PARIS — One balmy summer night in 2000, I was visiting Paris with a close friend to attend a wedding. It was a pretty bourgeois affair, with a party on a barge that cruised down the Seine and docked not far from the foot of the Eiffel Tower. After a day of foie gras and Champagne on high heels, we disembarked to find an enormous throng of people.

They were French, but not the kind that fashion magazines and style guides lionize; with their track suits and fanny packs, they looked more like my American countrymen than extras in a Claude Chabrol film. A loud electrified wail came up from the tower grounds as we searched in vain for a cab. My friend figured out that Johnny Hallyday was playing a concert there, and that we could forget finding a ride. I rolled my eyes, took off my heels and the two of us walked the very long way back to our hotel at the Palais-Royal. Merci, Johnny.

Johnny Hallyday, who died last week at age 74, was by all accounts generous and warmhearted, and an undeniably charismatic showman. But understanding France’s ardor for him does not come easily to us Americans. Mr. Hallyday arrived onto a pop scene that was dominated by well-spoken musicians in neckties, pitter-patting out songs full of saucy wordplay. Stars like Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Dutronc were intellectuals who sang from the head, even when their lyrical content was perverse. Johnny — one-name-only since his first album, “Hello, Johnny” sold one million copies in 1960 — dispensed with cleverness, and emanated from somewhere considerably further south. “Ah, c’est tout dans la hanche,” he growled to his audience in 1961 before launching, in English, into a cover of “Let’s Twist Again.” It’s all about the hips.

As rock music in Britain and America entered a Dionysian phase in the mid-1960s, the only French musician to achieve any success in the genre was Mr. Hallyday, who abandoned English as quickly as the world at large abandoned the Twist. French isn’t a language that lends itself well to the cadences of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant. Everything is equally stressed, with no natural emphasis in any single part of a phrase. French goes ba-da-bi-ba-da-bum rather than heyyyyyyyyyaaaaahh. That didn’t matter to Johnny, who loaded up on sequins and booze and cocaine, threw decorum to the wind and gave his audiences something they could finally wail along to. It never convinced Anglos, who, after all, had the real thing. But it didn’t need to.