Rick, however, had been Johny’s friend. So when the band decided that we’d be better off managing ourselves, why not just pay Rick a salary to be our spokesman? It would be the best of both worlds and we would maintain total control of our lives.
Rick Soderlind, meet Rosalie Morton. Oh, man. Somewhere, at that very second, Lucifer laughed.
Rick meant well. I really think he did. But he soon realized his own limitations. Soon, as our de facto “manager,” it was Rick who was staying home in Hollywood—at Johny’s house, by the way—while Rick’s friend Steve took us out on the road. But here’s what happened next. Rosalie, as our attorney, received court papers from an outfit in New York called the Martin Phillips Company claiming that they owned us. And we didn’t know who they were or what they were talking about.
Flashback to Dave K. and one of his slightly effeminate “friends” from back in the day. I’ll call the guy John P. He wore cologne and bad suits and ol’ Dave always got defensive, come to think of it, when John’s name came up. But he was just this creepy guy. There were always creepy guys. None of us ever thought much of it.
So imagine our surprise, sitting in Rosalie’s plush Beverly Hills office, to hear that just before he had headed off to parts unknown, Dave had sold our fraudulent management contract to his buddy and his buddy’s invisible partner. It was legal. He owned us. He had purchased us, fair and square, with our own money, and he legally had the right to do whatever he wanted with us. So he did. The threatening papers kept rolling in from New York, but—
We didn’t care. We had a lawyer in our corner and a major label courting us, and our Chicago trips were about to change the face of the band. For many of our late-night, post-performance excursions into the psychedelic, we were joined by our dear Windy City friends and fellow road dogs, Spanky and Our Gang. These guys were wonderful, not only as singers and musicians, but as raconteurs and fellow experimenters. Elaine’s pot punch fueled many an evening of story and song. Most nights, Johny, who elected to live in his own apartment across the hall, dressed to the nines and took one of the limos into town, either with a date or trolling for one. He thought that our wasted evenings were just that, so as a result, we revelers spent an inordinate amount of time with Spanky’s drummer, John Seiter—the Chief, as he was called.
After a time, the inevitable occurred: Barbata felt ostracized and Seiter felt guilty. Johny left the band without too much ceremony. He went on to play with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and was on their live 4 Way Street album in 1970, then moved on to join the final lineup of Jefferson Airplane and stuck around when they morphed into Jefferson Starship. We knew he’d be fine without us, probably able to wear his good suits now for a more discerning audience.
And we had a great new drummer who felt that he was finally in a band where his two cents actually meant something. We had a pot buddy in our tight little circle—not that Johny hadn’t been; it just wasn’t a sing-along kind of high—and we were proceeding with the notion that it was more important to surround yourself with friends than with talent. Not to take away from John Seiter’s drumming—the guy was solid as a rock—but Barbata had been amazing. On more than one occasion at the Astor Tower, we would all be invited upstairs to the apartment of the great Buddy Rich, where, after getting comfortably toasted and electrified, we’d be treated to Johny and Buddy “trading eights,” alternating solo drum breaks. Barbata kept up and Buddy was suitably impressed. And we’d laugh our asses off at Buddy’s snarky comments and classic showbiz stories. To further complicate life’s mysterious plan, by literally stealing John Seiter, the Chief, from Spanky and Our Gang, we effectively broke up the band made up of the closest friends we had. We didn’t mean to, honest. There were other drummers out there. They could have gone on. But it wasn’t like that. Our Gang had been like a family, all of them coming together from separate folk and blues bands in Chicago’s legendary Piper’s Alley. Now they had folded. Thanks to us. Great.
♦ ♦ ♦
Emily was getting to be an actual kid. I had never minded the diaper phase, not once I had gotten over the initial shock of that actual infant chore, but I was looking forward to being more of a dad than I had been, what with the road and the weed, the so-called creative process, and the ever-present mother-in-law and that self-satisfied smirk I wanted to knock off of her Grecian face.
We were still riding high in 1969 with “You Showed Me,” and Rosalie Morton took advantage of our chart position and longevity—not to mention her under-the-table talks with RCA—to demand a contract renegotiation with White Whale. She probably shouldn’t have brought up the blatantly illegal conversations with another label, a detail strictly prohibited under the provisions of any recording contract. Things got sticky and very confusing. Her legal standing was questioned. Old court documents were opened. We were now in court with both our label and the supposed new managers out of state. And because Bill Utley hadn’t received a payment of Dave K.’s buyout money since his disappearance, he was actively suing us too. The band was often in depositions, courtroom questioning under oath, three days a week. Later on, we would extend these litigious happenings for years. By the way, these are not the greatest circumstances for creativity.
Nonetheless, it was touring as usual for us, no matter what was going on in L.A., and with Seiter in on the hotel and rental car improvisations, it didn’t seem to matter much to anyone that we had lost a lot of our onstage snap. As far as the label was concerned, a drummer was a drummer, and besides, on account of Rosalie’s ranting and the transparent RCA dealings, we had a new deal with White Whale. We were now not only producers who delivered product to the label, as we had become prior to “Sound Asleep,” but a label ourselves. Still mimicking the Beatles, we became Blimp to their Apple. That meant that we had our logo on every record. It meant that we could sign new artists to our label. And, most importantly, it meant that we were making a buck a record instead of the twenty cents or so that we had been earning. On paper.
It would have been a fantastic deal for Seiter as a member of our new corporation, as well as for the rest of us, had we sold records. We were having fun being the Rhythm Butchers full-time, but despite the infusion of John’s blues influences, as well as his humor and wisdom, there was nothing at all that was commercial about our group’s decision. And deep down, I think that John knew it.
Rick Soderlind was still keeping our shit together, but we all knew that any growth now would be coming from the outside. Which it soon did when Rick brought us a new management situation to consider. Seems that Bill Cosby was forming a super-company. Cosby, the same guy that I had taken my prom date to see at the very Crescendo nightclub where we had danced the pot dance with Dave Diamond. That Bill Cosby. I remember reading about this new company in the trades. He had just launched his own sitcom, and it was a huge hit from the get-go, but he had become fed up with his own representation. Now he was going to make sure that the same treatment wouldn’t befall any of the artists that he signed. He hired the great Artie Mogul to head up his label, Tetragrammaton, which immediately had a hit with Deep Purple’s “Hush.” (In a few years, we would cross their paths again.) He also hired two extremely “Hollywood” agents, Ron DeBlasio and Jeff Wald, to head up the management division, which included us. And Tiny Tim. And Biff Rose, I think, and a few others. In a couple of weeks, they had us saying things like “outside the box” and “just go with it.”
We were back on television, even though we were lip-syncing to old hits. It felt sad and a bit directionless, and then the invitation arrived.
TWELVE
Fuckin’ Corporate Sellouts!
Since we’d played our big gig at the White House in May of ’69—Tricia Nixon’s birthday bash where we got loaded and almost had our heads blown off by the FBI—the Turtles’ bookings had been elevated to a new strata of elitism. The agency’s phone was ringing off the hook now with offers to play at posh events and upper-crust parties. One of these events was happening right up the c
oast at an elaborate mansion owned by the president of U.S. Steel on the occasion of his daughter’s birthday—she was in her teens; I don’t know the exact age. Anyway, I didn’t much care. I had gotten pretty political in the days following Nixon’s election and I had also gotten unbelievably high. The entire week preceding the U.S. Steel party, I was wasted on the most fantastic orange-barrel LSD I had taken in months. Of course, I didn’t get high for the show—that would have been unprofessional, and I certainly was never that. Nonetheless…
On the afternoon of the show, two stretch limos picked us up at our hotel and delivered us to the swimming pool entrance to the mansion. Our dressing room was the cabana. Still, I was cool. Business as usual. The audience was all out of a beach party movie: well-scrubbed collegiate types with sweaters draped around their necks, metaphorically. Our “dressing room” was well catered and all of us took advantage of the free-flowing champagne. At least, I did. And I learned a lot about combining alcohol with drugs that afternoon.
The band was set up just like in those great Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon movies, inches from the action. And the set was to be a low-pressure and low-profile show for big corporate bucks. But somehow, once the show started, none of those facts made sense to me. Here I was, performing for these stuck-up, entitled Stanford brats, and they’d dance or chat or toss each other into the water and we’d play yet another one of our big hits for them. And they just didn’t care.
I think it was during “She’d Rather Be with Me” when I lost it. My inner asshole began speaking to me: acid and champagne—recipe for disaster. Here we were, one of America’s biggest bands, playing live in these little dipshits’ backyard, like slaves, while they dithered about like extras in a Dobie Gillis episode. I couldn’t stop myself as I felt my blood pressure build along with the song I was singing. What a waste of breath. They didn’t deserve us. Then the endless song ground to a halt and I placed the mic back in its stand and waited for the obligatory applause before kicking off the next bit. But there was none. Just silence, except for the sound of a bunch of asshole kids wasting Daddy’s money. And I lost it.
“Well, how did you like that song, you entitled bunch of assholes?” I asked into the microphone. “You’re all a bunch of spoiled pricks, you know that, don’t you? These are hit records, you bastards! You guys are fucked and your girlfriends are fucked and your parents are fucked-up too!”
The band started trying to pull me back as the rich-bitch parents started filtering outside to see what the commotion was all about.
“Fuck you, sir, and fuck you, lady!” I was screaming now at the top of my lungs and tears were streaming down my face, out of nowhere. I threw the microphone, stand and all, into the swimming pool. And then the lawn chairs. And then the food. And I never stopped ranting.
They finally led me, still cursing, toward the dressing room. “And fuck you guys too!” I cursed at my bandmates. “Fuckin’ corporate sellouts! I quit, man. I fucking quit!”
I got into one of the two waiting limousines and went directly to the airport. I flew home to Los Angeles, drove to Woodland Hills, and locked myself in my den for two months.
I spoke to no one. No one called me. Not White Whale and certainly not a Turtle. I just sat there on my braided carpet with my acoustic guitar hanging around my neck, trying to write, but the songs were all dark and hopeless. Plus, it wasn’t easy to create with the weight of my actions hanging over my head, not to mention the sounds of Emily, Melita, and Helen, endlessly playing in the gigantic pool I could no longer pay for.
The marijuana couldn’t help the reality. I was unemployed and damned near friendless, with no future plans and a bank account that had about three months of living in it. I put out a few professional feelers and planned a lonely solo career of playing the nightclubs and passing the hat. I knew a lot of old rockers who were doing that stuff to stay alive at the end of the ’60s—I’d just never expected to be one of them.
I finally got my wish for more “daddy time,” but I was in a consistently shitty mood, so I’m not sure that my daughter benefited much from my company. My world was gray. I turned off every Turtles song that came on the radio. Maybe I could start a supergroup. I’d call John Sebastian and Harry Nilsson and put together a band that FM radio could get behind, one that Rolling Stone would finally appreciate.
Still, there were loose ends to tie up before I could really strike out on my own: checks to sign and contracts to void. One afternoon, I was forced to make the very short drive to Al’s house to complete some arbitrary paperwork and was surprised to see the entire band there, rehearsing.
“Whatcha doin’?” I asked.
“Rehearsing,” came the answer.
“Rehearsing what?” I asked.
“Stuff!” was the reply.
Really juvenile.
The Turtles had decided to go on without me and were all busy at work on their own material. Each guy was writing his own songs and together, somehow, they hoped to put it all into some sort of cohesive package. I asked to hear a few songs and the guys happily obliged. It was good stuff. “Do you hear a hit?” I was asked. But of course, I didn’t. And probably wouldn’t have admitted it if I had.
“So, what you doin’?” I was asked.
“Nothin’,” I answered.
“Cool.” was the reply.
Really juvenile.
“Want to come back into the band?”
“Sure. Why not?”
I was back.
♦ ♦ ♦
The group had six or seven songs they had been working on and I had a few of my own. The plan was for everyone to sing their own compositions on the new album. It would be a different kind of Turtles for a new generation who hadn’t grown up with the wide-eyed innocence of “Happy Together” or “Elenore.” Jim sang his Western song; Seiter had a tune about this hippie house that had taken him in; Mark and Al were actually writing together. It was a new era, all right.
We were a band with renewed enthusiasm—real or fake, it didn’t matter. Now we needed a producer who would share our excitement and take this band, five years on, to the next level.
We tasked each other with putting together a wish list of the greatest record producers in the world and, like the superstars that we imagined ourselves to be, the list was suitably awesome. Included were George Martin, Phil Spector, and, on everybody’s list, the amazing Ray Davies of the Kinks. The Kinks had just released their epic Village Green Preservation Society album, and we had worn out several copies wallowing in our appreciation for all things Ray. The man was a genius—we had known that since 1964—but he was, it seemed, unreachable. Besides, he only produced records for his own band. We weren’t the Kinks. We were dreaming.
Still on the road, we found ourselves in the unlikely town of St. John’s, Newfoundland, at the eastern edge of Canada. Trapped by a snowstorm for days, we listened to Village Green and drank the local poison, bottom-of-the-barrel dregs known as Screech. Fueled by that and our ignorance, we spent a Sunday afternoon phoning everyone we knew in London, trying to find Ray Davies. We figured that we were as close to England as we were going to get on this continent. Still, it wasn’t easy. Many expensive overseas calls later, we realized that only one guy in England knew everybody else, so we phoned up our friend, the brilliant Derek Taylor from Apple, who scanned his Rolodex and came up with Ray’s number in a matter of seconds.
“Hiya, Ray. You don’t know us. We’re the Turtles from America—”
“The ‘Happy Together’ Turtles?”
“Yep. Listen, we know this is sort of out of the blue, but would you be interested in producing an album for us?”
Crazy, right? I know. It shouldn’t have worked. But it did. Lucky for us. And so it was that three weeks later, the entire Turtles band went down to Los Angeles International Airport to pick Ray Davies up from his London flight and chauffeur him to the Sunset Tower Hotel, where he would stay while we recorded our final, complete studio album, Turtle Soup.
White Whale loved Ray once we explained to them who he was. We actually had to sing “You Really Got Me” for them before they’d agree to pick up the considerable check. And Ray wanted to do things right. He had done his Turtles homework. We went into Western, Studio 3, just like the old days. Ray loved that room. Our engineer was, once again, the legendary Chuck Britz. It felt like home in there. Still, there was the strange, new material that threw Ray for a loop. He hadn’t been told about any of the band’s internal strife. All he knew was, these were the Americans who had had a dozen hits. He really wasn’t prepared for the drummer to be singing lead. Or the bass player. Or the tambourine guy.
We trusted Ray to do the mixing on his own, since he knew the material by heart and had Chuck by his side. Ray Pohlman did the orchestral arrangements and we knew his work to be extraordinary, so we let the team go to work and we returned to the studio three days later to hear the final product. And we hated it. Ray had cranked the orchestra so high that the record didn’t sound like a band anymore. It sounded like the frickin’ Moody Blues. We were awash in strings. Ray was shocked and hurt that we disapproved of his work and was even more insulted when we insisted on standing behind him and literally hovering over a second, hastily done and simpler mix. But we weren’t an orchestra, damn it. And we were doing everything we possibly could to still be a group.
White Whale spent a ton (of our money) on Turtle Soup. The album was released with a foldout, matte-finished double cover. Henry Diltz took the photographs and Gary Burden designed an Eagles-style package complete with a custom sleeve and the lyrics done in painstaking calligraphy. Too bad it wasn’t a better album. Seiter’s “House on the Hill” was released as a single but didn’t chart. Al’s “Love in the City,” a great song, fared better, and my “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain” was a minor hit. Critics liked us again, but we were all disappointed.
Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Page 12