I’m not sure exactly what I fell in love with, but it hit me hard. I spent a couple of extra weeks in the city before I returned to Laurel Canyon, where I spent many more weeks on the telephone.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back at home, the big buzz was that the Beatles were coming to Los Angeles to play at Dodger Stadium and, of course, we were stoked! Having purchased a new Pontiac LeMans convertible a few days before the show, I agreed to drive. It was just me and Jim Tucker at the show itself, lost in the crowd of other insane fans and not able to hear anything over the teenage din. Still, we had seen the Beatles and braved the traffic and that had been enough. Afterward, we stopped off at the Whisky to check the local hot action. And David Crosby came strolling up.
“Hey, you guys are coming to the party, right? ’Cause I know that Derek had you on the list.”
“What party? What list?”
The party was at the Beatles’ rented house on Blue Jay Way in the hills just below Laurel. Derek was Derek Taylor, who was the Beatles’ as well as the Byrds’ PR guy at the time, and Crosby was one of the guys who was helping Derek put this party together. Oh, man. This was going to be unbelievable. Tucker and I headed for the door only to be stopped by former Beach Boy David Marks, who we had both known from our old surf days, looking for a ride. Apparently, he was on the list too. Why not? The more the merrier.
Down Sunset and left turn up to the foothills, where there were police checkpoints at every corner. My heart was pounding as I apprehensively approached checkpoint number one.
“Kaylan? Uh … let me see.” The uniformed cop was actually being quite cordial, considering the state of affairs between Hollywood’s Finest and the local hippie contingent.
“Ah, here we are. You’re good to go!”
Amazing. I was on the list. We were minutes away from actually meeting the lads. Up to the second checkpoint. And the third. Now we were right outside the house itself—I could see George Harrison drinking something in the living room. He was wearing an Indian scarf.
There was a knock on my window and I rolled it down.
“You can’t park here, son. Gotta turn around and go back a block.”
Okay. No biggie. I nodded and inched up to the very next driveway to turn around when all the lights in the world came on.
“Trespassing, officer. I told you!” Some lady in a fuzzy blue bathrobe had another cop’s ear. “All night long, cars in my driveway. I can’t stand it!”
“Sorry, fellas. You’re gonna have to—”
When from the backseat comes the sound of David Marks:
“Fuck you, pig! Oink, oink!”
“Out of the car, punks!”
Right there in the bathrobe lady’s driveway: hands against the vehicle. Pop the trunk, please.
“But officer, it’s a brand-new car.”
“… And what do we have here? A marijuana seed?”
What? In the trunk of a car that had never been opened? They schlepped us down to the Cole Street Station in Hollywood and started in.
“The Turtles, huh? Boy, your fans are going to love this! You guys are going away for a while.”
They held us all night. They called my folks since I was underage. Even my parents laughed. A seed? They let us go for illegal search and seizure. They just wanted to hassle us. The bastards kept me from meeting the Beatles.
Back at Lookout Mountain, news of my little adventure had triggered a small but evident case of paranoia. I was probably more nervous than Mark was, but I was certain that, because of the celebrity taunting I had received at the police station, we were being watched.
Richie Furay was living with us now, sleeping in the living room as he assembled his new band, the Buffalo Springfield. They were rehearsing here too. So cars were in our driveway at all hours and Stephen Stills, Neil Young, and Dewey Martin would come and go at all hours. They smoked too. It was risky business as far as I was concerned. If the noise was too much, I knew the cops would come to check it out. My name was on the lease and I now had a “record,” so any consequences would be indirectly my fault.
I felt shitty. I bit my lip and kissed my canyon goodbye. Richie moved into my bedroom and I slunk into a bottom-of-the-barrel “luxury studio apartment” on Hollywood Boulevard to lick my wounds and feel sorry for myself. Nita hated it and so did I. But I remained there for a long, long time. Self-punishment is my specialty.
♦ ♦ ♦
“You Baby” legitimized the Turtles. Now we were three-hit wonders, and that meant credibility. Suddenly we were co-headlining concerts with the Yardbirds and, yes, the Lovin’ Spoonful. The three acts worked really well together and did a bunch of shows throughout the Midwest that summer. And a big thank-you to Eric Burdon for showing us groupie games in a Hammond, Indiana, motel room that I still find unspeakable forty-five years later.
We had momentum on our side and then … White Whale couldn’t find a follow-up. Again.
Al and Chuck, cashing in on the Beatles’ new interest in Indian music, had written an Eastern-sounding jazz raga in 5/4 time called “Grim Reaper of Love.” It wasn’t commercial. It wasn’t melodic. Shit, it was barely a song. But Lee and Ted owned the publishing, were getting greedy, and had nothing else. So they released it and almost ended our brief career.
What was radio supposed to do with that? Not much, it turns out. And for the first time, our newfound success seemed to be slipping away.
Frantically, Lee and Ted started putting out limited runs of singles, hoping against hope that one of them would stick. They didn’t. “We’ll Meet Again,” the Vera Lynn World War II classic from Dr. Strangelove, was a hit in Canada. They tried a poppy number called “Makin’ My Mind Up,” which failed. Things were getting tense.
During a taping of the Jerry Blavat show one Saturday, Don Murray became convinced that the entire band was conspiring to replace him, talking behind his back, and trying to mess with him onstage. None of these allegations were true, but Don walked off in the middle of the show, screaming accusations. It was quite theatrical. He was quite nuts.
Now we had no drummer. Our Hollywood pal Joel Larson sat in on a few gigs while we began the arduous process of auditioning drummers. We were having trouble finding someone as good as Don had been, and word was all over town that we were searching. To the rescue, one Gene Clark, now formerly of the Byrds. He had a guy….
Johny Barbata auditioned for the band at Western Studios, where we were ready to cut yet another single attempt. He played a Buddy Rich solo, flawlessly. The best I’d ever heard. We hired him on the spot and, since he was already set up, we recorded him on “Can I Get to Know You Better,” another P. F. Sloan “You Baby” clone that charted, but not well enough.
Sensing the impending end of the band, Chuck Portz also jumped ship to become an abalone fisherman, of all things, which he still is today.
I couldn’t remember being this scared before. I felt the band slipping away. What was it “they” said? Oh, yeah. The average life span of a successful rock band is eighteen months. If that were so, we were already living on borrowed time. And just when it seemed that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, on the very same day, both Mark and I got our draft notices.
Shit!
SIX
How Is the Weather?
Maybe it was because we lived in the same house or were born in the same year, but for whatever reason, the local induction center requested our presence on the very same morning. Misery might love company, but neither Mark nor I was prepared for this sort of dilemma. I was panicking big-time. Three hit records in a row, an actual career making rock music, and it was all about to go away forever. I knew that if, or when, I returned from whatever fresh hell Uncle Sam had in store for me, there would be no Turtles and I’d be back in school studying for some half-assed life that I didn’t really want.
It was 1966 when we got the letters. I wasn’t in college anymore, so I couldn’t use that deferment. I wasn’t married. I wasn’t supporting a family.
I was in big trouble. I was going to go to Vietnam. I was going to die there, just like my high school friend Kenny Hanson would the following year. We went off to tour and Kenny went off to war. He never came home but we found his name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, DC, and it still makes me cry.
I was blind with panic. Utley said there was nothing he could do and sort of smirked about it in a very irritating way. You’d think he would have had a bit more compassion for his meal ticket. Lee and Ted were a lot more concerned, but totally clueless.
These were tough times for America, and we could feel the friction in the air. Although he didn’t get his invitation to don a uniform until well after Mark and I did, Gary Lewis is a perfect example of how a side trip to the military could screw things up for a rock star. Gary had had a giant number one hit with “This Diamond Ring” and scored big with several other Top Ten singles, and yet his father, the amazing Jerry Lewis, a lifelong idol of mine, had refused to help him escape the dreaded draft. President Johnson even offered a deferment to Jerry on Gary’s behalf and Jerry turned it down. Jerry was a patriot, although he was strictly showbiz and had never been in the military himself. Gary got the call in early ’67 and was sent off to Nam the following year. He watched his best friend get blown away in a foxhole next to him, and returned to Hollywood. Gary’s career had petered out long before he went away, but when he came home there was nothing here waiting for him. He never forgave his dad, and vice versa.
My parents were as afraid for me as I was and, in the end, it was my mother who turned everything around. “Why don’t you go see your cousin Herb?” she said. I barely knew my cousin Herb Cohen. I knew that he had come to my bar mitzvah. I knew that he managed Frank Zappa and had worked with Lenny Bruce. I had heard in whispers, throughout the years, about his involvement in smuggling deals throughout the Middle East, rugs and guns and maybe more. And I knew that he had operated one of the first hip coffee houses in L.A., the Unicorn, starting in 1957. I had absolutely nothing to lose. Mom got me the phone number and Herb agreed to meet me in Laurel Canyon, in fact at Frank’s house while the Mothers were out of town.
Herb was a human lawn gnome who never wore anything except those Cuban guayabera shirts, cargo pants, and an Indiana Jones fedora. If the cliché had existed back then, he would have been the model. He answered the door, directed me to a chair, and made certain that I understood he had no time for any crap.
I explained and he tried to settle me down.
“Stop worrying! I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I’ll get you out.” He handed me a notepad and a pen and told me to take notes.
“First,” Herb began, “you can’t bathe. I mean, for days. You should be ripe. Are you getting this?”
I nodded.
“Next, do you have drugs?”
I actually started going through my pockets.
“Not here! Jesus! You might not even need my help!” He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “I mean, do you have any drugs at home?”
Of course I did.
“Well, take them. Take all of them! Why the hell not? They got doctors there in case you OD. And remember this next bit: They are military and you’re not. That means you’re a civilian and they can’t tell you what to do. It doesn’t matter if they’re a private or a general—it doesn’t mean shit to you. Just keep disobeying. If they say, “Go right!” you go left. They say be quiet, you make a lot of noise, get it? There’s nothing they can do. Also, fail the test.”
“Huh?”
“They give you these little tests, you know? Like, basic logic. Identify the shapes, primary colors … don’t do it.”
“Don’t take the test?”
“What? Wait. No. You have to take the test. Just don’t pass the test. Man!”
I was scribbling down every word as if my life depended on it. Which it did. I’m certain that Herb thought I was a mental case.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it. Oh, and act a little queer. They really hate that.”
Mark and his girlfriend Pat Hickey had been fighting and he had taken an interim live-in lover named Pam Hermanson. On the eve of our draft board confrontation, it was the three of us at the house on Lookout Mountain and none of us had slept, washed, or changed clothes in over a week.
The weed wasn’t skunky—we were. We smoked everything in the house. We took every pill we could find. We played checkers with them. We made elaborate smoothie concoctions with booze and yogurt and cough medicine and chocolate syrup. Hash and uppers and more weed and downers; by the time Pam drove us to the draft board in downtown Los Angeles, we didn’t know who we were.
They divided us arbitrarily into alphabetical groups: A–L and M–Z. I whispered a hushed “See ya” to Mark as we parted ways for the day. I was told to line up with my group against a puke-green wall to await the exams. That was my cue to test the waters for the first time as I left the orderly line to stroll down the hallway, opening each and every door to stick my head in and taunt the inductees. My fellow victims were all motioning me back into formation, but it took a rather large corporal or two to corral me back.
We were led to our first test room, which resembled an eighth-grade math class with those uncomfortable one-piece desk/chair combos. This test was all about common sense: Which one of the following shapes does not belong: a circle, a square, a triangle, a rectangle, or a horse? Well, obviously, the triangle. I continued with my winning answers, adding numbers incorrectly and making apples into peace signs, all the while remembering Herb’s sage words of wisdom. When I handed in my paper, the sergeant at the desk took a perfunctory look, shook his head, and made a “tsk-tsk” sound with his tongue. Then he placed a red plastic tag around my neck with a piece of string.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a moron tag, moron. Just follow the red line on the floor.”
Which took me to the medical testing area. Here, my fellow paranoids were stripping down to their skivvies and holding their clothing in front of their naked little bodies for dear life as they approached the clerk in charge for the old turn-your-head-and-cough. But not me. I went up to the desk fully clothed in my stinkiest schmattas.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m not going to get undressed out here with all of these strange men. Are you kidding? But if you want to undress me, that’s different. We can go into one of those little rooms and you can do anything you want to me—anything at all!”
The clerk threw up in his mouth a little bit, I’m sure.
“Jesus Christ, Dorothy! Another one! All right, sweetie, here you go!”
And with that, he stamped my paper SECTION 8 and pointed down the hall to another set of offices, where I was given more paperwork to fill out. Next, I was introduced to the admitting psychiatrist, who had a few additional questions.
“So, under drug use, you checked yes; then you unchecked it, and then you checked it again. I can see that your eyes are the size of saucers. Are you high right now?”
“What? Wait. No. I don’t do drugs anymore. Oh, sure, I used to do drugs, lots of them. But now I find that I don’t have to. I can close my eyes and wish myself as high as I want to be. You should try it. It saves me a fortune.”
“Uh-huh. What’s this here? Under suicide, there seems to be some confusion.”
“Oh, no. That was a mistake. No suicides. I mean, once in a while I’d find myself just walking into the ocean, but that was just the old acid, I think. I’m totally in control right now. And I want to do my bit for my country.”
“Your bit?”
“Shit, yeah. I want to jump out of that chopper with my guns blazing, man. I want to kill everything that I see: women, children, dogs, you name it. They all gotta die, man. This is for America, you bastards! Blam! Blam!”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think so, Mister Ka—”
“What? You mean I don’t get to go over there and kill them gooks, them motherfuckers?
“Not today, son. You get to go home.”
They stamped my draft notice 4-F, NOT QUALIFIED FOR SERVICE and motioned me toward the exit door.
I did it! I beat the system. I wouldn’t die in Nam.
I had never before, and have never since, been so happy.
And check this out: For some reason there was a huge parade in the streets of downtown Los Angeles on that very afternoon! I believe it was the Puerto Rican Festival. Whatever it was, I joined right in, marching and cheering at the back of the procession. I was absorbed by the revelers for a few blocks and peeled off when I spotted a phone booth, where I called my dad to come and pick me up. I couldn’t wipe that smile from my face for days. Later, back at the house, I learned that Mark had undergone a similar experience, had also scored with his acting skills and, just like me, was free at last, free at last. Great God Almighty, we were free at last!
Free to be Turtles again.
♦ ♦ ♦
We had won our freedom to persevere and continue the quest for another elusive hit record. Unlike a lot of the other new bands of the late ’60s, we didn’t write our own A-sides. We wanted badly to be the Beatles, but the problem, according to White Whale, at least, was that John and Paul were great songwriters and we were not. We wrote our B-sides and album cuts, but only because White Whale owned our publishing. These guys were really old-school show-business creeps who believed that kids were good enough to sell records, but the writing belonged to the professionals. To this end, they recruited every Brill Building writer that they could, cuz after all, who in our band could deliver a tune as well as Carole King or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil?
We were actually quite content going through the stacks of submitted demo recordings. We might not have known how to write a hit song, but as a group, we had an uncanny knack of choosing the songs that we could perform best, and we knew our limitations, or at least what the label wanted us to believe. Hell, Peter Noone didn’t write his hits. The Hollies and even Gary Lewis sang Brill Building songs, and Lee and Ted were always playing on our insecurities. To them, we would always be The Boys. We were never taken seriously as songwriters until years later and even then, the label considered it a fluke. They would often just hand us a demo and tell us to learn it because it was going to be our next single. We resented them. But what could we do? I can’t help but feel like deals were being made under the table without our knowledge or participation. Shady deals. In the end, we were very lucky guys despite them.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 7