Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc.

by Howard Kaylan

  “…tick … tick … tick.”

  Out came the guns.

  “Up against the wall!”

  Oh, we went there. Up against that wall it was as they carted off our little black box. We stood there, a rock group inside enemy territory, the Nixon White House, looking through the crosshairs from the wrong direction. Guys in hazmat suits were brought in to deal with our little plastic tuner, and their freak-out escalated yet another notch when someone hit the tuning switch and the 440-cycle A tone started shrieking from the metronome.

  The term shitting a brick comes to mind.

  My knees were shaking and the sweat was rolling down my face. And it was only May—the fucking cherry blossoms were blooming on America’s Lawn and I was about to be shot for treason.

  We looked at each other and we looked at them. It was like a Peckinpah movie.

  I could almost hear the feds mumbling to each other as they got to work, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I only perceived a gushing in my ears, as though I were underwater. The only other sound I recall was my way-too-fast heartbeat.

  That little fog started to set in, the one where you think you might just pass out.

  Now the guns were cocked and ready to fire. They schlepped off our little plastic box for further examination. When they returned it ten minutes later, they had pried the faceplate off and the box was dripping water.

  “It’s a metronome,” they declared. Good work, guys.

  That was the longest ten minutes of my life.

  Many months later, we received a check from the White House for seventeen dollars.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The party itself was pretty crazy. I heard reports from a couple of the band members who actually went up to the roof of the White House with some CIA guys to smoke a joint before sound check, but I wasn’t part of that bunch. (In fact, I actually read it in one particular Turtle’s autobiography. Someone had to test those mics, and I guess that’s what I was doing.)

  However, later, when we returned to do the show, we were given President Lincoln’s library to use as our dressing room. Unbelievable! In fact, we were told that the entire first floor was okay for us to explore: Just as long as we didn’t enter the private quarters, everyone on staff was to let us have the run of the place. And we did. It was amazing. We were loaded—high from smoking pot back at the hotel and a wee bit tipsy from all the French Champagne that was being freely dispensed—and we were roaming around the most important home in America unsupervised.

  One member of our crew still had a few tricks up his sleeve, however, and not only did I get to take a few precious tokes of his mystery stash before the show started, but we were able to actually lay out lines of coke on Mr. Lincoln’s desk. As the powder flew up my nose, I wondered if this was exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Land of the Free, indeed. Well, I felt free and on top of the world.

  Now I think, Jeez, they must have had cameras, but back then, the thought never crossed my mind.

  The show was wonderful. Hey, what can I say? We were always a great band. And although our other vocalist, my career-long partner Mark Volman, had a few balance issues—he fell off the stage a few times, much to the amusement of all present—the actual concert was a huge success. Just looking around the room at the dignitaries, the emissaries, and the luminaries was like LSD to a stoner Democrat like me. That made things even more fun. I was smiling from ear to ear. Even the Temptations, who were also on the bill, were drinking and singing and laughing right along with us.

  And we were funny. We didn’t hold back just because of the venue. Hell, I thought, we’ve been thrown out of better places than this! But, of course, we hadn’t been. Jokes at America’s expense … literally.

  Right after the show, Mark decided to hit on Luci Baines Johnson, former president Lyndon Baines Johnson’s daughter, which would have been questionable under any circumstances, but was especially so with her husband, Pat Nugent, growling at Mark from inches away. Spittle was flying. I’m not exactly sure how peace was restored between them, but man, there was an almost incident that was happily avoided. History would have loved that one.

  Tricia and her friends seemed to love us. Most of her acquaintances were college kids and, probably unbeknownst to her, were busy spending their evening passing out subversive SDS flyers to the crowd.

  Much to our relief, Tricky Dick was off on a foreign mission somewhere, getting our troops killed, and so he never made an appearance. I’ve always been thankful for that. I am absolutely positive, considering our states of mind that evening, that I—or some other equally messed-up Turtle—would have given him an earful of contempt and probably would have ended up in Gitmo.

  *snap*

  They took some photos. One shows five shaggy guys, one psychedelic road manager, Ron DeBlasio, Jeff Wald and his wife, the singer Helen “I Am Woman” Reddy, and there in the center, looking like a Hummel figurine in white, Tricia Nixon herself. Another depicts only four shaggy guys—all of the Turtles except me—and Tricia. That one made it to the cover of Parade magazine. Read into my missing visage what you will. Was I up to something subversive? I wish I could say I was, but I was probably just exploring the presidential restroom or something. It all kind of makes you proud to be an American, though, doesn’t it?

  How in the world had I gotten here?

  ONE

  Howard Kaylan, with a Y

  I wasn’t born at home. That would have been too easy. Seems like even the moment of birth cosmically had me out on the road. Not far from home, mind you, but in postwar New York City, the distance between boroughs must have seemed enormous. Sid and Sally Kaplan lived in Brooklyn. He was first-generation and born there. Grandpa was Isadore Kaplinsky, who came from the old country and proudly joined the union as a plasterer. My grandmother on my dad’s side had been gone for many years and Ike, as we called him, was on his second wife when he entered my memory.

  They lived on Tapscott Avenue, right above one of those wonderful old candy stores where you could buy a foot of paper dots for a penny and get a two-cents plain, maybe with a spritz—seltzer water with some chocolate syrup—at the soda fountain if you were lucky.

  Mom was born Sarah Berlinsky in Russia and dragged to this country during a very famous revolution. Her mother and father had both died in the war, and her sisters raised little Sarah Berlin—as her name became upon entering the United States, before everyone started calling her Sally—in Providence, Rhode Island. She traveled to Manhattan to attend beauty school but wound up in a police uniform keeping the NYC streets safe in wartime as part of something called the City Patrol. There she met my dad, just back from England and Germany, and set up house in a government-sponsored cardboard community in Brooklyn called the Linden Houses. Enter Howard Lawrence Kaplan on June 22, 1947—born in the Bronx because my parents were visiting my aunt at the time. Little Allan was to follow in three years’ time, but hey, this isn’t his book.

  My earliest childhood recollections are of those Linden Houses, little boxes in the suburbs filled with knickknacks, each with its own little yard and the illusion of privacy for people who had grown up in the concrete jungle with little hope of a sky view. I remember my dad walking me to the bathroom to do my business like a man—I must have been two or three—and me trying to hurry the process and getting piss all over the bathroom and myself in a mad rush to see the fire engines going by.

  My other most prominent childhood memories came courtesy of television. We were the first in the entire development to have a set, and she was a honey: a round-screen, seven-inch black-and-white console that would become my window to the future. I would spend hours on end with my only true friends: Howdy Doody, Uncle Miltie, Arthur Godfrey and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the denizens of the eponymous puppet show. Another show I loved was Super Circus, with a tall blond circus lady in a sparkling one-piece bodysuit. She was hot! I would also watch whatever my parents turned on, without question, even if it was Meet the Press,
and my television habits have hardly changed over these many years. These days, locked in a smoky hotel room, that very same “take what you can get” philosophy has gotten me through some pretty barren nights—this was my preschool.

  There was a little girl my age who lived next door. I think her name was Connie. My mom called her my “little girlfriend,” but my only recollections of her are the photos that my dad took of the two of us riding my tricycle. I don’t think that I had any other friends. Come to think of it, the two constant themes of my early youth, media viewing and hanging with a chick, are the overriding threads that still hold my life together.

  Sid and Sally didn’t have a car. Of course, if you live in New York City, even today, you are a moron to own one. We were pedestrians and proud of it. Or they were. I got to be pushed around in my dinky little stroller with the food tray in front of my face. And they all wondered why little Howie seemed to be gaining weight. It’s not like the pop-down tray was filled with apples or grapes. No, instead, my father would refrigerate these wonderful confections known as Bonomo Turkish Taffy bars. He’d let the candy harden in the fridge overnight and then smash it into Howie-size pieces and place it in my tray, ostensibly to keep me placated during our strolls through the five boroughs.

  Bridges were my mother’s passion and we must have lived very close to either the Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge—I never did know which one—because we were always rolling into the city. As we passed the humongous hangar where the Goodyear blimp was tethered, I would stare in disbelief at the spacecraft hovering above my world and chew my taffy religiously. Or we’d go to Coney Island, the legendary amusement park where I was to record my very first song.

  I don’t recall learning this song, but I still have the scratchy proof that I did. It cost twenty-five cents to step into the tiny recording booth. The red light would go on and you had about two minutes to transcribe your message or tune. Then, just like with the photo booths that still exist in arcades and movie theaters, you would wait outside for your vinyl prize to drop out of the slot. The smell was exciting to me. Hot vinyl. And you could watch your disc being made and see threads of plastic falling into the bin below as your voice was carved into the grooves. My first record was of a song called “Very Good Advice” from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. It’s still a great song and, not to brag, but my little effort wasn’t half-bad. A few weeks later, we returned to Coney Island for my second session. This time it was a kid’s song called “I Am a Fine Musician.” Several years ago, my seven-year-old grandson, Max, had to learn the same song for school. Talk about a rush.

  I would take these little nuggets of plastic home and play them in my room on the tiny record player till the grooves were smooth and there were no sounds but that amazing hiss and my little voice, but in by mind, I was making a record just like the ones my parents owned. The new plastic smelled wonderful. I would write my name across the paper label—Howard Kaylan, with a y.

  My parents thought I was stupid or, at best, a bad speller. But for some reason, even at that very early age, I knew that I was a Kaylan. Whatever that was. I had no reason for it. I was a really little kid and I had never heard that name before, but it was already defining me.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was the early 1950s. My mother had given up her beauty shop dreams and the City Patrol was disbanded after the war ended. She had become a nuclear-age housewife and Sid was repairing televisions for Sylvania when opportunity knocked and rocked my little boat. There was this job, it seemed. And the pay was great. It wasn’t repairing, it was creating, and my father was as excited as I’d ever seen him.

  One day, my mom got fat and the next day, as I recall, I had a brother. It got very loud around our little house, and eventually even my mom had to admit that we had outgrown our surroundings. The good news was that I finally had someone to beat up. Then one day my dad got the job offer he had been waiting for since returning from Europe. The bad news, and you could see it on my mother’s face, was that the offer had come from an unlikely geographic region known as Utica, New York. Upstate. Cold. Away from everything and everyone they knew. And we’d need a car, too.

  TWO

  Music Juice and the Sounds of Pounds

  When I think about Utica I think gray. That’s the color of the sky, the buildings, and most of the people. Okay, I was very young, but a kid’s first impressions are what he or she takes away to file in the dusty cardboard boxes of adult memory. We moved into the upstairs of a gray house on Genesee Street. Dad drove his new pride and joy, a black 1947 slope-backed Chevy, to his daily job as an electrical technician at General Electric. I have no idea what he actually did there, except that it brought him little joy.

  Mom would walk me to school in the mornings and we lived close enough that I could walk back all by myself. Customarily dressed in flannel shirts and corduroy pants with the cuffs rolled up, I made a zippery sort of noise as I shuffled down the block. On one miserable occasion, I just wasn’t fast enough, and despite all my bouncing and grabbing, I found myself blocks away from the big gray house with a lapful of wet. Oh, man. I was only five, but that hot-faced moment of embarrassment was fated to become a feeling that I would butt heads with throughout my life.

  One day, Miss Daisy’s kindergarten class at Utica Elementary took a field trip.

  Both parents signed my permission slip allowing me to accompany the seventy-five-year-old teacher and the rest of the class on a walk—not a bus ride, mind you—to the nearby Wonder Bread and Hostess cake factory. To a pudgy six-year-old, not even Coney Island held such promise. The factory was huge, like four or five gigantic blimp hangars all connected. We soaked up the sights and smells hungrily and were all treated to hot slices of bleached white bread and, in another hangar, got samples of Twinkies and Sno Balls. I peeled off the idiot coconut marshmallow crap and flung it across the room. I’ve always taken my cream-filled doughballs straight—like a man, damn it! And the elderly Miss Daisy, smelling of lavender and mothballs, glowed with a prideful smile at our youthful antics.

  With full tummies and pockets bulging with cellophane-wrapped samples, the happy class was led out of the bakery’s doors and headed, ostensibly, back to school. Only we weren’t walking in the right direction—even I knew that. Miss Daisy walked all thirty of us through a residential district and into one of Utica’s prominent and well-kept cemeteries. There were frightened whispers and some of the girls started crying. Miss Daisy grouped us all around one particular headstone and addressed the class brightly.

  “Children,” she said, “I’d like you to meet my husband. Darling, here are the children I was telling you about. Aren’t they special?”

  We were freaking.

  “Boys and girls, some day, after you have all lived your little lives, you too will be here with my husband and me, under the ground, where it’s cool and quiet and no one can bother you anymore. It’s a wonderful place, children. Let us all pray that we see each other in heaven.”

  Miss Daisy didn’t return to school the next day. We never saw her again. Evidently, more than a few kids had told their parents about the bakery trip and more than a few calls were made to the school. Farewell, old lady. I felt bad for her, but she was old. Really old. And it was 1953.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The following year, Dad finally had the down-payment money together for the purchase of our first home. Of course, the price we paid for our own piece of the pie was a steep one. The washhouse cost $10,000, but it wasn’t in Utica, exactly. It was in a suburb of Utica. Who knew that Utica had suburbs? This wide spot on the two-lane highway was called Marcy. Our new house was a two-bedroom ranch with its own garage connected by a breezeway, one of my mother’s favorite words. It sat about a hundred yards back off Cavanaugh Road and backed onto a working farm, replete with cows, chickens, and the traditional red barn with the obligatory childhood hayloft. Only a double strand of barbed wire separated my brother and me from myriad adventures.

  Dad built us the
best tree house in the world. There, we could read comics, tease the cows, drink cocoa, and plan our futures. All we needed to do was shimmy under the electrified fence into our own magic kingdom. We chased and tipped the cows and had Robin Hood fights in the sweet-smelling hayloft. On the roof of the barn were faded letters spelling out Marmendy Mill. I have no idea what or where Marmendy Mill is or was, but the name intrigued me so much that many years later I wrote an autobiographical song about this golden era.

  The community fire station was only a few houses away. It was the center of our lives. Halloween was the best: We’d bob for apples at the firehouse, and I’d get to wear my cowboy clothes without threat of a beating. We really didn’t have many friends out there, and although I was far past my corduroy days, I wasn’t then, nor am I now, a fountain of confidence. Awww, see little Howie on the big yellow bus for the first time in his life, all bundled up in layers of wool and nylon. And mittens. You can hear the laughter. I don’t need to draw you a picture. Life sucked.

  Except for television. That was cool, glued to the tube again and eating something, probably wearing cowboy stuff. I had great fringy pants and double six-shooters. The hat was standard-issue Roy Rogers but the vest … ah, the vest. That was a fashion touch all my own: Hoppy would never wear a vest like that. Nope, old Hopalong Cassidy always dressed in black. I knew, even back then, that yes, I am fashion.

  I might have been eating chocolate pudding. God, I loved that shit. When my mother wasn’t around (and strangely, she wasn’t around a lot in the afternoons when I would return from school—she would always say that she was “playing mah-jongg with the girls,” but I don’t remember any girls), I would make my own dessert treat. If pounds made sounds, you could have actually heard me getting fat. I would make Royal chocolate pudding for the entire family on the frequent days of her absence. Of course, everybody would get a little bowl, and I’d get a nice big one. Plus, I’d have the advantage of “licking the pot,” which, when I did the cooking, involved a substantial mound o’ goop. When I was a baby, I would call pudding “dubdie” for some reason still unknown to me. The cutesy little name stuck. My parents used it forever. I now have a Manx kitty named Dubdie and she too is cutesy.