Pierre Lacocque
Pierre Lacocque
Pierre Lacocque is 'Mississippi Heat’s' band leader and song writer. Pierre was born on October 13, 1952, in Israel of Christian-Belgian parenthood. However, shortly after his birth, Pierre’s family moved to Germany and France before going back to Belgium in 1957. By the age of 6, Pierre had already lived in three countries. A preview of his future musical career on the road. Pierre’s childhood in Brussels resonated with the intense and impassioned Scriptural upbringing of his father, a Protestant minister, now living in Chicago, who became a world-famous Old Testament scholar. Pierre, his brother Michel (Mississippi Heat’s General Manager), and his sister Elisabeth (who did the artwork design on the Heat’s first three CDs) went to a Jewish Orthodox School in Brussels. From the radio, he heard and was moved by such soulful singers as Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin. Pierre was careful to keep the volume down. This is where he began to appreciate African-American music.
The sound of the harmonica was first introduced to him when he lived in Alsace, France. Pierre’s father had bought him a green plastic harmonica toy. He was about three years old at the time. He remembers blowing in and out of it and feeling a surge of sadness that felt so familiar. It was not until he came to Chicago in 1969, however, that he finally detected his destiny: playing the blues on the harmonica.
Pierre then left Chicago to go to College in Montreal, Canada. He played harp through his college years, making a few dollars here and there. While at Stanislas College and later, at McGill University, both located in Montreal, Pierre got his first live experience with a local blues group named the ALBERT FAILEY BLUES BAND. About a year later, Pierre joined another band: OVEN. That was in the early 1970s when he lived for six years in that French-Canadian city (1970-1976). OVEN gigged regularly and eventually won the Montreal Battle of The Bands contest in the summer of 1976. Unfortunately, the promoter who promised the winner 1,000 Canadian dollars and a record contract skipped town and was never seen or heard from again. The news of the win and the shady promoter did make the Montreal newspapers though.
Pierre, 24 at the time, and disillusioned, came back to Chicago. Although playing the blues on the harp could never be more fitting than it was at this point, it couldn’t pay the bills. And it was at this point (1976) that Pierre described his life as going “the intellectual route”. Pierre decided to further his education in Clinical Psychology. It was during this period that Pierre met his Social Worker wife Vickie, and began working as a clinician at a Mental Health center in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. For the next decade, Pierre was involved with his psychological work and research, finishing a doctorate at Northwestern University and publishing professional articles and a book, until a major insight took place in 1988. Pierre, an accomplished 36-year-old man, who had been studying Existentialism, Theology, History of Religions, etc. began to feel a void in his life. He began to re-evaluate his life and look into his own heart. Eventually, he heard the answer loud and clear: He missed playing the blues.
This is where Pierre’s passion revived, his fire and “joie de vivre” rekindled, and his ability to take what was lost inside of him all these years and turn it into the raw, powerful heat that it is today.
(Pierre Lacocque at Riverfront Blues Festival, Wilmington, Delaware 2015)