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Jay Telfer
Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness / Watch the Birdie - 7"
Sir John A - 1968
Michael Panontin
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Though he was once a household name in Canrock circles, Jay Telfer seems to have fallen a little deeper than most down the well of pop history. As the singer and principle songwriter for A Passing Fancy, he helped send three singles into the CHUM-AM top-30 in 1967, as well as pen Steel River's country-fried 'Ten Pound Note', which shot all the way up to #5 nationally in the summer of 1970. Of course, no one really listens to those bands anymore. So it should surprise no one that Mr. Telfer, who passed away in 2009 after a lengthy illness, is hardly the most talked about subject in the record shops these days.
But sandwiched between those hit singles is a record that is definitely worth digging up. Telfer's little-known 'Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness' was issued in the late fall of 1968 - RPM makes brief mention of it in the November 25th issue - but it curiously failed to chart even on CHUM, a bit of a surprise given the singer's considerable currency in Toronto at the time. Even stranger is the fact that it came out on John Pozer and Ron Greene's Sir John A label, a tiny Ottawa-based indie that pressed up runs of between 100 and 500 copies and thus was probably ill-equipped to handle any sort of national hit.
It's a shame really because 'Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness' is an awesome tune, both as satire and as pure rock and roll. Subtitled 'A Hippy Philosophy', it takes the listener on a light-hearted ride through the occasional silliness of love, from courtship to the family way, as told through the sarcastic lens of a late-sixties scenester, with the whole thing set to a beefy Bo Diddley-inspired beat. Telfer's tongue-in-cheek lyrics are hilarious, from the opening salvo of "I got long hair like a female woman / I'm tall and lean, I got big feet / I got an iron-on patch on the seat of my jeans / so why can't you love me?" to the Zappaesque wit of "...and we can pawn your rings on Church Street / And we can sell paper flowers in the street forever / Oh how happy we will be". So how did this not become a hit?
In 1969, Telfer and his ex-Passing Fancy mate Fergus Hambleton teamed up to record an album's worth of songs as Goody Two Shoes. But by the early seventies his career was unfortunately already starting to lose steam. After a moderately successful album on Axe, 1973's Time Has Tied Me, plus tours with the uber-selling Lighthouse and labelmates Gary and Dave the following year, he pretty much disappeared from view. From 1995 until 2006, Telfer quietly operated The Wayback Times, a guide to buying and selling antiques and collectibles.
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