STANISLAS' NIGHTMARE

Everything started with a nightmare instead of a dream. But first, a few things about Garrie’s childhood and the road which took him to Paris where he recorded his legendary album which remained virtually unheard for decades until the Internet and its reissue appeared. Our hero was born in Ripon, a small town in North Yorkshire, most famous for its cathedral founded by Scottish monks fifteen centuries earlier. Nick stayed there more or less only for a day since his mother insisted on giving birth in England, and returned to Paris as soon as possible. His parents soon divorced. His mother married an Egyptian diplomat and Nick stayed with her and learned French and English simultaneously. When he was six, they sent him to Britain, to go to school in Hull and Norwich. There he sang in a choir, which he did not like, but he learned all about harmonies and melodies in it. When he was thirteen, he started playing the guitar and imitating the Beatles. Although he was an English student, France was his first homeland, regardless of his birth in Ripon. That is why he crossed the English Channel after graduation. He wandered with his guitar around Saint-Tropez, an already fairly famous artistic hub. Paul Signac’s pointillist painting in the nineteenth century had turned this ordinary fishing village into a creatively potent environment. In this tiny harbor on the Côte d'Azur, young Garrie would leisurely play the guitar and sing his songs wherever he happened to be. A man who introduced himself as a French producer noticed him on an occasion and offered to record his songs. The session was organized in Belgium, where the song Cambridge Town was made. Even today Garrie does not know who the girl that sang this melancholic madrigal duet with him was. She lived in the vicinity of the studio where he recorded, so they met and he asked her if she would like to sing with him, and she said yes. Garrie still talks about not remembering her name and adds a pinch of romance and enigma to this gentle song partly reminiscent of Renaissance, which modern audiences had the opportunity to hear in the American movie We Are What We Are (2013). “The saddest thing is that I don’t know who she is. I never had a relationship with her; all I remember was that she was engaged to be married. Every time I hear it I think of her. I wish she could hear it sometime and know that what she did with me lasted and touched people’s hearts,” says Garrie about the curiosities of his first recorded track.

Garrie did not have to wait long for his professional contract regulating the recording of his debut album. Through his mother, he got five minutes to persuade Lucien Morisse, the first man of both the prestigious record company Disc AZ and the biggest commercial radio station in France at the time. Lucien Morisse was an interesting, clever and marketing-savvy man. He was married to Dalida and largely the figure behind the success of Michel Polnareff, Pascal Danel and Petula Clark in France; he was always ready, at first glance, to detect whatever was hiding within the domain of possibility in unknown artists, like a sculptor who unmistakably recognizes a future first-rate statue in a shapeless boulder. In the arranged meeting, Morisse asked nineteen-year-old Garrie what he could do and what he had for him. Instead of answering, Garrie played Deeper Tones of Blue. Morisse needed no more. He pulled out a contract, laid it on the desk and told Garrie to sign. He only asked him if he had more songs like that. Garrie said he had. “We’ll make an album,” Lucien Morrise said and everything was settled.

Garrie wanted to make an album which would primarily feature his voice and the guitar. The demo versions of these songs, added as bonus tracks on a recent reissue of The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas, clearly show what Nick Garrie wanted to achieve and what the aim of his own music was. Somewhere between McCartney and Donovan, with his bright, clean, clear and reliable voice which beautifully evoked his youth, Garrie wanted to record a stylistically defined songwriter’s album which would express his personality well enough so that the whole record could rest on it freely and safely. However, Eddie Vartan, the man who got to produce Garrie’s debut, saw someone else in Garrie – a new Bob Dylan, which, however, did not mean he was going to treat his songs like Dylan’s. Already deep into working on orchestrations and arrangements for his then-famous sister Sylvie Vartan, Eddie gathered a staggering orchestra of fifty-six players who were to record Garrie’s first record. The work in the studio took a few weeks and Nick did not like this experience. He was neither ready nor willing to have his songs orchestrated in the style of baroque pop music which was very popular at the time but was not part of his creative habitus. The result was a modern but hybrid record on which Garrie’s God-given songwriting talent met grandiose orchestration. Time would show that Eddie Vartan did more good for those songs than inadvertent harm. It is these somewhat pompous but more often tactful and always superbly composed and professionally performed arrangements, merged with the body of Garrie’s unforgettable songs, that today’s listeners enjoy when discovering reissues of Garrie’s first record. Of course, what saved those songs from oblivion and the ever changing spirit of time unavoidably taking its toll was not only Vartan’s orchestration which anticipated the style of British pop bands from the nineties but Garrie’s songwriting genius and his convincing and vibrant voice. There was an unusual air of completeness about this nineteen-year-old youngster.

The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas starts with a conceptual track of the same title, which sounds triumphant, like a protosong of an era. The protagonist of the song is Garrie’s alter-ego, created after his experiments with Dadaistic practices and automatic writing. The name Stanislas, a Latinized version of Stanislav, emerged in this game with possible underground personalities as a connection with Nick’s Russian roots on his father’s side. And that already was proof of the bizarre at work since the Slavic name Stanislav denotes a person on the way to great fame and glory, a status which was not written in Garrie’s cards, as we now know all too well. Vartan’s expansive orchestration carries Garrie’s intensive, here tensed voice, and the five-minute song rolls and flows over as if it was a powerful waterfall. The title song The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas is one of those compositions which you can proudly play to an alien or a child (not much difference between them anyway) when you want to show them how really good the music of the sixties was.

What follows is a sequence of exquisite, spirited, and energetic songs, of which only one (Queen of Queens, an unnecessary mocking pastiche written in the spirit of American cowboy music) is redundant on this album. In my superstitious nation, creating a partly imperfect work would be taken as a good omen, protection against charms. Everything else that can be heard on the record is a testament to the remarkable songwriting talent of this British lad with classical looks and the Russian subconscious from the French cultural milieu. Can I Stay with You, Ink Pot Eyes, and Wheel of Fortune sound like undeniable world classics within the genres of baroque pop and orchestrated folk music. The Wanderer could have been signed by Simon and Garfunkel, while some other songs on the album would easily have found their place in the Beatles catalog, not in the sense of Garrie’s epigonism, but because of his synchronic resonance with the best music created by the famous quartet from Liverpool. Little Bird is a bird that McCartney would have released from his imagination into reality. The harmony and melody of the psalmic and delicate David’s Prayer anticipated the manner in which the Norwegian trio A-ha would make their best songs decades later. Deeper Tones of Blue is a song of sublime beauty which one happens to make once, or never. It is the same song that Lucien Morrise heard in 1968 and offered Garrie a contract for the whole record; it is the same song that I heard half a century later and started to write this short narrative. “I’ve played it at weddings and funerals. I didn’t have any fans after Stanislas but I played my songs to my mother in a little kitchen in France. I played Deeper Tones of Blue and she said ‘One day that will be heard all over the world.’ Mums are always right aren’t they?” said Nick Garrie with a gentle smile years later. The atmospheric Evening was probably the closest to what Gary wanted. Eddie Vartan agreed to let him do whatever he wanted only with this song. Garrie chose to send the whole orchestra home and to record the song just with one trumpeteer.  

The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas triggered different associations by music critics over the years. Syd Barret was mentioned, primarily for the record’s unconventional but emphasized Englishness, rather than for possible psychedelic layers in the structure of Garrie’s songs. His record was really not psychedelic, and albeit all rational and justified comparisons of its different parts, it was too elusive for any comparative approach as a whole. It had energy, freshness, authenticity, and imaginativeness, the characteristics which still adorn it as if it was not subject to aging and formal or semantic erosion due to the passage of time. This might be the case because the record was practically preserved, frozen and put into a time capsule which was to be opened forty years later by someone who would announce the finding of a lost gem of the world’s music heritage. This might be the case because Garrie’s record, into which a lot of money was invested (those were top-notch musicians and an excellent composer and producer), was heard by nobody at the time when it should have been. One day before the announcement of the record The Nightmare of J. B. Stanislas, the news broke in France that Lucien Morrisse had killed himself. The man who would have stood behind Garrie’s debut album, who would have promoted him expertly and quite certainly would have made him famous first in France, and later in other countries too, was gone. There were rumors that Garrie’s album was printed only in a hundred promotional copies and that was true to an extent because much later collectors paid some of those records rather expensively. There is a possibility that a certain number of his records were intentionally broken since it was common in France at the time to destroy records that had not reached shops or had not been sold. This was done in order to prove that there were no unpaid mechanical royalties. Garrie himself never saw the original album back then. In the record shop on Champs-Élysées, he only found Nick Drake’s record, not his own, and after waiting for half a year, he realized that the once powerful and now headless record company was not going to do anything for the life of his debut album. That was the true nightmare of J. B. Stanislas. Disappointed, he left France. Even more painfully, he quit music completely and gave up his creative dream. His mother managed to get hold of one copy of her son’s lost album though. On the record sleeve it said:

All songs written and composed by Nick Garrie

Production and arrangements by Eddie Vartan

Dedicated to Lucien Morrise

Excerpt taken from Legend of a Grounded Dreamer (a story about Nick Garrie, a forgotten genius of pop music)

Translated by Igor Cvijanović