Tu Paries, Charles

Poor France--it is blessed with three immense schools of popular songwriters. There is the rock-twist crowd, which follows the spiritual guidance of Elvis Presley. Chubby Checker and a Gallic hero named Johnny Hallyday. and spawns an army of combos with names like Les Chats Sauvages. There are "The Defenders of French Music." troubadour-poets like Georges Brassens and Leo Ferre who sing their verses to naughty cafe melodies. And there is Charles Aznavour.

All by himself. Aznavour, 38, five-foot-four. 112 pounds and esthetically alone, is the biggest of the three. As composer, lyricist or both, he has written 508 songs in the past 20 years, and an average of five a year have reached France's Top Ten. As singer and performer, he has packed the Olympia in Paris. Carnegie Hall in New York, and last week he was packing the Comedie-Canadienne in Montreal on the start of a world tour. As a result of all this, plus a career as movie star (Shoot the Piano Player) and music publisher. he has acquired two chateaux, a flight of sports cars and $2,000,000. And, as a philosopher, by his own gay admission he has firmly pushed back the moral frontier of France.

Special Pinnacle. "When I began." Aznavour says, "the radio banned my songs. They didn't want to hear my forbidden words. Nothing is dirty, everything is poetic--but moral hypocrites never admit this. For ten years the ban went on, forbidden, la verite! Then, five years ago, the pressure of the truth was too much--I was allowed to speak my message: 'Live now, tomorrow who knows?' "

To nostalgic melodies full of trembling triplets and the heaving rhythm of circa 1957 rock 'n' roll, he sings his message in the husky voice the French call "apres I'amour." He sings only his own songs, and as he fills the demands of recordings and concerts, he turns them out with spectacular ease. "Some people turn the light out while love-making," he slyly explains. "I keep it on."

With his light on, Aznavour has discovered that in life I'amour rarely rhymes with toujours, and he tirelessly embroiders this theme in his songs. "What could I have been thinking of? Was it with you I fell in love?" sings a disillusioned Aznavour husband. "I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there." Other songs deal with fading Don Juans, wifely nagging, and Who Gets Lolita When Humbert Humbert Dies? "I have no intellectual colleagues," Aznavour says from his artistic pinnacle, "but my rapport is with everyone."

Special Chemical. Aznavour grew up in Paris, dwarfed by everything. At home, his immigrant family constantly sang the songs of their native Armenia, but from infancy Charles had what he calls "a little frog" in his throat. During the German occupation, his luck turned so sour that he took to hawking papers in the streets in order to support his night life as a ducktailed razou in tight pants and flashy jacket; when the nightclubs closed, he went home on roller skates. But shouting out headlines gave a resonant fogginess to his crippled voice, and soon Aznavour was a fulltime singer.

The first song he wrote. J'ai Bu (I Drank ). was an immediate hit. "Tu paries, Charles" (You said it, Charley), Aznavour remembers telling himself, and he began to grind his song-a-week music mill. Somehow he managed to write no bad songs at all. Jacqueline Francois, Juliette Greco and Johnny Hallyday all made hits with his songs, but it is the special chemical Aznavour adds to his music when he sings it himself that France likes best. Aznavour is the perfect salesman for his own works; his words are the plea of any poor devil, sung in any poor devil's voice.

In America, Aznavour has just started to make his pitch. His S.R.O. Carnegie Hall concert was a strong beginning, and a new record (Formidable!, Mercury) is just out; it is a polished collection of Aznavour hits, screened and sanitized. "I am not sure America will like me," Aznavour says, "because here conventions are different. But the truth is the truth, here as in France, and in France tout le monde believes in my music."

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