Disco Pucks, Or Guy Lafleur's Hockey Instructional Disco Record

Despite being the two most crossover-prone forms of mass entertainment circa the late 1970s, disco and professional sports never really took off as mutual partners—at least, not in the way that novelty rap and sports did the following decade. But while disco was insufficiently macho for what was then presumed to be the sports' main demographic—blue-collar, real-man, conservative types, people who came by their mustaches honestly—it was never out of the picture entirely. Lord knows how many copies of Sister Sledge's We Are Family LP got detonated at Comiskey on Disco Demolition Night, but one losing team's hesher-luring scapegoat gimmick is another's World Series-bound powerhouse's rallying anthem.

In any case, disco burned bright and fast before retreating in the face of 1980s AOR chunkheadism, and by the time it was popular enough to become ubiquitous, it had also become ubiquitous enough to be wearying. Even with a strong hit-to-miss ratio—one week of Instant Funk alone cancels out three of Rod Stewart—disco in '79 was getting milked for all it was worth, with armadas of trend-grasping studio hands mistaking Chic's hitmaking masterplan for an easy template. If the phrase "Ethel Merman disco record" isn't enough to give you a strong notion of just how standing-room-only the bandwagon was, maybe "Guy Lafleur disco record" will drive the point home. Or slap shot the point into the goal. What I'm saying is that a French Canadian hockey star made a disco record. It is about as strange as it sounds.

The Montreal Canadiens dominated the NHL in the '70s, and Guy Lafleur was the Canadiens. By the time the '78-'79 season concluded, the Habs had won four straight Stanley Cups, with Guy leading the team in points and assists during the last three seasons. In Montreal, there were fewer easier sells than Le Démon Blond. The man was marquee handsome, an offense-heavy highlight-reel fixture, and a home-province superstar raised just two hours away in Thurso. The surprise isn't that Guy Lafleur cut an album, it's that he only cut one. It's a drag that his sole record is kind of a letdown—there was clearly so much more trend-chasing novelty music in him.

There is more to this than crass fad-grabbing, though, for one easy-to-overlook reason: in Lafleur's Montreal, disco was king. "Disco" is a Francophone abbreviation of "discotheque," and years before the Siano brothers' NYC dance temple The Gallery set a precedent for discos and nightclubs in America, swingin' sixties Montreal had more than a dozen of them. By the mid-late '70s, disco was an institution in Montreal, and a bumper crop of local producers and musicians had become club-hit tastemakers in themselves. In a metropolis reeling from a fiasco of an Olympics and still running off the fumes of sputtering Expo '67 optimism, there was at least a local music culture to be proud of, and plenty of places to dance; no fan base was less likely to sustain a White Sox-ian disco-backlash vibe than Montreal's in the second-half of the '70s. For Montreal's disco scene, a Guy Lafleur disco record is effectively a victory lap at 33 ?…".

But it's not that it's a disco record, or even a Guy Lafleur disco record, which makes Lafleur! so weird. Guy doesn't bother singing, fortunately, keeping his input to spoken-word monologues. It's what Guy says on the record that makes it such a poor-fitting choice for parties, dancefloors, and most other disco-friendly settings: the man sticks to what he knows, and what he knows is 1) hockey and 2) the story of Guy Lafleur's life. The result are "lyrics" like these, from "Checking":

"When I joined the Canadiens from Quebec, I found that the move that got me scoring chances in the Junior League just drew a big blank in the NHL because the defensive systems and good checkers were taking my game away from me. So I started watching, and when I soon learned that when the checker made the puck carrier come to him, the checker was boss. But: when the puck carrier was far enough to make the checker attack him… well. That was a different story."

I'm sure it is.

See, Lafleur! is an instructional hockey record, except for the two tracks where it's more a hockey-themed disco-pop record without Lafleur's narration. Those two cuts, "Face Off" and "Power-Play," are only nominally hockey-centric, and mostly in a strained-metaphor-for-doin'-it sense; they seem even less so in their Francophone versions ("Vas-y" and "Y'a Rien Pour M'arreter" respectively). As Montreal disco goes, it's pretty solid stuff, comparable to contemporary offerings by acts like Toulouse and Watson Beasley—which makes sense, since singers and producers from both those acts had a hand in putting together just about everything on this record besides the haltingly delivered tips on puck-control strategy.

Looking back, it was probably inevitable that the attempted integration of "avuncular Quebecois NHL megastar talks to pee-wee hockey kids about proper skating form" and "get-down boogie jams with heavy sexual undercurrents" would wind up as the pop music equivalent of putting peanut butter on a hamburger. Guy's stilted delivery sounds hilariously low-energy pitted against funky clavinets and bottom-heavy basslines, and the more hockey-specific the hooks are, the weirder they sound coming from the backup singers. "Scoring"'s command that "You've gotta reach out, try it, snap your wrist/keep on-a reachin' out, keep on tryin' it/aw, snap your wrist, snap your wrist, let it go, let it go" seems like solid encouragement, but it's hard not to think of those words as sounding like either a dance move or a sexual technique, especially when delivered in female close-harmony disco vocals.

Thankfully, there's a catch: Montreal is bilingual as hell, and with zero knowledge of hockey or the French language the French version of Lafleur! is exponentially better. Without the knowledge that the lead vocalist is talking about forechecking, the resulting words and music have an enigmatic but smooth, cosmopolitan, slouch-around-looking-cool kind of vibe. This is almost entirely due to the fact that everything sounds significantly more suave when delivered in French—or at least sound that way to people who don't speak French. It's a simple fix, but it works. In English, Lafleur! is a goofy novelty record with state-of-the-art disco production. In French, it sounds 300 percent cooler. The less you're learning about hockey, the easier it is to imagine yourself strolling through some Montreal club with a cigarette in one hand and a 7-and-7 in the other, secure in the knowledge that disco will never die.