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

by Howard Kaylan

  Still, the touring continued and we were already contemplating our next step.

  Not that it would make any difference.

  THIRTEEN

  Put a Fork in Us

  The ever-present roadwork continued. The girls were still there in quality and quantity, and being a good dad at home somehow didn’t seem to affect my logic when my lower brain won over logic night after night. We had some bizarre things happen, but then again I’ve read everybody else’s road stories, so I know that everybody did. If you’ve spent any time at all on the road, drug-free or otherwise, I’m sure you’ve had some interesting times too.

  Mine include waking up in the backseat of our speeding station wagon to the screams of everybody there including George, our roadie, who closed his eyes and prayed. We were careening toward two semi trucks, one passing the other. We were dead. No laughing this time. And then it was over. Somehow, they separated and we drove between them—like in a Burt Reynolds movie. We pulled the car over to the shoulder of the highway and wept or prayed or kissed the ground. Everybody got out and needed to walk for a minute. It was a good fifteen minutes before we could resume the ride. I think somebody else drove the next leg.

  Another time, the entire group decided to do just a taste of sweet blotter acid that we had taken with us across the border into Canada before a rather prestigious show. We were hired to perform at the Miss Teen Canada pageant. It was supposed to be a classy affair with an audience of suits, press, and proud parents. That was fine with us: We were a classy band, certainly ready for anything. We had suits too. We didn’t, however, expect to begin the show in the theater’s basement. We didn’t see any classy audience. We didn’t see anybody. We were in a pit, looking at a cement wall.

  The idea was that John was to begin playing the drum lick opening of “You Baby” as we rose, like magic, on the hydraulic stage. When we got up to normal audience level, that’s when the song was to start. Well, the show began. We could kind of hear our introduction, all muffled and distant from a floor above us. We got the cue. John started the drumming and as the stage got higher, so did we, or so it seemed. We got our second cue. Now the guitars played the familiar riff. Higher went the stage; now we saw the audience—huge and in multitiered balconies, and the cameras and the Pepsi banners. And everybody stopped.

  We just stopped.

  And stood there. Like we had no idea who we were or what we were doing there. Then, after what seemed an eternity but was probably a nanosecond, all of us got on the same mental page and picked up the song exactly where we had left off. No one knew. They loved us. The contestants, in their formal gowns, told us so after the concert. Man, how we did enjoy pushing the envelope.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We didn’t have the Astor Tower anymore. Those glory days were over and we were, once again, a band on a budget. Still, when it came to taking time off, we spared no expense and would usually hang in Manhattan, frequently at the Gramercy Park Hotel in ragged but wonderful suites. We had keys to the gated little neighborhood park across the street. Nice place to smoke.

  We often walked in the Village and bought hip clothes. We smelled the incense emanating from one shop from a block away, even over the normal hot dog and urine odors. It may have been the New York branch of Granny Takes a Trip, the famed London boutique. The place was small and hot, but cramped with hangers and the strangest prints and styles we had ever seen: Carnaby Street collars and brocade jackets, paisleys and Nehru coats, and oh so many scarves. Loud bongo music plus that Indian aroma drew us in on a cloud of smoke like Pepé Le Pew. A wonderful British hippie couple welcomed us with hugs. We might have had our sitars with us. No, really. We purchased. We schmoozed. And we heard the strangest music playing. The singer was wailing away in some bizarre foreign tongue. But it was hypnotizing. Who were these strangers from another world, we asked our new salespeople friends? What was this lyrical language?

  It was English. The dude was singing in English. Huh? They showed us the album cover, the husband and wife who owned the store. The album was called My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … but Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows. Well, that was different. It had been recorded by a British duo called Tyrannosaurus Rex. We loved it. We bought it. And there had been others—English imports. We bought them too. And learned them. And sang them. We were fans, probably among their few American acoloytes.

  Cut to: the Turtles, on the road again, a one-nighter at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. And the opening act: Tyrannosaurus Rex. Boy, were we jazzed! Onstage, an Oriental rug, incense burners, candles, and cushions. Out walks a tiny elfin sprite, who we correctly assume is Marc Bolan, and a lanky hand drummer, who we know is Steve Peregrin Took. This was not unlike the night that I stood next to David Crosby at the Palladium in Hollywood and watched, dumbfounded, as the Who performed Tommy in L.A. for the first time. It was that heavy for me.

  We didn’t hang in our backstage dressing room, as usual. We went out into the ballroom and nudged our way into the front row. It wasn’t difficult to do. No one had ever heard of these guys, and once they started up, they failed to impress the audience, owing to their lack of both rock and roll.

  The boys couldn’t help but notice us there, like groupies, and performed with a renewed vigor when they spotted us. After the show, we hung out backstage and had a legendary smokeout at our hotel. Marc’s wife, June, was along for the ride and she was a captivating beauty and a lovely spirit. We sang and rolled into the morning and Bolan couldn’t believe that he had met us at all, being a huge fan. He knew Turtles B-sides and album cuts. He was far more impressed that we could join him on such album selections as “Mustang Ford” and the early single “Debora.”

  We were shocked to realize that he had sung on the very cool song “Desdemona” by John’s Children that White Whale had released. We traded info and promised to look him up the minute we got to England. We really never expected to be in England again, but we would soon be proven wrong.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  It was a weird time. Again. The Campbell-Silver-Cosby Corporation, our management company, was splitting up. What? They can do that?

  Now we found ourselves represented by the newly formed DeBlasio-Wald Management. But Jeff was now spending most of his time launching the career of his wife, Helen Reddy. It felt lonely again. These were “big picture” guys who really had no inclination to deal with day-to-day tour minutiae. Plus, we were still in depositions scheduled around these very tours. We would come home, have a day or two off, and then zip right into some courtroom or attorney’s office to answer an endless stream of moronic questions from Martin Phillips’s or Bill Utley’s lawyer. It was pretty exhausting, not to mention exorbitant.

  Meanwhile, White Whale, disappointed by the weak showing of Turtle Soup, despite the billboard they had paid for on Sunset Boulevard, was freaking out and growing more evil with every day. Now they had another genius idea. They would have hit producer Chips Moman record some great tracks for us and fly Mark and me into Memphis to do the vocals and, presto, a hit record. You should have heard the yelling in that office. Al was not happy. Label or not, we were the Turtles, damn it, and they couldn’t tell us what to do. We’d tell them what to do!

  Indeed, it was time to make another album, but this time, we—not Lee and Ted—were going to run the show. Deciding to stay closer to home, we asked our friend Jerry Yester to produce. Jerry had been in the Modern Folk Quartet with Chip Douglas and had arranged the orchestra for us on much of the Happy Together album. He’d also been in the Spoonful for a while, replacing Zal Yanovsky. His brother, Jim, was in the Association. We had known Jerry forever. And John Seiter had been working with Jerry and his wife, folksinger Judy Henske, on an interesting side project that would soon wind up on Frank Zappa’s new label. So we began to gather material for a much more commercial album than Turtle Soup had ever been.

  The album was to be called Shell Shock and it was going to be a great one. I was singing a lot
more, thankfully, and writing better than I had in a long time. With one piece, “We Ain’t Gonna Party No More,” I continued my quest to do one autobiographical song on every record. It was an antiwar opus when we needed it the most, and I was anxious for it to be heard. It was a mini rock opera because I had a lot of Vietnam to get off my chest. Some other standouts: Mark’s beautiful “There You Sit Lonely” and a Bonner and Gordon leftover, “Goodbye Surprise,” a heavy guitar rocker. There were also some “inside joke” cuts, like our a cappella take on “Teardrops” by Lee Andrews and the Hearts and the bizarre “Gas Money,” which had been the flip side of Jan and Arnie’s “Bonnie Lou” in 1963. White Whale didn’t hear a hit.

  Instead, they gave us this demo, this awful, horrible demo. The song was called “Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?” by an unknown songwriting team and it sucked. Honestly. Maybe it could have been a B-side for Billy Joe Royal or something, but it certainly wasn’t for us. It was country, for God’s sake. The kind of thing Chips Moman would have had us record. Hmmmm. We refused to record it. White Whale said record this song or you don’t get to finish the album. We buckled. We recorded their stupid song with Jerry producing. It sucked. The label loved it. They released it as a single. It bombed bigger than even I expected. We yada-yada’d and went back to Sunset Sound only to find that the studio doors had been padlocked and we were locked out. Our equipment was still set up inside, but we weren’t getting in, that was certain.

  Livid, we arranged for an independent audit of White Whale’s books by the Harry Fox Agency in January of 1970 and discovered a discrepancy of more than $650,000 for one six-month period of time in 1969, a good but not banner year for sales. Extrapolating their results, in March we initiated a lawsuit against the label for two and a half million dollars, and of course they immediately countersued. Because we had signed our new production deal with them as individuals as well as collectively, we were forbidden to use the name Turtles or any of our individual names, either, to go elsewhere. We were trapped. We had screwed ourselves over.

  We sure didn’t want to go out that way. What a terrible way to leave our fans. The Turtles were never again to make another record. It was sad. We decided to do a rather unorthodox thing. We begged.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Our own label, Blimp, had signed a brilliant singer-songwriter to a contract. Her name was Judee Sill, and she was an extraordinary artist: sensitive, brilliant, and talented beyond my comprehension. Jim Pons and his fellow ex-Leaves member John Beck had discovered Judee, who had a heroin problem, upon her release from a reform school in L.A. for one crime or another. Her husband was, in fact, Bob Harris, who would later be installed as the keyboardist in the Mothers of Invention: The world of professional music is a very small one. Judee was currently in the studio with Graham Nash producing what would be the first album released on Asylum Records, Judee Sill.

  One of Judee’s songs screamed to be sung by yours truly. I humbled myself by appealing to White Whale to do the unthinkable on their dime. I went into Western with Judee playing guitar and sang her beautiful “Lady-O” as sweetly as I could. We added a string quartet and Al and Mark’s la-las at the end. It was gorgeous. We begged the label to release it as our swan song. Despite the impending court battles, to them a buck was a buck and they weren’t about to throw a new single away. It came out quietly as the final Turtles record even as the new lawsuit began.

  Now we found ourselves in court almost every day, fighting at least two managers and our former record company. We couldn’t sign with anyone else, couldn’t join another band or put our names on another contract. Put a fork in us, folks. The Turtles were done.

  FOURTEEN

  Around Here, We Have Rules

  Darkness. That’s what I remember. I don’t think I got out of bed for a week. There were only a few calls, some from incredulous friends who had heard, but not believed, the grapevine, and others from showbiz types, quick to admonish me for being a moron. It had been hard enough to quit the Turtles, but somehow this felt a lot more final. There would be nothing to return to now.

  None of the band guys called either. It was creepy. Nobody had planned on this. I tried to put myself in my wife, Melita’s, shoes. There goes the meal ticket. I’m sure that I was part of it—I couldn’t have been easy to be around. I tried to do normal daddy things, but even going to Gelson’s, our local market, seemed like a waking dream. We hadn’t spoken about it, but it was sort of understood that whatever happened, Mark and I would remain partners. After all, it had been the two of us who had rallied against Al and Jim’s sudden swing toward country music, à la the Flying Burrito Brothers. We were brought up on Broadway and the Kingston Trio, not Hank Williams or George Jones—although I had driven to Las Vegas with Pons to see George and Tammy Wynette. Hell, I had also driven there to see Elvis, but I wasn’t interested in doing his music.

  So I just curled up in a fetal position and pondered my fate. I had plenty of weed. I’d shuffle downstairs in our enormous Woodland Hills house, grab something from the fridge, and sit in the dark corner of my brass-railed mahogany bar with stained glass fixtures and cabinets, where no one had ever come to be entertained. And there I’d feel sorry for myself. But unlike the last time, I wasn’t writing songs and imagining my solo career with nervous anticipation. I was turning inward and entering my own Brian Wilson/Harry Nilsson bathrobe phase.

  I just didn’t care. I wanted to wallow in the bitter taste of my failure. Not even twenty-three and it was over. I knew that I was lucky to have been in a band that had been successful and I counted up all of our hits in my head over and over. I wasn’t going to kid myself. I didn’t look forward to getting a real-world job, but the unlikely possibility of a Volman-Kaylan duo finding favor in this new FM radio world weighed heavily on me. So I would curl into a tighter ball and await my fate. Change had always come from the outside, and I knew, deep down, that it would again. Something, or someone, would save me.

  The phone rang about 2 P.M. on one memorable afternoon. Of course, I was still in bed and everyone else had left the house. I reluctantly rolled over to silence the noisy intrusion. It was Donald Fagen, an aspiring writer from Trousdale Music, upstairs from the White Whale office. Mark and I had sung on the demo recording that had gotten him and his partner, Walter Becker, their publishing deal: a song called “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.” Now they wanted to make records themselves, only Donald hated his voice and was petrified about the inevitability of having to perform on a stage. Hence the call. Yeah, hence.

  Did I want to be the lead singer in Donald and Walter’s new band? There were no guarantees—we’d be playing a lot of small clubs perfecting this new jazz-style rock fusion. It wouldn’t be easy. But here was the kicker—they didn’t need two of us. They only wanted me. Still, it was a gig; somebody actually wanted me. And that knowledge was all I needed to feel cocky again. Hell, I was still Howard Kaylan and I could still afford to pick and choose the direction of my life. It may not have been true, but that brief infusion of confidence was all that I needed. In my fog, I explained that Mark and I had always been a team and that, unless they were interested in hiring both of us, I would respectfully have to pass. What a jerk! Why was I saying this? Did I have some sort of death wish? Was I not in a panic mere minutes before the call? I don’t know. To this very day, I don’t know. It just felt wrong. Not for me. Sorry, boys. Yeah, and by the way, good luck with that new group of yours, Steely something or other. And then I rolled over and went back to sleep. Back to feeling sorry for myself.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The Turtles had now been officially kaput for one week. The next day, Mark finally made contact, but not for the reason I expected him to.

  Back in our New York City hang days, Mark had spent a great deal of time in the company of one Shelley Plimpton, a diminutive sprite of a Broadway actress who had been appearing in a featured role in Hair, the tribal love-rock musical that was a huge success in Manhattan. We went to see th
e show quite a few times in between those Zappa performances at the Garrick. Shelley was a great girl who brought us backstage in the show’s early days when it was still part of Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival at the Public Theater in the East Village to meet the show’s creators, James Rado and Gerome Ragni. We laughed, we smoked, and we forgot about it. Until they too heard of the Turtles’ demise and offered Mark and me the two lead parts of Claude and Berger in the Los Angeles production of the hit play happening at the newly named Aquarius Theater, formerly the Hullabaloo and previously the Moulin Rouge. (Hello, Bobby Darin!)

  It was a legit offer, and it was for both of us. The proposition certainly deserved consideration. So we considered it. And decided that, right or wrong, this would definitely be the one move that would end our careers in the saddest possible way. No way, Jose. Neither one of us wanted to be Teddy Neeley—no offense.

  Sigh. More depression. More time locked into that fetal position.

  Oh, yeah. There was something else in that call from Volman: a reminder that, weeks before, the two of us had made plans to attend a Frank Zappa concert at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. Frank had located his original bunch of ragtag Mothers of Invention from the Garrick Theatre days and combined them with Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a one-time-only event.

  We brought our wives and took one car. Mark drove, as always. The show was great. We got to hear “Call Any Vegetable” and “Concentration Moon”—all of our old faves from Frank’s doo-wop beginnings—and, as an added bonus, Zappa previewed his latest orchestral piece and an early clue as to his new direction, “200 Motels.” And, for serious music, I remember liking it. So afterward, the girls kept our seats warm while Mark and I went backstage to give our kudos to Don Preston, Motorhead Sherwood, Buzz and Bunk Gardner, and the rest of the motliest band that was ever assembled. And there was the maestro himself, leaning against the wall, cigarette dangling from his mouth and his ever-present thermos cup of coffee in hand, speaking volumes of truths to a group of drooling reporters. We walked over to shake the Man’s hand and congratulate him on a perfect show.