For a while I was under the misconception that Van Dyke Parks had produced the third Happy End album. He very much did produce the album closer, Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan, but I think that was approximately the extent of his involvement. He showed up drunk, lectured the band on the evils of the Japanese emperor, and then arranged their new song for them, confusing Matsumoto and blowing Hosono and Ohtaki's minds in the process.
Back in Japan, wanting to figure out what the hell had happened that fateful day in Los Angeles, Hosono started listening obsessively to Parks' solo album Discover America. It had a massive influence on the Tropical Trilogy. Hosono and Parks became friends, and stayed friends. Check out the love in their eyes in this absurdly beautiful performance, from sometime earlier this century. As if Hosono and Parks on one stage didn't equal enough legends, note that Sakamoto is playing keyboards and Miharu Koshi accordion. Parks gives Koshi's shoulder a shake on his way offstage.
When I first heard the last Happy End album, I was living in the hospital (or should I say a kind of paradise...), dosed out on morphine. I was listening to nothing but early Hosono, early Ohtaki, and Happy End. This final album sounded really weird coming after Kazemachi Roman — "great songs," I remember thinking, "but what the hell's wrong with the arrangements?" But then I reached the closer, and had my mind blown right open, and so I went back and listened again — and again — and again...
The most beautiful thing about it isn't even the music, or not the music alone. Takashi's lyrics consist of only four distinct words. And yet I think the song is one of his most moving.
It's an anthem of liberation. Home hadn't worked out for them, and neither had the United States, the country that the artists who inspired them most — Buffalo Springfield, Moby Grape, Jimi Hendrix — all hailed from. Where the band members would go from there didn't matter. This was the final song on their final album. What mattered was the understanding that the chains of the place they had come from, as well as of the place they had dreamed of, were shattered. For at least as long as it took to write and record and sing the song, anything at all was possible, and everything was clear.
In 1985, soon after Hosono's great Yellow Magic Orchestra experiment had ended, Happy End reunited for exactly one show. It was the only time they all played together in the years between their final concert in '73 and Eiichi Ohtaki's death forty years later. The setlist was a synthpop medley of four songs, one from each vocalist, followed by Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan with a massive chorus of backing singers that included Hosono signees World Standard and Miharu Koshi. But the band's original idea had been to perform just Goodbye America, Goodbye Japan, for twenty minutes straight. "We didn't think the audience could have handled it," Hosono sighed, "but that would definitely have been best."
:::
Goodbye, America.
Goodbye, Japan.
Goodbye, America.
Goodbye, Japan.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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