A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 154: “Happy Together” by the Turtles

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You” by the Foundations. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hig. Episode 154 Happy Together by The Turtles. We've spent a lot of time recently in the LA of summer 1967, at the point where the sunshine pop sound that was created when the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys collided with folk rock was at its apex, right before fashions changed and tight-time.

sunny pop songs with harmonies from LA became yesterday's news and extended blues rock improvisations from San Francisco became the latest in thing. This episode is the last part of this four episode sequence and is going to be shorter than those others. In many ways this one is a bridge

between that sequence and next episode where we travel to London because we're saying goodbye for a while to the LA scene and when we do return to L.A., it will be, for the most part to look at music that's a lot less sunshine and a lot more shadow. So this is a brief fade out while we sing Bababa Bar, a three-minute pop song of an episode, a last bit of sunshine pop before we return to longer, more complicated stories in two weeks' time, at which point

the sun will firmly set. Like many musicians associated with LA, Howard Kalan was born elsewhere and migrated there as a child. And he seems to have regarded his move from upstate New York to L.A. as essentially a move to Disneyland itself. That impression can only have been made stronger by the fact that soon after his family moved there, he got his first childhood girlfriend, who happened to be a mouse catere on the TV. And TV was how young Howard filtered most of his perceptions, particularly TV comedy. By the age of 14, he was the president of the Super Sails fan club, and he was also obsessed with the works of Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and the great satirist and paradist, Stun Freiburg.

You call me, Chief? Yeah, it's the dragon again, devouring maidens. The king's daughter may be next. Mm-hmm, you got a lead? Nothing much to go on. Sid, you take that 45 automatic into the lab to have and check on it? Yeah, you were right. I was right?

Yeah, he was a gun. 8.22 p.m., I talked to one of the maidens would almost been devoured. Could I talk to you, ma'am? Who are you? I'm St. George, ma'am. Homicide, ma'am. I want to ask you a few questions, ma'am. I understand you're almost devoured by the ma'am. Is that right, Dragon? It was terrible. He breathed fire on me. He bane me already. How can I be sure of that, ma'am?

Second only to his love of comedy, though, was his love of music, and it was on the trip from New York to L.A. that he saw a show that would eventually change his life. Along the way, his family had gone to Las Vegas, and while there, they had seen Louis Prima and Keely Smith do their nightclub act. FEMA is someone I would have liked to do a full podcast episode on when I was covering the 50s, and who I did do a Patreon bonus episode on. He's now probably best known for doing the voice of King Louis in the Jungle Book. The King of the Swingers, oh, the jungle VIP, I've reached the top and had to stop, and that's what's bothering me.

I want to be a man, man, man, cop, and stroll right into town, and be just like the other men, I'm tired I'm all going to round Oh Ubi do I want to be like you I want to walk like you

Chip talk like you It's true Who Shubidoo But he was also a Jump Blues musician Who made some very good records In a similar style

to Louis Jordan Like jump jive and whale It's like it's gonna hail Baby baby it looks like it's gonna hail You better come inside Let me teach you how to But you're going to jump and jive and jive and then you're really got to jump and music. Usually comedy involving stereotypes about his Italian-American ethnic origins.

At the time young Howard Kalen saw him, he was working a double. act with his then wife, Keeley Smith. The act would consist of Smith trying to sing a song straight, while Prima would clown around, interject, and act like a fool, as Smith grew more and more exasperated, and would eventually start contemptuously mocking Prima. This is, of course, a fairly standard double-act format, as anyone who has suffered through an episode of The Little and Large show will be all too painfully aware. But Preman Smith did it better than most, and to young Howard Kalen,

this was the greatest entertainment imaginable. But while comedy was the closest thing to Kalin's heart, music was a close second. He was a regular listener to Art Labo's radio show, and in a brief period as a teenage shoplifter, he obtained records like Ray Charles' album, Genius Plus Soul Equals Jazz, and the single Tossing and Turning by Bobby Lewis.

tossing and turn in made a deep impression on Kalen because of the saxophone solo, which was actually a saxophone duet. On the record, Baritone's sax player Frank Henry played a solo, and it was doubled by the great tenor sax player King Curtis, who was just playing a mouthpiece rather than a full instrument, making a high-pitched squeaking sound.

Curtis was, of course, also responsible for another great saxophone part a couple of years earlier, on a record that Kalen loved because it combined comedy and rock and roll. Yackety Yek. Those two saxophone parts inspired Kalen to become a rock and roller. He was already learning the clarinet and playing part-time in an amateur Dixieland band, and it was easy enough to switch to saxophone, which has the same fingering. Within a matter of weeks of starting to play sex,

he was invited to join a band called the Night Riders, who consisted of truck ports on bass, Al-Nickle on guitar and Glenn Wilson on drums. The Knight riders became locally popular and would perform sets largely made up of Johnny and the Hurricanes and Ventures material. While he was becoming a budding King Curtis, Kalin was still a school kid, and one of the classes he found most enjoyable was choir class.

There was another kid in choir who Kalin got on with, and one day that kid, Mark Vulman, came up to him and had a conversation that Kalin would recollect. decades later in his autobiography. So, I hear you in a rock and roll band. Yep. Um, do you think I could join it? Well, what do you do? Nothing? Nothing? Nope.

Sounds good to me, I'll ask Al. Volman initially became the group's rowdy and occasional tambourine player and would also get on stage to sing a bit during their very occasional vocal numbers, but was mostly in the band, in name only at first. He didn't get a share of the group's money but he was allowed to say he was in the group because that meant that his friends would come to the nightrider shows and he was popular among the surfing crowd.

Eventually, Volman's father started to complain that his son wasn't getting any money from being in the band while the rest of the group were and they explained to him that Volman was just carrying the instruments while they were all playing them. Volman's father said If Mark plays an instrument will you give him equal shares? And they said that that was fair

so Volman got an alto sax to play along with Kalin's tenor. Volman had also been taking clarinet lessons, and the two soon became a tight horn section for the group, which went through a few line-up changes and soon settled on a lineup of Volman and Kalin on saxes, nickel on lead guitar, Jim Tucker on rhythm guitar, ports on bass,

and Don Murray on drums. That new lineup became known as the Crossfires, presumably after the Johnny and the Hurricane song of the same name. Bullman and Kalan worked out choreographed dance steps to do while playing their saxes, and the group even developed a group of obsessive fans who called themselves the Chunky Club, named after one of the group's originals. At this point, the group were pretty much only playing instrumentals, though they would do occasional vocals on R&B songs like Money, or their version of Don and Dewey's Justine, songs which required more enthusiasm than vocal ability.

But their first single, released on a tiny label, was another surf instrumental, a song called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The group became popular enough locally that they became the house band at the Revel Air Club in Redondo Beach. There, as well as playing their own sets, there would also be the backing band for any touring acts that came through without their own band, quickly gaining the kind of performing ability that comes from having to learn a new artist's entire repertoire in a few days, and be able to perform it with them live, with little or no rehearsal. They banked artists like the coasters, the drifters, Bobby V, the Rivingtons, and dozens of other major acts.

And as part of that, Volman and Kalem Wood, on songs that required backing vocals, sing harmonies rather than playing saxophone. And that harmony singing ability became important when the British invasion happened, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals, but vocals, along the lines of the new British groups. The Crossfire's next attempt at a single was another original. This one, an attempt at sounding like one of their favourite new British groups, the kinks. This changed to vocals necessitated a change in the group dynamic.

Volman and Kalen ditched the saxophones, and discovered that between them they made one great frontman. The two have never been excessively close on a personal level, but both have always known that the other has qualities they needed. Frank Zappa would later rather dismissively say, I regard Howard as a fine singer, and Mark is a great tambourine player and fat person, and it's definitely true that Kalin is one of the truly great vocalists

to come out of the LA scene in this period, while Volman is merely a good harmony singer, not anything particularly special, though he is a good harmony singer. But it undersells Volman's contribution. There's a reason the two months, men performed together for nearly 60 years. Kalyn is a great singer, but also by nature rather reserved, and he always looked uncomfortable

on stage, as well as, frankly, not exactly looking like a rock star. Kalyn described himself not inaccurately as looking like a potato several times in his autobiography. Volman, on the other hand, is a merely good singer, but he has a naturally outgoing personality, and while he's also not the most conventionally good looking of people, he has a memorable appearance in a way that Kalyn doesn't. Volman could do all the normal frontman stuff, the stuff that makes a show an actual show,

the jokes, the dancing, the between-song patter, the getting the crowd going, while Kalen could concentrate on the singing. They started doing a variation on the routine that had so enthralled Howard Kalin when he'd seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do it as a child. Kaelan would stand more or less stock still, looking rather awkward but singing like an angel, while Volman would dance around, clown, act the fool, and generally do everything he could to disrupt the performance,

short of actually disrupting it in reality. It worked, and Volman became one of that small but illustrious group of people, the band member who makes the least contribution to the sound of the music, but the biggest contribution to the feel of the band itself, and without whom they wouldn't be the same. After one potato two potato was a flop, the crossfires were signed to their third label. This label, White Whale, was just starting out, and the crossfires were to become their only real hit act,

or rather, the turtles were. The owners of White Whale knew that they didn't have much promotional budget and that their label was not a known quantity. It was a tiny label with no track record, but they thought of a way they could turn that to their advantage. Everyone knew that the Beatles, before Capital had picked up their contracts, had had their records released on a bunch of obscure labels like Swan and Tolly. People might look for records on tiny independent labels

if they thought it might be another British act who were unknown in the US but could be as good as the Beatles. So they chose a name for the group that they thought sounded as English as possible, an animal name that started with the and ended in Ulls, just like the Beatles. The group, all teenagers at the time, were desperate enough that they agreed to change their name, and from that point on they became The Turtles.

In order to try and jump on as many bandwagons as possible, the label wanted to position them as a folk rock band, so their first single under the Turtle's name was a cover of a Bob Dylan song from another side of Bob Dylan. To protect you and defend you, whether you are right or wrong, someone to open each and every door. Maybe. It ain't me or looking for being. That song's hit potential had already been seen by Johnny Cash, who'd had a country hit with it a few months before.

But the turtles took the song in a different direction. inspired by Kalan's other great influence along with Prima and Smith. Kalan was a big fan of the zombies, one of the more interesting of the British invasion groups, and particularly of their singer Colin Blunstone. Kalan imitated Blunstone on the group's hit single She's Not There, on which Blunstone sang in a breathy, hushed voice on the verses. Before the song went into a more stomping chorus

on which Blunstone sang in a fuller voice. Kaylin did this on the Turtles version of It Ain't Me Babe, starting off with a quiet verse, before, like the zombies, going into a four-square, more up-tempo, louder chorus. The single became a national top-10 hit, and even sort of got the approval of Bob Dylan. On the group's first national tour, Dylan was at one club show, which they ended with It Ain't Me, Babe, and after the show, the group were introduced to the great songwriter. who was somewhat the worst for wear. Dylan said,

Hey, that was a great song you just played, man, that should be a single, and then passed out into his food. With the group's first single becoming a top ten hit, Volman and Kalen got themselves a house in Laurel Canyon, which was not yet the rock star Meccae

was soon to become, but which was starting to get a few interesting residents. They would soon count Henry Dotes of the modern folk quartet, Danny Hutton, and Frank Zapper, among their neighbours.

Soon Richie Fury would move in with them, and the house would be used by the future members of the Buffalo Springfield as their rehearsal space. The turtles were rapidly becoming part of the end crowd. But they needed a follow-up single, and so Bones Howe, who was producing their records, fought in P.F. Sloan to play them a few of his new songs. They lacked Eve of Destruction enough to earmark it as a possible album track,

but they didn't think they would do it justice, and so it was passed on to Barry McGuire. But Sloan did have something for them, a pseudo-protest song called Let Me Be, there was very clearly patent after their version of It Ain't Me Babe, and which was just rebellious enough to make them seem a little bit daring, but which was far more teenage angst than political manifesto. That did relatively well, making the top 30,

well enough for the group to rush out an album, which was padded out with some sloppy cover versions of other Dylan songs, a version of Eve of Destruction, and a few originals written by Kalyn. But the group weren't happy with the idea of being protest singers. They were a bunch of young men who were more motivated by having a good time than by politics, and they didn't think that it made sense for them to be posing as angry politicised rebels. Not only that, but there was a significant drop-off between It Ain't Me Babe and Let Me Be. They needed to do better.

They got the clue for their new direction while they were in New York. There they saw their friends in the Mothers of Invention playing their legendary residency at the Gammock Theatre, but they also saw a new band, the Lovin' Spoonful, who were playing music that was clearly related to the music the turtles were doing, full of harmonies and melody and inspired by folk music, but with no sense of rebelliousness at all. They called it Good Time Music.

Back on radio. As soon as they got back to LA, they told Bones Howe and the executives at White Whale that they weren't going to be a folk rock group anymore. They were going to be good time music, just like the loving Spoonful. They were expecting some resistance, but they were told that that was fine,

and that P.F. Sloan had some good time music songs too. You Baby made the top 20. The turtles were important enough in the hierarchy of L.A. stars that Kalin and Tucker were even invited by David Crosby to meet the Beatles at Derek Taylor's house when they were in L.A. on their last tour. This may be the same day that the Beatles met Brian and Carl Wilson, as I talked about in the episode on All You Need is Love,

though Howard Kalin describes this as being a party, and that sounded like more of an intimate gathering. If it was that day, there was nearly a third beach boy there. The Turtles knew David Marks, the Beach Boys former rhythm guitarist, because they played a lot in Inglewood where he'd grown up, and Marks asked if he could tag along with Kalin and Tucker to meet the Beatles. They agreed, and drove up to the house and actually saw George Harrison through the window, but that was as close as they got to the Beatles that day.

There was a heavy police presence around the house, because it was known that the Beatles were there, and one of the police officers asked them to drive back and park somewhere else and walk up, because there had been complaints from neighbours about the number of cars around. They were about to do just that, when Marks started yelling obscenities and making pig noises at the police, so they were all arrested, and the police claimed to find a single cannabis seed in the car. Chargers were dropped, but now Kalin was on the police's radar, and so he moved out of the Laurel Canyon home to avoid bringing police attention to Buffalo Springfield, so that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer wouldn't get deported.

But generally the group were doing well. But there was a problem, and that problem was their record label. They rushed out another album to cash in on the success of You Baby, one that was done so quickly that it had Let Me Be on it again, just as the previous album had, and which included a version of the old standard All My Trials, with the songwriting credited to the two owners of White Whale Records, and they pumped out a lot of singles.

A lot of singles. ranging from a song written for them by new songwriter Warren Zvon. To cover versions of Frank Sinatra's, it was a very good year, and the old standard, we'll meet again. Of the five singles, after You Baby, the one that charted highest was a song actually written by a couple of the band members.

But for some reason, a song with verses in 5-4 time and choruses in 6'4, with lyrics like, Killing the Living and Living to Kill, The Grim Reaper of Love thrives on pain, didn't appeal to the group's good time music pop audience and only reached number 81. The group started falling apart. Don Murray became convinced that the rest of the band were conspiring against him and wanted him out, so he walked out of the group in the middle of a rehearsal for a TV show.

They got Joel Larson of the grassroots, the group who had a number of hits with Sloan and Barry songs, to sub for a few gigs, before getting in a permanent replacement, Johnny Barbator, who came to, them on the recommendation of Jean Clark, and who was one of the best drummers on the scene. Someone who was not only a great drummer, but a great showman, who would twirl his drumsticks between his fingers with every beat, and who would regularly engage in drum battles with Buddy Rich. By the time they hit their fifth flop single in a row, they lost their bass player as well. Chuck Ports decided he was going to quit music and become a fisherman instead. They replaced him with Chip Douglas of the modern folk quartet.

Then they very nearly lost their singers. Volman and Kalen both got their draft notices at the same time, and it seemed likely they would end up having to go and fight in the Vietnam War. Kalen was distraught, but his mother told him, speak to your cousin Herb. Cousin Herb was Herb Cohen, the merger of the Mothers of Invention and numerous other LA Act, including the modern folk quartet,

and Kalin only vaguely knew him at this time, but he agreed to meet up with them and told them, Stop worrying, I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I'll get you out. Cohen told Volman and Kalen to not wash for a week before their induction, to take every drug of every different kind they could find right before going in, to deliberately disobey every order, to fail the logic tests, and to sexually proposition the male officers dealing with the induction. They followed his orders to the letter, and got marked as 4F.

unfit for service. They still needed a hit though and eventually they found something by going back to their good time music idea. It was a song from the Coppulman Rubin Publishing Company, the same company that did the Loving Spoonfuls Management and Production. The song in question was by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner,

two former members of a group called The Magicians who had had a minor success with a single called An Invitation to Cry. The magicians had split up, and Bonner and Gordon were trying to make a go of things as professional songwriters, but had had little success to this point. The song on the demo had been passed over by everyone, and the demo was not at all impressive, just a scratchy acetate with Bonner singing off-key and playing acoustic rhythm guitar, and Gordon slapping his knees to provide rhythm.

But the group heard something in it. They played the song live for months, refining the arrangement before taking it into the studio. There are arguments to this day as to who deserves the credit for the sound on Happy Together. Chip Douglas apparently did the bulk of the arrangement work while they were on tour, but the group's new producer Joe Wissert, a former staff engineer for Cameo Parkway, also claimed credit for much of it. Either way, Happy Together is a small masterpiece of dynamics. The song is structured much like the songs that had made the Turtle's name,

with the old zombie's idea of the soft verse and much louder chorus. But the track is really made by the tiny details of the arrangement, the way instruments and vocal parts come in and out as the track builds up. dies down, and builds again. If you listen to the isolated tracks, there are fantastic touches like the juxtaposition of the bassoon and an oboe, which I think is played on a melitron.

And a similar level of care and attention was put into the vocal arrangement by Douglas, with some parts just Kalin singing solo, other parts having Volman double him, and of course the famous Babbabab massed vocals. At the end of the track, thinking he was properly going to do another take, Kaelin decided to fool around and sing, How is the Weather, which Bonham and Gordon had jokingly done on the demo.

But the group loved it and insisted that that was the take they were going to use. Happy Together knocked Penny Lane by the Beatles after number one spot in the US. But by that point, the group had already had another. the lineup change. The monkeys had decided they wanted to make records without the hit factory that had been overseeing them, and had asked Chip Douglas if he wanted to produce their first recordings as a self-contained band. Given that the monkeys were the biggest thing in the American music industry at the time,

Douglas had agreed, and so the group needed their third bass player in a year. The one they went for was Jim Pons. Pons had seen the Beatles play at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and decided he wanted to become a pop star. The next day he'd been in a car crash, which had paid out enough insurance money that he was able to buy two guitars, a bass, drums and amps, and used them to start his own band. That band was originally called the Rockwells, but quickly changed their name to the Leaves, and became a regular fixture at Ceros on Sunset Strip, first as customers, then after beating love in the auditions, as the new resident band when the birds left.

For a while, the Leaves had occasionally had guest vocals from a singer called Richard Marin, but Pons eventually decided to get rid of him because, as he put it, I wanted us to look like the Beatles. There were no Mexicans in the Beatles. He has at pains in his autobiography to assure us that he's not a bigot, and that Marin understood. I'm sure he did. Marin went on to be better known as Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The Leaves were signed by Pat Boone to his production company and through that company they got signed to Mira Records. Their first single, produced by Nick Vennett, had been a version of Love minus Zero No Limit, a song by Bob Dylan. That had become a local hit, though not a national one, and the leaves had become one of the

biggest bands on the sunset strip scene, hanging out with all. the other bands. They had become friendly with the Doors before the Doors got a record deal, and Pat Boone had even asked for an introduction, as he was thinking of signing them. But unfortunately, when he met Jim Morrison, Morrison had drunk a lot of vodka, and given that Morrison was an obnoxious drunk, Boone had second thoughts, and so the world missed out on the chance of a collaboration between the Doors and Pat Boone. Their second single was Hey Joe, as was their third and fourth, as we discussed in that episode. Their third version of Hey Joe had become a top 40 hit, but they didn't have a follow-up, and their second album, All the Good That's Happening. While it's a good album,

sold poorly. Various band members quit or fell out, and when Johnny Barbator knocked on Jim Pons's door, it was an easy decision to quit and join a band that had a current number one hit. When Pons joined, the group had already recorded their happy-together album. That is a album included the follow-up to Happy Together, another Bonham and Gordon song, She'd Rather Be With Me. None of the group were tremendously impressed with that song, but it did very well, becoming the group's second biggest hit in the US, reaching number three, and actually becoming a bigger hit than Happy Together in parts of Europe. Before Happy Together, the group hadn't really made much impact outside the US.

In the UK, their early singles have been released by Pi, the smallish label that had the Kings and Donovan, but which didn't have much promotional budget, and they'd sunk without trace. For you, baby, they'd switched to immediate, the indie label that Andrew Alden had set up, and it had done a little better, but still not charted. But from Happy Together, they were on Decker, and much bigger label, and Happy Together had made number 12 on the charts in the UK, and she'd rather be with me reach number four, so the new line-up of the group went on a UK tour. As soon as they got to the hotel, they found they had a message from Graham Nash of the Hollies, saying he would like to meet up with them.

They all went round to Nash's house and found Donovan was also there, and Nash played them a tape he'd just been given of Sergeant Pepper, which wouldn't come out for a few more days. At this point, they were living every dream a bunch of anglophile American musicians could possibly have. Jim Tucker mentioned that he would love to meet the Beatles, and Nash suggested they do just that. On their way out the door, Donovan said to them, Beware of Lenin.

It was when they got to the speakeasy club that the first faux par of the evening happened. Nash introduced them to Justin Hayward and John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and Volman said how much he loved their record, go now. The problem was that Hayward and Lodge had joined the group after that record had come out to replace its lead singer Denny Lane. Oh well, they were still going to meet the Beatles, right?

They got to the table where John Paul and Ringo were sat at a tense moment. Paul was having around with Jane Asher, who stormed out just as the turtles were getting there. But at first, everything seemed to go well. The Beatles all expressed their admiration for happy together and sang the Bababa-Bars parts at them, and Paul and Kalin bonded over their shared love for Justine by Don and Dewey, a song which the Crossfires have performed in their club sets, and started singing it together. But John Lennon was often a mean drunk

And he noticed that Jim Tucker Seemed to be the weak link in the group And soon started bullying him Mocking his clothes, his name And everything he said This devastated Tucker Who had idolised Lennon up to that point And blurted out

I'm sorry I ever met you To which Lennon just responded You never did son You never did The group walked out hurt and confused and according to Kalyn in his autobiography, Tucker was so demoralised by Lenin's abuse

that he quit music forever shortly afterwards, though Tucker says that this wasn't the reason he quit. From their return to LA on, the Turtles would be down to just a five-piece band. After leaving the club, the group went off in different directions, but then Kalen, and this is according to Kalen's autobiography,

there are no other sources for this, was approached by Brian. Jones, asking for his autograph because he loved the turtles so much. Jones introduced Kalen to the friend he was with, Jimmy Hendricks, and they went out for dinner, but Jones soon disappeared with a girl he'd met and left Kalen and Hendricks alone. They were drinking a lot, more than Kalen was used to, and he was tired, and the omelette that Hendricks had ordered for Kalin was creamier than he was expecting, and Kalen caelan capped what had been a nightful of unimaginable highs and lows

by vomiting all over Jimmy Hendricks's expensive red velvet suit. Rather amazingly, after all this, the Moody Blues, the Beatles and Hendricks all showed up to the Turtle's London gig and apparently enjoyed it. After, she'd rather be with me, the next single to be released wasn't really a proper single. It was a theme song they'd been asked to record

for a dire sex comedy titled Guide for the Married Man, and is mostly notable for being composed by John Williams, the man who would later go on to compose the music for Star Wars. That didn't chart, but the group followed it with two more top 20 hits written by Bonner and Gordon. You know what I mean, and she's my girl. But then the group decided that Bonham and Gordon weren't giving them their best material,

and started turning down their submissions, like a song called Celebrity Ball, which they thought had no commercial potential. at least until the song was picked up by their friends Three Dog Night, retitled Celebrate, and made the top 20. Instead, the group decided to start recording more of their own material. They were worried that in the fast-changing rock world, bands that did other songwriters' material were losing credibility. But Soundersleep, their first effort in this new plan, only made number 47 on the charts. Clearly they needed a different plan.

They called in the role bass player Chip Douglas, who was now an experienced hitmaker as a producer. He called in his friend Harry Nilsson, who wrote the story of rock and roll for the group, but that didn't do much better, only making number 48. But the group persevered, starting work on a new album produced by Douglas.

The Turtles present the Battle of the Bands, the conceit of which was that every track would be presented as being by a different band. So there were tracks by Chief Kamanawan Wanalaya and Israel macadamacadamara nuts, Fats Mallard and the bluegrass fireball, the Atomic Encelada, and so on, all done in the style suggested by those band names. There was even a track by The Crossfires. It was the first time the group had conceived of an album as a piece,

and nine of the 12 tracks were originals by the band. There was a track written by the friend Bill Martin, and the opening track by The US Teens featuring Raoul. was co-written by Chip Douglas and Harry Nelson. But for the most part, the songs were written by the band members themselves, and jointly credited to all of them. This was the democratic decision, for one that Howard Kalin would later regret,

because of the song for which the band name was just Howie, Mark, Johnny, Jim and Al. Where all the other songs were parodies of other types of music, that one was, as the name suggests, a parody of the turtles themselves. It was written by Kalen and disgust at the record label, who kept pestering the group to, Give us another happy together.

Kalen got more and more angry at this badgering, and eventually thought, Okay, you want another happy together, I'll give you another happy together, and then a few minutes wrote a song that was intended as an utterly vicious parody of that kind of song, with lyrics that nobody could possibly take seriously, and with music that was just mocking the whole structure of happy together,

specifically. He played it to the rest of the group, expecting them to fall about laughing, but instead they all insisted it was the group's next single. Eleanor went to number six on the charts, becoming their biggest hit since she'd rather be with me. And because everything was credited to the group, Kalen's songwriting royalties were split five ways. For the follow-up, they chose the one actual cover version on the album. You Showed Me is a song that Roger McGwin and Gene Clark had written together in the very early days of the birds, and they'd recorded it as a jangly folk rock tune in 1964. They'd never released that track,

but Gene Clark had performed it solo after leaving the birds, and Douglas had been in Clark's band at the time and liked the song. He played it for the turtles, but when he played it for them, the only instrument he had to hand was a pump organ with one of its bellows broken. Because of this, he had to play a, slowly and while he kept insisting that the song needed to be faster the group were

equally insistent that what he was playing them was the big ballad hit they wanted and they recorded it at that tempo you showed me became the turtle's final top 10 hit but once again there were problems in the group johnny barbeta was the greatest drummer any of them had ever played with but he didn't fit as a personality he didn't like hanging around with the rest of them were not on stage and while the were no hard feelings, it was clear he could get a gig with pretty much anyone, and didn't need to play with a group he wasn't entirely happy in. By mutual agreement, he left to go and play with Crosby Still's Nash and Young,

and was replaced by John Sater from Spanky and R Gang, a good drummer, but not the best of the best like Barbator had been. On top of this, there were a whole host of legal problems to deal with. The turtles were the only big act on White Whale records, though White Whale did put out some other records. For example, they'd release the single Desdemona by John's Children in the US. The group, being the Anglophiles they were, had loved that record, and were also among the very small number of Americans

to like the music made by John's children's guitarists, new folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex. When Tyrannosaurus Rex supported the turtles indeed, Volman and Kalen became very close to Mark Bowlin and told him that the next time they were in England they'd have to get together, maybe even record together. That would happen not that many years later, with results we'll be getting two in, episode 201 by my current calculations.

But John's children hadn't had a hit, and indeed nobody on White Whale other than the turtles had, so White Whale desperately wanted to stop the turtles having any independence, and to make sure they continue to be their hit factory. They worked with the group's rhodi, Dave Cranbeck, to undermine the group's faith in their manager, Bill Utley, who supported the group in their desire for independence. Soon, Cranbeck and Whitewale had ousted Utley,

and Cranbeck had paid Utley $50,000 for their management contract, with the promise of another $200,000 later. That $50,000 had been taken by Cranbeck as an advance against the Turtle's royalties, so they were really buying themselves out. except that Cranbech then sold the management contract onto a New York management firm without tying the group. He then embezzled as much of the group's ready cash as he could

and ran off to Mexico without paying Utley his $200,000. The Turtles were out of money and they were being sued by Utley because he hadn't had the money he should have had and by the big New York firm because since the Turtles hadn't known they were now illegally their managers

they were in breach of contract. They needed money quickly. And so they signed with another big management company, this one co-owned by Bill Cosby, in the belief that Cosby's star power might be able to get them some better bookings. It did. One of the group's first gigs after signing with the new company

was at the White House. It turned out they were Trisha Nixon's favourite group, and so they and the temptations were booked at her request for a White House party. The group at first refused to play for a president they rightly thought of as a monster, but their managers insisted. That destroyed their reputation

among the cool anti-establishment youth, of course, but it did start getting them well-paid corporate gigs. Right up until the point when Kalen became sick at his own hypocrisy at playing these events, drank too much of the complimentary champagne at an event for the president of US Steel, went into a drunken rant about how sick the audience made him,

and then about how his bandmates were a bunch of sellouts. threw his mic into a swimming pool and quit while still on stage. He was out of the band for two months, during which time they worked on new material without him, before they made up and decided to work on a new album. This new album, though, was going to be more democratic. As well as being all original material, they weren't having any of this nonsense about the lead singer singing lead.

This time, whoever wrote the song was going to sing lead, so Kalyn only ended up singing lead on six of the 12 songs and what turned out to be their final album, Turtle Soup. They wanted a truly great producer for the new album, and they all made lists of who they might call. The lists included a few big names like George Martin and Phil Spector, but one name kept turning up. Ray Davis.

As we'll hear in the next episode, the Kings have been making some astonishing music since you really got me, but most of it had not been heard in the US. But the turtles all loved the Kinks' 1968 album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, which they considered the best album ever made. They got in touch with Davis and he agreed to produce the album the first time he did any serious outside production work, and eventually they were able to persuade White Whale, who had no idea who he was, to allow him to produce it. The resulting album is by far the group's strongest album length work.

though there were problems. Davis's original mix of the album was dominated by the orchestral parts written by Wrecking crew musician Ray Pullman, while the group thought that their own instrument should be more audible, since they were trying to prove that they were a proper band. They remixed it themselves, annoying Davis, though reissues since the 80s have reverted to her mix closer to Davis's intentions. Some of the music, like Ponzi's, Dance This Dance With Me, perhaps has the group trying a little too hard to sound like the kinks. But on the other hand, Kalen's You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain,

is the group's last great pop single and has one of the best lines of any single from the 60s. I look at your face, I love you anyway. But the album produced no hit, and the group were getting more and more problems from their label. White Whale tried to get Volman and Kalin to go to Memphis without the other band members to record with Chip's moment. but they refused. The turtles were a band, and they were proud of not having session players

play their parts on the records. Instead, they started work with Jerry Esther producing on a new album, to be called Shellshock. They did, though, bow to pressure and record a terrible country track called Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret, backed by session players at White Whale's insistence, but managed to persuade the label not to release it. They audited White Whale and discovered that in the first six months of 1969 alone, a period where they hadn't sold that many records, they'd been underpaid by a staggering $650,000.

They sued the label for several million, and in retaliation, the label locked them out of the recording studio, locking their equipment in there. They basically begged White Whale to let them record one last great single, one last throw of the dice. Jim Pons had, for years, known a keyboard player named Bob Harris and had recently got to know Harris's wife, Judy Sill.

Sil had a troubled life. She was a heroin addict and had at times turned to streetwalking to her money and had spent time in prison for armed robbery. But she was also an astonishing songwriter, whose music was as inspired by Bark as by any pop or folk composer. Sill had been signed to Blimp, the Turtle's new production and publishing company and Pons was co-producing some tracks on her first album

with Graham Nash producing others Pons thought one song from that album Ladio would be perfect for the Turtles The Turtles stuck closely to Sills' vision of the song so closely that you haven't noticed that before I started talking we'd already switched from Sills record to the Turtles version.

That track with Sill's. on guitar backing Kalen, Volman and Nichols vocals, was the last Turtle single to be released while the band were together. Despite Ladio being as gorgeous a melody as has ever been produced in the rock world, it sank without trace, as did a single from the Shell Shock sessions

released under a pseudonym, The Dedications. White Whale followed that up, to the group's disgust, with who would ever think that I would marry Margaret, and then started putting out whatever they had in the vaults, trying to get the last few pennies, even releasing their 1965 album track version of Eve of Destruction, as if it were a new single. The band were even more disgusted when they discovered that, thanks to the flurry of suits and countersuits, they not

only could no longer perform as the Turtles, but White Whale were laying legal claim to their own names. They couldn't perform under those names. Howard Kalen, Mark Volman and the rest were the intellectual property of White Whale, according to the lawyers. The group split up, and Kalen and Volman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters. When that demo got the songwriters a contract, one of them actually phoned up to see if Kalan wanted a permanent job in their new band. But they didn't want Volman as well, so Kalem refused,

and Steeley Dan had to do without him. Volman and Kalan were despondent, washed up, has been ex-rock stars, but when they went to see a gig by their old friend Frank Zapper, it turned out that he was looking for exactly that. Of course, they couldn't use their own names, but the story of the Florescent Legionadi is a story for another time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

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or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com That's 5000-0-the-numbersongs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast.

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