palladium, Van Morrison at the Bottom Line, Laura Nyro (christ, Laura Nyro!), X from a Brooklyn show, and the singer-songwriter gents when they were newer and less prone to professionalism: Randy Newman in 1972 persists in being a wise-ass because his audience isn't seemingly familiar with what he does, and Warren Zevon is 1978 is audibly drunk and playing off-key. Hey man, that was rock 'n' roll, and more importantly live rock 'n' roll. If you want polished, go check out that arena crap.

Well worth your time:
Wolfgang's Vault