The Hit
Buckle up, because this one’s juicy.
A Belgian singer named Jacques Brel wrote the song that became Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun.” Moreover, it had a completely different story and vibe: Brel both wrote and set it in a Tangiers whorehouse. Titled “La Moribund" (and here's Brel performing it, with subtitles) it recorded the last words and final farewell by a heartbroken husband to his cheating wife and it featured verses like these (in French, obviously):
“Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife,
without you I'd have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then I forgave you in the end,
though your lover was my friend.”
According to a wonderful, exhaustive 2014 interview on a site called Song Facts (again, just read that), Brel and Jacks met after the latter’s brighter re-working of the tune became an international hit; Brel even kept pushing Jacks to secure songwriting credit for his version, something the latter literally never got to it. Rod McKuen, another songwriter who re-wrote “Le Moribund,” did. Jacks, meanwhile, not only flipped the story into something earnest and innocent - fitting, seeing as he wrote it in memory of a close friend who died too young from leukemia - he added an entire extra verse and, if memory serves, changed the key. He does, however, own the rights to his version. Which became a big deal.
And yet, he never intended to record it. He first offered it to the Beach Boys, but it came during a turbulent phase for them. They flew Jacks down from Vancouver, BC, to produce it, but he could never get more than one Beach Boy at a time, they had to hide the tapes from Brian Wilson to keep him from dicking around with them, and he had to deal with rock-star bullshit to boot. As Jacks recalled:
“I remember Mike Love came in to do his lines in a guru outfit with some girl, and they were on a watermelon fast. His lines were like ‘We had joy, we had fun... Bom bom bombombom, bom bombombombaba.’ Typical Mike Love-type voice on that.” When all that took too long and drove Jacks to the brink of nervous exhaustion, he tried to pass it to a guy named Larry Evoy, who fronted a band called Edward Bear, but Evoy passed when Jacks played it for him. They actually swapped songs at an airport, each writer playing for the other songs they thought would be hits. When Edward Bear got a hit out of the song Jacks refused to produce, “Last Song,” he’d call Jacks each time it went up the charts, and even leave messages if he couldn’t get hold of him. Then Jacks decided to record and release “Season in the Sun”...
Now it was Jacks doing the calling: “Seasons in the Sun” sold 14 million copies in short order, it was the biggest-ever single by a Canadian as of 1973 and it remains one of the biggest all-time singles by a Canadian. Before long, Jacks was fielding calls from American Bandstand and Sonny & Cher, then fronting one of the biggest shows on television at the time (maybe divorced, maybe not). Dick Clark even reached out personally to ask Jacks to perform his hit. And that’s where we get to…
The Rest of the Story
Terrence Ross Jacks was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1944, and moved to the Vancouver area by the early 1960s. Against his father’s preferences (who wanted him to be an architect), he’d picked up a guitar, dreamed of becoming a songwriter and got started young. He started in a band called The Chessmen (not be confused with the Texas-based version), who posted four Top 10 hits on the Canadian charts with them between 1964 and 1966 - one of them when a bunch of kids from a Vancouver suburb decided to see whether a call-in request line actually took requests. When that project broke up, Jacks formed an act called The Poppy Family with Craig McGaw, Satwant Singh, and his then-wife Susan Jacks (nee Pesklevits). His second act landed a bigger hit with a song titled “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” which talked about a young man leaving behind his sweetheart en route to Vietnam; that one topped the Canadian charts in 1970 and hit #2 on Billboard. They knew they’d arrived (or at least Wikipedia implies as much) when they performed the Lethbridge, Alberta Stampede. And that brings the story to “Seasons in the Sun.”
The long and the short of it, is that Jacks didn’t want to promote it - or at least not on any terms but his own. He turned down Sonny & Cher (leaving a producer sputtering, “Well, how do you expect to sell any records if you don't do our show?”), and Dick Clark only called because Jacks turned down everyone else who called from the show. The particular story of those first refusals is both wonderful and gets at how in demand he was at the time - and how he responded to it:
“I said, ‘Golly, I just don't want to do anything like that.’ In fact, I took off and went scuba diving down in the South Pacific for two months. When I came back my phone was just jammed and the mail was all over the place. It was a mess.”
Jacks could not, for the record, turn down Dick Clark. He could, however, turn down label offers for an all-expenses-paid junket to Europe. Distributors called, his label called, just about everyone called, trying to get Jacks on stage, on TV, on the radio, anywhere. He just kept saying no and doing more or less exactly what he wanted - this would be the period when he was too busy to nail down songwriting credits, by the way…which could explain how a guy named Timothy Wayne McDonald was able to (legally) change his name Terrence Jacques and, for what had to be the time of McDonald’s life, convince everyone in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that he was the Terry Jacks:
“Jacques seduced women and mooched off his ‘fans.’ He crashed on their couches, ate their food and drank their booze – all the while telling them that he was broke because he was waiting for his royalty check to arrive.”
Shortly thereafter, Jacks more or less walked away from music at that point. His…think this is his fourth act now, was environmental activism. He bought/built a boat with his royalties and fell in love with the British Columbia and Alaska coasts…where he couldn’t stop seeing clear-cutting and pulp mills dumping cancerous toxins into the sea. Jacks became adversarial, borrowing protest tactics that recall Greenpeace:
“I was out on the front line fighting these guys, going to these pulp mills, throwing bags of dog shit saying, ‘Hey, you're putting all these chemical pollutants, here's some nice organic pollutants for you guys.’ I was doing that and taking flotillas of boats out to these pulp mills.”
He got used to death threats, hoaxers calling his 75-year-old mother claiming to be the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, passing on their regrets that he had been killed. During his 12 years of activism, Jacks insisted hat mills could make paper without the worst of the pollutants and he did his best to make clear that he saw the CEOs who ran those companies - along with officials of the Canadian government who refused to fine them for serial violations - as the real villains. That distinction never connected with either the employees at the mills, the fishermen, or the people who lived off the recreation/tourist trade. Before too long, frustration led to burn out…
Jacks is still alive and, as of that Songfacts interview, he still had his own modest label, Goldfish Records, and he still played a couple shows a year - but only when he wanted to. He moved further up the BC coast to more pristine lands and he has a second home still farther north in Haida Gwaii, an island off the coast of Alaska. His love of nature and environmental causes remains intact - he goes on an impressive, blue-tinged tear toward the end of that same interview - and it was his love of nature that lead to his conversion to Christianity. He’d even put together an album that he’d hoped would get some of his friends, most of them atheists, to come to Jesus. Jacks ended that long interview with words of wisdom from a refigerator magnet - and he lived 'em:
Buckle up, because this one’s juicy.
A Belgian singer named Jacques Brel wrote the song that became Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun.” Moreover, it had a completely different story and vibe: Brel both wrote and set it in a Tangiers whorehouse. Titled “La Moribund" (and here's Brel performing it, with subtitles) it recorded the last words and final farewell by a heartbroken husband to his cheating wife and it featured verses like these (in French, obviously):
“Adieu, Francoise, my trusted wife,
without you I'd have had a lonely life.
You cheated lots of times but then I forgave you in the end,
though your lover was my friend.”
According to a wonderful, exhaustive 2014 interview on a site called Song Facts (again, just read that), Brel and Jacks met after the latter’s brighter re-working of the tune became an international hit; Brel even kept pushing Jacks to secure songwriting credit for his version, something the latter literally never got to it. Rod McKuen, another songwriter who re-wrote “Le Moribund,” did. Jacks, meanwhile, not only flipped the story into something earnest and innocent - fitting, seeing as he wrote it in memory of a close friend who died too young from leukemia - he added an entire extra verse and, if memory serves, changed the key. He does, however, own the rights to his version. Which became a big deal.
And yet, he never intended to record it. He first offered it to the Beach Boys, but it came during a turbulent phase for them. They flew Jacks down from Vancouver, BC, to produce it, but he could never get more than one Beach Boy at a time, they had to hide the tapes from Brian Wilson to keep him from dicking around with them, and he had to deal with rock-star bullshit to boot. As Jacks recalled:
“I remember Mike Love came in to do his lines in a guru outfit with some girl, and they were on a watermelon fast. His lines were like ‘We had joy, we had fun... Bom bom bombombom, bom bombombombaba.’ Typical Mike Love-type voice on that.” When all that took too long and drove Jacks to the brink of nervous exhaustion, he tried to pass it to a guy named Larry Evoy, who fronted a band called Edward Bear, but Evoy passed when Jacks played it for him. They actually swapped songs at an airport, each writer playing for the other songs they thought would be hits. When Edward Bear got a hit out of the song Jacks refused to produce, “Last Song,” he’d call Jacks each time it went up the charts, and even leave messages if he couldn’t get hold of him. Then Jacks decided to record and release “Season in the Sun”...
Now it was Jacks doing the calling: “Seasons in the Sun” sold 14 million copies in short order, it was the biggest-ever single by a Canadian as of 1973 and it remains one of the biggest all-time singles by a Canadian. Before long, Jacks was fielding calls from American Bandstand and Sonny & Cher, then fronting one of the biggest shows on television at the time (maybe divorced, maybe not). Dick Clark even reached out personally to ask Jacks to perform his hit. And that’s where we get to…
The Rest of the Story
Terrence Ross Jacks was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1944, and moved to the Vancouver area by the early 1960s. Against his father’s preferences (who wanted him to be an architect), he’d picked up a guitar, dreamed of becoming a songwriter and got started young. He started in a band called The Chessmen (not be confused with the Texas-based version), who posted four Top 10 hits on the Canadian charts with them between 1964 and 1966 - one of them when a bunch of kids from a Vancouver suburb decided to see whether a call-in request line actually took requests. When that project broke up, Jacks formed an act called The Poppy Family with Craig McGaw, Satwant Singh, and his then-wife Susan Jacks (nee Pesklevits). His second act landed a bigger hit with a song titled “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” which talked about a young man leaving behind his sweetheart en route to Vietnam; that one topped the Canadian charts in 1970 and hit #2 on Billboard. They knew they’d arrived (or at least Wikipedia implies as much) when they performed the Lethbridge, Alberta Stampede. And that brings the story to “Seasons in the Sun.”
The long and the short of it, is that Jacks didn’t want to promote it - or at least not on any terms but his own. He turned down Sonny & Cher (leaving a producer sputtering, “Well, how do you expect to sell any records if you don't do our show?”), and Dick Clark only called because Jacks turned down everyone else who called from the show. The particular story of those first refusals is both wonderful and gets at how in demand he was at the time - and how he responded to it:
“I said, ‘Golly, I just don't want to do anything like that.’ In fact, I took off and went scuba diving down in the South Pacific for two months. When I came back my phone was just jammed and the mail was all over the place. It was a mess.”
Jacks could not, for the record, turn down Dick Clark. He could, however, turn down label offers for an all-expenses-paid junket to Europe. Distributors called, his label called, just about everyone called, trying to get Jacks on stage, on TV, on the radio, anywhere. He just kept saying no and doing more or less exactly what he wanted - this would be the period when he was too busy to nail down songwriting credits, by the way…which could explain how a guy named Timothy Wayne McDonald was able to (legally) change his name Terrence Jacques and, for what had to be the time of McDonald’s life, convince everyone in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that he was the Terry Jacks:
“Jacques seduced women and mooched off his ‘fans.’ He crashed on their couches, ate their food and drank their booze – all the while telling them that he was broke because he was waiting for his royalty check to arrive.”
Shortly thereafter, Jacks more or less walked away from music at that point. His…think this is his fourth act now, was environmental activism. He bought/built a boat with his royalties and fell in love with the British Columbia and Alaska coasts…where he couldn’t stop seeing clear-cutting and pulp mills dumping cancerous toxins into the sea. Jacks became adversarial, borrowing protest tactics that recall Greenpeace:
“I was out on the front line fighting these guys, going to these pulp mills, throwing bags of dog shit saying, ‘Hey, you're putting all these chemical pollutants, here's some nice organic pollutants for you guys.’ I was doing that and taking flotillas of boats out to these pulp mills.”
He got used to death threats, hoaxers calling his 75-year-old mother claiming to be the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, passing on their regrets that he had been killed. During his 12 years of activism, Jacks insisted hat mills could make paper without the worst of the pollutants and he did his best to make clear that he saw the CEOs who ran those companies - along with officials of the Canadian government who refused to fine them for serial violations - as the real villains. That distinction never connected with either the employees at the mills, the fishermen, or the people who lived off the recreation/tourist trade. Before too long, frustration led to burn out…
Jacks is still alive and, as of that Songfacts interview, he still had his own modest label, Goldfish Records, and he still played a couple shows a year - but only when he wanted to. He moved further up the BC coast to more pristine lands and he has a second home still farther north in Haida Gwaii, an island off the coast of Alaska. His love of nature and environmental causes remains intact - he goes on an impressive, blue-tinged tear toward the end of that same interview - and it was his love of nature that lead to his conversion to Christianity. He’d even put together an album that he’d hoped would get some of his friends, most of them atheists, to come to Jesus. Jacks ended that long interview with words of wisdom from a refigerator magnet - and he lived 'em:
"One of my sayings is on my fridge. It says, 'Simplicity.' And then it
says, 'I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything
they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it's not the answer.'"
About the Sampler
I find Terry Jacks delightful as a person, but I couldn’t get excited about his catalog. Fans of “Seasons in the Sun,” however, will find plenty to like across the one album (Seasons in the Sun) and larger collection (40 Seasons in the Sun) Spotify has on the platform (for now). I saw someone describe him as bubble-gum pop, but what I heard sounded closer to “folk rock” to me, something you’d hear in semi-square pop culture vehicles from the mid-1970s.
Jacks had some minor hits I didn’t mention above - I got too wrapped up in his story - but he got some traction with a couple numbers I included on the sampler, like “Concrete Sea,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life),” and, one he recycled from his Poppy Family days called, “Where Evil Grows.” The rest of the songs I added I liked more - e.g., “You Fool Me” (a little funky), “Since You Broke My Heart” (good instrumentation), and “Saginaw Michigan” (cute!), and a slight personal favorite in “Fire on the Skyline” (which has 10 seconds of dead-air at the end?) - or less - e.g., “Y’ Don’t Fight the Sea,” “I’m Gonna Love You Too” (a Buddy Holly tune, basically), “Voice of America,” and “Life With You (Was Oh So Easy).” Just to note it, those last two appear on 40 Seasons in the Sun, which has…more production, which hits and misses...so 80s...
And, for shits ‘n’ giggles, I rounded out the sampler with three from The Poppy Family - their hit single, already linked to above, plus “Beyond the Clouds” and “There’s No Blood in the Bone.”
That’s all for Terry Jacks. Till the next one…
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