My show was on Tuesdays and Thursdays at first, but I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to do daily shifts even though my classes clearly conflicted with my new schedule. Screw the classes; this was way better. I was a virtual encyclopedia of useless knowledge on KBRU, as that was what it was called at the time. Bruin Radio. And what I didn’t know, I manufactured. Then things started getting silly. I would ask Mark to come on the show, introduce him as my cousin Gerry Marsden from Gerry and the Pacemakers, and proceed to ask him questions right out of the real band’s official biography. Volman’s English accent was the absolute worst, but somehow the shows worked. I got better and better, the show got more and more popular, and I stopped going to more and more of my classes.
One lunchtime, I came home from school early, as I had no intention of visiting my afternoon classes: Much to my dismay, I found my father had also come home for a midday meal. I was busted. When he asked what the hell I was doing there, I told him flat out that I was going to quit school because I just wasn’t interested. He went red—not just sunburn-y red, but red like a fire engine, like a beet, like a madman.
“We work and we slave for you—we’ve given up everything and this is how you repay us? Just what do you intend to do with your life, idiot?”
A fair question.
So I told them that I intended to make hit records instead. The silence was palpable. My parents were suicidal. So I promised them that if, for some bizarre reason, I didn’t get a hit record within the next six months, I would return to school and never bring up the music business again. However, I was underestimating myself. It didn’t take that long.
♦ ♦ ♦
The Crossfires were doing their weekly thing at the Revelaire, but we were not very happy. Al Nichol had to get married and there was no way in hell that our meager little rock ’n’ roll stipend could support his entire family, so, sadly, I was elected to take a note of resignation upstairs to Bill Utley, the nightclub manager. This was bad and boded poorly for a guy who had sworn to become famous in a matter of months. But here’s where it gets weird. These two guys in suits who had been watching the entire show approached me as I headed up the stairs. They said that they were starting up a new record label and that our version of the new Byrds hit “Mr. Tambourine Man” had so impressed them that they wanted to take us into the studio and make a record. At first, I didn’t put too much stock in these guys or what they were offering.
We had actually made records in the past. We had released an instrumental called “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” on a little label owned by the guy who had a huge international hit with a novelty song called “Alley Oop,” but it did nothing. Then we had put out an original Kinks-style knockoff called “One Potato Two Potato” on a label called Lucky Token. That one had actually charted in San Bernardino and Riverside and got us on television locally, on Sam Riddle’s 9th Street West dance party. Still, exciting though it had been, it wasn’t exactly fame.
But hey, now we were getting one more, probably last chance to make a record before we sputtered out. What the hell, why not? That was our attitude and that is how we came to record my original folk songs from the Crosswind Singers days. My folk obsessions had also led me to Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Fred Neil, and many others, and it was on a Dylan album that I found “It Ain’t Me Babe.” I had absolutely no idea that it had been recorded by Johnny Cash as a country hit, but my original take on the song wasn’t the same as Cash’s anyway. I heard the song “angry,” not a plaintive cry as Cash and, in fact, Dylan had done. In my brain, I heard it the way Colin Blunstone of the Zombies would have done it, à la “She’s Not There.” So my version of the song has a soft, innocent, Blunstonesque verse followed by a driving four/four chorus sung in a much harder fashion. This pattern, by the way, remains true to even “Happy Together” and “Elenore.” Hey, what can I tell you? It’s my thing, man.
♦ ♦ ♦
The label, which didn’t have a name yet, now had a record by a group that didn’t have a name yet. “The Crossfires” certainly wouldn’t work for a folk-rock band. Enter Reb Foster from out of the shadows. Watching from a nice, safe distance, Reb had come up with a plan.
“I’ve had this name rolling around my head for months,” he told us. “Your new name is … the Turtles!”
We laughed at him. Right out loud. We rolled on the ground and held our sides.
“You have got to be kidding,” we chided. “Turtles are fat and ugly and cold and stupid. Why the hell would we want to be called that?”
And Reb explained, “Look, you’re on a new label. The Beatles are putting out records on all of these weird little labels.” He was correct. “And the name has an l-e-s ending, just like the Beatles, and it’s an animal name too. The public is going to think that you guys come from England, and England is really hot!”
Well, we couldn’t argue with that logic. And I’ll be damned if Reb Foster wasn’t absolutely correct. “It Ain’t Me Babe” came out exactly four months after my fateful bargain with my parents. It all happened so fast we didn’t know what hit us. One weekend, we were playing our standard shows at the Revelaire with the little girls crying over the onstage banner, which read FAREWELL TO THE CROSSFIRES, and the following week we returned to do the exact same set with the addition of “It Ain’t Me Babe” and wearing the lime-green velour shirts and matching caps that Reb had picked out for us.
We sat in the parking lot of the club before our first show, munching potato chips and listening to the radio as the disc jockey on KRLA announced that the new Bob Dylan record had debuted at number seven, and we remained hopeful that, maybe next week, our record might have a shot too. “Like a Rolling Stone” was magnificent, and we prepped for our little show with resignation.
And then the announcer said, “But wait, we have one record that debuted even higher!” “It Ain’t Me Babe” came on the radio and we screamed and hugged and lost our minds. It took a minute to get our shit together. We still had a show to do. Inside the familiar Revelaire, the new banner read WELCOME THE TURTLES. We played that show and then we were gone.
“It Ain’t Me Babe” became a national Top Ten record. I bought my parents a huge color TV and a trip to Hawaii and never heard about bad career choices again.
♦ ♦ ♦
During one of our last days in the studio, Lee Lasseff and Ted Feigin, the two suits who ran White Whale Records, came into the booth, a rare occurrence already, to finalize the credits for the album and the single.
Everybody gave them the correct spellings of their names as well as the names of those who had written the songs on the record. When they came to me, I had to spell my last name for the two executives. And I spelled it K-a-y-l-a-n.
What?
The band looked at me like I was insane. “What are you doing, man?”
“I don’t know why.” It wasn’t to mask my being Jewish. It wasn’t anything. I had just known since childhood that I was supposed to be Howard Kaylan.
The label didn’t care, and the band didn’t think that we had a shot in hell with this album anyway, so they let it slide with only a few giggles and some hurtful asides.
But there it was now, in stone, or print, as the case may be. The B-side of “It Ain’t Me Babe” was “Almost There,” written by Howard Kaylan.
I was now officially Howard Kaylan.
Two years later I went to court to legally change it. But right now, this was good enough for me.
♦ ♦ ♦
To be reflective for a minute, looking back, the years fifteen through twenty were—as they probably are for most people—the most formative years of my life. Mainly, during this time, I learned to make my own decisions. Had I truly realized how important this time in my life was, I probably would have taken greater pains to be more serious about choices that obviously affected every facet of my future. But these are the days of impending adulthood where no kid wants to hear that he is acting impulsively. I personally don’t think that I had any choice in the
matter. I was destined to do this entertainment thing from a very early age, and I knew it. And when anyone is that certain about anything, and is prepared to stay the course for his or her convictions, that path is a righteous one and that dream is destined to come true. Honestly. I truly believe, and I’ll go down fighting on this one, that this is true.
So, if you’re a parent, listen to your kids. By the time they are old enough to know what they are doing, they are already doing it. It’s too late for your input. I am of the opinion that the worst thing a parent can do is to offer the advice to “have something to fall back on.” I have heard this all of my days. It is my experience that, if a child has something to fall back on, they will fall back. Absolutely. When any passion takes over your child’s life, that is the strongest voice that he or she will ever hear. For God’s sake, encourage them to listen to it. It is passion that is missing from so many of our humdrum existences. We go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed. Maybe your son or daughter deserves more. Maybe they are aiming just a little bit higher. Please don’t attack their dreams. Talent is like a flower and it needs encouragement as much as sunlight or water. At this age, listen to your children—they know more than you do.
Of course, as I turned eighteen years old, I wasn’t thinking like a parent; I was becoming a rock star and figuring out what exactly that meant. It was the mid-’60s and I had a massive hit record.
In 1965 and 1966, the Turtles spent most of our waking hours on the road when we weren’t recording back in Los Angeles. We traveled in two station wagons, usually pulling a U-Haul trailer behind us filled with our equipment. We were folk-rock darlings when we first went to New York City to perform for a week at the Phone Booth, where the Young Rascals had been the house band before their recent success. It was here that we met Bob Dylan. After a particularly energetic show that climaxed with “It Ain’t Me Babe,” we were led past him in processional fashion. When I got my chance to shake his hand, Dylan said, “Hey, that was a great song you just played, man. That should be your single.” Then he passed out into his food. I didn’t see him again until 1984.
FIVE
The West Coast Ambassadors of Good-Time Music
Well, life is certainly different when you have a hit record. And I had it all in 1965, before my eighteenth birthday.
Gone was the ’51 slush bucket Chevy I had inherited from my dad, though I’d give a lot to have that baby now. I had moved on up to a used Cadillac convertible, thanks to my cousin Ruby Bird at Budget rental cars. He told my dad it was a nice, safe ride.
And, lest we forget, I had Nita Garfield as my girlfriend and she was, by anybody’s standards, one hot chick.
The very next week after my birthday, Reb had us booked at the very same Crescendo on Sunset where I had seen Bill Cosby onstage less than one year before. The DJ who introduced us was named Dave Diamond from the AM rock station KHJ. He had us all jumping around behind him chanting, “We are hot ’cause we smoke pot!”
Which we didn’t.
Nor did he.
But the riots on Sunset Strip had begun just down the street at Pandora’s Box and anything less than revolutionary wouldn’t have attracted any attention at all.
So now we were a Hollywood band, commuting from Westchester, but not for long.
I moved away from home. This was traumatic for my folks and a blessing for my brother, who got his own room at the age of fifteen. As far as I was concerned, mentally I had left a long time ago.
Mark and I moved into a house together in fabled Laurel Canyon on Lookout Mountain Avenue, across from Wonderland Avenue School. Everybody who worked in a Hollywood band seemed to already be there. Our pals Danny Hutton (later of Three Dog Night) and the great photographer Henry Diltz were neighbors. The famous Zappa log cabin was there as well as the burned-out ruins of Houdini’s mansion, where vigils were held each year on Halloween to invoke the magician’s ghost. We were moving up quickly.
♦ ♦ ♦
As our little record climbed the national charts, much to our surprise, Lee and Ted had us in the studio recording our debut album. Both had been record promoters in the L.A. area for years, much as Sonny Bono had, and they had gotten together in Aldo’s, the Hollywood Boulevard bar that sat downstairs from KFWB, the big AM rocker in town. Lee told Ted that he’d leave his job at Liberty Records if Ted would give up his at London Records and together they’d scour L.A. for the right band and begin their own label. After all, they knew everybody and, apparently, were due a few favors.
Thank God for those favors. And here’s where the luck comes in. These clowns could have thrown us into any studio with any old engineer and probably without a producer either and we wouldn’t have known the difference. But, like I said, they knew people.
So we wound up recording at the world-famous Western Studios on Sunset Boulevard, in Studio 3, which, although we didn’t realize it, was already legendary for being the sonic home to the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean and, soon, a host of others. Lee and Ted had positioned themselves to be “the producers,” although they just sat near the console nodding their heads.
But it was the engineers who were the true stars of those early sessions.
The brilliant veteran Chuck Britz, who had recorded our ridiculous “Dr. Jekyll” record the year before, was once again at the console. But the head engineer was a tall drink of water named Bones Howe, who knew exactly how to get the sound that we and, more important, Lee and Ted were looking for.
Bones had been used to working with L.A.’s famous Wrecking Crew, though they weren’t called that yet. This was the crème de la crème of Hollywood’s session players and they played on everybody’s hits. No shit, everybody: all the Beach Boys’ stuff, Phil Spector’s records, the Mamas and the Papas, the Fifth Dimension, the Monkees, all of it. The list is stupid long.
These guys were one-take pros. Record companies couldn’t waste their money on valuable studio time nurturing their new crop of long-haired long shots. Slap a singer on it, put some shaggy guys on the album cover, and invent a name. Shit, it worked for the Grass Roots—the band wasn’t even put together until after their first record had become a hit.
Ah, but that’s not how White Whale did it.
These guys were cheap. And—at this point, at least—presumably poor. So we played everything ourselves, just like on our little demo records. We were ignorant. We thought everybody played on their own records. Thankfully, we had Bones. And the fact that there was still an opportunity for actual teenagers to play on their own records must have appealed to him.
The songs we had recorded in the past had all been rather primitive, as were the recording techniques employed. The Nightriders’ demo had been done using one microphone set up in the middle of the room, in one-track mono. The Crossfires had done our records with Larry Johnson on two tracks and with Chuck Britz at Western on three, still mixed down to mono. By the time Bones recorded us, the industry standard was the Ampex four-track.
The band was in the studio together to do the basic instrumental tracks. Al and Jim’s guitars were usually put on the same track, Chuck’s bass and Don’s drums were combined together on a single track, and my work vocals were saved on third. Later, I would go in to do the actual vocals, the entire band would be mixed down to stereo, and we’d have a track left over to which we’d bounce guitar overdubs and background vocals from a second, or slave, two-track machine. Of course, all of this bouncing and combining made for some hissy-sounding recordings as two separate performances had to be moved over to an open track, freeing up the spots where they had been for even more recording. But we learned how to be economical about our choices and how to cut and edit actual magnetic tape, an art that is dying in our present digital age.
Also, in the era before we had vices, our little band was remarkably focused. And that was a lucky thing. We were a folk-rock group by default. So where was the material for the album coming from? We were hardly prolific, and our sudden success had taken everyb
ody by surprise. Luckily, I had a few trusty gems left over from the Crosswind Singers days and, along with some Dylan and a few public domain folk relics that we rocked up and took credit for, we had the bulk of an album that White Whale could release as our first national tour kicked off.
But, everyone agreed, there wasn’t a second single.
♦ ♦ ♦
White Whale’s office was in a beautiful building on Sunset near Beverly Hills that they shared with ABC-Dunhill Records and Trousdale Music, both operated by Lou Adler, a brilliant entrepreneur and one smart cookie. He was responsible for the Grass Roots.
Lou had signed a new writer named Phil Sloan and Bones brought him backstage to meet us after a show at the Crescendo.
He introduced himself as P. F., produced an acoustic guitar from thin air, and proceeded to sing his new song, adding how great this would be as our Dylan follow-up. And we gasped.
Phil, or P. F., or Flip—or whatever he was calling himself that day—sang us “Eve of Destruction” for the very first time. We didn’t know how to react. We weren’t stupid—we all realized that this song was earthshaking and absolutely a monster hit record, but it scared the shit out of us. What did we know? We were all white, middle-class kids of the Leave It to Beaver mentality. Whoever released this record would have a lot of explaining to do, and we knew that we weren’t those guys. What the hell did we have to protest anyway?
Bones was crushed. He was going to be a hero and we had shot him down. But fortunately, Phil was no one-trick pony. He had another song for us to hear and this one, “Let Me Be,” was definitely a gentler, while still confrontational, option. It was written from the point of view of a kid imploring his parents and the over-thirty bastards that were ruining the world to leave him alone to grow his hair long and think for himself. Plus, Phil had patterned the song to echo the formula of “It Ain’t Me Babe,” with soft minor verses followed by angrier hard fours in the chorus sections. This we could do. And it fit our new so-called image to a T. Now we had a follow-up.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 5