Those who played records in clubs during the ’60s had relied almost exclusively on 45’s which featured artists from elsewhere (usually France) and were mostly available on major labels. What changed in the ’70s was the involvement of Montrealers in the flow of music. Montreal’s discothèques of the ’70s continued to occupy the same parts of downtown as their predecessors, and they attracted a similar mix of socialites and young club kids. Straining belief, the police reported in 1970 that 80% of Montreal’s missing young people could be found in discothèques. In 1972, Quebec’s Minister of Justice claimed that 400 nightclubs in Montreal were controlled by organized crime, and that 50% of all the city’s murders over the previous year had taken place in bars or clubs. Political and economic conditions in Montreal toughened in 1971-1973, while organized crime reasserted its presence in the nightclub sector after a slight loosening in the ’60s. Discothèques continued to open in Montreal in the early ’70s, but the chic glamour and technological futurism which had marked Expo ’67 were fading. In the ’60s, the discothèque seemed European by the middle of the ’70s, it had come to evoke New York. The two phases in the history of Montreal disco divide quite neatly along the line which separates the ’60s from the ’70s. The millions of tourists who came to Expo filled Montreal’s dance clubs, but the Fair itself, with its light shows and experimental soundscapes, had a direct influence on discothèque design. The explosion of fancifully designed discothèques took place against the backdrop of Expo ’67, the futuristic and highly successful World’s Fair which opened in Montreal in April 1967. Another was the Alti-thèque 727, which opened in 1971 on the 44th floor of Montreal’s Royal Bank building, with windows like those on airplanes and the logos of international airlines decorating the walls. This was one of several Montreal discothèques (or “boîtes à go-go,” as they were also known) which would experiment with outlandish architecture and décor over the next five years. (The club’s name was a contraction of the artist’s last name with the words “spatial” and “discothèque”.) Designed to offer the same multi-sensory experience as Andy Warhol’s Plastic Exploding Inevitable, la Mousse Spacthèque featured hundreds of mobiles suspended from the ceiling and dozens of department store mannequins, usually missing limbs, scattered about the room. The most spectacular of the clubs listed in Echos Vedettes’ guide was la Mousse Spacthèque, launched by the aforementioned businessmen Carufel and Archambault in collaboration with one of Quebec’s most daring artist/designers of the period, Jean-Paul Mousseau. (Believing this claim means accepting that the Peppermint Lounge, which had operated in New York City since 1958, wasn’t really a discotheque (perhaps because it relied more on a house band for its music than on the playing of records.)) La Licorne was launched by two entrepreneurs, Claude de Carufel and Gilles Archambault, who quickly became major players in Montreal’s nightlife scene, opening some of the best-remembered clubs of the ’60s and early ’70s. Rightly or wrongly, local journalists have long claimed that the first discothèque in North America was La Licorne, which opened in Montreal in 1963. Quebec’s hasty modernization in the ’60s, which produced a new middle class drawn to the signs of chic cosmopolitanism, nourished a discothèque boom which first peaked in 19. By the middle of the decade, entrepreneurs from France moved to Quebec to open clubs and French youth came to work in them. The idea of the discothèque was first brought to Montreal in the early 1960s, by locals who had seen this kind of nightclub on visits to Europe. In the beginning, the discothèque was a European invention, born in Parisian cellars during World War II and then spreading – in the late 1950s – through the nightlife of the Mediterranean Riviera and other vacation spots. ![]() One of these began in the early 1960s, and was marked by the influence of ideas and people coming from France. ![]() It makes sense to distinguish between two phases in Montreal’s history as a disco capital. “Montreal’s music is disco,” the Toronto Star claimed in 1977, “in either language.” During the ’70s, Montreal was home to a richly-layered disco industry in which label heads, remixers, musicians and DJs mediated the flow of records and influences between North America and Europe. This status signalled the large number of clubs in the city, but had more to do with the extraordinary sales of disco music in Montreal, particularly in the 12-inch vinyl single format.
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