''Le Chat Bleu'' is the third

album An album is a collection of audio recordings (e.g., music) issued on a medium such as compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl (record), audio tape (like 8-track cartridge, 8-track or Cassette tape, cassette), or digital distribution, dig ...

by the

rock Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wale ...

band

Mink DeVille Mink DeVille was a Rock music, rock band founded in 1974, known for its association with early punk rock bands at New York City, New York's CBGB nightclub and for being a showcase for the music of Willy DeVille. The band recorded six albums in th ...

, released in 1980. The album received critical acclaim and elevated lead singer and composer

Willy DeVille Willy DeVille (born William Paul Borsey Jr.; August 25, 1950 – August 6, 2009) was an American singer and songwriter. During his thirty-five-year career, first with his band Mink DeVille (1974–1986) and later on his own, DeVille created song ...

to star status. The ''

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. The magazine was first known fo ...

'' critics' poll ranked ''Le Chat Bleu'' the fifth best album of 1980, and music historian

Glenn A. Baker Glenn A. Baker (born 28 July 1952) is an Australian journalist, commentator, author and broadcaster known for his vast knowledge of rock music. He has written books and magazine articles on rock music and travel, interviewed celebrities, manag ...

declared it the tenth best rock album of all time. The album cover is a photo of Willy's first wife Toots Deville's tattoo on her shoulder.

Recording

''Le Chat Bleu'' was recorded in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

. "I wanted that (French) sound," Willy DeVille told ''

.'' "French records are so much more vivid. I knew what I was going for—this record was my dream." For the album, bandleader Willy DeVille dismissed the original members of Mink DeVille except for guitarist

Louis X. Erlanger Louis X. Erlanger (born June 3, 1952) is an American rock and roll and blues guitarist best known for his work with the band Mink DeVille. Erlanger recorded three albums with the band: ''Cabretta'' (1977), ''Return to Magenta'' (1978), and '' Le ...

in favor of new musicians, including rhythm section

Jerry Scheff Jerry Obern Scheff (born January 31, 1941) is an American bassist, best known for his work with Elvis Presley from 1969 to 1977 as a member of his TCB Band and on the Doors' '' L.A. Woman''. Biography Scheff grew up in Vallejo, California. After ...

(bass) and

Ron Tutt Ronald Ellis Tutt (March 12, 1938 – October 16, 2021) was an American drummer who was the principal drummer for Elvis Presley, the Carpenters, Roy Orbison, Neil Diamond, and Jerry Garcia. He was also a session drummer who recorded with some of ...

(drums), who had recently toured with

Elvis Presley Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as Cultural impact of Elvis Presley, one of the most significant cultural figures of the ...

. Instead of

Jack Nitzsche Bernard Alfred "Jack" Nitzsche ( '; April 22, 1937 – August 25, 2000) was an American musician, arranger, songwriter, composer, and record producer. He came to prominence in the early 1960s as the right-hand-man of producer Phil Spector, a ...

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF), also simply referred to as the Rock Hall, is a museum and hall of fame located in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States, on the shore of Lake Erie. The museum documents the history of rock music and the ...

member Steve Douglas, another associate of

Phil Spector Harvey Phillip Spector (December 26, 1939 – January 16, 2021) was an American record producer and songwriter who is best known for pioneering recording practices in the 1960s, followed by his trials and conviction for murder in the 2000s. S ...

, served as producer. ''Le Chat Bleu'' was the last Mink DeVille album to feature any original members of the band besides Willy DeVille. Willy DeVille wrote some songs with

Doc Pomus Jerome Solon Felder (June 27, 1925 – March 14, 1991), known professionally as Doc Pomus, was an American blues singer and songwriter. He is best known as the co-writer of many rock and roll hits. Pomus was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hal ...

. As well as classic rock ("Savoir Faire", "Lipstick Traces"), DeVille delved into

Cajun music Cajun music (), an emblematic music of Louisiana played by the Cajuns, is rooted in the ballads of the French-speaking Acadians of Canada. Although they are two separate genres, Cajun music is often mentioned in tandem with the Creole-based ...

(the accordion-dominated dance music of French-speaking Louisiana) and the French

cabaret Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, casino, hotel, restaurant, or nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or drinking, ...

tradition for the album. The album includes a cover of " Bad Boy", the 1957 hit by the Jive Bombers.

Jean-Claude Petit Jean-Claude Petit (born 14 November 1943) is a French composer and arranger, born in Vaires-sur-Marne. After accompanying jazzmen in his childhood, Petit went to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied harmony and counterpoint. He did the s ...

supervised the

string String or strings may refer to: *String (structure), a long flexible structure made from threads twisted together, which is used to tie, bind, or hang other objects Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''Strings'' (1991 film), a Canadian anim ...

arrangement In music, an arrangement is a musical adaptation of an existing composition. Differences from the original composition may include reharmonization, melodic paraphrasing, orchestration, or formal development. Arranging differs from orchestr ...

s of some songs.

Joel Dorn Joel Dorn (April 7, 1942 – December 17, 2007) was an American jazz and R&B music producer and record label entrepreneur. He worked at Atlantic Records, and later founded the 32 Jazz, Label M, and Hyena Records labels. He called himself ...

did the remixing. In ''Lonely Avenue'', a biography of Doc Pomus, Alex Halberstadt wrote about ''Le Chat Bleu'':

(Willy DeVille) created a record that sounded like nothing that had come before... It was clear that Willy had realized his fantasy of a new, completely contemporary
Brill Building The Brill Building is an office building at 1619 Broadway on 49th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, just north of Times Square and farther uptown from the historic musical Tin Pan Alley neighborhood. The Brill Building hous ...
record. To the symphonic sweetness of
the Drifters The Drifters are an American pop and R&B/soul vocal group. They were originally formed as a backing group for Clyde McPhatter, formerly the lead tenor of Billy Ward and his Dominoes in 1953. The second group of Drifters, formed in 1959 and ...
he added his own Gallic romance and, in his vocal, a measure of
punk rock Punk rock (also known as simply punk) is a rock music genre that emerged in the mid-1970s. Rooted in 1950s rock and roll and 1960s garage rock, punk bands rejected the corporate nature of mainstream 1970s rock music. They typically produced sh ...
's
Bowery The Bowery () is a street and neighbourhood, neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. The street runs from Chatham Square at Park Row (Manhattan), Park Row, Worth Street, and Mott Street in the south to Cooper Square at 4th ...
grit. Doc was elated when he heard it. Thinking they'd signed a new wave band, Capitol didn't know what to do with Willy's
rock and roll Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll, rock-n-roll, and rock 'n' roll) is a Genre (music), genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It Origins of rock and roll, originated from African ...

chanson A (, ; , ) is generally any Lyrics, lyric-driven French song. The term is most commonly used in English to refer either to the secular polyphonic French songs of late medieval music, medieval and Renaissance music or to a specific style of ...
and shelved it for a year. When it was finally released in 1980, ''Le Chat Bleu'', remixed by Joel Dorn, made nearly every critic's list of the year's best records.

In his 2012 autobiography, bassist Jerry Scheff wrote about the album, "In 1979 I was invited by my friend Steve Douglas, the saxophone player, to go to Paris to make an album with Mink DeVille. Steve was co-producing the album and had invited Ronnie Tutt to play drums. I don't know how Steve came to the impression that Ronnie and I would fit in this scenario, but I have to say that the end result, ''Le Chat Bleu'', is one of my favorite rock albums of all time... Willy's songs had a heavy Hispanic influence as well as a hint of Cajun music. Put all of that together with street-corner doo-wop, accordion playing, and Willy's wonderful velvet voice and what you get, in my opinion, is great rock 'n 'roll."

Capitol Records' lack of support for the album

Capitol Records Capitol Records, LLC (known legally as Capitol Records, Inc. until 2007), and simply known as Capitol, is an American record label owned by Universal Music Group through its Capitol Music Group imprint. It was founded as the first West Coast-base ...

, Mink DeVille's record company, was not happy with ''Le Chat Bleu'', believing that American audiences were incapable of listening to songs with

accordion Accordions (from 19th-century German language, German ', from '—"musical chord, concord of sounds") are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a Reed (mou ...

s or lavish string arrangements; consequently Capitol in 1980 released the album only in Europe. "That really broke my heart," DeVille said, "That record was my '' Starry Night''. Records are like children; it's like having a baby. Your blood is on those tracks, and you do the best you can. They threw dust in my face. To them the music was too

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

. They said, 'We really don't know what to do with this. We've never heard anything like this before.' They didn't even know what Cajun music was." Reported

Kurt Loder Kurt Loder (born May 5, 1945) is an American entertainment critic, author, columnist and television personality. He served in the 1980s as editor at ''Rolling Stone'', during a tenure that ''Reason'' later called "legendary". He has contributed ...

of ''Rolling Stone'':

Despite DeVille's indisputable chops, Capitol was less than elated when he elected to cut ''Le Chat Bleu'' in Paris... And when Willy DeVille returned—many thousands of dollars later—bearing a record sprinkled with Cajun-style accordions and washboards, an unseemly number of ballads and vivid string arrangements by Jean-Claude Petit (who once worked with celebrated French chanteuse
Edith Piaf Edith is a feminine given name derived from the Old English word , meaning ''wealth'' or ''prosperity'', in combination with the Old English , meaning '' strife'', and is in common usage in this form in English, German, many Scandinavian lang ...
), the label was flabbergasted, refused to release the album and dropped the artist. Burgeoning import sales finally forced Capitol to change its mind, but with DeVille now signed to
Atlantic The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the Age of Discovery, it was known for se ...
, ''Le Chat Bleu'' is probably a dead issue. Which is a shame, because it's one of the year's most impressive discs.

DeVille told ''Leap in the Dark:''

On ''Le Chat Bleu'' we had all these great people involved, you know, and we thought we had something great. I came back to America, and my label at that time said, "Well, we think we should put it on the shelf for a while." This was right before Christmas for God's sake when you know people are going to be buying stuff, so I asked them what the problem was. They said they had never heard anything like it before and didn't know what to do with it. We had Charles Dumont, Elvis's goddamned rhythm section, and they say they've never heard anything like it. I was heartbroken and angry. Finally Maxine Schmidt from my distributor in France (
EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At t ...
Paris) phones and he says, "Willy what's going on?" So I told him. He said don't worry we'll release it over here. We did, and then it became a matter of not what are we going to do with Willy Deville, but who the hell let him get away. As an import it was racking up great sales here. Capitol finally went and released a copy of it, but never did too much work on it."

For the American release of ''Le Chat Bleu'', Capitol substituted "Turn You Every Way but Loose", a rocker, for "Mazurka", a

zydeco Zydeco ( ; ) is a music genre that was created in rural Southwest Louisiana by French speaking, Afro-Americans of Creole heritage. It blends African and Caribbean rhythms, blues and rhythm and blues with music indigenous to the Louisiana ...

song written by

Queen Ida Ida Lewis "Queen Ida" Guillory (born January 15, 1929) is a Louisiana Creole accordionist. She was the first female accordion player to lead a zydeco band. Queen Ida's music is an eclectic mix of R&B, Caribbean, and Cajun, though the presence o ...

Cover art

The shoulder and panther tattoo on the cover of ''Le Chat Bleu'' belong to Toots, DeVille's first wife.

Critical reception

Writing for ''

Smash Hits ''Smash Hits'' was a British music magazine aimed at young adults, originally published by EMAP. It ran from 1978 to 2006, and, after initially appearing monthly, was issued fortnightly during most of that time. The name survived as a brand ...

'' in 1980,

David Hepworth David Hepworth (born 27 July 1950) is a British music journalist, writer, television presenter, and publishing industry analyst. He was instrumental in the foundation of a number of popular magazines in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Along with the j ...

said DeVille "still sings like an angel who's fallen on hard times". Hepworth described the album as "patchier than anything eVille'sdone before but the delights are nothing if not delightful". Critic

Robert Christgau Robert Thomas Christgau ( ; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became a ...

, who had previously called DeVille "the songpoet of greaser nostalgia," did not care for ''Le Chat Bleu.'' He wrote sarcastically about the album, "Goils — they break your heart, run off with your coke, mess up your drug deals, and take your count when you go to the blood bank.

Rhythm and blues Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated within African American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predomina ...

was never like this, so maybe he's a

punk Punk or punks may refer to: Genres, subculture, and related aspects * Punk rock, a music genre originating in the 1970s associated with various subgenres * Punk subculture, a subculture associated with punk rock, or aspects of the subculture s ...

after all. But more likely he's one more struggling professional musician."

Neil McCormick Neil McCormick (born 31 March 1961) is a British music journalist, author and broadcaster. He has been the chief music critic for ''The Daily Telegraph'' since 1996, and presented a music interview show for Vintage TV (TV channel), Vintage TV i ...

, a music critic for ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...

'', wrote about the album 29 years after its release, "Whenever I am taken with one of those bouts of nostalgia where I am compelled to sit and flick through my old vinyl, there's a very high chance that ''Le Chat Bleu'' will wind up on my stereo. It is a perfect album, from first track to last, and how many of those really exist?"

Track listing

All songs written by

, unless otherwise noted. # "This Must Be the Night" – 2:40 # "Savoir Faire" – 3:08 # "That World Outside" (DeVille,

) – 2:59 # "Slow Drain" – 3:28 # "You Just Keep Holding On" (DeVille, Pomus) – 2:47 # "Lipstick Traces" – 2:49 # "Just to Walk That Little Girl Home" (DeVille, Pomus) – 3:52 # "Mazurka" (European release) (A. J. Lewis,

) – 2:28 Turn You Every Way But Loose" (US release) – 3:35# " Bad Boy" (

Lil Armstrong Lillian Hardin Armstrong (née Hardin; February 3, 1898 – August 27, 1971) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, singer, and bandleader. She was the second wife of Louis Armstrong, with whom she collaborated on many recordings in t ...

Avon Long Avon Long (June 18, 1910 – February 15, 1984) was an American Broadway actor and singer. Early years Long was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He had typhoid fever when he was 2 years old, and he later said that the disease affected his feet, g ...

) – 2:47 # "Heaven Stood Still" – 2:52

Personnel

–

guitar The guitar is a stringed musical instrument that is usually fretted (with Fretless guitar, some exceptions) and typically has six or Twelve-string guitar, twelve strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming ...

vocals Singing is the art of creating music with the voice. It is the oldest form of musical expression, and the human voice can be considered the first musical instrument. The definition of singing varies across sources. Some sources define sing ...

* Steve Douglas –

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to p ...

– guitar * Jake and the Family Jewels –

background vocals A backing vocalist is a singer who provides vocal harmony with the lead vocalist or other backing vocalists. A backing vocalist may also sing alone as a lead-in to the main vocalist's entry or to sing a counter-melody. Backing vocalists are u ...

** Allan "Jake" Jacobs ** Rochelle "Bunky" Skinner * Kenny Margolis –

piano A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a c ...

, background vocals * Eve Moon – background vocals *

–

s *

–

bass Bass or Basses may refer to: Fish * Bass (fish), various saltwater and freshwater species Wood * Bass or basswood, the wood of the tilia americana tree Music * Bass (sound), describing low-frequency sound or one of several instruments in th ...

–

drums The drum is a member of the percussion instrument, percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, it is a membranophones, membranophone. Drums consist of at least one Acoustic membrane, membrane, c ...

Production

* Chris Coffin –

engineering Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...

–

production Production may refer to: Economics and business * Production (economics) * Production, the act of manufacturing goods * Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services) * Production as a stat ...

– mixing (at Regency Sound, New York) * Steve Douglas – production * Gerry Gabinelli – engineering * Roy Kohara –

art direction Art director is a title for a variety of similar job functions in theater, advertising, marketing, publishing, fashion, live-action and animated film and television, the Internet, and video games. It is the charge of a sole art director to super ...

* Jean Luc –

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

* Eric Migliaccio – assistant engineer * Nicola – assistant engineer * Phil Shima – design

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chat Bleu 1980 albums 1981 albums Mink DeVille albums Capitol Records albums