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Alex Fontaine
Goodbye / Tu n'es pas sincere - 7"
Trans-Canada - 1967
Michael Panontin
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Alex Fontaine's garage corker 'Tu n'est pas sincere' has long been a holy grail of sorts for fans of Quebec francophone 45s, and decent copies will set you back upwards of 200 bucks these days. But for years Fontaine's identity had been a bit of a mystery.
That is until a couple of collectors up in la belle province, Sebastien Desrosiers, whose Mondo PQ blog is a fount of interesting information, and his friend, Michel Gagnon, managed to track down the elusive singer in a tiny village in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue region along the border with northern Ontario. The pair were thus able to confirm what many had long suspected: that Alex Fontaine was actually Jean-Marc Lafontaine of Les Items, a Trois-Rivieres group who issued a pretty swell interpretation of Hendrix's 'Foxy Lady', en francais, in early '68 (though that was when Lafontaine was no longer with the group).
Lafontaine left Les Items in the spring of '67 but by then had already amassed a number of his own compositions. Armed with fifteen demos that he had cut at RM Studios (Radio-Marie) in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, he set off for Montreal to present them to Joey Gallimi and Tony Catichio, who were employed with the Trans-Canada label. The two producers chose a couple of tunes from the lot, 'Goodbye' and 'Tu n'es pas sincere', and corralled a few musicians - Andre Parenteau, Gilles Briere and Pierre Martin - from a local group called Les Chanceliers for backing tracks to which Lafontaine would later add his vocals.
"It was a General Motors mechanic from St-Jerome who financed the $2,500 for the recording of my 45, through Catatchio or Gallimi," Lafontaine would tell Desrosiers and Gagnon (translated here with the help of Google). "It was Gallimi who renamed me Alex Fontaine."
'Tu n'est pas sincere' was issued on Trans-Canada in September. Lafontaine toured Quebec with Paolo Noel and another singer whose name escapes him. "We visited all the radio stations in Quebec and Trois-Rivieres, starting with CHLT in Sherbrooke for the show Bonsoir Copains with Jean Malo. I performed my two songs, but during my first ('Goodbye'), the sound completely cut out...and we were live!" Lafontaine had better success on Quebec City's Tele-4, and as a result the record received plenty of airplay, reaching according to Lafontaine "first or second position on certain stations".
'Tu n'es pas sincere' has found its way onto a number of well-regarded compilations, including Rumble - Quebec Garage Beat '66-'67 and People of Tyme - Canadian Garage Beat '66. Lafontaine, who left the music business shortly after the record's release, was unaware of all the recent interest. He was just a teenager when it came out and, some would say wisely, chose not to let a little fleeting fame go to his head.
"I think I sold 2000 copies in total. [And] I earned 3 cents from each record sold because I was the songwriter...I did it for fun, to earn a little pocket money, but I didn't see myself making a career out of it."
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