Rendez-Vous in ’86 lit up Houston’s morale, future
French music pioneer looks back at event that helped buoy city
When Jean-Michel Jarre visited Houston in late 1985, the city was in a deepening rut.
Flatlining oil prices were leaving major dents in the Bayou City economy — hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished, the housing market was in free fall and the city government was backed into a treacherous financial corner.
Perhaps because Jarre was an outsider — a musician from France — he didn’t see a city sinking into a swamp of struggle initiated by the oil bust. Rather, Jarre was consumed by the future, evidenced by his standing as a pioneering figure in progressive electronic music. He saw Houston as an epicenter of possibility and innovation.
With that in mind, he worked with the city to stage “Rendez-Vous Houston: A City in Concert” on April 5, 1986. The performance was a large-scale medley of lights, lasers, music and fireworks that used the city’s skyline as both a stage and a canvas for enormous projections of regional iconography, including Sam Houston and the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Fireworks sprang from above the tall buildings. Lights rushed
from the tops of skyscrapers hundreds of feet into the sky. People still speak with awe and reverence when they recall the event, which drew an estimated 1.3 million people and stopped traffic on the city’s ever-flowing freeways.
When Houston was at its lowest, Jarre put on the biggest concert in the world.
“It remains one of the most memorable concerts of my life,” he said.
Jarre’s interest in NASA has brought him back to Houston since then. But his show Tuesday at the Smart Financial Centre will be his first here since “Rendez-Vous Houston.” Jarre, now 69, said he still sees in Houston attributes that appeal to him, more than 30 years later.
“The first time I went to Houston I fell in love with the skyline, the people,” he said. “I thought I’d try to do something different. Something about that Texan soul and attitude, where nothing is impossible. That’s what I think a performance should be. … to do something nobody has seen.
“In a sense, I feel like I’m celebrating the future just being back. The idea of us now living in the moment technologically. We’re still doing what we were doing then: Thinking about what the 21st century is really going to be.” There would be fireworks
The Houston Festival was a spring mainstay in the city dating back to the early 1970s. In 1983, the festival’s organizers began planning for the 1986 event, which was the sesquicentennial of Houston and Texas. Houston Festival Foundation president Rochella Cooper and her staff devised a long-range plan that, she said, “involved finding out what the city was really about. And the bottom line was Houston was about arts and technology.”
A programmer for a Chicago festival sent Cooper a flier for a 1982 Jarre performance in China. “Synchronicity is a word I live by,” Cooper said. “It doesn’t work all the time. But I thought, ‘Art, technology, this is it.’ Jarre wasn’t that well known in America. But he was perfect for this event.”
Jarre, then 38, had been releasing music for more than a decade. The son of famed film composer Maurice Jarre, he put out his debut album in 1972 and enjoyed his first significant success four years later with “Oxygène.” As rock ’n’ roll codified into a lumbering guitar-bassdrum-centric beast that filled arenas, Jarre took nascent electronic music and tried to project it on a similar scale — a grand forward-thinking music accompanied by a modern light show. Such a presentation, particularly outdoors at night, had its own tag in France: “son et lumière.”
Jarre visited in 1985 and viewed the city by helicopter. He toured NASA, where he befriended astronaut Ronald McNair, who played saxophone.
In Houston Jarre identified a progression that interested him as a composer. He saw the city as a frontier that had grown into a modern urban center. The presence of NASA nearby represented the third piece of a past-present-future triptych. Musically, he built a set of compositions that would use his “Oxygène” for Houston’s rural beginnings, his 1978 album “Équinoxe” for the urban development and “Rendez-Vous” for outer space.
“Houston was perfect for telling such a story,” he said.
Jarre planned to set up the stage in front of the Meridien Hotel. He had the idea of using the city’s skyline not just as a backdrop, but also matting the sides of some buildings to create a screen onto which he could project images. The performance was to be broadcast via radio, so he would rely on car stereos and boomboxes to help spread the sound beyond the show’s amplifiers.
Jarre would debut his laser harp, an instrument designed in France that requires special gloves so the performer can interact with colored rays of light that replicate the strings of a harp.
He brought his band, and planned to draw from local talent such as the choir for the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and the Singing Boys of Houston. And there would be fireworks, naturally, as well as thousands of projectors and lights.
For an event with such a grand vision. “Rendez-Vous Houston” still had the feeling of a gamble. Jarre had sold tens of millions of albums at the time, but the United States was slowanything er to warm to electronic music than Europe had been. He simply wasn’t a ubiquitous musical presence here. In fact, he’d never performed in the U.S. at that point.
But the city was in a bad place — both in its morale and its finances — and the future offered some form of hope.
“I had no clue who he was,” said Shannon McNair, a college freshman at the time. “But we were MTV kids, and he was going to be using real lasers. What else do you need? And he was going to use the city itself as his stage. The idea of it as an art experience was fascinating. It felt like a big thing and it was happening in our town.” Challenger tragedy strikes
Cooper had a feeling something big was afoot when people were camped out in Buffalo Bayou the night before the show.
“We knew we were involved with something extraordinary, but I don’t think we really knew exactly what to expect,” said Joanne Adams, who worked on Mayor Kathy Whitmire’s staff and coordinated the city’s participation in event. “I remember a lot of discussions that involved little things to make sure everything came off well. But crowd size wasn’t something we talked about too much, frankly.” She laughs about this, now. “We certainly didn’t expect people to stop their cars on the freeways. We just had no idea. We were clueless about the effect this show would have.”
Adams said Jarre’s connection to astronaut McNair only intensified the local interest. The South Carolina native was a physicist and also a 5th-degree black belt. In 1979, he completed training to become an astronaut and logged nearly 200 hours in space.
When Jarre was plotting “Rendez-Vous Houston,” he envisioned it as an experience that transcended the Earth. McNair brought his saxophone on the Space Shuttle Challenger and planned to film himself playing in space. Jarre would then use the footage in the show. On Jan. 26, about two months before the performance, McNair was among the seven crew members killed when the Challenger exploded a little over a minute after take-off from Cape Canaveral.
“We talked every two or three days,” Jarre said. “The morning of the liftoff, we talked. He said, ‘Watch me on TV.’ I couldn’t do after that. I was just in tears for days.”
Jarre called the festival organizers to discuss canceling the concert. But astronaut Bruce McCandless talked him out of it. “He told me we had to do it,” Jarre said. “As a tribute to the astronauts, to NASA, to the whole space program.”
Jarre hired Texas Southern University alum and jazz star Kirk Whalum play the saxophone solo that was supposed to be performed in space. He also composed a new piece of music, “Last Rendez-Vous (Ron’s Piece).”
“The concert became a tribute to these heroes, though it also became something bigger than that. This idea — that’s very strong in Texas — about the future, hope for the future. Dreams that cars will fly, social systems will be better.
“A lot of that still hasn’t happened. But we always have some vision for the future. Expectations and hopes.” ‘Everyone sat on … freeway’
Expectations and hopes for “Rendez-Vouz Houston” were nearly stifled again before they could be realized.
The Houston Fire Department chief worried about the proposed fireworks being blown onto the concert-goers; he worried about scaffolding toppling. As the show’s April 5 date approached, the weather was ominous.
“It was just one thing after the next,” Adams said. “I remember the fire chief asked what we’d do if one of the buildings caught fire. I told him, ‘That’s not funny, don’t even bring it up.’ But the Fire Department reluctantly agreed to go with it once the building owners agreed. The ball got rolling and things started to happen. But I think some people were pretty nervous.”
The event received a steady push of radio, TV and print promotion, so it was a formidable crowd. Estimates range from 1 million to 1.5 million.
“I remember the city being quite excited about it beforehand,” said Pat Bonner, the beloved vocal teacher at HSPVA. Some of her students were clad in white jumpsuits and on stage for the show. “I think that was one of the first times they closed down parts of the city for a special event like this. As for the music, I don’t remember there necessarily being a lot of words. Just a lot of sounds — sounds and lights.”
As the event approached, the west side of downtown and Buffalo Bayou quickly filled up with people. Then traffic on the freeways went from slow to stopped.
“There was no way to get downtown,” said Marsha Jo Mains, who watched with her infant daughter Mlee Mains, now a local musician. “So everyone sat on the freeway.”
The Office of Emergency Management reported that traffic was stopped on I-45 from the Loop through downtown. Despite the snarl, the “RendezVous Houston” occurred without significant problems.
By the time Jarre and his band took the stage after the sun had set, the assembled crowd was, at the time, believed to be the largest for an outdoor concert event in history.
“I cannot see you, but I can feel your presence,” Jarre told the crowd, a grand understatement.
Cooper said “there was an afterglow to the city after the concert. There was no crime there that night. It was something people talked about in the grocery store line for days. This social event created this remarkable feeling between people and their city and each other. All through the arts.”
This week, Jarre has a few days between his show here and the next one that will allow for a NASA visit. The experience of the concert will be entirely different: an immersive indoor experience for a few thousand fans using LED screens instead of fireworks.
“It’s very exciting to be back in Houston and to share this new show with the people there,” he says. “We look back, but we also try to look ahead with the music, the visuals. And Houston, to me, has always had an appetite for the future.”