The morning after champagne at 33, rue de Verneuil
Summer 1962, 33 rue de Verneuil, Juliette Gréco’s big living room in Saint-Germain. Records, champagne. Gainsbourg is still the opening act on some of her nights, not yet the name on the marquee. Gréco later tells the story without the affair people wanted to hear. He goes home, cannot sleep, and the next evening arrives with a sheet of paper, sits at the piano and sings La Javanaise. What happened between them, she says, was a song, and not a minor one. The title is deposited at SACEM on 8 October 1962. It plays on two things at once: the java, the Parisian waltz, and javanais, the old slang that slips the sound “av” into words. Gainsbourg builds the lyric out of French words that already contain that sound, so the language seems coded and is not.
He records it first. Between 2 and 5 January 1963, at Studio Fontana in London, a Philips room, Jacques Plait is artistic director and the Scottish arranger Harry Robinson conducts. Robinson’s charts pull the song away from the Alain Goraguer orchestrations of Gainsbourg’s previous discs and toward a brighter, British string sound. The take lasts 2:29. Philips issues it in March 1963 on the EP Vilaine fille, mauvais garçon (432-862), as a B-side, beside songs he had written for Brigitte Bardot and Petula Clark. The waltz is slow, in three, and the vocal stays close, almost spoken.
Gréco’s version follows. She has already put the song at the top of her March 1963 cabaret tour, La Tête de l’art. On 4 April 1963 she records it at Studio Blanqui in Paris, arrangements by Jean-Michel Defaye, Léo Ferré’s usual orchestrator, a warmer color than Robinson’s. Philips holds her recording for the May album, the set later known as N°8, rather than a competing single, plus a Canadian 45. On stage it is already hers. She keeps it for decades: a 1966 live recording at the Théâtre National Populaire, a 1982 remake, and a 1998 version after Gainsbourg’s death.
What happened between us? A song, and not a minor one.
(Juliette Gréco, on the evening the song was written, 1962)
The tune has a cousin. In 1957 Boris Vian writes La java javanaise for Louis Massis, with music by Alain Goraguer, who will orchestrate Gainsbourg. The 1963 song is not that piece, but the pun is already in the air. Gainsbourg’s own record does not explode in 1963 the way Gréco’s stage version does from 1964 on. He returns to the lyric in 1979 on the Kingston album, retitled Javanaise remake, with a changed text and the same I-Threes band behind Aux armes et caetera. In October 1985, at the Casino de Paris, he sings the 1963 song again. The live album keeps it under three minutes, quieter than the funk numbers around it. The player here is that later night. The song is the London master.
The recording to know is Fontana: Robinson’s strings, the “av” game, two and a half minutes, March 1963. Gréco’s Blanqui take is the other door, warmer and more cabaret. The Casino night is a visit, not a replacement. The song was written in one night and arranged in London a few months later. That is the whole scale of it, and it is enough.
