Le Chat Bleu - Capitol Records' Lack of Support For The Album

Capitol Records' Lack of Support For The Album

Capitol Records, Mink DeVille’s record company, was not happy with Le Chat Bleu, believing that American audiences were incapable of listening to songs with accordions 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. 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 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), 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, 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 Blue 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 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 wracking up great sales here. Capital 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 song written by Queen Ida.