THE TURTLES: Music’s Pride & Joy (Etc.) [1988]

Text by Dawn Eden / FFanzeen, 1988

Introduction © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015

Images from the Internet

This interview / article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #15, dated 1988. It was written by Dawn Eden.

The only time I ever had the opportunity to see a version of the Turtles was when lead singers Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman had their bookended Flo and Eddie stint, opening for Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies tour at Madison Square Garden during June of 1973. Eventually, they returned to the Turtles name, after their Greatest Hits CD helped make Rhino Records a solvent company. Also, a good friend of mine interviewed Kaylan at some point, and when asked why the name return, he was quite open, stating how much they earned as Flo and Eddie compared to payments for the Turtles.

One of the more interesting aspects of this article is that it is usually Kaylan who does the interviewing, but here, Dawn manages to strike up a convo with the wild-haired Volman.

On that note, Kaylan recently released an absorbing autobiography, co-written with music historian/mensch Jeff Tamarkin, titled Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo & Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. [reviewed HERE]. – RBF, 2015

Then

In today’s incestuous Top-40 world, musicians switch from one band to another faster than you can say Sammy Hagar. It’s rare for a band to stay around for 10 years, let alone 25 years. And the number of successful bands whose members have played together since high school can be counted on the gaps between David Bowie’s teeth. Which makes it all the more unusual to look at Flo and Eddie, the nucleus of the Turtles.

FFanzeen caught up with Mark “Flo” Volman in his suite at Atlantic City’s Trump Plaza the day after he and partner Howard “Eddie” Kaylan played there.

Volman and Kaylan met in their Westchester, California, high school’s a capella choir. In 1962, Volman joined Kaylan’s surf band, the Crossfires, who became one of Redondo Beach’s most popular groups. The Crossfires were the house band at the Rebelaire Club when they were discovered by White Whale Records in 1965. After changing their name to the Turtles, they recorded a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and almost instantly found themselves elevated to the ranks of rock and roll royalty.

Volman reflects fondly upon the Turtles’ early, innocent years: “When you think [about] what happened to us, and how few bands that happens to in history – how you start as a high school band and years later, find your songs making it into the Top-10 and competing against the biggest in America – you don’t really consider that plausible. That is a dream. When you’re in high school, your main thing is to get out of high school. I mean, for me it was to get out of science class.”

Now

Recently, “Happy Together,” the Turtles’ 1967 No. 1 hit and biggest seller, was being revived in a number of forms. It was used as the theme song of the film Making Mr. Right, and a video of the song mixing scenes from the movie with live Turtles footage was added to the VH-1 cable station’s playlist. The single was also reissued by Rhino Records, the label that reissued the Turtles’ entire catalog of albums.

Oddly enough, “Happy Together,” which is still Our Song to millions of love-struck couples, is really about unrequited love. According to Volman, “A lot of people overlook one very important part of the song. Even as we made the record, we may not have been concerned with its actual philosophy… It starts out, ‘Imagine me and you…’ If you say one thing [about] that record, all we’ve immediately done, to anybody who’s really listening, is paint a picture that this is all a fantasy. It’s all make-believe. It’s the story of a boy who’s fantasizing over a girl who he doesn’t have. ‘Imagine me and you…’” Volman repeated. “There is no relationship. They are not ‘together,’ but, ‘I can’t see me loving nobody but you.’ Lyrically, this record never pays off. The boy never gets what he wants.”

After the Turtles broke up in 1970, Volman and Kaylan performed and recorded with Frank Zappa’s infamous Mothers of Invention. During the same period, they released several solo albums. Because legal hassles prevented them from recording under the Turtles’ name at the time, they took on the nicknames of their former roadies: Flo (short for “The Phlorescent Leech”) and Eddie [The Best of Flo and Eddie, on Rhino Records, is an excellent introduction to their solo career – DE, 1988]. They also embarked upon a second career, that of singing back-up on other artists’ albums. Volman and Kaylan backed up just about every major artist, from John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen.

Ronnie, Bruce, Howard and Mark

Volman says that he and Kaylan met Springsteen by a fluke. They were friends with his road manager, who invited them to attend a Cleveland concert on the Born to Run Tour. Volman picks it up from there: “While we were at the soundcheck, Bruce called me and Howard out of the audience and asked if we wanted to join him, singing [back-up] with Ronnie Spector. I was real surprised he even knew who we were. We rehearsed right there at the soundcheck, and we ended up singing with him and Ronnie in that night’s show! It was real fun.” Volman and Kaylan later did several more shows with Springsteen, and even sang on The River [1980].

In light of the recent commercial that uses “Happy Together” to hawk Golden Grahams, Flo and Eddie have truly come full circle. More than a decade ago, on one of their classic albums, they performed a sketch about a practice that was almost unheard of then. Volman recalls: “What Howard and I were raving about was taking rock and roll and using it as a commercial product. We were saying, ‘What if you took Fleetwood Mac’s big hit and used it to advertise McDonald’s Big Mac?’ It was [meant as] comedy. You go back and listen to it and it’s not dated at all. It’s me and Howard singing to ‘Rhiannon’: ‘You deserve a break today, so come to McDonald’s.’”

 

 

Book Review: Shell Shocked, by Howard Kaylan with Jeff Tamarkin

 Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2013
Images from the Internet
 

Shell Shocked: My life with the Turtles, Flo & Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc…
By Howard Kaylan, with Jeff Tamarkin
Backbeat Books (Milwaukee)
An imprint of Hal Leonard
277 pages; $24.99: 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61780-846-3
www.backbeatbooks.com

When little Howie Kaplan grew up, sorta, he was known by many names; but we know him as Eddie, and especially by Howard Kaylan. If you sprouted listening to ‘60s radio, you knew his chubby face, facial hair, and principally his voice.

Sure, he has backed up some of the biggest music stars of the ‘70s, such as Zappa, Springsteen (do you really need a given names?), Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, and even the Ramones.

While the even more physically memorably hirsute and chunky Mark Volman (aka Phlorescent Leech, or Flo, for short) has been his partner for umpteen years, it’s Kaylan you think of when you hear the pride and joy of “Elenore,” “Happy Together,” “You Showed Me,” “She’d Rather Be With Me,” et-cet-trah.

Starting life as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, then upstate New York, and finally transplanted in his formative years to sunny SoCal, his life changed – as with so many others of his generation – with the introduction of rock and roll, the Beatles, and then Bobby Dylan (also a man of many names).

Fame came early for Kaylan and Volman, and with quick success and youth, along with the period in history that was exploding around them, also arose what Ian Dury would famously coin, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll.

I have read a number of autobios of musicians, such as Cheetah Chrome (Dead Boys), Slash (Guns n’ Roses / Velvet Revolver) and Andy McCoy (Hanoi Rocks), and there is a similar trajectory with a difference in that while they were poor and fighting to get off the mean streets, Kaylan grew up middle class and had a relatively decent childhood. And yet they have all had ups and downs in their career, making and losing tons of cash, the involvement of drugs, wild stories on the road, and multiple partners and wives. However, as far as the descriptors go, the bigger distinction is that Kaylan approaches the whole meshugas with a wicked sense of humor, usually pointed at his own faults and failings. For example, from page 76:

So, not to brag or compare myself to an NBA player, but it was astounding to me, as a not-so-attractive teenager, how many women I was able to “be with” – and this continued into the ‘80s: lined up in the hallways, crossing paths in the lobby preceding the shift change… [sic] Of course, with each lady came baggage. I heard more stories about parents and brothers and unfaithful boyfriends and school than I care to recall. In fact, fortunately, I recall none of them. A switch in my brain could accept a certain amount of palaver without even taking it in. Click. Ah! That’s better. Now I don’t hear a word you’re saying. Oh, is that your bra?

Every bio has its own quirk. For example, Slash repeats the line “all things considered” into the ground. For Kaylan, it’s more like a cliffhanger with the verbal tic lines of, to paraphrase, “I should have known what would happen next…” Note that is my observation, not a complaint. It comes across as the reader is on the ascension of a roller coaster, and you’re about to hit the peak of the upward climb leading to, wheeeee.

My one bone to pick is that as well as the good times, I also wanted to learn about the lean. He mentions that he had to go on unemployment a few times, but never really dives into the depth of what that entailed or was like for him. It was more like a sigh of “oy” than getting the feeling of any kind of depth on the topic. The only despair he does invite the reader into with some feeling is the death of some loved ones, such as Marc Bolan.

Naturally, there is a lot in the book of the Turtles period, of Zappa, on tour with Alice Cooper (I saw Flo and Eddie open for Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies tour at Madison Square Garden on June 23, 1973), but short shrift about the period after, during the mid-1980s until present, other than a few mentions of going into the studio with various musicians as back-up, like the abovementioned Ramones. I laughed when he describes working with Boston’s garage legends DMZ and Jeff “Monoman” Conolly (I saw Conolly’s the Lyres a few times, but never DMZ), whose music he describes as “punk”; I’m not sure, however, if Kaylan knows the difference between ‘60s-style punk and punk rock, but I digress…

Kaylan has the pleasure of knowing, meeting or seeing the performance of some of the most important rock legends of his day, from Hendrix to Joplin, and bedding a bevy of beautiful women, such as Miss Pamela (DesBarres). While he doesn’t shy away from indiscretions, such as his own, Volman’s or those of the late Zappa (d. 1993; I wonder what Gail Zappa thinks of this book), he discusses rather than describes in detail (a point I applaude).

Even with all the trials and tribulations of Kaylan’s life, much like his music this is a feel-good book, such as he describes the sound of the Turtles, a style they adapted, changing from folk rock after they heard the Lovin’ Spoonful. It’s more of an enjoyable beach read than, say, something academic or meant to give a deep message, like Jim Carroll’s (d. 2009) overrated The Basketball Diaries (1978). If you are at all familiar with the sound of the Turtles, that will give you an indication of the zeitgeist of the book, if you extrapolate a tad.

Unsurprisingly, Penn Gillette’s forward is wicked funny and caustic, and yet gives the impression of fandom and loyalty to a band and man he never expected to like, yet learned there’s more to the music than appears at first listen.

This book is based on Kaylan’s extensive journals that he kept throughout his career. To help him edit his writing, Kaylan wisely chose music historian and writer Jeff Tamarkin, who famously wrote Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane in 2003. His vast knowledge of the music scene on the West Coast during the 1960s and ‘70s certainly helped. I’m hoping he can perhaps persuade Kaylan to write a more detailed expose of his life in the last half, as this is so focused on the first.

Bonus videos: