Gerry Casey Interviews Pierre Lacocoque

November 30, 2025

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Making a Scene Presents Gerry Casey’s Interview with Pierre Lacocque of Mississippi Heat!

On the back cover of Mississippi Heat’s album Footprints On the Ceiling, there’s a photo of a man playing harmonica with such intensity you can almost hear the music in the silence of the still image. That man is Pierre Lacocque—the band’s founder, bandleader, and principal songwriter. What that photo suggests is exactly what his music delivers: a harmonica voice full of fire, soul, and emotion.

Pierre was born in Israel in 1952 to Christian-Belgian parents. His childhood moved quickly across borders—Germany, France, then back to Belgium—before he turned six, a hint of the traveling life that would later come with music. He grew up in Brussels in a deeply scholarly home. His father, a Protestant minister and now a world-renowned Old Testament scholar, sent Pierre and his siblings to the Jewish Orthodox Athenee Maimonides so they would understand Jewish history, suffering, and philosophy. Pierre became fluent in Hebrew, immersed in religious studies, and surrounded by a culture of intellectual discipline.

Music wasn’t encouraged in the Lacocque household, but Pierre found it anyway. With the volume low on his bedroom radio, he discovered Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin—his first doorway into African-American music. His earliest memory of the harmonica traces back to age three in Alsace, France, when a toy harmonica stirred an emotion he didn’t yet understand.

The defining moment came in 1969 when Pierre’s family moved to Chicago for his father’s university appointment. Sixteen years old, he wandered into a blues concert at the University of Chicago’s Ida Noyes Hall. Onstage was Big Walter Horton. The amplified, sax-like tones of Horton’s harmonica hit Pierre like lightning. He had never heard anything like it. That night changed his life.

On Monday morning, he bought his first harmonica. From then on, Pierre practiced obsessively—six or seven hours a day—learning everything he could about the Chicago blues tradition and its masters: Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and the many giants who built the city’s electric sound.

Pierre graduated from the University of Chicago Lab School and moved to Montreal for college, where he began playing with local blues bands, including the Albert Failey Blues Band and later OVEN, which won the Montreal Battle of the Bands in 1976. When the promised prize money and record deal vanished with a crooked promoter, Pierre returned to Chicago at age 24 with a bruised dream.

Unable to make a living solely from music, Pierre turned toward academics, eventually earning a doctorate in clinical psychology at Northwestern University and publishing professional work. He married his wife Vickie and worked in community mental health. But even with a successful career, something felt missing.

In 1988, at age 36, Pierre realized the truth: he missed the blues. He missed the harmonica. He missed the fire that music had always given him.

That realization sparked the rebirth of his musical life. What had once been buried returned with full force, shaping the passionate, unmistakable harmonica sound that fuels Mississippi Heat today—a sound born from travel, intellect, spirituality, longing, and the moment he first heard Big Walter Horton bend notes under Chicago’s lights.

Pierre Lacocque’s journey is one of rediscovery, devotion, and the enduring pull of the blues—a sound he carries with unmatched feeling every time he steps onstage.