Jérôme Dupras, my favorite bassist-drummer-academic

Les Cowboys fringants is a Québécois folk rock band that has gotten a lot of my attention over the past five years (though I’ve enjoyed their music for even longer than that. I have a bunch of their albums, but over the past few months, I’ve taken to listening to some of their concerts that have been recorded. I do this while I’m working, so I’m usually listening to the sound rather than watch the visuals, but I do enjoy taking the occasional peek at what’s happening on stage, too.

There’s a moment in a 2023 concert where Jérôme Dupras, who is the band’s bassist and drummer, does a neat little drum solo before goofing around on stage for a few minutes, then bringing out a ladder, putting it at the end of the stage, climbing to the top, tearing off his shirt, and then diving into the audience for a bit of crowd surfing. As he’s being brought back to the stage, lead singer Karl Tremblay (who will pass away later that year from cancer) has this to say:

C’était le docteur Jérôme Dupras, mesdames, messieurs. Un homme qui fait des conférences à travers le monde, un scientifique imminent et très respecté, qui a fait ça pour vous ce soir—se dénuder et plonger dans la foule.

In English:

That was Dr. Jérôme Dupras, ladies and gentlemen. A man who attends conferences all over the world, an up-and-coming, respected scientist, who did that for you—strip down and dive into the crowd.

This cracks me up because it is 100% true. When he’s not playing bass, doing drum solos, and crowd surfing at a show for one of Québec’s most famous musical groups of all time, Dupras is a professor of ecological economics—as well as a Canada Research Chair and UNESCO Chair—at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. He joined the band as a novice bassist before starting his academic career, making his way through his studies and into academia at the same time that the band was getting bigger and bigger. He has stories to tell of writing grant applications on tour buses, and he’s certainly the reason that this is one of the few bands in the world to have a song that casually references a character going off and doing a post-doc somewhere. If you search for his name on YouTube, you get a mix of him appearing on the news to talk about his research and other clips of drum solos and crowd surfing.

I’ve achieved most of what I really ever wanted to get out of my career, and I’ve had some recent experiences that remind me that the most important thing I want to accomplish in this job is to be remembered as someone who was kind and supportive, not someone who was difficult to work with. In the moments where I do allow myself a bit of professional jealousy, though, I often think of Dr. Dupras, who has not only accomplished more in his academic career than I ever will, but has also done it while taking the occasional break to tour with a band that has made French Canadian history. What a cool guy.

• Les Cowboys fringants
• Jérôme Dupras
• academia