The Canadiens' organist, Diane Bibaud, has been playing for the team since 1987. The diehard fan has been eyeing the gig since she was eight years old.Adil Boukind/The Globe and Mail
Twenty-thousand people are screaming loudly enough to inflict hearing loss. The public announcer roars the names Caufield, Suzuki, Dobes.
Diane Bibaud closes her eyes and breathes deeply, to calm her nerves.
“You’re not allowed to make mistakes during the national anthem,” she explains.
Bibaud is the organist for the Montreal Canadiens, a position she has held, with brief interruptions, since 1987. A native Montrealer and diehard Habs fan, she coveted the gig from the age of eight.
In her hands, a role that might seem obsolete in the age of stadium DJs and multimillion-dollar sound systems has instead assumed a kind of sanctity. A small woman with hockey hair and a gap-toothed grin, Bibaud is the artisanal soul of the Bell Centre’s multimedia entertainment machine.
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Before puck drop, high up in the press gallery, she sets herself in front of a Roland E-600 and plays the first notes of The Star-Spangled Banner. If she makes a mistake, she will hear it. The limitations of hockey arena repertoire mask the fact that Bibaud is a serious musician who studied piano performance at McGill. She’s blessed, or cursed, with perfect pitch, and off notes are torture, no matter where she encounters them.
“At the dentist, the drill? I try to tune it!” she says.
Wearing an oversized red-white-and-blue jersey with the name Bibaud on the back and a treble clef where the number would be, she has the smiling eyes of a mascot as she makes her way through O Canada. Inside, she is all butterflies. Even after 39 years, stage fright overcomes her before every home game. It keeps her sharp.
Bibaud plays at the Bell Centre on Tuesday for Game 4 of their playoff series against the Buffalo Sabres. She says still gets game-day nerves.Adil Boukind/The Globe and Mail
“I think I’ll be good as long as I’m nervous,” she says.
A perfectionist in a light-hearted job, Bibaud also knows how to forgive herself if she does play an off note.
“It’s human,” she said. The phrase could be her motto.
Hockey was the first sport to adopt the organ as musical accompaniment, in 1929, when the Chicago Blackhawks introduced a 3,663-pipe behemoth that put most cathedrals to shame. It would be played by the nine-fingered Al Melgard until the dawn of the Gerald Ford administration.
Every “Original Six” team eventually had an organist, some of them as well known as the players, but the 1980s saw the beginning of a long decline for the hockey organ. Prerecorded rock music – think We Will Rock You – gradually began taking its place, writes Antonio Giamberardino in a 2011 Master’s thesis on the history of the genre.
When Bibaud started working for the Canadiens, she was more or less the extent of the in-game entertainment at the Montreal Forum. Now she’s part of a sensory-overload symphony. She insists she doesn’t mind – “it’s less pressure” – but at times the organ can struggle to assert itself in the audio-visual melee.
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The ebb and flow of the game still provides most of her cues. She wears a headset to receive prompts but otherwise provides her own intuitive soundtrack. Some moments call for Hava Nagila, others for that Kentucky Derby bugle. She plays a little slapstick whoopsie when a puck goes out of a play, and a dejected whomp-whomp when a penalty goes against the Canadiens.
Other Bibaud interventions can swing momentum in the Habs’ favour. A well-placed arpeggiated trumpet call – otherwise known as the lead-up to “Charge!” – rallied the fans on Tuesday night after the Buffalo Sabres had a goal overturned.
“When the fans respond, I can’t believe it,” she says. It makes her feel she’s influencing the action on the ice, almost like a second head coach.
“I’m the seventh player – and the oldest,” she cracks.
Bibaud shows emotion during a playoff game against the Sabres. The Montrealer has become a fan favourite and the team's unofficial 'seventh player.'Adil Boukind/The Globe and Mail
Fans treat Bibaud almost as though she were on the team. Her occasional appearances on the Jumbotron elicit howls of delight from the crowd. Once she performed at the high-school graduation of Gideon Zelermyer’s son, as a favour to the cantor who sometimes sings the anthems before Habs games.
“You hear this murmur in the audience,” he recalled. “They introduce her to the crowd, and she gets a standing ovation.”
Every kid crossing the stage got an emphatic fanfare of the kind she plays when the announcer names goalscorers at the Bell Centre.
The bulk of Bibaud’s power derives from her beloved Farfisa organ, a triple-decker beauty she calls Ti Puck. It’s the same one she has been playing since 1987. Such is her devotion to the machine that she once travelled to the factory in Italy where it was made.
“As loyal as the Canadiens,” she says.
Truth be told, the team has not always been entirely faithful. Past ownership groups have let her go twice, including in 2002 when they abandoned the organ altogether, before the Molson family rehired her 15 years ago.
It was a relief for Bibaud to be back in the Bell Centre rafters. Keyboards have been her salvation. Adopted as a baby by working-class parents – firefighter father, hairdresser mother – Diane was sent to boarding school at a young age because of behavioural issues. The only way the nuns could calm her was through music.
“The sisters said, ‘Your daughter is a devil, but she’s an angel in front of the piano.’”
Back at home, the Bibauds enrolled Diane in lessons. Her mother died young, but her father eventually had the chance to see his girl play at the Forum.
“It was the dream of a lifetime,” she says.
Even at 66, with her knee acting up and ears that buzz until 2 a.m. after every game, she has no intention of retiring. The suburban music store she runs is still going strong, but you don’t quit a dream job.
Just as well for the Canadiens. There’s no replacing her fingers on the keys, a real musician teasing real emotion out of 20,000 strangers, only suddenly less strange.
“We still have to be human beings, let’s face it,” she says.