TERRY JACKS – "Seasons In The Sun"

I love this one! One of several songs we’ll encounter that I know primarily thanks to “Sounds of the 70s” ads that used to run during Robotech reruns in the early 90s. Only in the last few months have I bothered to track down the whole song, and it really threw a curveball – from the hook you think we’re going to get some sort of “All Summer Long” type thing, a wistful but positive look back at the good old days. But when you hit “Goodbye Michelle, it’s hard to die”…I mean, what do you do with that? I agree with Tom about the weirdness of the thing – but it’s a weirdness that works, fusing the suicide ballad type of “Alone Again, Naturally” with the thick gauziness of “Crimson and Clover.” Above-average track.

One time, I’ll post here before Marc gets to. Unlikely, I know…

The melody is so simple and well known that it must have been used as a terrace chant, but I can’t for the life of me think of any.

This song always makes me think of poor seventies quality video and a man throwing a frisbee to a shaggy retriever-like dog. I have no idea why.

A pretty awful Brel cover all round, though much more of the discredit needs to be attached to Rod McKuen’s mawkish mistranslation than to Jacks’ harmlessly anodyne voice. Once upon a time, many people considered McKuen’s own Patience Strong-esque pronunciamentos to be “poetry”, believe it or not.

Wasn’t it Charlton Athletic who had joy, and had fun, and had Millwall on the run?

As far as I was concerned at the time, this song was The Enemy Of Pop, and part of a wave of soppy dirges (Everyday, Remember Me This Way, Emma, The Air That I Breathe, You Are Everything… and hell, even Barry Blue had forsaken me with the drippy School Love) that made me instantly nostalgic for the good old days of glam. My first ever “The Charts Aren’t What They Used To Be” moment, no less.

Round about the same time, a well-meaning friend of the family bought me a paperback collection of Rod McKuen’s poetry back from the States. Eww, so not me. Rightly or wrongly, I still associate his work with that whole ghastly wave of pseudo-deep gift-shop blank verse, invariably all in lower case, that you could pick up in pamphlet form, somewhere between the Snoopy key fobs and the pot-pourri. (Leonard Nimoy was a particular star in this field, by the way.)

Best of all, you could actually send off for customised pamphlets of this stuff, into which various personalised details could be inserted. (“oh DAVE / your BROWN eyes are deep like the ocean / i knew you were for me / when our souls first entwined / that sparkling starlit night / at TOP RANK HEMEL HEMPSTEAD / etc etc”)

Maybe I was a little harsh?

Oh, happy dawn! 🙂

Bit of a SPOILER that banner, chaps!

Mike must surely have heard McKuen’s recording of “Eros.” Also I liked the way he conned Sinatra into making an album of gay songs (A Man Alone).

There’s a great version of “Seasons in the Sun” on The Squirrels’ homepage. Total greatness.

Hooligans recall:

We had joy we had fun
we had arsenal on the run
but the fun did not last
cuz the bastards ran too fast.

Oh God, Rod McKuen’s “Eros”, how could I forget that one? (It’s on the Jon Savage Queer Noises comp.) It’s all a bit “mine is a twilight world”, but undeniably effective, and clearly penned from personal experience. Cast in a certain light, and given McKuen’s bisexuality, “Seasons” could almost be read as an eerie premonition of… but then again, let’s not.

I wouldn’t want to lower the tone, but… ah well:

We had joy we had fun,
Flicking bogies at the sun;
When the sun got too hot…

You can probably guess the rest. Just a North London playground thing, maybe.

Unjustifiable. The worst song ever recorded. Tom’s entry reads like complete gibberish to me; I literally disagree with every line in this review. Tom lives in an alternate universe; I have nothing in common with him.

Not being privvy, at the time, to the Brel original (in fact I only heard Le Moribund a couple of years ago) I had to judge Jacks song only on its own merit. I wasn’t particularly fond of the sing-songy chorus which was easily adapted for nefarious uses such as :-
‘we had joy, we had fun, we stuck fingers up our ****’ (thanks West London massive). I didnt like the mawkish nature of the verses. But, I did like Jacks voice, the production, the twangy guitar and that indefinable quality that you can’t quite put your finger on. So I developed a soft spot for the record which was further softened by the fact that I discovered Bowie, who I was mad on at the time, had also released a Brel song, ‘Amsterdam’ as the flip of Sorrow. He’d also played ‘My Death’ live. So Brel became a familiar name to me. Further enhanced by finding Scott Walkers recordings. Which, of course, leads us to Jacks next hit. Again, he used another Brel song, ‘If You Go Away’ and tinkered with it. Severely edited and knocked into a more straightforward pop format it triggered a similar reaction in me to Seasons.

Listening to Seasons now, post Le Moribund, I actually like it a little more. Brel’s songs do lend themselves to interpretation, and this was Mr Jacks own (even with McKuens dodgy lyrics). Listen to The Poppy Family and you’ll see where he’s coming from – or just call it ‘slightly sad pop’.

I don’t know whether, before I joined your happy band, you discussed a perfect loo book from a couple of years ago – “I hate myself and want to die: the 52 most depressing songs you’ve ever heard”? Naturally about half of them are on my Ipod, but that’s just me.

“Seasons” is the lead entry in the “Perfect Storm” category – ” the absolute most depressing….. when songwriters, attempting to create an emotionally affecting song, swing for the catharsis fence, but end up fouling into the grandstand, wiping out 1,000 nuns and orphans. There’s a complete cluelessness to perfect storms, with the perpetrator completely unaware of the catastrophe that’s being unleashed” (Actually that’s nonsense, one of his Perfect Storms is Harry Chapin’s “The Shortest Story”, and Chapin knew EXACTLY what he was doing).

If anyone’s interested I could post the entry in full.

Morbid, dying Hoser, Jacks, caterwaulers his way back to the pavilion in a dour soliloquy of self-pity. He has just enough petrol left in the tank to say tatty-bye to a few of the folks and donate a few choice guitar chords to posterity before hitting the snooze button. Do we care? Er…no.

But cards on the table, peeps. I bloody loved this back in the day. It was completely miserable, negative and self-centred and so was I at that time. I played it over and over, also the B-side, which told the story of Terry’s mutt getting run over, and only stopped playing it when my brother, older by three and a half years, suggested that if I really wanted to feel sorry for myself, I was welcome to his Neil Young and Leonard Cohen albums. I snapped this offer up in a microsecond. What is it about Canadian soloists? Young, I discovered, is a wonderful artist, as to a certain extent is Cohen. But it certainly would not be wise putting any of their records on the jukebox in the Beachy Head Tavern, one of my own occasional watering holes.

I now regard “Seasons in the Sun” as a comedy record and this allows me to pay it an unexpected compliment, in as much as suggesting that Jacques Brel could have written it and Lord Scott Walker could have sung it, as has already been discussed by all you clever dickies. It certainly is an oddity and that ticks the main Brel/Walker box before we get out of the starting blocks. Terry Jacks himself, meanwhile, had earlier featured in a hippy-type mob alarmingly called The Poppy Family, who charted here with a ridiculous offering called “Which Way You Going, Billy?”, the song’s subject most certainly not the same Billy who got relieved of all his earthly burdens in the last episode here.

“Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” was a GREAT record by a GREAT group with a HIDDEN SUBTEXT THINK ABOUT IT

Cohen’s one of the funniest writers in all of “rock.” If you want black comedy you can’t beat “Dress Rehearsal Rag” (and if you want unintentional comedy you can’t beat Noel Harrison’s version of “Dress Rehearsal Rag”).

1974 Neil Young would have been On The Beach – not a bundle of laughs for sure but then it’s not suicidal either (the irony of those two IMac reviews a lifetime apart).

Is there actually a Beachy Head Tavern then? I bet it’s been turned into one of those themed Irish pubs with non-stop Corrs and Westlife on the jukebox. Now THAT would be enough to drive me off the cliff.

Marcello (#34) – Yep, The Beachy Head Tavern, although it’s now just called The Beachy Head. I was in there yesterday afternoon, in fact, with Mrs Waldo and there were plenty of blokes in England rugger shirts milling around with a very worried-looking Beachy Head Chaplain weaving his way around them. The pub is an excellent eatery and is certainly not “themed”, which is just as well. Outside on the cliffs there are a series of plaques quoting the scriptures, basically telling folk not to jump. Of course, one poor guy was once famously racing to the edge in order to turn himself over but was checked by being upended by one of these monuments stating “NO PROBLEM IS TOO GREAT FOR GOD”. I’m sure that’s true but it cost this poor fucker a broken ankle. Even more bizarrely, a wonderful local man, who has saved several lives up on the Head, was recently cautioned as to his activities by none other than the Coastguard for breaching Health and Safety regulations, that is to say he was putting himself at risk. This guy has now ceased his work. Honest to God, you couldn’t make it up.

Lena – “Sounds like it has a theme to me – don’t jump off the cliff!”
Good one, I have to say…

“”don’t jump off the cliff!

Never did Sue Barker any harm

That came back in ’75, a number two hit for the second time thanks to Noel Edmonds and his sodding Saddest Song Ever poll. It was bad enough the first time around!

For no reason whatsoever Tommy Cooper’s 1960 hit single and Junior Choice perennial “Don’t Jump Off The Roof Dad (You’ll Make A Hole In The Yard)” has just sprung to mind.

Stuart Maconie played another great Brel cover last night – “Next” (“Au suivant”) by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. A fine band, though slightly deranged and you might not necessarily want them next to you in the bus queue. I see MC has referred to Alex Harvey in the “Streak” thread – maybe he can verify the legend of his jeans being held together with sellotape? Oddly enough I don’t remember “Next” from the time, but did get “The Faith Healer” single, which shoulda been a monster.

I have an old tape of “Whistle Test” showing Harvey doing “Next” and, yes, it’s magnificent. Whispering Bob pronounced it “great”. So no stereotyping there, then. Also featured was Tim Buckley, only months away from edging one to the keeper, the poor sod. He performed “Dolphins”. Brilliant also.

Welcome along Cragster, the more the merrier.

“Edging one to the keeper” – great phrase!

thanks for the welcome (not sure about “cragster”, mind).
You might be right about the Link thing Marcello though i personally cant hear any similarity between the two riffs and, besides surely even before the recent events of Hazelhurstgate we all knew to take much of whats on Wiki with at least a pinch of salt?
Either way I think i’m going to continue to keep believing it if only cos its such a bizarre idea.