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| Robert Ouimet (L) and Pierre Gagnon at their Oct. 5 Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Montreal. Gagnon is one-third of PAJ Disco Mix, the edit team that created exclusive cuts for Ouimet’s DJ sets and revolutionized the disco edit format using reel-to-reel tapes, selling over half a million records at their pinnacle in the late ’70s (photo by Karel Chladek/Red Bull Content Pool). |
Montreal’s famed disco scene cranked out many disco stars during
its 1970s heyday and the scene’s epicentre was the city’s famed Lime Light
disco founded by Yvon Lafrance in September 1973, on Stanley Street above where
the Chez Paree strip joint stands today.
Montreal DJ Robert Ouimet was the house deejay at the Lime Light from 1973 to 1981, and today Yvon Lafrance says Ouimet – known worldwide as the Godfather of Montreal Disco – was hands-down the best deejay in Canada from 1973 to 1982, when Ouimet was declared best North American DJ by Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, and won Billboard magazine’s DJ of the Year Award in 1977.
“I used to go to New York all the time during the week – I remember I was flown
over there once for the premiere of (the movie) Thank God It’s Friday (starring
Donna Summer),” Ouimet told
me in 2013. “Then I used to work in Montreal on the weekends.”
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| Disco diva France Joli (Photo by David A Lee) |
Meanwhile, Montreal singer France Joli became an “overnight
success” at the age of 16 back on July 7, 1979, when she headlined a legendary
beach concert performance for 5,000 gay men now famously known as Beach ’79.
Donna Summer had cancelled at the last minute, so Joli
stepped in as a replacement and sang her song Come to Me, which would chart at
#15 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart – then at #1 on the disco chart – and
to this day the song is widely-known as “the definitive Fire Island dance
classic.”
“I was blown away, I was a kid and had never seen gay life
like that before, it was beautiful to see two men embracing – and it was 1979!”
France Joli told
me in 2013. “I loved that freedom and the happiness that disco reflected.
It’s impossible not to be happy and dance to disco. The lyrics could be dark,
but the music always lifted you up.”
Both Ouimet and Joli will take part in the Québec Électrique: Montréal Discoville event at the Paradoxe Theatre as part of the 2016 Red Bull
Music Academy conference being held in Montreal.
