First Chapter - Not Just Happy Together by Mark Arnold & Charles F. Rosenay
The Turtles A-Z (AM Radio to Zappa)
It’s time to get “Happy Together” again!
Discover the songs and the history of one of the most successful pop rock bands ever, The Turtles, who had many, many Top 40 hits including “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Let Me Be,” “You Baby,” “She’d Rather Be with Me,” “You Know What I Mean,” “She’s My Girl,” “Elenore,” “You Showed Me” and of course, the iconic “Happy Together!” All of their Golden Hits!
Authors Mark Arnold (Looking for the Good Times: Examining The Monkees Songs and Headquartered: A Timeline of The Monkees Solo Years) and Charles F. Rosenay!!! (The Book of Top 10 Beatles Lists and The Book of Top 10 Horror Lists) have joined forces to cover the entire careers of The Turtles from their early days as The Crossfires, through their hit-filled years, into their break-up that led to most of The Turtles’ members joining forces with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, to Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan’s years as a duo under the guise of Flo & Eddie, and even their forays into children’s records.
Arnold and Rosenay!!! have reviewed every song and album, and interviewed many of The Turtles’ friends and associates along with most of The Turtles themselves, who have given startling new revelations that will surprise even the most hardcore fan.
Open the doors to your library to add this book. This definitive Turtles compendium is as unique as The Turtles themselves.
FORGET THE MONKEES, WHY THE HELL AREN’T
THE TURTLES IN THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME?!?
A Rant and Historical Discussion by Mark Arnold
This may shock anyone that’s reading this, but I’ve been a Turtles fan longer than I have been a Monkees fan. I just didn’t know it. Anyone who has read my two Monkees books or has listened to my Fun Ideas Podcast probably knows my history with The Monkees. In short, I didn’t like them when I first encountered them as a child on Saturday morning TV reruns in the early 1970s. That all changed with Michael Nesmith’s Elephant Parts in 1980, when I suddenly discovered that there actually was some talent and creativity there in the bunch and I began collecting the group’s records, and realized there was more to them than just the typical teeny-bopper flash-in-the-pan group.
In the meantime, I had already encountered on TV the two crazy hippies colloquially known as Flo & Eddie. I was already a fan of comedian Martin Mull, thanks to the comedic soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off talk show parody called Fernwood 2-Night (later called America 2-Night). I discovered that Mull also sang humorous songs and eventually hosted an episode of The Midnight Special in 1978 that featured Flo & Eddie as his special guests. I think somewhere along the line I saw this and Mull’s 1976 appearance on Soundstage that also featured Flo & Eddie. Mull was really the attraction for me. In fact, I saw him live on stage in 1977, my first actual concert. Flo & Eddie also had a certain charm for me, and I liked that they actually could sing despite their hairy facades.
Around this same time, I became aware of a fledgling record label called Rhino Records, who loved to reissue rarities and obscurities of rock and roll and comedy. One of their earliest releases was a picture disc featuring (what seemed to me at the time) a bunch of fat guys going by the name The Turtles. This turned out to be a 12” EP that featured two previously unreleased songs, a demo and a long out-of-print song bearing the title 1968. As all of the songs and the group seemed unfamiliar to me, I didn’t purchase this disc until about a decade later when I was a certified Turtles fan.
I soon discovered that a tune I did know by just hearing it on the radio called “Happy Together” was done by this mysterious group known as The Turtles. Well, I liked that song… a lot… but I still wasn’t willing to plop down good money on four songs I didn’t know at all.
Rhino Records had a lot of faith in these Turtles and by the early-to-mid 1980s, they had reissued the group in a number of configurations including a compilation, some of their original 1960s LPs and even a turtle-shaped EP on green vinyl. The most fascinating of these was a three-record box set called The History of Flo & Eddie and The Turtles. I was gobsmacked. I mean, why the hell were these crazy singers named Flo & Eddie even remotely combined with the group that sang the angelic “Happy Together?” This was truly worthy of further investigation.
Strangely, I did not go out and purchase Rhino’s 14 track Turtles Greatest Hits collection from 1982 which would have been the obvious choice, or even this three-record set, which I deemed too pricey for my teenage income.
Eventually, I was rummaging through those cheapie cut-out bins that had various LPs and audio cassettes with drill holes in them. I came across a different Turtles Greatest Hits on cassette that had more tracks than the Rhino one and was a release from France! I think it was 99c if memory serves, which was the perfect price if Happy Together turned out to be the only good track on the tape.
I went home and played it. The first song was “She’d Rather Be with Me” and it immediately captivated me as much as “Happy Together” did. I discovered that it too, was almost a #1 record. So now, The Turtles were no longer one-hit wonders to me. The track that followed, “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain,” was very strange sounding to my ears and it took me years to actually like it and appreciate it.
The next song was “You Know What I Mean,” followed by “Elenore,” both winners to me, although “Elenore” did have some pretty silly lyrics.
Next up was “Grim Reaper of Love.” Like “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain,” this one also took me a while to warm up to it. So the tally so far: four hits (counting “Happy Together”) and two misses.
“Lady-O" was sung very sweetly and “It Ain’t Me Babe” was my first encounter with the Bob Dylan song, as I wasn’t much of a Dylan fan, apart from the covers done by The Byrds and Jimi Hendrix. So now we’re at six hits and two misses. Not bad. I kept listening.
“Sound Asleep” was very strange upon first listen. In fact, I would have to say that I didn’t like it much, although it was kind of neat to hear a tree being sawed and felled in stereo. Overall, I thought it, more than “Elenore,” was more of a rip-off of “Happy Together.”
“You Baby” and “Let Me Be” were both decent rockers, so I gave them high grades, and then next was “Happy Together” followed by “Guide for the Married Man,” another winner.
“The Story of Rock and Roll” followed and was kind of meh, but the rest of the tracks I really liked: “She’s My Girl,” “You Showed Me,” “Me About You,” “Outside Chance,” and “Can I Get to Know You Better?”
My final tally for the 18 tracks: 14 hits and 4 misses. Not bad for a greatest hits collection of songs that I hadn’t heard before apart from one. I liked The Turtles and I played that tape over and over and over again, so eventually I came around and also liked the four songs that I initially wasn’t too crazy about.
In the meantime, Rhino started reissuing the rest of The Turtles catalog, including The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands, Turtle Soup and Wooden Head. The first of these three really intrigued me as I had heard about this concept album wherein The Turtles pretended to be a bunch of other bands in various styles and “competing” in a Battle of the Bands, something The Turtles (and their precursor The Crossfires) actually did in the formative years of their career.
I already knew “You Showed Me” and “Elenore,” but when I played the rest of the album, EVERY track was glorious and was filled with many treasures. I loved the stylistic differences with the country-sounding “Chicken Little Was Right” and “Too Much Heartsick Feeling,” but it was the humor that put me over the edge with tracks like “Oh, Daddy!,” “I'm Chief Kamanawanalaya”, and especially “Food.”
I honestly felt that The Turtles had out-Beatled The Beatles, coming up with a better concept album than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and their upcoming The Beatles a.k.a. The White Album.
Equally surprising and also baffling was that despite The Battle of the Bands having two Top 10 hits for The Turtles, the album only charted at a paltry #128! Wow, that must have been a disappointment!
Indeed it was, as Howard Kaylan revealed much more recently. He actually left The Turtles for a time between Battle of the Bands and Turtle Soup. He didn’t claim that Battle’s lousy chart performance was the reason, but I speculate that it had something to do with it. It also explains why Turtle Soup features the other Turtles taking on lead vocals on some tracks.
Eventually, I got all of The Turtles’ other albums. Happy Together is their only LP that comes close to Battle of the Bands as far as overall consistency to me. Turtle Soup still kind of leaves me cold, but knowing that Howard left for a time and producer Ray Davies from The Kinks really didn’t know how to produce The Turtles, it’s amazing that it hangs together as well as it does.
The leftover tracks that would have become Shell Shock and eventually be re-recorded and issued as Flo & Eddie tracks leads me to believe that had The Turtles not broken up and were somehow able to wrangle themselves from the clutches of White Whale Records, they might have had greater chart success in the 1970s.
As it was, and as the story goes, The Turtles broke up in early 1970, and Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (and soon Jim Pons) joined Frank Zappa’s reformed Mothers of Invention by March. Now simply known as The Mothers, they basically went on tour together through the end of 1971, when two significant events ended their progress: the fire in Switzerland at Montreux that destroyed their instruments and was the inspiration for Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” on December 4, and six days later on December 11, when a jealous fan pushed Zappa into the orchestra pit in London, where the band was now playing with rented instruments.
Zappa was so prolific that a studio album, a soundtrack double album and three live albums (one released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono) came out covering this period, with many more years later.
Flo & Eddie bided their time while Zappa recovered, creating their own albums starting in 1972. Zappa did recover by 1973, but decided to transition into a more jazz fusion stage and also created some of his highest charting albums of his career: Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe. Zappa, Kaylan and Volman remained friends, and OCCASIONALLY worked with each other professionally again.
Flo & Eddie secured the rights to The Turtles music by 1974 and quickly issued a double-LP compilation called Happy Together Again! in November.
Throughout the rest of the 70s, they continued to tour and release albums under the Flo & Eddie moniker, as well as sing backup on some of rock and roll’s biggest songs, including “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen and “Get it On (Bang a Gong)” by T. Rex.
By the 1980s, Flo & Eddie released the last of their LPs and also a number of children’s albums featuring the characters of Strawberry Shortcake, The Care Bears, and G.I. Joe. They continued touring as The Turtles featuring Flo & Eddie and released a live album in the 1990s that was reissued and repackaged many times.
By this time, many, many, many Turtles compilations hit the shelves with varying success and with occasional rarities and outtakes. As a fan and collector, I cherry-picked the best ones, getting all of The Turtles, The Mothers, Flo & Eddie, but cautiously avoiding the children’s albums and totally missing bizarre pet projects like Checkpoint Charlie and most of The Rhythm Butchers releases, which are admittedly best forgotten.
I’ve seen The Turtles a number of times and have gotten both Howard and Mark’s autographs, and eagerly purchased Howard’s only solo album and wished there were more.
As I got more and more interested in The Monkees during this same time period, I realized that there was a growing public outcry demanding why The Monkees were not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
While I feel that The Monkees SHOULD be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I can somewhat see the reasoning of why they aren’t, namely due to how they were formed and packaged… at least for their TV series and first two albums. This would mean that other “fictional” groups like The Chipmunks, The Beagles, The Banana Splits, The Globetrotters, The Partridge Family, The Hardy Boys, The Archies, Josie and the Pussycats, The Cattanooga Cats, The Groovie Goolies, The Bugaloos, and more could all theoretically also be in consideration for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which arguably could tarnish the image and meaning of the Hall.
But none of this applies to The Turtles! The Turtles were created organically the way a rock band is arguably supposed to, originally as The Crossfires (and other names). The Turtles played their own instruments from the start mainly because they had to. White Whale was cheap. Even Howard and Mark honked their way into the group with their saxophones before becoming singers and clowns. The Turtles did use outside writers for their songs, but so did The Beatles, and also like John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles, Howard, Al Nichol, and Chuck Portz were all writing original songs from the beginning for the group to play.
Eventually, The Turtles were writing and performing all of their own music and had as many Top 40 hits as The Monkees.
Besides, Flo & Eddie have done a few rap parodies over the years in concert. While I feel that rap has no place in a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this alone should help qualify them.
So, why aren’t The Turtles in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Politics. Grrrr!
Note from co-author Charles: Let’s get this book - and Mark Arnold’s valid argument - into the hands of the powers-to-be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so the oversight of The Turtles’ omission can be rectified.
Get your copy now! Not Just Happy Together