Celebrating Terry Jacks, born on this day in 1944. —Ed.
First, a plug. I’m reading 2001’s Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth, The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop, From The Banana Splits to Britney Spears. Edited by Kim Cooper and David Smay, the book is the Rosetta Gumball of preteen pop, including as it does essays on the machinations of record label svengalis like Don Kirshner, behind the scenes super-producers such as Kasenetz-Katz, here-and-gone-in-a-45rpm- flash record labels like Colgem Records, cartoon groups from Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids to The Beagles, and most importantly bands you’ve probably never heard of, like Salt Water Taffy, The Yummies, and Professor Morrison’s Lollipop.
Amidst such obscurities the group that most piqued my interest was The Poppy Family, because they weren’t really a bubblegum band at all. In fact they were an anti-bubblegum band. Their songs lacked bubblegum’s sunny sound and infectious choruses. Instead they were dark vignettes of existential despair which, strung from end to end, would make for a sturdy Juicy Fruit noose. What Kim Cooper’s essay on The Poppy Family, which was really just a front for husband and wife team Susan and Terry Jacks, is doing in this anthology is just as great a mystery as why if you licked The Archies flexi disc on a box of Honeycomb it tasted suspiciously like the Monkees flexi disc on a box of Raisin Bran.
I suspect it came down to the fact that Cooper co-edited the anthology and could do whatever the hell she wanted. More importantly, the band’s name perfectly encapsulated the bubblegum aesthetic; you blow bubbles and they pop, and wholesome family values still meant something to the preteens of that era. Not only could they stomach their parents, they even fantasized about starting bands with them. Just ask the Partridges.
But there was nothing wholesome about The Poppy Family. In her form-fitting pink jumpsuit Susan Jacks looks like Barbarella, and her photo on the cover on the band’s debut LP Which Way You Goin’ Billy? must have nudged many a male preteen into an early puberty. And husband Terry Jacks is no teen idol. On his big 1973 solo smash “Seasons in the Sun” he informs friends and family he’s going to die, but he never tells us why. Judging solely by his photo, I’m guessing hair cancer.
The best way of familiarizing yourself with The Poppy Family—who specialized in a lush species of commercial folk rock with psychedelic overtones—is by picking up a copy of the 1996 compilation A Good Thing Lost: 1968-1973. It collects the material from The Poppy Family’s two LPs, 1969’s Where You Goin’, Billy? and 1971’s Poppy Seeds.
What makes many of the songs on A Good Thing Lost so strange is the schizophrenic disconnect between song and lyrics. Susan Jacks’ full-throated vocals are the epitome of healthy mind (vroom!) body, and the songs are your standard folk pop fare, but the lyrics are in serious need of antidepressants. I count one amongst the LP’s twenty-one tracks that doesn’t make me want to blow my brains out with a piece of Bazooka Joe. What’s more, a few of these songs aren’t merely down in the mouth—they’re flat-out creepy.
How creepy? First we’ve got the vaguely psychedelic “Where Evil Grew,” which opens with Terry singing “I like the way you smile at me” and ends with the lines “Evil grew, it’s part of you/And now it seems to be/That every time I look at you/Evil grows in me.” And on companion piece “Evil Overwhelms Joe” Susan tells Joe he was alive when he was with her but now he’s dead or maybe just a junkie or something—she’s vague on the details.
On the ghostly “Shadows on My Wall,” Susan sees things that aren’t there, and some of them “make you so terrified you want to hide.” On the unhappy “Happy Island,” she’s on a bad trip of the sort that leads people to stand naked on fourteenth floor windowsills shouting “I CAN FLY!” But the scariest part is the beginning, where clicking dolphins seem to be telling her, to the accompaniment of tabla and sitar, to jump.
But the most deranged song by far is “There’s No Blood in Bone,” a padded room classic that opens with Susan, who is obviously insane and possibly possessed by Satan as well, sinisterly intoning the words, “Marie now walks, her life is sleep/She never looks above her feet/She never smiles, nor does she speak,” her voice going from living doll creepy to a possessed Linda Blair along the way. And if that’s not enough to make your flesh crawl, she follows that up by singing “When Joey died, Marie went mad.” The kids who actually heard this horrorshow no doubt spend the next 25 years of their lives afraid to look under their bed.
I wouldn’t call A Good Thing Lost: 1968-1973 a bad album—quite the opposite in fact. Most of its songs don’t particularly stand out, but some are quite good; these include “That’s Where I Went Wrong,”“Which Way You Goin’, Billy?,” “A Good Thing Lost,” “Tryin’,” and let us not forget “There’s No Blood in Bone.” It’s unfortunate that The Poppy Family went the way of so many bubblegum bands, namely stuck beneath the school desk of pop history and promptly forgotten. But unlike most of these bands The Poppy Family were doomed from the get go. In the sugary world of prepubescent pop, nobody wanted to listen to bummergum.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
