“We believed naively that music could change the world … as young hippies. But in the end, we did change downtown Montreal,” Alain Simard says.
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Alain Simard had a dream in his hippie days back in the ’60s to bring a Woodstock-like festival to Montreal that would unite everyone via the power of music.
And his dream came true, with a few twists along the way. Simard co-founded the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Les Francos de Montréal and the winter fest Montréal en lumière. He was also the guy who at the beginning of this century started pestering the various levels of government to create Place des Festivals, just outside Place des Arts.
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His pleas eventually found some sympathetic ears and, voilà, Place des Festivals opened for business in the summer of 2009, with a free concert starring Stevie Wonder serenading well over 100,000 people.
Simard’s vision transformed downtown Montreal — it’s now festival central for most of the summer, and Place des Festivals is a major tourist destination. And it’s all thanks to some woolly, naive ideas that probably first sprang to life in a room full of pot smoke.
“I was already organizing festivals when I was 19 years old,” Simard said in an interview this week in the exhibition room in the lobby of Place des Arts, which is hosting a display of memorabilia from Simard’s career. It is open throughout the jazz festival, which continues until July 6.
“I wanted to create a Quebec Woodstock, but the police wouldn’t let us,” Simard said with a laugh. “My dream was to have a big pop festival, which was the new mass of that era. We believed naively that music could change the world … as young hippies. But in the end, we did change downtown Montreal.”
Les Éditions La Presse has just published Simard’s memoir, Je rêvais d’un festival, which is much more than just the story of how Simard created the three festivals. He goes right back through his family history, underlining how his grandfather and great-grandfather were deeply involved in Montreal’s cultural life, and chronicles his own early life, how he began promoting festivals and concerts as a teenager and never stopped.
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With a collective of promoters, he helped bring many of the top British progressive rock bands of the ’70s to Montreal, producing the first concerts here for Genesis, Gentle Giant and Pink Floyd. Those shows helped turn Quebec into one of the best markets in the world for prog rock back in the day. Many of these gigs were at the Centre sportif of the Université de Montréal, including Pink Floyd’s first show here.
“Everyone was stoned,” Simard said. “There was so much pot smoke, you didn’t even need to smoke to get stoned.”
He also produced the legendary Pink Floyd concert at the Autostade in 1975. He remembers them playing almost the entire Wish You Were Here album even though it only came out a few months later.
The book also has stories about the various musicians Simard got close to over the years at the jazz festival, including memories of Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Vic Vogel, Miles Davis and B.B. King.
“In the 1970s, it was the explosion of jazz rock, Latin jazz, jazz fusion, and it was the logical followup to progressive rock,” Simard said. “Jazz was originally the music of African-Americans, but musicians from all over the world appropriated it, and I thought Montreal could be the entry point for all these musicians. And Montreal is a bilingual city and I thought we could attract anglophone and francophone fans.”
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He and his partner André Ménard, the fest’s longtime program director, built it into one of the world’s leading jazz festivals. But what really made it unique was the free outdoor shows right in the heart of the city. Simard said promoters would come to the festival from other cities and were blown away, but felt it would be hard to replicate in their cities. Here the fest has big free outdoor blowouts with 100,000 people and there are no issues. He said one promoter from Boston said it simply couldn’t be done in his city — that it would degenerate into a riot.
By 1992, Simard brought together all of his activities — the festivals, concert production and artist agency — under one roof, forming L’Équipe Spectra.
“Me and André, when we started the jazz festival we could never have believed that it would become as big as this, that it would change our city,” said Simard, who retired from Spectra and the festivals a few years back. “We were just music lovers who wanted to help people discover new artists.”
Simard and his partners finally sold Spectra, which runs all the festivals, to Groupe CH, the company that owns the Montreal Canadiens, in 2014. Both Les Francos and Montréal en lumière had big deficits at the time, so Simard welcomed the cash infusion from the Habs.
“The reality is that if we hadn’t sold to Groupe CH in 2014, with all the bad things that have happened to the television and music businesses since, and all that happened during the pandemic, we probably would have gone bankrupt. Groupe CH was solid enough financially to survive the pandemic. It’s well managed.
“I think it’s a bit unfair: People go on about how rich Groupe CH is. I doubt they make much money with these festivals. In our negotiations, (Groupe CH CEO) Geoff Molson really had Montreal close to his heart. His family has deep roots here. He even wrote me a letter to say the festivals will always maintain their free outdoor programming.”
bkelly@postmedia.com
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