A bassoon line from The Rite, parked on a programmed beat
In June 1984, at House of Music in West Orange, New Jersey, Serge Gainsbourg is after an American frame. Billy Rush plays guitar, bass and the drum machine. Larry Fast programs the synthesizers. Stan Harrison plays saxophone. George and Steve Simms, the brothers who had sung with David Bowie, stack the backing vocals. John Rollo engineers, Nelson Ayres assisting. Philippe Lerichomme co-produces with Rush. The album is Love on the Beat, on Philips, released on 2 October 1984, mixed by Larry Alexander at the Power Station in New York. Gainsbourg sings and plays synthesizer. After the reggae years, he wants funk and rock played by people who live in it.
I’m the Boy sits on side two, four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. The chorus lifts a melody that matches the bassoon line opening Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the tune that started a fight in 1913, parked here under a programmed beat and a saxophone answer. The English hook, “I’m the boy that can enjoy invisibility,” comes from a scrap of song near the start of Joyce’s Ulysses. Around it the French verses move through shadows, men among men, and a blunt sexual night: bars, back rooms, the city after dark. On a record already headed for trouble, with Lemon Incest sung with Charlotte over Chopin’s Étude Op. 10 No. 3, this is the track that talks about gay desire without putting a classical name in the title. The classical line is hidden in the tune.
The studio cut is dry and bright. Rush’s guitar and bass lock to Fast’s synths. Harrison’s sax answers the vocal. The Simms brothers thicken the hook. Gainsbourg does not belt. He places the words. The same year Philips presses a promo interview disc with Philippe Manœuvre, excerpts of the album sequenced around the conversation, and a slice of I’m the Boy is on it. The label hears the track as part of the pitch, not as a leftover.
I’m the boy that can enjoy invisibility.
(Serge Gainsbourg, “I’m the Boy”, Love on the Beat, 1984)
A year later he takes a shorter version on stage. On 3, 4 and 5 October 1985 at the Casino de Paris, Rush conducts, John Kumnick plays bass, Gary Georgett the keyboards, Tony “Thunder” Smith the drums, Harrison is back on sax and the Simms brothers are still singing. The song opens with more than two minutes of bass before the vocal. The live album Gainsbourg Live (1986) keeps selected verses rather than the full studio text: the shadow, the man among men, the last blunt line. The recording in the player here is that night, not a remaster of the New Jersey master. The composition, the Stravinsky lift, the Joyce line and the subject are the 1984 record.
Start with the studio cut if you want the sax and the programmed beat locked to the bassoon shape. Use the Casino version if you want to hear the band stretch the intro until the hook feels like a dare. Either way the song is Gainsbourg doing what he often did with classical music, only this time the stolen line is harder to spot, and the lyric does not hide behind it.
