Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Fowlie had gone into insurance after getting her degree in psychology — her father had warned her to be practical — but her heart was in music. After seven years doing corporate insurance, she rebelled. She threw away the husband, the house, and the secure job. She was vulnerable, but determined: Hey I’m going to be a singer, whatever it takes.

A week later, there was a party at Lefebvre’s high-rise apartment on Fifteenth Avenue SW, and Fowlie found herself there. When things wound down, there were just the two of them. “I always felt really safe and secure around John,” she says. “I never felt he had prying eyes and like I was on edge. ‘Here’s a big comforter, wrap yourself up. And here’s a fresh glass of wine. Tell me your story.’ I remember talking to him for hours about life. What I wanted was to be a musician again.”

Lefebvre thought, Oh, you do, do you? Could we write a song a day for seven days? “John was in a similar situation,” she continues. “We wanted to give up these stressful positions and focus on building the dream. ‘Maybe we’ll produce an album and tour — who knows where it could go?’”

Within a week or two, they were off. Fowlie says, “We started writing and playing these songs. We’d get together and have a glass of red wine, mostly in John’s condo. Or else we’d go to my suite, which was also in the Beltline area.” At first they both sang while he played guitar. Then he taught her to play guitar.

They needed cover songs to fatten the live repertoire, so they learned the latest Jann Arden, Amanda Marshall, and Tragically Hip hits. Fowlie was born in 1970 and knew nothing of the sixties. Lefebvre threw in a few favorites like “White Rabbit” from his beloved era anyway. They had a fever to promote themselves, writing press releases and blitzing media outlets. They even shopped their wares in person to restaurant owners who had never thought to showcase live music. Their relationship status remained ambiguous, possibly because of Fowlie’s divorce proceedings. Outwardly it was a musical partnership. “It was a lovely musical pairing for eight months,” is all Lefebvre ever offers when asked about the relationship.

The duo called themselves French Kiss the Fortune Teller, and their first gig was at Michelangelo’s, a beat-up wine-and-appies joint with an artsy clientele on Eleventh Street SW. They played a Second Cup franchise, the Karma Café, and wherever else they could get noticed. They went to Original Joe’s to watch the performers and then hung around after closing for the open stage. “You start jamming at one in the morning,” says Lefebvre, “drinking beer and smoking pot until 3:30 or so, just having a wonderful time, getting up and trading songs.” They darted to the Golden Inn before four o’clock closing, for Chinese. “Then around 5:30 go busk, get sixty, seventy, eighty bucks up in Whitehorn, then go down to the Shamrock Hotel and have bacon and eggs, sausages, for breakfast, then home and crash around nine.”

They got up again at 3:30, just in time to make the afternoon rush-hour busk. Working-class commuters made an impression on Lefebvre. They treated buskers with respect and generally had a kind word and gave more money than upper-middle-class folks, who were misers with pocket change and tended to avert their eyes, he noticed. Maybe a few were lawyers who recognized him.

The late hours and music making went on for months, yet Lefebvre never fully abandoned the law. His IPG severance didn’t last forever, and busking only got him so far. He needed the extra bread and was still a member of the Law Society, so Bergman slipped him a bit of work here and there to keep him afloat. “It was while I was fucking around,” he said, “French Kissing and the rest of it, that I got back doing some things for Steve.”

French Kiss lasted long enough to fulfill one ambition. With the help of Lefebvre’s brother Ted’s old high school pal Danny Patton, Lefebvre and Fowlie recorded an album. During the late seventies, Patton played bass for the Unusuals, a popular New Wave trio in Calgary. Later, he built a studio in his garage and became a producer.

Even before he met Fowlie, Lefebvre was plotting a return to music, something he hadn’t done for money since the early seventies, with Steve Kelly. At this point he really didn’t care how old he was. He was simply sick of doing everything but what he really wanted to do. So he called Patton, whose studio at the time was located in the basement of a Long & McQuade store downtown. Patton says, “He just phoned me up one night, ‘Do you mind if I come over?’ He brought a bottle of wine — it was only a five-dollar bottle of wine then — and played some songs. We both had an affinity for Procol Harum — not many people do — so we drank the wine and played some of their songs and the Band’s. Karen wasn’t in the picture quite yet. He was just starting to think about throwing the law thing out the door and go busk.”

Fowlie and Lefebvre sometimes played live with Patton on bass guitar and a drummer. Patton suggested they record in a studio north of Calgary, near Gull Lake, kind of a vacation recording. Lefebvre wasn’t happy with the sound they got, so Patton remixed the album in his studio to make it more “Neil Young than Neil Diamond.” Lefebvre still wasn’t happy. Several years later, in 2006, Patton recorded some of the same tunes again, as a demo to shop around to producers. Years after that, in 2011–12, Patton remixed more songs. Lefebvre had spent lavishly, getting the best musicians and the best technical help, but he still couldn’t hear on tape what he was hearing in his head. To this day, Patton is still remixing some of those songs.

Lefebvre trusted Patton and turned to him for advice when he wanted to record an album for real, with big-name players, just before the Neteller bust. But this record, the French Kiss record, turned into a souvenir almost immediately. He hawked it around to lawyer pals and managed to sell a few, but the group went no further. “Once Karen and I finished making the record in 1998,” he says, “we stopped working in music quite so much. It was fun, but it was not my thing.” Over time, it became obvious to Lefebvre that Fowlie’s musical instincts were more pop-oriented and commercial than his.

As Neteller grew into more than cell tissue, French Kiss faded away. Lefebvre’s departure for San José, Costa Rica, in early 2001 killed off the project. Fowlie headed to Santiago, Chile, to work at a school for disadvantaged children. She visited Lefebvre in San José on her way back to Calgary. Eventually, she remarried and moved to Vancouver to restart her music career. Four French Kiss songs were resurrected on Lefebvre’s first double CD, Psalngs , in 2008, but Fowlie was co-credited with only one. This seems out of character, since Lefebvre was always known to be generous, until she points out, “I have a hundred thousand reasons why I’m not concerned about that.” Turns out Lefebvre’s “royalty” payment for her contributions financed Fowlie’s 2009 solo album, Pushing the Edge .

Meanwhile, Bergman married a man named Dave McMullen and became Jane McMullen. When pregnant in the summer of 1999, she started talking to Lefebvre about the idea of him taking over her law practice, for about a year, so she could have a bit of time with her newborn. “I had to earn some money,” says Lefebvre, “so I’m working for Steve and some others from Jane’s office. That’s when Steve and I started talking about doing Neteller.”

When something new locks down his interest, Lefebvre tends to become exclusively focused, and that’s what happened with the Neteller project. Lawrence and Lefebvre were becoming more than lawyer-businessman — they were becoming business buddies. They shared a connection to U of C student politics. In the early eighties, when Lefebvre went to work for McCaffery, Lawrence had been elected as a student representative on the programming committee of the student union. His committee chose and booked bands into the MacEwan Hall Ballroom and organized other social events. Lefebvre says, “Oh, we were great friends. I enjoyed him a lot. We drank whiskey and smoked cigars and bullshitted with each other. You didn’t go out with Steve, sitting around having a drink with him, without sooner or later plotting some kind of scheme, some kind of way to make money.”