Psychedelic Era and Transition To Adulthood
At the beginning of the year 1967, Gall sang a duet with Maurice Biraud, La Petite, which describes a young girl coveted by a friend of her father. The controversy over this performance overshadowed her release that year of Gainsbourg’s poetic Néfertiti.
Her next single was recorded with the orchestration of English composer David Whitaker. New authors Frank Thomas and Jean-Michel Rivat were brought on board. They wrote Bébé requin (Baby Shark), a song which met with some success for Gall.
This was followed by Teenie Weenie Boppie, an anti-LSD song by Gainsbourg, which has been described as "a bizarre tune about a deadly LSD trip that somehow involves Mick Jagger." Gainsbourg then sang an anti-capital punishment song with Gall, Qui se souvient de Caryl Chessman? ("Anyone remember Caryl Chessman?"), about the death row prisoner.
Stewart Mason wrote about this period: "The psychedelic era found Gall, under Gainsbourg's guidance, singing increasingly strange songs . . . set to some of Gainsbourg's most out-there arrangements."
Her next record C'est toi que je veux, again with Whitaker, also failed to make an impact.
With this string of recordings in the late 1960s, none of them an unmitigated success, and making the transition from teen-age to adult performer, Gall faced some challenges in this period through the early 1970s. Mason wrote:
No longer a teenager, but without a new persona to redefine herself with, (and without the help of Gainsbourg, whose time was taken by his own albums and those of his wife Jane Birkin), Gall floundered both commercially and artistically. A label change from Philips to BASF in 1972 didn't help matters . . . "
Read more about this topic: France Gall
Famous quotes containing the words psychedelic, era, transition and/or adulthood:
“Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, “How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?””
—Jerry Garcia (1942–1995)
“...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.”
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“Some of the taverns on this road, which were particularly dirty, were plainly in a transition state from the camp to the house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice—that is, until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say, “I lost it.””
—Sydney J. Harris (b. 1917)