Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

During the past three-and-a-half decades, expatriate New Yorker and now Paris, France-based singer-songwriter Elliott Murphy has achieved some lofty artistic goals. Recently, he was honored in Paris with the two-week exposition “Last of the Rock Stars” that celebrated his 35 years in the music business and culminated with a concert. Several times while on tour in France, Bruce Springsteen has brought Murphy up on stage to sing with him: In 1996, they did an acoustic version of Murphy’s “Rock Ballad”, and earlier this year, Murphy and son Gaspard were brought up on stage by the boss for “Born to Run” in front of 50,000 people at Parc De Princes.

Murphy’s had a busy career releasing some 30 albums, all of which have all been of a high standard that juxtaposed hard-edged arrangements with literate, poetic lyrics. He has also written a number of European-released short story collections and other literary works; in fact, early on he wrote sleeve notes to the Velvet Underground’s 1969: Velvet Underground Live album. Yet, for the most part, Murphy languishes in that “never, never land” reserved for cult artists, especially here in the United States. In 2006, England’s influential magazine Uncut devoted an entire page review to his 1973 (now out-of-print) debut album, Aquashow, declaring it an all-time classic. Ironically, Murphy was part of that artsy and vibrant New York scene that spawned the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads. He even had four albums on three different major US labels in the ’70s, and Aquashow was hailed as the best Bob Dylan album since 1968 by Rolling Stone magazine back in 1973. Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Harrison, and Shawn Colvin, among many others, have made guest appearances on his albums, although he recently joked that “some of them weren’t nearly as famous then as they are now.” But despite all this, he has remained on the periphery of commercial success.

Much of Murphy’s obscurity has to do with deciding to export himself to France when he moved to Paris permanently in 1990. At one point, Murphy had joked that by moving there he chose “culture over success,” but in a recent interview, he was a bit more forthcoming by saying, “Why did I move here? [Laughs] You know, it was half for artistic inspiration and half for total practicality. In late 1979, I did my first show in France, and soon after that in Italy and Spain, and then by the end of the ’80s, I was doing almost all of my shows over here. I was hardly touring America. I had records out on about five different independent labels in Europe, and then someone said, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’, and I said that I’d like to move to Paris. There was a friend of a friend that had an apartment and—wham bam, thank you ma’am—two weeks later I was here… but it was one of the best moves I ever made.” I asked Murphy, given that he sings in English, if there really was a big market for literate, poetic songs. “Yes, surprisingly, a lot of singer-songwriters do well in France, Spain, Italy, and more. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, Tom Waits, etc. There’s a market for good songwriting.”

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